by Nick Petrie
The older cop never looked away from Peter’s face. “Check the trucks,” he said.
While the younger cop walked over to Henry’s pickup, still on the red wrecker’s tow bar, the older cop took out his notepad and flipped to a new page without looking. “You want to tell me about it?”
The younger cop opened the rear driver’s-side door with a single gloved finger, and peered inside. “Sarge?”
Something in his voice made the older cop glance over. “What?”
Peter had left the weapons jumbled in the back seat, rifles and handguns. He hadn’t been neat about it. It was a serious pile of hardware.
The younger cop moved quickly to the cab of the tow truck. He saw the windshield blown in and the back of the cab painted with the driver’s blood and brains. “Jesus.”
The older cop turned back to Peter without expression. “Why don’t you tell me what happened.”
Peter pointed his thumb at the pickup. “That big steel box in the back? It’s full of money. I work for Heavy Metal Protection.” He gave them his name and his Social Security number so they could look him up in their system.
“Wait,” said the younger cop. “This is dope money?”
“Yes,” said Peter. “Strictly legal. We were moving it for a client, there were four of us, and we were attacked. In or near the Arapaho National Forest. Five men, three vehicles. Very well planned. I got lucky. The hijackers killed everyone on the crew but me.”
“What about the hijackers?” the younger cop asked.
“They’re dead, too,” Peter said. “All but one of them.”
The older cop had his head down toward his pad, but his eyes were up, glued to Peter’s face. He’d seen something there. “Did you happen to shoot anybody yourself?”
Peter sighed. “Are the detectives coming?”
The older cop nodded calmly. “Already on the way.”
Peter said, “I’ll tell it to them.”
The younger cop didn’t like that much, Peter could tell.
The older cop told him, “Grab some GSR bags from the car.” To Peter, he said, “Just regular paper bags, like for packing your lunch. We’ll put those over your hands to preserve any gunshot residue for the evidence techs.”
He glanced at Peter’s face. “You over in the sandbox?”
“A few years back,” Peter said. “How’d you know?”
“You have the look.” The cop gave him a thin smile. “Plus a civilian would have lost his shit. We’d be peeling you off the ceiling.” He looked back at the wrecker with its red smear. “I was in the reserves,” he said. “Called up twice, protecting convoys in the Sunni Triangle. I’m lucky I made it home.”
“Were you a cop before, too?” Peter was curious.
That thin smile again. “Protect and serve.”
Peter didn’t say anything more. He hadn’t mentioned that the fifth man was dressed as a state trooper, driving an unmarked car with state plates. He was still wondering whether the trooper was the real thing or an impostor, and how he might determine which.
He’d talked to the police before. He had more practice with it than he wanted.
He hadn’t decided how to play this yet.
—
Two more patrol cars rolled up to protect the scene, but the first detective took another twenty minutes to arrive.
In his late forties or early fifties, he had a slight hunch and a comfortable paunch, colorless hair clipped close to hide the expansion of his bald spot, a bushy brown mustache that drooped down past the corners of his mouth, and a baggy brown suit with his badge clipped to one side of his belt and a pistol clipped to the other. He stopped to talk to the uniformed officers for a few minutes, went inside the hospital, then came back out for a look at the wrecker and Henry’s pickup before he approached Peter.
“I’m Detective Steinburger.” He put a business card on the bench but didn’t offer to shake hands. “I’m going to take your picture now.” He took a half dozen photos with his phone, then sat on the other end of the bench, with a few careful feet between them.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Peter. “So am I.”
“The crime scene techs will be here soon,” Detective Steinburger said. “The mobile crime lab will be here eventually. They’ll take more pictures, take samples of the blood on your skin. We’ll need to take your clothing into evidence.” He glanced at Peter’s road-wrecked boots. “You got anyone coming? Anyone to bring you something to wear?”
After Peter had used Henry’s phone to call Elle Hansen from the highway, he’d sent a text to his friend Lewis in Milwaukee, telling Lewis he’d killed four men in self-defense and that he needed a good lawyer to meet him at Swedish Medical Center in Denver.
