Port City Crossfire (A Brandon Blake Mystery, Book 1)

by Gerry Boyle

  A pause.

  “Besides, it’s your word against mine.”

  “I recorded your call,” Brandon said. “I record everything these days.”

  “Dude,” the guy said. “That is low.”

  They were sitting at the light at Longfellow Square. The guy drew on the joint, turned toward the window. Lunged toward the door, yanked it open.

  Brandon got him by the neck, a forearm lock, pulled him back in. The truck started to roll as the light turned green. A horn honked somewhere behind them. The guy flopped back into the seat and put the truck in gear, the joint smoldering on the floor at this feet. He glanced into the rearview as he pulled through the intersection, leaned down and fished the joint up, put it in his mouth and toked. The horn honked again.

  “Chill, back there,” the guy said, exhaling. “Everybody in this town is in such a freakin’ hurry.”

  “You’re out of your league,” Brandon said.

  “No shit.”

  “Drive to the P.D.,” Brandon said.

  “Oh, come on, Blake. Don’t be such a hardass.”

  He turned right, headed down the hill through Bayside, headed for the Oaks. The original plan, Brandon thought. A set-up?

  “Pull over,” he said.

  “Shit, dude. No need to get all macho.”

  He pulled to the curb, stopped in front of a hydrant.

  “Your ID.”

  “No way.”

  “I have to know who I’m dealing with,” Brandon said. “Let me see your license.”

  “What?”

  “I’m a cop, remember?”

  “Listen, Blake. How ’bout I just give you the fucking thing, we pretend like we never met.”

  “I’m not gonna touch the card,” Brandon said. “You’re gonna hand it over and you’re gonna tell them the whole story.”

  “The money, you mean? I was just seeing what was out there, man. I got friends, they’re going to Tahoe for the winter. Just needed a little cash, carry me for a few months, you know?”

  “Not the money part. Just how you found it.”

  “You can tell them.”

  “Chain of evidence,” Brandon said. “They could say I altered it or something.”

  “Can’t really alter it. Well, I guess you could. But then you’d have to put the file back on the card and the dates would be—”

  “Drive.”

  The guy put the truck in gear, pulled out into traffic. “Dude, this was not how it was supposed to go down at all.”

  “You could be a hero,” Brandon said. “The guy who found the card, cleared up the mystery of Thatcher Rawlings.”

  The guy frowned, took a deep breath.

  “I got warrants,” he said. “Failure to appear out of Mass. Nothing big. Disorderly. Criminal mischief except it wasn’t me for that. Total bullshit.”

  “I’ll tell them you helped. Good intentions. Get those filed.”

  The guy was thinking. When they stopped at intersections, Brandon turned, ready for the guy to try to bail again.

  They were past Market, approaching Pearl. The guy took another deep breath, squirmed in his seat.

  “Don’t you have any money?” he said.

  Brandon hesitated, like someone mulling a panhandler. He reached into his pocket, took out his wallet. Fished out all the bills. He handed them over.

  “How much is this?”

  “A hundred-fifty. Maybe a little more.”

  “Ain’t going cross country on that.”

  He folded the bills and stuffed them in his jeans. When he took his hand out, he was holding a memory card. The label was smudged and the card was dirty. It said 32 gigabytes.

  “This is it, Blake,” the guy said. “Just take it, dude.”

  “Right on Pearl.”

  “But I don’t want to be a hero,” he said. “Not my style. I’m like wicked self-effacing.”

  “Too late,” Brandon said.

  They were a couple of blocks away from the P.D., the intersection at Congress, waiting for traffic. Brandon could sense the guy tensing, one last chance to run. Brandon reached out and opened the glove box, pulled out an envelope. He took out the registration. The guy’s name was Elery Slamm. He was 27. He lived on Sherman Street, right around the corner. Brandon knew the building. It was a dump. Brandon put the registration in his pocket.

  “Hey,” Elery said. “I might need that.”

  “The P.D., Elery,” Brandon said.

  He looked over at Elery and held his gaze.

