Blood on the Tracks (Sydney Rose Parnell Series Book 1)

by Barbara Nickless

  “I’ll tell him,” Nik said quietly, just before his son walked into the kitchen.

  Gentry Lasko, Nik and Ellen Ann’s golden child. The center of their universe, for whom they’d sacrificed everything to put him through law school. Brilliant, cheerful, with a tall and sturdy build, Gentry was the kind of guy who took over a room just by walking in. A handsome brute—as he called himself—who’d e-mailed me every day while I was in Iraq and earned my undying love for it.

  I stood to hug him.

  “Syd! I knew that was your unit parked in front.” He hauled me into a bear hug then pulled away and kissed both my cheeks. “Damn, girl, you look good. Pale, though. You need a few days on the beach. Am I right? Where’s Clyde?”

  Clyde had been waiting for Gentry to notice him. He barked and wagged his tail, his tongue hanging as he hopped up on his back legs. Gentry bear-hugged Clyde, too, then hauled him down to the floor to alpha-roll him. Other than myself, Gentry was the only person—man, woman, or child—whom Clyde genuinely loved. I figured it was because Gentry so resembled Dougie, who’d once been the love of Clyde’s life.

  And mine.

  For an instant, I could see Doug Ayers standing in front of me, grinning at something I’d said. Tall and blond and raucous, in my face and full of life. Looking at him, I laughed, too, and took his hand.

  Three of his fingers were missing, the stumps oozing blood. I lifted my eyes to his, but they’d gone dead.

  I blinked.

  Gentry play-wrestled Clyde for a few minutes, then rose and turned toward his father. Immediately he froze, the merriment leaving his face as if someone had doused him with ice water.

  “Dad? What’s happened? What is it?”

  Nik kept his eyes on Gentry. “Give us a minute, Sydney Rose.”

  I whistled to Clyde, and we went out to the porch. I looked for the kids playing soccer, but they had vanished, leaving behind one partially crumpled orange cone. I hunched against the wind, eyeballing the remnants of the swastika on Nik’s porch and wishing I’d brought the whiskey. Clyde pressed close against my legs, and I laid my hand atop his head, finding comfort in his steady presence.

  From inside the house, Gentry’s voice rose in a raw cry. Clyde barked. I heard Nik’s low rumble, another cry, and then Gentry slammed out through the front door. He gave me a wild-eyed stare and ran to the curb.

  “Gentry!” I hurried after him. “Wait!”

  But he threw himself into his cherry-red muscle car, started the engine, shifted into gear, and punched the gas, screaming away from the curb. The orange cone flew up from his wheels, bounced into the gutter. Seconds later he turned the corner and disappeared.

  I went back inside to find Nik in the hallway, fists balled, looking like he’d been pistol-whipped. I walked him back to the kitchen, and this time I was the one who poured the whiskey.

  Nik opened the kitchen window wider then rooted in a drawer and dredged up a pack of cigarettes even though I knew he’d promised Ellen Ann he had quit. He offered the pack to me. In the chill air, we sat at the table and lit up with matches from Pete’s Diner on Colfax. I hadn’t had a cigarette in a month, and the nicotine hit felt even better than I remembered. I pulled smoke hard into my lungs.

  “He’ll be okay,” I said, knowing the words to be a lie.

  Nik used an empty glass as an ashtray. “I know who did this.”

  I thought of the photos in Elise’s living room and kitchen, the hundred or so faces staring out through the lens of the camera.

  And the hobo sign in her room. A bad man lives here.

  “How can you know?”

  “Elise had taken up with a kid named Tucker Rhodes,” Nik said in a flat voice. “Born and raised in Montana, but he landed in Denver after a tour in Iraq. Kid was hurt bad a few days before his tour ended. Trapped in a Humvee that ran over an IED. Third-degree burns over thirty percent of his body. The VA tried to do everything for him, but after a few surgeries he walked away from any kind of help. The Corps hit him with a dishonorable discharge.”

  “For skipping out on the surgeries?”

  “For going AWOL. He took to hopping freights, catching work here and there. Basically a bum. Don’t know what Elise saw in him except something hurt that needed saving.”

