Dead Cold Mystery Box Set 1

by Blake Banner

  “I think I know why you won’t tell me your theory.”

  “Assuming I have a theory.”

  “You have. I think you are vain. Like the song, you know? I bet you think this song is aboutcha, dontcha?” She laughed out loud. “You can’t bear the thought that you might tell me your theory…”

  “Assuming I have a theory.”

  “…and it might be wrong. Go on. Admit it.”

  “I have a certain intellectual vanity…”

  She mimicked my voice. “I have a certain intellectual vanity…” She burst out laughing again. “You’re cool, Stone. I’ll let you off. But when you start all that ‘Ha! It is as I suspected!’ bullshit, you’ll know that I know that you didn’t know…”

  We had reached her door, and her eyes were bright in the starlight. I smiled. “Good try. But I repeat: I have no theory. I know. I know almost everything. And with a little luck, I will confirm it tomorrow. And then, Miss Cocky Pants, you’ll be laughing on the other side of your face.”

  I opened my door and stepped in.

  “Good night, Dehan.”

  As I closed the door, I heard her parting words.

  “I still say you’re vain.”

  Twenty

  I lay for a long while that night, staring at the ceiling and running over her theory. It was good. It made a lot of sense. It was elegant and simple. I weighed it against my own conclusions. Was she right? Was it vanity? Or something else?

  We started out early, as the sun was rising in the east and before the heat started sapping the life out of everything it touched. We drove west toward Amarillo for about an hour and a half, staring at the endless expanses of dry flatness. Dehan was looking like she was trying hard to hold on to her patience. I didn’t let that distract me. I was trying to imagine what had been going through Mick and Maria’s minds as they drove along this road ten years ago.

  Finally she couldn’t keep her mouth shut any longer, and she said, “This is route 66…”

  I smiled. “That’s where we get our kicks, Dehan.”

  “It’s I-40, and it leads to Los Angeles.”

  “You want to go to California, hang out with the beautiful people?” She didn’t answer. She just looked at me through her shades and waited. “You think we should go south, toward Mexico?”

  She cocked her head on one side and did something that was never intended to be a smile.

  We had reached the turnoff for the 207 down to Claude. I pulled off right, then followed the loop over the bridge, and then we were driving dead south. The landscape was still about as flat and featureless as you could get without sandpapering it.

  “Stone…” She was sounding now like it wasn’t really amusing anymore. She gestured at the thousands of square miles of emptiness. “The only thing you could hide out here is corn, or dirt—flat dirt! Come on! Give it up! How can you hide a red Mustang in this, for crying out loud?”

  I scratched my chin. She said, “Listen to me. The car is in Mexico!”

  We drove in to Claude and out the other end again, and everything was still flat when we got there. After another five or six miles, little had changed, except that we had gone over a small rise, once. Then I said, “When you look around you, you’d think that this endless, featureless landscape would go on forever. But here is the advantage of being a little studious and using your imagination, not to mention maps…”

  She raised an eyebrow at me. I pointed up ahead. “See where the road bears right up ahead?” She glanced, curious in spite of herself. “See what happens when we get there.”

  We got there and she shrugged. “So the road bent. I agree, out here that is like a major event. But…”

  “Climb off…”

  “What?”

  “Your high horse. Climb off it. Look again.” I slowed right down and pointed left. “See the land over there? Flat, featureless, and fertile. Now look over on your right. The earth is turning gray. It’s scrubland, small gnarled bushes. Now, as we proceed further round the bend, what do you notice…?”

  She was frowning. “Okay… The landscape is changing. We have a deep valley opening up here on the right. But I don’t see…”

  “Oh, little grasshopper!” I said, “You see, but you do not imagine!”

  “Give me strength…”

  I pointed up ahead again. “Now, you see up there? The road turns left. Let’s see what happens there…”

  She stared at me a while. The expression in her eyes was hidden by her large, reflective aviators. She said, “Is it like this in your head all the time?”

  “You should join me. It’s fun.” We turned the bend, and I exclaimed, “Oh, by golly, by gum! What have we here?” I did a fair imitation of a Texan and said, “Ah do believe, Detective Dee-han, that we are in a canyon!”

