Hardboiled Crime Four-Pack
Page 38
“Is that a weapon?” she asked, pointing at Hurlocker’s corpse.
The man shifted his gaze. Even racked by pain and trying to catch his breath, Hobbs saw it coming. Hell, it was even funny. The nudnik looking away, the woman raising Alan’s gun and shooting him through the back of the skull. The man’s body falling heavily on the wet, sandy soil.
Seeing this, Hobbs wanted to laugh one last bitter laugh before he died, but he could not. His chest convulsed once and there was a flash of white. For a moment he saw nothing but pain.
When he opened his eyes again, the woman was standing over Alan. She asked, “Where’s the money?”
Alan said something, but his words were drowned out by the rain and the roar of blood in Hobbs’s ears.
She stepped on the kid’s leg and Alan screamed. Then, in the exact same tone of voice, she asked again, “Where’s the money?”
This time Hobbs heard Alan say, “Fuck you.”
She shot him in the other leg.
The cold, professional part of Hobbs knew what was going to happen, what had to happen to all of them. Maybe there would be more or less suffering, but the end would be the same. But still, stupid as it was, he was proud of that “Fuck you.”
The woman stood on both of Alan’s legs now and his scream rose to a peak and disappeared. There was the roar of thunder and another flash. Hobbs thought she had shot him again, but no. It was just the storm.
“OK, OK, it’s still in the truck,” Alan screamed. This was enough to buy him a temporary reprieve. She got off his leg.
“Where’s the truck?” the woman asked, sounding almost bored with the whole thing.
Alan told her, quite simply, where the truck was. He even added latitude and longitude. Kid was smart. He liked that play even better than the “Fuck you.”
The woman said, “Thank you,” with exaggerated politeness. Then she shot him in the head.
Even though there was no point to it, even though it was inefficient and unprofessional, Hobbs tried to cry out. He tried to get up. To do something. To hurl himself in rage at this woman from the storm. He tried. But he couldn’t. So he fell back in the mud and tried to die.
SEVEN
Hobbs woke up when his head slammed into the deck of the boat. The woman had dragged him to the dock and rolled him in. He could see what was left of Hurlocker next to him. The blackness danced around the edges of his eyes and he tried to pull it together. His limbs felt cold and sluggish. How could he not be dead? He had given up.
Alan’s corpse landed on top of him. He heard footsteps on the deck, then the engine starting beneath him. There was a lurch as the boat was put in gear and headed out into the canal. What was she doing?
As the boat sped up, he struggled to get Alan’s corpse off him. Through a space he could see the blond woman at the wheel. His limbs were so heavy, all he could do was watch. Then the shivering started. This must be shock. Or whatever comes after shock. If his bowels let go, he would know he was dead and this was hell.
The motion of the boat became more violent. They must have cleared the point. The woman turned the boat and lashed the wheel in place. Then she pushed the throttle to full. As the engine roared and the hull battered its way uncertainly through the waves, the woman staggered to the rail and dove over.
As the boat cleared the top of a large wave, everything on the deck seemed to float, as if gravity had been repealed. Then gravity came back with a vengeance. Reeling from the impact, Hobbs sputtered as water poured over the bow and sides. Alan’s body rolled away from him.
Hobbs tried to stand, but it was no good. The corkscrewing of the boat in the waves, the wind, the torrent of rain all conspired to cause him to slam into the deck once again. Then, plunging through the waves, the deck slammed him back. He felt the blackness closing in again. He felt at peace, and suddenly the storm felt very far away. He couldn’t imagine what it was that held him to the world, but he could feel it draw thin.
He watched the bodies and rushing water lift free from the deck again. He felt himself weightless for another instant and did not care. Then all of it came crashing down again. A side locker exploded with the impact and discharged fishing gear and equipment onto the deck. In the debris, Hobbs’s hands found a life preserver. Then the deck crashed down again. Time skipped.