  Tucker Rhodes. The Burned Man. Had to be. What Nik hadn’t said, although I knew he was thinking it, was that Tucker Rhodes was a coward for walking away from whatever help the military might offer. Counseling. Medications. Ways to mitigate the pain. Help that might have saved both him and Elise.

  Something obstinate rose in me. “Getting help from the VA isn’t always easy.”

  Nik gave me a steely stare. “You are not defending him.”

  “No. If he did this, then he deserves whatever the law throws at him. I’m just saying there isn’t as much help to be had as people think. Nor do we know he’s guilty.”

  “He’s a killer.”

  We’re all killers, Nik, I wanted to say. All of us who have seen combat. Some of us haven’t figured out how to turn from killers to suits when we come back to the land of plenty.

  I knocked ash into the glass. My hand shook on the cigarette. How many mangled bodies had I pulled from Humvees and tanks and the slow-moving five-tons with their five-hundred-gallon water buffaloes and loads of Meals Ready to Eat? How many men and women had I touched, Marines missing limbs and eyes and ears, their intestines spilling into the dirt, their faces blank with shock or white with terror?

  If the Burned Man had brought that back with him, how responsible was he for making a mess of his life? For Elise? I’d danced on the edge myself more times than I wanted to count, found myself looking across that thin red line at something monstrous.

  “Why do you think it was him?” I asked.

  “Twice he hurt her. Twice I know of. Popped her in the face. I didn’t hear about it until he’d run off and left her.” The words came out like talking hurt. “Then she goes and talks him home. She was going to marry the son of a bitch.”

  “They were in love?”

  Nik went to stand by the window. “Elise didn’t much separate her feelings for a stray cat with how she felt about the man she planned to spend her life with. She felt sorry for Rhodes. She thought she could fix him.”

  “If he loved her, then why would he do such terrible—why would he end her life?”

  Nik was suddenly breathing hard, his lungs going like bellows, and I knew he’d heard what I’d almost said. Why would he do such terrible things to her?

  “Nik, I didn’t mean—”

  He talked over me, uninterested in apology or explanation. “Maybe Elise had come to her senses. Maybe she told him she couldn’t marry him, and he flipped out.”

  “You’re making a pretty big leap. Guys hit their wives, their girlfriends. Sometimes the woman hits back. But it doesn’t usually end with—”

  My throat closed as the past rose up like a fist. Murder, I’d almost said, before thinking of my mother and the man she’d taken up with even before my father left. The man the law said she’d shoved in front of a train during a drunken spat. The judge had sentenced her to twenty for second-degree murder. But she’d been dead of cancer before she’d served a year. With my dad still MIA, I’d effectively become an orphan.

  Nik saw it immediately. “Ah, hell, Sydney Rose. I’m sorry.”

  I looked down and forced together the ragged edges of my childhood, zipping closed old wounds. After a minute I said, “It doesn’t make Rhodes guilty.”

  “Well, maybe I’m wrong. I hope to God I’m wrong. I hope the last thing Elise saw before she died wasn’t the face of someone she—”

  He stopped. Blinked.

  “Fuck of a day,” I whispered.

  We waited. Smoked. Let the roar of our pulses calm enough to allow in the sounds of the clock and the traffic.

  Nik said, “Tucker’s the most likely, isn’t he? We’re usually betrayed by those who claim to love us best.”

  I felt my o
wn Weight. “He was in camp this morning. At Hogan’s Alley. One of the transients saw him.”

  Nik crushed his cigarette out in the sink, closed the window. “He still there?”

  “Not when I was, as of 0800. He’d come in on a freight and walked out.” I pulled out my cell phone. “I’ll tell Cohen.”

  “You do that. But I’m going to find him first.”

  “How do you plan to do that?”

  “I’ll start with the camp. Maybe he told someone where he was going. Maybe he’s back there. Or he could have caught out already and someone saw him. I’ll find him.”

  I dropped the phone back in my pocket. “This can’t be about vigilante justice.”

  “I’m not saying that’s what I mean to do. But I will not let this man go. I will not let him ride into another jurisdiction and disappear under some overworked sheriff’s paperwork. Rhodes could be halfway across the country by now. You know that. So you go ahead and call Cohen, but I’m not waiting on Denver PD. If he’s caught out, he’s mine.”

  “We aren’t murder police.”