  “And if this isn’t the real card, if this was some kind of set up, I’ll hunt you down myself.”

  Twenty-Six

  They drove in silence, passed people walking toward Congress Street, headed east. Their signs Kids Lives Matter.…Portland PD=Gestapo. One said Thatcher Rawlings Did Not Die in Vain. The rally was a half-hour off, at Monument Square.

  Brandon told Elery to drive up to the Middle Street entrance. He did and Brandon reached over and shut off the motor and yanked the keys out.

  “You sit there,” he said. “I’ll come around.”

  He got out, circled the truck and opened the driver’s door, like the guy was in custody. He almost put a hand on Elery’s head, keep him from banging it. But he did walk close to him, one hand on his arm, all the way up the steps.

  “Don’t worry, Elery,” Brandon said, smiling. “You’re doing the right thing.”

  Sherri at the window buzzed them in, nodded to Brandon as they as he passed. Brandon kept Elery in front of him as they went down the corridor and up the stairs, two at a time. They went through the door, headed for the chief’s office. As they approached, the chief’s admin looked up from her computer, said, “He’s not in there. He had a meeting.”

  Brandon kept going, down the corridor. He stopped at Lieutenant Searles office, heard voices behind the door. He knocked once, opened the door and nodded to Elery. He stepped in, Brandon behind him. Searles was talking to O’Farrell and Chief Garcia and Sergeant Perry.

  They turned in unison.

  “Blake,” O’Farrell said.

  “This is Elery Slamm,” Brandon said. “He has the card.”

  They looked at Elery. He hesitated, then smiled and said, “Hey there, officers. How’s your day going?”

  “From the GoPro,” Brandon said. “Elery works at Strike Two, the bar where the shooting happened, out back. He found this card in the back of his pickup.”

  Elery fished in his pocket, took out the card, held it out.

  “I thought it was, like, my civic duty and everything to make sure this wasn’t lost or whatever. So I called Officer Blake here and reported it.”

  Perry took two steps and took the card. “Did you look at it?”

  “Yessir,” Elery said, opting to go military in the presence of so many uniforms. “Some messed up shit, sir.”

  O’Farrell took the card from Perry and handed it to Searles, who fumbled as he tried to slide it into the side of his laptop.

  “Have you seen it?” Garcia asked Brandon.

  Brandon shook his head.

  “Never touched it,” he said. “We came directly here.”

  Garcia said, “Record this, in case it blows up or something.” Searles took a small tripod out of this desk drawer, set it up, and plugged his phone onto it. He fiddled and then leaned forward and hit play.

  They crowded around the back of the desk, the cops in front, Brandon and Elery at the back.

  “Jesus,” Perry said. “There he is.”

  Thatcher Rawlings was in the middle of the screen, the GoPro on his head. He was filming himself in a mirror, sitting on a bed. He moved and the springs squeaked.

  “I’m Thatcher Rawlings,” he began. “I live in Moresby, Maine. I’m sixteen years old. This is like my last testament. By the time you see this, I’ll be gone. Unless I chicken out. But I don’t think so.”

  He looked away, licked his lips, then looked back.

  “It’s like this. My parents, they don’t like me. I
mean, I don’t like them much, either, but they started it. It’s not like they hate me or anything but they just would rather I wasn’t around. It’s like animals, you know? Failure to bond. They just think I’m a pain in the ass. My mother was really pissed when my dad blew like almost all their money with some stupid investment thing—he’s like this really lousy stockbroker—and they could only afford to send me to like one semester of boarding school.”

  Thatcher smiled. “He’s back!”

  “Anyway, this isn’t funny. I don’t mean the part about me. I mean the rest of it. There’s only three of us. I don’t think they meant to have me and then they were stuck. But it’s four if you count my grandmother. She’s this wicked cool old lady, my father’s mother. How she had him, I don’t know. Her husband must’ve been a real dickhead and it all rubbed off on my dad.”