When Hobbs opened his eyes again, he had no idea how long he had been out. Probably a blink. Maybe an hour. But he still clutched the life preserver to his chest. With his left hand, he reached the side rail and pulled. He got his feet underneath him, but couldn’t push hard enough to stand. He waited until the top of another wave, until everything went weightless again, then pushed himself over the side.
The water welcomed him with a wet, concrete slap. Then it melted and sucked him in. The sting of the salt on his wounds was enough to revive him. Force him to cry out, and suck air and water. He coughed and clawed the water around him. He had lost the life preserver. The impact had torn it from his hand, and he struggled to stay afloat. His thrashing grew weak and feeble.
A flash of lightning illuminated the sky and was all the more terrifying for the blackness of the ocean it revealed. His head went under, and the roaring of the ocean seemed to call his name.
The sea spit him up again, and he shook his head, coughing. The side of his face bumped into the life jacket. And he knocked it away as he clawed for it. He swam after it, but it drifted farther away. All strength left him. As another wave lifted him up, he resigned himself to death.
At the crest of the wave, the wind caught the corner of the life jacket and blew it back to him.
He put one arm in, and then the other. He struggled to buckle the straps. He whimpered in rage and impotence, for he could not scream. One of the straps clicked, and then he had no more to give. He drifted as the waves turned to mountains, the wind to water, and the full fury of the hurricane hammered into the Florida coast, taking him with it.
EIGHT
Then Hobbs was on the beach. The sun was shining and he knew he was alive because he was in a lot of pain. He turned his head and watched a car go by on the other side of some scrubby dunes.
Somehow he stood. His need for water overwhelmed his need for rest. He half crawled across the dunes and managed to stand in the middle of the road. Just another piece of flotsam scattered across the tarmac. He started walking. A National Guard truck, a big deuce and a half, pulled up alongside him. One of the guardsmen called down to him from the cab, “You a looter?”
“No,” said Hobbs, because it was the truth. He’d tried. But he hadn’t looted a damn thing.
They lifted him into the back of the truck and he passed out. When he woke again, he was in a makeshift hospital in Apalachicola. He checked his stomach. It had been stitched up, messily and quickly, but somebody had operated on him. Then he passed out again. Three days later, when he could stand, he stole some clothes and slipped out of the hospital with a bottle of pain pills. An awful lot of money had gone missing, and, hurricane or no, people would start asking some pretty serious questions about a John Doe with a gunshot wound.
He stole a car from an empty house and headed north in a haze. He never would remember the path he’d taken through the twisty back roads and forgotten towns of middle Georgia. He’d just headed north until he hit US 1. Somewhere in there he had robbed a convenience store in a cinder-block building with a Laundromat. It was the middle of the night, and when he leaned on the counter, an evil-faced, chain-smoking woman asked him if he was all right. He leaned in as if he were going to tell her a secret, the reek of fifty years of Pall Malls filling his nose. The he hit her behind the ear with a left hook she never saw coming. She went down, pulling an overfull ashtray on top of her as she went.
He didn’t feel good about it, but he felt worse about the fact that the register only had sixty-seven dollars in it. He thought about getting something to eat, but the smell of cigarettes and the red, dying glow of the jar of pickled eggs next to the cash register caused his gut
to do flips. He turned on the pumps and crunched the last of the pills as he pumped the gas.
He must have had some kind of a plan, but on the other side of all that fear and rage and stale, shaky adrenaline, he couldn’t have told you what it was.
He coasted into Charlotte on fumes. Feeling like an old tree that had rotted away from the inside. He eased off I-77 and headed away from the bright lights of the downtown. He pulled into the parking lot of a place with a sign that said, “Chicken and Ribs.” Food, just needed some food.
At first he had thought the gnawing pain in his gut had caused him to sweat through his clothes, but then he realized that he had bled through his bandage and the stolen shirt. Couldn’t go into a restaurant like that. Probably couldn’t hit a drive-through. He tried to think of a way around this, but even as the gears in his brain tried to mesh, his body stepped in and said, enough.