Lewis had texted back almost immediately. On it. Sit tight.
But there was no lawyer in sight. And no clean clothes, either.
Now, answering the detective, Peter shook his head. “I don’t live here. I was just doing a favor for Henry.”
“We’ll figure something out,” Steinburger said. “Once the techs get here, you can clean yourself up. I’ll send a patrolman to your hotel for some clothes. We’ll go downtown and you can make a formal statement. But right now you need to talk to me, tell me what happened.”
Peter shook his head. “We can talk all you want, but I’m not going anywhere. I need to talk to Henry’s daughter, when she’s done inside.”
“I’m not asking,” Steinburger said mildly. “People are dead. You want the cuffs, we can do the cuffs. I’ve got four cops with Tasers. We’ll put you in the car, then put you in a cell. You can talk to us from there, if you’d rather.”
Funny, there was a time when Peter thought spending the night in jail would cure him of his claustrophobia. It was a dumb idea, and the last thing he wanted now. Except maybe to talk about it with a stranger, but that was unavoidable now.
“I can’t go inside,” he said. “I have claustrophobia. I’ll have a panic attack. It’s a post-traumatic stress thing.”
He felt the heat of embarrassment again. Even after months of therapy, part of him still felt like it was his fault, something personally wrong with him. Not just his brain chemistry altered by eight years of war, locked into that fight-or-flight zone.
Although they were still useful, those wartime reflexes. He’d proven that today.
“Huh,” the detective said. “You got any paperwork for that?”
—
A red BMW sedan, gleaming under the sodium lights, rolled up and double-parked in the ambulance zone, the nose of the car pushing up against the yellow perimeter tape set up by the cops.
Peter heard the door slam.
“Excuse me.” A bright, brassy voice cut through the purr of the idling cruisers’ engines. “Are you Peter Ash?”
A woman strode toward them across the asphalt. Her hair was blond and kinky and down to the shoulders of the midnight-blue suit stretched tight across her chest and thighs. Four-inch heels, horn-rimmed glasses, the whole package looked expensive as hell to Peter, although admittedly, he wasn’t the best judge.
“That’s me,” Peter said. Wondering who the hell this woman was, hoping that Lewis had come through again.
The younger cop stepped quickly to intercept her, but she held up a palm and stopped, still a dozen feet from where Peter sat.
She looked Peter up and down. “You look like shit,” she said, then spun to face the younger cop. She moved like a dancer, comfortable on her toes.
“I’m Miranda Howe, Mr. Ash’s attorney.” She produced a crisp business card out of nowhere and held it up to the cop, who looked at Steinburger.
The detective nodded and Miranda Howe stepped forward and presented her card to Steinburger.
“Why isn’t my client getting medical care? Why hasn’t my client been allowed to clean himself off? He’s the victim of a brutal crime, and it’s only through his own history as a veteran and war hero that he was lucky eno
ugh to survive.”
She talked quickly and in complete paragraphs, and the detective couldn’t squeeze a word between the sentences that kept coming. Peter was going to object to her description of him as a war hero, but he didn’t have time, either.
She said, “Surely you’re not charging him with anything. You certainly haven’t detained him in any way, so I’m assuming he’s free to go. We’ll make an appointment for a statement downtown. Tomorrow.”
She spun back to Peter and reached down for his elbow to help him off the bench, giving him a very nice view down the front of her cream-colored blouse.
He noticed that she wore a red brassiere, although it didn’t appear to cover much.
“We’ll go inside and find you the necessary medical attention that the local police have clearly neglected to provide. When that’s done, I have a change of clothes for you in the car.”
Standing up, Steinburger found his voice. “Ms. Howe, wait a moment.” His back was straighter, and his suit somehow seemed to fit him better. He no longer looked like a tired, overworked civil servant, a pose Peter realized Steinburger probably used a lot, in order to seem less threatening to victims and suspects alike. Now, with Miranda Howe breathing down his neck, he looked like a pretty capable cop.