  Before us, the interminable flatness had been suddenly replaced by a vast sweep of deep valleys and rolling hills. The earth began to turn now from gray to red, as though it had been rusted through the millennia. An abundance of bushes and small trees dotted the landscape among rough, hardy shrubs. The road continued to bend and curve as it descended.

  “We are now entering, Detective Carmen Dehan, the Palo Duro Canyon, said to be the second largest in the USA. At the bottom, in about five minutes, we shall find the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River, and then we shall begin to climb up, onto the far side of the canyon.”

  “Shall we?”

  “Indeed.”

  The river was less impressive than its name. It was more like a very large trickle of mud. We crossed it via a concrete bridge and slowly began to climb up the far side. Dehan had gone quiet, and I was watching the roadside, waiting to see something that would tell me I had found the place. I saw it after about five minutes. It was an esplanade, just before a small bridge that crossed a broad track. The track wound its way down into the canyon and was lost among juniper bushes and mesquite. I slowed right down, spun the wheel, and eased off the road and down onto the track.

  It must have been about ten a.m. by then, and it was getting hot. As we bumped down along, clouds of fine red-and-gray dust rose up around us. But there was no breeze to carry them away, so they just lingered and followed us, like sleepy, lonely ghosts that had been abandoned in the desert too long.

  We bounced and rattled down the track for about fifteen minutes, with the sides of the canyon growing steeper and narrower around us the deeper we sank. As we proceeded I began to realize that it wasn’t really a track at all, but a dry river bed. And after a quarter of an hour, we came to a place where a second, smaller river joined this bigger one. I figured they only flowed in the rainy season. I stopped and sat staring. The banks and the slopes were overgrown, but the bed itself was clear. There were rocks but no growth.

  “When is the rainy season in the Panhandle, Dehan?”

  She shook her head. “I have no idea.”

  “May and June. The water must come down there at quite a rate, washing everything away. That’s why the watercourse is clear of vegetation, while the sides are overgrown. December, there is very little rain here.”

  “Really…”

  “Yup.”

  I killed the engine and climbed out. I started scrambling up the dry tributary and heard the truck door slam behind me. We scrambled and climbed for about five minutes toward a dense clump of juniper bushes that had grown up around a sharp bend in the stream. I could imagine that during the rainy season a lot of water accumulated there, making that spot especially fertile. I thought about explaining that to Dehan but decided to leave it till later, over a beer.

  I stopped about twenty yards from the thicket. You could see clearly where, over the years, the water had carved out a new course for itself to get around the obstruction. Dehan came and stood next to me, panting slightly and perspiring, with her hands on her hips. She was quiet for a long time. Finally she said, “Son of a bitch.”

  I grinned at her and said, “Ha! It is as I thought!”

  She ignored me a
nd we clambered the remaining few yards. A decade of heat and rain had taken its toll on the car. The red paint was faded, and there was a lot of corrosion. The windows were down, and I peered in. Dehan leaned in the other side. It was hard to be sure at a glance. There was no telling how many times the car had been flooded with fast-moving water over the years. Dehan, not for the first time, spoke my thoughts aloud.

  “You’ve got air and you’ve got water, so you’ve got bacteria, and so, fast decomposition. Plus, you have all kinds of wild animals. There are going to be bits of them all over this canyon. But I’d lay money on a man and a woman.”

  I nodded, staring at the passenger seat. There was a small collection of bones on the floor and what looked like a thigh bone on the seat. I said, “We should leave it untouched and get the forensic anthropologist to have a look at it. But I just want to have a glance…” I pulled open the door and peered in the back. There were bones back there too, mainly small to medium. I made a mental note, then leaned down and looked under the passenger seat. It was there. I got my handkerchief, reached in, and carefully pulled it out. A skull. The lower jaw was barely hanging on, but it was there. Dehan watched me as I set it on the roof of the car and photographed the teeth from several angles. Then I put it back where I had found it.