His eyes closed for him.
That was the last thing he remembered until he woke up in the rest home. Wasn’t hard to fill in the blanks, though. Somebody had rolled him for thirty-four dollars and a stolen car with Florida plates. Well, fuck them too.
PART FOUR
GIRL VERSUS BOYS
ONE
Special Agent Barry Leproate worked in the Purgatory field office of the FBI. It was hot in Jacksonville, Florida, but not hot enough to kill you. It was nicer than, say, Buffalo, he supposed, but probably less exciting. Mostly Purgatory involved paperwork. Never ending, always the same. Sometimes there were people to be interviewed, but mostly it was financial records that needed scouring.
A year and a half ago he had gotten to slap cuffs on a suspect while he was trying to shred evidence. He had joked with his boss that he should have gotten hazard pay due to the risk of paper cuts. His boss had almost laughed. The FBI was not known for a sense of humor, but when the work was this dry and boring, you did what you could to get through.
It was all pointless in the way that only the machinations of large bureaucracies can be pointless. Leproate knew there were criminals out there. People stealing and swindling from the American taxpayer on a scale that boggled the imagination. There still had been no prosecutions from the 2008 financial crisis. Leproate didn’t know which bankers were guilty, but he knew some of them were. Maybe all of them were. Maybe it was just too big, too horrifying to uncover? Steal a dollar and it’s a crime. Steal a few trillion and it’s a statistic?
Leproate tried not to think about things like that. But in Purgatory he had a lot of time on his hands.
It hadn’t always been this way. Leproate had once been a rising star, hot shit with a federal badge. But he’d screwed up. And they’d sent him to Purgatory. He tried not to think about that either. In fact, he tried not to think of anything but the top piece of paper on his desk and going home and enjoying the weekend with his wife and two kids.
It was, Leproate imagined, like doing time. You kept your head down and one day they would let you go back to the world. Getting excited about that would just make doing time more agonizing. Don’t hope. Don’t dream. Just do the time.
Most of the time, this strategy worked for him. But his old partner, Dan Tunks, had just gotten reassigned to San Francisco. A beautiful city, a paradise of a place, and all manner of real and interesting cases to work on. Not interstate wire fraud. So every time he looked up, Tunks’s empty desk served as a reminder that escape was possible, but denied to him. And worse, the pile of paperwork on his desk had grown as a result. Same workload, but only one agent until the FBI saw fit to send him a new partner. How long would it be before someone screwed up badly enough to get stuck with this job? It took about two weeks.
His new partner was a woman. Blond, and would have been attractive, except for the rage in her eyes. Tight, angry eyes you wouldn’t be surprised to see behind the bars of a cage. Her name was Wellsley, and even though he didn’t know the particulars, he knew she had screwed up somehow. Maybe worse than he had, if such a thing was possible. She didn’t seem to know she had screwed up. In fact, he could see she thought she had done the right thing. He read her as hell-bent on self-destruction.
Worst of all, she was young. Had she really been out of the academy long enough to screw up that badly? Evidently. Maybe she’d fuck up again and make him look good by comparison. Maybe she’d fuck up again and drag him down with her.
Leproate decided to let her have all the rope he could. He played it cool in the initial meeting. He was a quiet man anyway. He shook her hand. He said it was nice to be working with her, even though he could feel the floor sinking under his feet. The ASAC did most of the talking. He finished up with as much of a pep talk as he could muster: “I’m not going to tell you it’s exciting work, Agent Wellsley—but it’s important, and it needs to be done right.”
When they got back to their desks, Leproate said, “Here we are. Give me a couple of minutes to straighten this out and I’ll take you to lunch.”
Wellsley stood there, bathed in the pale fluorescent light, staring at the gray-green industrial desk, and becoming well and truly whelmed by the magnitude of paperwork on it.
“Welcome to hell,” she muttered.
“Oh no,” said Barry Leproate, closing a folder, “this is Purgatory.”