“Mr. Ash, is this woman your attorney?”
“I believe so,” Peter said.
Steinburger took a deep breath. “Ms. Howe, several people are dead. I still don’t know what your client saw or did, and I have a lot of questions about what happened. As for how he looks, the scene techs need to take samples before he can get himself cleaned up, and the techs are on their way. The first officer on the scene offered medical care, and your client declined. In short, he is sitting here at my discretion, Counselor, so unless you’d like Mr. Ash cuffed and put in a car and hauled down to the pokey, I strongly suggest you take it down a notch.”
“Hmm,” she said, looking at Steinburger a bit differently. “Fair enough. I’d like to speak with my client in private, please.”
“I’ll give you until the crime scene techs get here,” he said. “But then we start asking questions. The state police are on their way. It’s likely that they have jurisdiction here.”
She nodded and Steinburger stepped away, waving the uniformed officers back before putting his phone to his ear. They moved out of earshot, but still effectively blocked any pathway Peter might have taken to get out of there.
Miranda Howe, Peter’s apparent attorney, stared at him. Her makeup was expertly applied, rendering the faint pockmarks of her acne scars almost invisible. He could feel some vast engine of calculation whirring away behind her eyes, though he did wonder why she wasn’t completely freaked out by her new client, who was covered with other men’s blood.
“Did anyone read you your rights?”
“No.”
“Okay, that’s good.” She sat beside him on the bench. Her perfume was a floral riot, like a hothouse garden in full bloom. He was having trouble getting past that glimpse down her blouse. He was fairly certain she’d done that deliberately, as part of some strategy he didn’t yet understand. He didn’t mind. It was a nice view.
He really needed to get back to June.
“Tell me what happened,” she said. “The short version, but don’t leave out anything important. I’m your attorney, so this entire conversation is privileged. That means I can’t tell anyone else what you tell me without your permission. You can trust me.”
Peter smiled. At the moment, with two hijackings in a week, he wasn’t going to trust anyone. Especially someone who told him to trust her. “Maybe first you’d better explain how it is that you’re my attorney.”
“Mr. Lewis called my office,” she said. “He has a relationship with the firm. He said to tell you Dinah sends her love. And that better be good enough for right now, because I left a friend at Guard and Grace to come here, and I only got one lousy appetizer, so I’m pretty goddamn hungry.”
Peter’s connection to Lewis wasn’t something she could have discovered quickly, and Dinah was the reason Peter and Lewis had become friends to begin with. “Good enough,” he said.
He told her about the disappearance of the first car, the heavy crew’s protection run, the ambulance blocking them on the narrow mountain road, the wrecker slamming into Henry’s truck from the side.
He told her about the car that came up behind them, but didn’t mention that it was set up to look like a police car, driven by a man in a state police uniform. Peter still had the license plate number. It was the only thing he had to hang on to, the only detail that might lead him back to the remaining hijacker.
He told her how Deacon and Banjo had died, the man with the shotgun, the paramedics. The semi-controlled gurney ride down the mountain with Henry, the death of the hijacker driving the wrecker. Loading Henry onto the back of the pickup.
Miranda looked at him.
“You’re shitting me, right? This is the story you’re planning to tell?”
He shrugged. “It’s the truth.”
Mostly.
Aside from the fact that he was leaving out details about the fifth hijacker, the truth was that he didn’t want to talk to the cops at all.
But avoiding the cops would be worse. It would limit his movements. It would make him a suspect, which would make it even harder to do what he wanted to do.
Which was to talk with Henry’s daughter about why and how somebody might hit her guys. Grill that grower to see if he was part of it. Track down that state trooper, real or fake, and make sure there was nobody else involved in the murder of his friends.
Then maybe beat that trooper to death.
It probably wasn’t what Don, his therapist in Eugene, would recommend. Not the best way to get the war out of his system.
But here he sat, with Henry dead, and other men’s blood drying on his clothes.