  The other skull was smaller, and it was wedged under the driver’s seat. I did the same, then put it back where I’d found it. “The positions of the skulls don’t tell us much, because water and animals may have moved them around several times, but it’s interesting his skull was under the passenger seat.”

  I found the release button and popped the trunk. I closed the driver’s door and walked to the back.

  There was nothing much to see except a spare wheel, a tool case, and an old sports bag. Dehan was by my side staring in. I glanced at her. “You done?”

  She nodded and I closed it. I stayed a while, leaning against the car and gazing down along the desiccated channel among the dusty junipers. I said, “We haven’t got long. We have to report this, and as soon as we do, it goes over to the bureau. That gives us twenty-four, forty-eight hours at the outside.”

  “What the hell were they doing? It’s a miracle they got the car here at all! Why would you do that?” She scowled at me, like Mick and Maria and I had all got it wrong. “He’s going to Mexico—we at least agree he was headed for Mexico?”

  I nodded. “Yes, he was headed for Mexico.”

  “So why, instead of driving directly south on 83, out of Shamrock, straight to the Mexican border, does he go maybe a hundred miles out of his way to the Palo Duro Canyon and take his beloved, priceless, 1969 Mustang down a dry riverbed?”

  I shook my head and held up my hand. “Stop.”

  She didn’t. She went on, “And more than that, Stone, how in the name of holy fuck did you know he did that?”

  “Stop, Dehan. Stop.” We stared at each other a moment. “Detective Carmen Dehan would not do that. Detective Carmen Dehan is a very smart cookie and thinks in a logical, systematic way. She suits her thoughts and her actions to her intentions. But we are not after Detective Dehan. So stop thinking like Detective Dehan, and start thinking like the person you are hunting.”

  “More dinosaur shit.”

  “What does Mick want?”

  “Okay, okay…” She walked away from me and stood with her hands on her hips, looking out at the glare of the canyon. She made a nice silhouette. She spoke without looking at me. “He wants what he’s always wanted, to rule the roost, to show off, to intimidate. He wants to display his power, his wealth, his cute chick, his car.” She turned to face me. “But I still don’t see…”

  I interrupted her. “But you do see that, given that his prime motivation was not to cross the Mexican border, it would not be so difficult to draw him a hundred miles off his route.”

  “Yeah… I see that. But who…?”

  “That, that is the question. Who? Not why, but who.”

  In the truck, as we bumped and scrambled our way back toward the road, she said, “Right from the start, there has been the presence in this case of an unknown person.”

  I nodded. “Yup.”

  “And you saw it from the beginning, didn’t you?”

  “Yup.”

  “When you did your little acting out of the murder on day one—” She imitated my voice. “—‘Good evening, gentlemen, nothing to be alarmed about…’ you were thinking to yourself, ‘There is somebody here we can’t see…’”

  I laughed. “I guess so.”

  “That person lured them here and killed them.” She shook her head and rubbed her face. “Stone, I have to admit, I am even more confused now than I was before we found the car and the bodies. We are looking at exactly the same question we were looking at from the word go. Who is this unknown person? The only difference is now we’re asking it about seven bodies instead of five.”

  I sighed. “Looks that way.”

  She went silent then, and I drove back the way we’d come, but instead of going directly to Shamrock I took the 83 to Wheeler and dropped in on the sheriff. He smiled at us as we stepped into his big, shady office and said, “You still here? I hope you ain’t causin’ trouble.”

  “Not at all. I compliment everybody I meet on how Irish they are. Actually, we will be leaving very soon. I just wanted your guidance on a matter of jurisdiction.”

  He frowned at me and crossed his arms. “Tell me.”

  “We were just exploring the Palo Duro Canyon. We thought it would be a shame to come this far…”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get you. What did you find out there?”

  “We happened to spot a red 1969 Mustang stuck in a dry riverbed, about three miles past the bridge on the 207.”

  We stared at each other for a long time. Finally, he said, “Son of a gun… Well, that’s Armstrong County…”

  “Exactly. Now here is what I am thinking, Sheriff. There are what appear to be human remains in the car.”