When Wellsley didn’t smile, the bottom fell out of Agent Leproate’s sinking feeling.
TWO
A Catholic school upbringing had taught Leproate that nobody stayed in Purgatory forever. So he bided his time and maintained his condition. Every working morning, he got up early (before the heat, but never early enough to beat the humidity) and ran sprints. In his neighborhood of identical houses on identical streets all named for trees that would not grow naturally in Florida, he would sprint one block on, one block off. He would run as fast as he could, putting all the passion and the rage into one explosion of motion, then jog a block and hope he wasn’t having a heart attack.
He never stopped. He rarely walked. Stopping just made it harder not to throw up in the intervals. Not that Leproate would have minded. That was part of the game, but he didn’t want the embarrassment of throwing up in front of a neighbor’s house. Still, sometimes it happened.
Sometimes—when the early morning was still, and the air was cool, and it seemed as if all of life had been put on pause—he thought that he might be able to outrun the past. The shame and stupidity of what he had done. But it never worked. No matter how far or how fast he ran, his memory never changed.
When he got back to the house, Jennifer was cleaning up from breakfast and the daily tornado of getting the boys out the door to the bus stop.
Jennifer said to him, “When are you going to bring your new partner home for dinner? I want to meet him.”
“Her,” said Leproate, trying to not to wince in anticipation.
“Her? You didn’t say anything about a her last night!”
“I did,” he lied, “you just didn’t hear me.” Jesus Christ. Nobody on Earth can outrun this.
“Well, now you have to bring her.”
“OK,” said Leproate, putting the empty glass in the sink, “but you won’t like her.”
“Don’t you like her too much either,” snapped Jennifer.
“Honey, hand to God, I hate her already.”
Jennifer held his gaze, then turned back to the garbage can. As she pulled the drawstrings on the trash bag tight, she muttered, “I don’t know why any woman would want to join the FBI.”
Neither did Leproate. Neither did most of the guys they worked with, but, political correctness being what it was, everybody tended to keep his mouth shut about it until after the third beer.
When the dinner finally happened, it was horrible. Wellsley dressed like a soldier who had been deployed for so long she had forgotten what civilians wore. No makeup. Jeans and a polo shirt. Not a girly thing about any of it, but somehow that only served to make it worse. Trying not to call attention to how beautiful she was just amplified the youthful, animal beauty of her athletic body.
“Have you ever shot anybody?” Rob asked.
“Have you ever killed anybody?” demanded John-Matthew, always trying to outdo his older brother.
Wellsley paused as if she was afraid of the attention, and looked to Leproate for an answer. He just smiled and shrugged. Do what you want. He was amused to see his angry new partner show her humanity for a change.
As Wellsley opened her mouth to speak, Jennifer snapped, “Young men, we don’t talk about things like that with our guests. Now go wash your hands.”
As the boys scampered off, Wellsley, said, “Oh, it’s OK—” but she was cut off.
“Well,” asked Jennifer, “have you?”
This time Wellsley did not look to Leproate for guidance. “Yes,” she answered. “Does that make you feel better, or worse?”
“Better. I wouldn’t want my husband to have a weak partner.”
Wellsley said, “I’m not weak,” in the same way that she might have stated any other obvious fact. Like, “It’s raining” or “That door opens outward.”
Jennifer looked away first. She muttered, “Better than the last one,” as she padded back into the kitchen, but she didn’t sound as if she had convinced herself.
Afterward they finished the uninspired meal of pork chops and pasta. Well, everyone except Wellsley had pasta. When Jennifer had set the bowl down, she had said, “Nothing fancy,” in a way that fished for a compliment.
Wellsley said, “I’m sorry, I don’t eat pasta.”
There was an awkward good-bye at the door. Wellsley tried, “You have a lovely family,” but it was such a strain, Leproate thought he heard one of her molars crack with the effort.
When the round, sedentary softness of his wife slid into bed next to him, she said, “That woman has to be a lesbian. She didn’t have a stitch of makeup on.”