Something had broken loose in him on that mountain. He could feel it, that restless urge toward the fight, like some clattering windup mechanism whose coiled spring never unwound.
It’s just who he was, that need to do something. To be of use.
Sometimes, to cause some fucking trouble.
He just hoped he could pack it all away again, when the time came to see June.
“Anyway,” he told Miranda, “no matter what I tell the cops, there’s a long trail of evidence.” He gestured to his clothes, his face. “Whose blood do you think this is? Not much of it is mine. They’re going to figure it out anyway. Better to be up front.”
“No,” she said. “Better for you to shut up right now and let me do the talking.” She shook her head. “Your boss warned me that you were a loose cannon, but he didn’t say you were fucking crazy.”
“Wait. My boss?”
“Yes, Mr. Lewis, the CEO of your company. Unfortunately, I never got his first name.”
Peter laughed. Lewis was full of surprises.
She kept talking. “Apparently Mr. Lewis places a high value on your continued availability. I asked what your position was with the company, and he wouldn’t say.” She looked at him sideways. “Perhaps we’ll talk more about that later. However, because your company does a great deal of business with my firm, and pays a substantial retainer for our services, I am under strict instructions to provide any and all possible assistance.”
Peter said, “What exactly is your legal specialty?”
She shook her kinky blond hair out of her face. “My official title is senior counsel,” she said. “Unofficially, I solve client problems using whatever means necessary.” She showed her teeth, which were bright white and far too even to be natural. “In other words, I’m a fixer.”
“Huh,” said Peter. “That’s kind of what I do, too.”
10
A black SUV arrived and a man and a woman climbed out and spoke to the older uniformed officer, who pointed them at Steinburger, who pointed them at Peter and at the wrecker with Henry’s pickup on the tow bar. They were dressed in black wo
rk pants and beige polo shirts with some kind of logo on the breast.
The man carried a big plastic toolbox over to the trucks. The woman carried her own big plastic toolbox over to Peter. She was older than Peter, with her dark hair in a no-nonsense bob, basic makeup, and her only jewelry was modest gold studs in her ears. “I’m going to take some pictures of you now,” she said. “Then I’ll take samples from your skin and clothes.”
Under the watchful eyes of Miranda Howe and Detective Steinburger, the woman removed an enormous camera with flash from her toolbox and captured Peter from every possible angle. Then she pulled on thin blue nitrile gloves, set out a variety of plastic collection bags and containers and tools, removed the paper bags from his hands, and swabbed and scraped his face and ears and neck and hands and clothes. With a pair of heavy-duty scissors, she cut samples from his hair and shirt and pants and the webbing of his ballistic vest and tucked them into individual plastic envelopes.
She looked like a busy, efficient suburban mom, but here she was collecting the remains of the dead from Peter’s living body.
Then she turned to Steinburger. “I’m going to need the rest of his clothes now,” she said.
Miranda nodded. “I’ll get something for you to change into,” she said. “Don’t say anything until I get back.”
She strode to her red BMW, clipping along in her four-inch heels. Both Peter and Steinburger watched her go. “Some lawyer,” said Steinburger.
“No comment,” said Peter.
“How does a glorified security guard rate Miranda fucking Howe?”
“I have no idea,” Peter said. “But I think I’m in good hands, don’t you?”
Steinburger made a face like he’d licked a lemon. “Yeah.”
Miranda returned with a soft leather duffel, pointing one long-nailed finger at Peter. “What did I just tell you? Not one fucking word.”
“No harm done, Counselor,” Steinburger said mildly. “Just making conversation. Let’s try not to make this adversarial, shall we? Mr. Ash is not under arrest. I’m just trying to determine what’s happened.”
“Just to be clear, he’s cooperating voluntarily.”
“Absolutely, and we appreciate his help,” Steinburger said. “We’re going to have to go inside.” The detective waved a hand toward the hospital entrance. “I can’t let you get naked out here. And I’m going to ask you some questions.”