  “You know how kids play catch with their dads? I remember the one time my dad played catch with me. Somebody must’ve told him it was one of those things dads and their sons have to do. So we get out there and I suck at it and I’m missing the ball and throwing it over his head and he says, ‘Wow. You are really bad.’ And he walks away. Leaves me out there in the yard with the stupid glove on my hand. I thought he was coming back and he didn’t. I waited a long time and then I went in and cried. I know it’s a small thing but I never forgot it.”

  He licked his lips then pursed them, like he was gearing up.

  “But enough about me, right? The real story is that me and my parents, we have separate lives. I have my friends, they have the rich people they suck up to. It’s pathetic. Anyway, they’ve been arguing for like months. Okay, so my grandmother is really rich. But she hangs on to her money, bails out my parents once in a while, but not the whole wad, not ’til she’s gone. She says my dad is such a fuck-up that she doesn’t want to enable him. But then like two years ago, she goes into this assisted living place. It’s like forty-thousand a month, with all these fancy meals and a whirlpool bath and a massage person and this lady playing classical music on the piano in the community room.

  “So my parents, they’re pissed because the money is like going steadily down the drain. And then my grandmother, she falls and breaks her hip and that’s even more money and my parents, they can see her chewing through the whole thing and she dies and they get nothing. My mother, she always hated my grandmother, thought she was a total snob. Which she was. She used to call my mom trailer trash. Not to her face, but that’s beside the fact.”

  Thatcher took a deep breath, reached up and adjusted the camera on the band around his head. The picture shook like there was an earthquake. The cops in the room stared intently, Elery, too.

  “Here’s the deal.”

  A swallow and a breath, inhale slowly, exhale slowly.

  “My parents are real assholes. I mean, they are just evil. Totally into themselves, think the world owes them everything, you know? Like the fact that they’re losers is somebody else’s fault. Everything is somebody else’s fault. In psychology in school, they were talking about these disorders and they came to narcissists and I’m like, ‘Hey, that’s my ‘rents.’ Except they’re like narcissistic together. Which is exponentially more bad.”

  Thatcher looked away. O’Farrell said, “Come on, kid. Don’t quit now.”

  “So listen now. Right now ’cause I’m laying it out. My parents killed my grandmother. They brought her home like it was this nice thing to do. Give her a change of scenery, is what they told the assisted-living place. And then they made her a Manhattan—that’s what she’s always drank—and they made it like really strong, and then they told her she had to take her meds. And they gave her like all this shit, Oxycodone and codeine and all this stuff, and she passes out and chokes on her own vomit. This nice lady, she pukes to death. I mean, what is more evil than that?”

  Thatcher started to tear up, pulled himself together.

  “So I’m ratting them out, you know? That’s what I’m doing. I heard them talking about it a few days after, the night after the funeral. I was on the roof outside my bedroom window, I go out there to look at the stars and think and get away from them, and I hear them on the patio and they’re telling each other how it was for the best. Mostly my mom talking because my dad, he was feeling kind of guilty. Killing his own mother and all. She says shit like like, ‘What kind of life was it anyway? It was time for her to go. It’s the quality of life.’ And how the place and the doctors were gonna bleed her dry and what a waste that was. And how in some cultures, old people just go off in the woods and croak, it’s just America that hooks you up to machines and keeps you going until you’re just a beating heart hooked up to this decrepit body. I heard my mom say, ‘We had to do it, baby. It was the merciful thing to do.’ I heard that. This is my sworn testimony.”

  “Jesus,” Garcia said.

  “So I’m gonna go now. I mean, really go. I had this idea for a video. It’s based on surveillance camera footage. You know how they always show robbers and they’re at the bank counter or whatever, and the camera is looking down at them and it’s all fisheye and distorted? Well, I thought, what if the camera was from the robber’s POV? Wouldn’t that be totally cool?”

  He jiggled up and down excitedly.

  “So I’m gonna do that before I die. And if it all works out and I don’t wuss out, my parents will see their son in this cool video, I mean, it would go totally viral. I searched and searched and I never found anything like this.”

  A grin.

  “And then they’ll see their son die. The muzzle flash. The thud as I hit the ground.”

  A wider grin. “Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad. It’s been real. You made me what I am today.”