  Nik stared at the whiskey bottle for a long time, as if contemplating finishing it off. Instead, he capped it and returned it to the cupboard above the refrigerator, out of easy reach. He squared his shoulders at me. “How long you been on the force?”

  “Just over eighteen months.”

  “I’ve been working the trains longer than you’ve been alive, Sydney Rose. Forty years, the last twenty as a railroad cop. Since I was sixteen I’ve worked the lines. The only time I took off was a stretch in the Corps when I was nineteen. I’ve worked jumpers and gangbangers and serial killers. I’ve handled bombers and thieves and dealt with the general scum of the earth. I’m a Level I POST-certified peace officer like every goddamn cop in Denver, and have been since before your city detective got his ears wet at the academy.” He stabbed a finger at me. “Now you sit there and tell me that I am not qualified to track down this piece of shit. You tell me that, Sydney Rose, and I’ll put my feet up on the desk and stare down at a belly grown fat, and I’ll sit that way until I die.”

  I took in his anger, understanding it. But I was shaking. I didn’t want to be dragged into another death investigation. I’d left that behind in Iraq. I didn’t want to go to the autopsy, give up Tucker Rhodes’s name, embroil myself in Elise’s death. I didn’t want the Weight of Elise’s soul.

  I would hold her in my heart. But I didn’t want her at my breakfast table.

  As if reading my mind, Nik said, “I don’t need your help on this. You call your detective then go into the office and tell the captain I’m searching for a trespasser. I’ll do this on my own time.”

  “Nik—”

  He held up a hand. “I’m police and I’m kin. No one knows the lines and the yards like me. If Rhodes caught out, I’ve got a better chance than anyone of finding him. If he’s sitting on a siding somewhere or hiding in a DPU, he’s on railroad property, and that makes him mine.”

  I drew a deep, shuddering breath. “They won’t talk to you.”

  “What?”

  “The transients. They won’t tell you anything.”

  “They’d damn well better.”

  “That’s just it, Nik. You’re too old school. They’re afraid of you.”

  “Then get me started.”

  I saw in his eyes what he wouldn’t say. He needed me to do this more than he’d ever needed anything from me.

  I looked out the window. The crows had flown away. There came a lull in the traffic. The world lay empty. Even the ghosts I’d brought back with me were gone, although I could hear the whisper of their passage across the pale, dead grass in Nik’s yard. I looked for the Sir in the tangled scrub oak in the field behind Nik’s yard, but there was only the rattle of the wind.

  I turned back, the familiar nausea in my gut. “Just this one thing, Nik. I’ll talk to the people at the camp. But we notify city police. And as soon as we have a lead, we step out, let them handle it. Deal?”

  He nodded. “That’s the way you want it.”

  But he was lying, and I knew it. Nik wouldn’t let this go. He’d track Tucker Rhodes to the ends of the earth. He’d hunt the boy down every rail line and road and dirt track until one of them finished it.

  CHAPTER 4

  Why did I re-up? Because when I came home, I didn’t know how to be home. Didn’t know how to fit in anymore. Didn’t know what to do with myself. I missed the order. The adrenaline. The sense of larger purpose.

  War is a drug; it’ll call you back until it kills you.

  —Corporal Sydney Rose Parnell. Denver Post.

  January 13, 2010.

  The sky had lowered when Nik and I emerged from his house. Slow, fat flakes fell and melted on the asphalt. The air was raw. I opened the rear door of the Ford and Clyde jumped into his carrier. I got in behind the wheel. Nik stood on the other side of the truck, his forearms on the roof as he leaned into the closed door and stared at the curb where Gentry’s car had been parked thirty minutes earlier.

  Through the glass and the swirl of snow, Nik’s face looked as if someone had bulldozed the foundation of his cranial bones, the skin pocked and falling like a ruined house. It hit me that Nik was no longer young. And that maybe sometimes age comes in an instant. Nik had been fifty-nine years young right up until I sat at his kitchen table and told him about Elise.

  Now there was nothing young about him.