  He said, “Mick Harragan, aka Michael O’Hannafin, and Maria Garcia.”

  “Looks that way. It is also looking very much as though he was responsible for at least five murders and one abduction on my turf, plus a lot of corruption and racketeering.”

  He was nodding before I finished. “Sooner or later you have to hand this over to the Feds and they’re gonna take over your case. Well…” He gave me a knowing look. “I know you are mighty anxious to do that as soon as possible, but we have to observe all the correct formalities.” He had a twinkle in his eye that told me we were on the same page. “I am no expert in jurisdiction, Stone, but I think you should leave it to me to contact Sheriff Oats out in Armstrong, get his opinion on the matter, and then I suppose he’ll need a statement from you, which he will submit through the appropriate channels.”

  I smiled. “That sounds about right.”

  We shook hands and headed back toward the Route 66 Inn in Shamrock. As we turned into the parking lot, Dehan said, “Well, whaddaya know, Stone? We got a visit from the Mob. Were you expecting this?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  There was a dark blue Audi 8 parked by the door, and as we pulled up, Vito, dressed in his best Armani, got out and opened the back door for Pro. He waved at us and said, “Where you been? I been waiting for you!”

  Twenty-One

  We sat in my room. Vito stayed outside in the car. Dehan sat on the bed, Pro had the chair, and I sat with my ass on the chest of drawers.

  I said, “What are you doing here, Pro?”

  “What can I tell you? I live down the road. I heard there’s a guy who does a good steak here. His name is Big Vern, or was it Big Paddy? I heard he does his own beer too. But this place—Shamrock! I ask you? It’s full of Micks everywhere. Do you think this Big Vern’s beer is green? I never had green beer. Not even on St Paddy’s Day. Real Irish. Everything is fuckin’ Irish. Place must be crawlin’ with Micks. You find any Micks since you been here, Stone?”

  Dehan said, “Down the road
. Five hundred miles down the road, as the crow flies. How the fuck did you know we were here?”

  He looked sad and made an expressive gesture with his hands. “Such a shame. Such a pretty face, such an ugly mouth. Who taught you to talk like that?”

  “People like you. Answer the question. How did you know we were here?”

  “Guys like me, you know, we hear things. You don’t always remember who told you what. Sometimes it’s one person, sometimes it’s another. Somebody said to me, ‘Hey! You know what? Stone is over in Shamrock!’ I said to myself, ‘What is a guy of Stone’s qualities and abilities doing in a two-bit town like Shamrock?’ So I thought I’d come over and see how you was getting on.” He gave me the dead eye for five seconds and asked, “Did you find the motherfucker or not?”

  I shook my head, but before I could say anything he was talking again.

  “I know you found something, because you been out all fuckin’ day. I know you weren’t admiring the fuckin’ view, ’cause there ain’t one. So what are you doing here, Stone? We had a deal, remember?”

  It was Dehan who answered, which seemed to irritate Pro. “You don’t listen, do you, Morry? You got this crazy thing going on in your head, babbling away, and that’s all you hear. So when a cop tells you, ‘we ain’t going to hand over a suspect to you or provide you with information about him,’ that doesn’t fit with your head babble, so you don’t hear it.”

  I smiled. She’d nailed it. Pro looked at her a moment, turned to me, and said, “So you have found something?”

  “What do you expect us to find, Pro?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Did you find anything?”

  “Here’s what I don’t understand, Pro. I’ll tell you what. We’ll do a trade. You explain this to me, to my satisfaction, and I will share what I have found with you.”

  I saw Dehan glance at me and frown, but I ignored her. Pro shrugged and said, “Shoot.”

  “When we came to visit you in Port Lavaca, you said to me that all I had to do was, and I quote, ‘report to the relevant authorities’ and you would do the rest. From which I understood that you and Vincenzo would be duly informed of what I discovered about Mick.” He grunted. I went on. “But I step outside of New York and in twenty-four hours you’re here like a fly on shit. You’re not sitting by the pool waiting for a call from Mick’s replacement. You’re here, asking me why I am here. Explain that to me, and I will tell you what I have learned.”