  He laughed. “It’s like Blade Runner, you know. I’m a replicant gone off the rails. Somebody’s gotta take me out.”

  And then he was serious, leaning to the mirror.

  “One thing before I peace out. Apologies to whatever cop has to do the deed. Not your fault. So sorry. For everything. And oh, yeah, bye Amanda. You’ve been totally cool. I wish I could’ve been a better boyfriend.”

  The screen went black. The room was silent. Searles shifted in his chair and it creaked. Finally O’Farrell said, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph.”

  And then the screen brightened to gray, the audio crackled. Running shoes flashed in and out of view, and then a door swung open. Music was playing. The Pogues, Brandon thought. The Irish pub. Two women were washing table tops. A guy was sweeping the floor. They looked up. Thatcher said, “Hands where I can see ’em. You’re being robbed.”

  One of the woman said, “You’re shitting me.”

  It was four minutes long. Thatcher gathering everyone up in front of the bar. Five of them. They stood with their hands up and Thatcher walked up and down the line and said, “This is what a robbery looks like, POV.” In the last minute, Thatcher ran behind the bar and found the bartender, a woman with big horn-rimmed glasses, and herded her out with the others. The bartender said, “You’d better get out of there. Cops are coming for you, you little prick.”

  Thatcher said, “Great.” And then he was quiet, told the group to stop moving. And then the camera pivoted and the door came into view, then it was banging open and he was running, the images swinging wildly, streetlights flashing. A siren sounded and then went off. “That’s us,” Brandon said.

  More movement, the sound of shoes slapping on the street. And then Thatcher slowed and heaved himself up. There was a shot of lights and then a truck cab, the back window. “He’s jumped into the bed of a truck,” Perry said.

  And then there was more dizzy swinging and Thatcher, breathing hard said, “Holy shit. What if they shoot the GoPro?” There was a clatter and the screen went black.

  “He took the card out and tossed it,” Brandon said. “And kept running.”

  “And you came up behind him.”

  “I guess he wanted to make sure the thing about the parents was on the video more than he wanted to record his own death,” O’Far
rell said.

  There was a long pause, the room gone quiet.

  “I think you’re off the hook, Blake,” Garcia said.

  “If only,” Brandon said.

  Twenty-Seven

  The news spread fast. Before Brandon left the building a meeting was called with Charlie Carew for the union and Esli Hernandez for the city. Another meeting was scheduled for the next morning with Jim Beam from the AG’s office. Searles and O’Farrell went directly to the DA’s office with the memory card. Sergeant Perry took Elery into an interview room to take his statement. “You did the right thing, son,” Perry said, and he patted Elery on the back.

  “This,” Searles said to Brandon as they left the room, “changes everything.”

  In the conference room, it was Carew and Hernandez and Brandon. Carew said it was too bad the shooting itself wasn’t recorded but the intent to commit suicide by cop was pretty clear. “It was a good shoot all along,” he said, “but this is icing on the cake.”

  “We go from defense to offense,” Hernandez said. “If they’re convicted of killing the old lady, you can sue them civilly for damages. Emotional, psychological, damage to your reputation.”

  “How do you fix that?” Brandon said.

  And then they broke off, the plan for coming days set in motion. At some point, Kelly would be informed of the new evidence against his clients. The rallies would likely die a natural death. Brandon would be called to testify as to Thatcher’s demeanor in the confrontation that led to the shooting. A judge would rule on the admissibility of Thatcher’s allegations, given that he couldn’t be in court to be questioned by the defense.

  “All good, Brandon,” Carew said, reaching across the conference table to shake Brandon’s hand. Hernandez smiled. Brandon thanked them for their help. They said they’d be talking.

  “No doubt,” Brandon said.

  Brandon went out the way he came, the woman at the front desk giving him a thumbs up. The word was spreading.

  His phone was buzzing as he crossed Middle Street, headed for the waterfront and his boat. Kat, a text: “CALL ME TONIGHT!” Mia, a voice mail: “Kat called me looking for you. She said you had good news?”