  After a moment, he slapped his open palm against the metal roof and climbed into the cab. I started the engine and backed out of the driveway as snow gathered on the grass. The warmth from the whiskey had fled, and I was both tired and painfully sharp, the way I had felt in Iraq after a shift processing the dead. In Camp Taqaddum, I’d walk outside into the 3:00 a.m. night, always with company because sometimes the male Marines weren’t my best friends. We’d stand outside and smoke, me and Bailor or Tomitsch. Sometimes the Sir. Whoever’d been with me on shift. We’d listen to the passage of ghosts, our senses scraped raw after handling flesh that would never know of our touch.

  “The hardest pounds,” Nik said.

  I glanced over, saw the Weight collect on him as he began his own walk with the dead. His hand cupped mine for an instant.

  “Glad it was you who brought the news, Sydney Rose.”

  At Hogan’s Alley, I pulled into the same patch of dirt where I’d parked that morning and turned off the engine. The snow hadn’t started to fall here, yet. A light wind blew. Trash Can’s tarp and the green pup tent were gone. I zipped my coat and grabbed my bag.

  “Wait here,” I said. “You’ll just intimidate everyone.”

  “To hell with that.”

  I shrugged and said, “Your show.”

  This time I leashed Clyde. On a lead or not, he’d feel my anxiety, and I didn’t want him deciding on his own if someone was a threat. It’s easier to call a dog out than to call him off.

  The camp was empty save for one person, a black woman in her forties with the road name Calamity Jane. Calamity Jane had been hopping trains for eight years; she had to be one tough bitch to have survived. Blacks on the rails were rarer than hen’s teeth, women near as scarce. A black woman stood out like a crow trying to hide in a flock of pigeons.

  Jane sat atop the picnic table, hunched over with forearms on thighs as she slowly swayed, a ratty quilt draped over her shoulders and a homemade cigarette hanging from her lips. She was whip-thin under her gray sweatshirt and blue jeans, her long feet thrust, sockless, into filthy Keds. Her hair was greasy and shot through with gray, her eyes at half-mast.

  We stopped next to the table.

  “Morning, Jane.”

  She blinked at me. Recognition filtered in like light through a dirty window.

  “Senior Special Agent Parnell. And Clyde.” She squinted. “Your first name Bonnie?”

  I smiled and shook my head. “How’s life treating you, Jane?”

  “Rough here. Rough there.” She barked a phlegmy laugh. “Rough all
through. So who cares?”

  Her voice was husky, tattered, as if her vocal cords had been scraped raw. She pursed her lips, blowing cigarette smoke up into the skies, then knocked ash on the ground. “Heard I done missed your pancakes.”

  I gave her a chocolate bar from my bag. She tucked it into the pocket of her sweatshirt.

  “You can get food at the shelter,” I said, my voice soft.

  “Yeah.” She snorted. “I get me a steamed hot dog, then some shit be wanting head as payback. I done with that.”

  Nik had had enough of the pleasantries. “We’re looking for someone.”

  Her eyes cut to him, and she used one skinny fist to gather the blanket at her throat. “Yeah?”

  “A bum known as the Burned Man. You seen him?”

  “He been around. Came in early, when it all still dark. Took off near as fast. What you want with that poor boy?”

  “He’s a material witness.”

  She waved a hand dismissively. “We all material witnesses. Only we ain’t got none of the material.” She cackled.

  “You heard anything about where he might have gone?”

  “He didn’t do no check-in with me, that what you asking.”

  Nik exhaled sharply, his last bit of patience a single thread in a fraying blanket. “What do you know?”

  “Maybe I seen him.”

  “Where?”

  She shrugged, coy. “Then again, ain’t nobody paid me to watch him.”

  Nik leaned in, putting his cop’s eyes on her. “You want to tell the same story down at the station?”

  “You can’t arrest me ’cause I don’t know where that boy is.”

  “Loitering. Vagrancy. Illegal drug use. Vandalism. Trespassing.” He put his hands on the table and stepped in until his face was inches from hers. “I can haul you in for ass-fucking a rabbit if that’s what I decide you did. You get my drift, you piece of filth?”

  Nik. Old school all the way.

  Jane dropped the blanket. She looked ready to take a swing at Nik, and I began to get an idea of how she’d lasted on the rails.

  “Ah, Jesus, Nik.” I grabbed his arm, yanked him back, out of earshot. It was his show, but that didn’t mean he had to throw it all away. “You’re going about this all wrong.”