Day late and a dollar short.
He looked around at the crowd, now mumbling a lot more softly than before, decided there wasn’t anything going on that would make good footage and stepped back up and into the van.
I stood on the porch next to Cowboy, our shotguns below railing level, and watched the armed guys in the group do this weird interpretive dance movement. They’d start to reach down toward their hip, unconsciously, realize what they were doing, jerk their hands away, palms out, fingers spread, and exhale a huge breath. After I watched the third guy do it, I nearly busted out a laugh, but held it together. Didn’t want anyone down on the lawn to get the wrong idea.
“You think they’ll give up now?” I said.
“Dunno. My guess is they took you serious and all. Depends on how stupid they be. A’course you were a candy-ass. Didn’t shoot no-one or nothin’.”
I looked at the sunset shimmering off the bottom of the clearing cloud and wondered if that would change during the dark hours.
“I guess we’ll find out,” I said.
“Ah yuh.”
Chapter 25
I left before sunrise the next morning, sneaking over the back fence and tip-toeing my way down alongside the neighbor’s house. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about pushing my way through the crowd out front, but I didn’t want them knowing exactly how many people were or weren’t inside.
Might give them ideas.
I made it around the block to the Pacer unnoticed, and tooled through the pre-dawn streets, drifting toward the Park Cities and Imani Laweles. Had the window cracked, trailing pipe smoke behind me, thinking about my approach as compere of the latest installment of everybody’s favorite game: ‘Truth or Consequences.’
She was clearly scared of her foster-father, or of what he might think or do, so I’d have preferred to get Imani alone and give her the space she needed to tell me what I needed to know.
Only problem was, I didn’t know how to do that. I figured Donald would have her buttoned down pretty tight. Enough that walking up to the front door and asking to speak with her privately wasn’t going to work.
As it turned out, it was academic.
Being in front of peak hour meant that I made it to the house quicker than I expected, and I pulled into the curb across the road and one house up. It was a beautiful morning, blue sky and dewy grass glistening in the sun, birds hopping about on the tract of parkland alongside the Beckett house as they looked for an early meal.
I was enjoying the peace and quiet and still thinking about how to play my next step when I realized the figure standing near the garbage cans and squinting across the street at me was the aforementioned Donald Beckett.
Next thing I knew he was in motion. I made it out of the car before he closed the gap and met him on the sidewalk under the branches of a large oak tree.
“Good morning, Mr Beckett. Spring is definitely on the way. Terrific weather, isn’t it?”
He rumbled through a scowl at me. “I told you to leave us alone.”
“Can’t do that, I’m afraid.”
“I could call the police, right now.”
“And tell them what? That there’s a man here minding his own business, enjoying the sunshine? The last thing DPD needs is another scandal about frivolous call-outs. The Chief has enough on his plate as it is.”
He side-eyed me for a few seconds.
“How’s Imani doing?” I asked.
“None of your business.”
“Raising teenagers is a tough gig.” I’d heard that from someone a while ago.
“Hmmph. Like you’d know.” Looks like my Doctor Spock impression wasn’t going to fly. But I waited. “Imani’s been through hell and back, Mr Rafferty. I won’t go into the details, but suffice to say, no-one deserves to see what she’s seen in her young life. And now, just when we’re able to be the ones taking her away from that awful mess, this happens to her.”
I wasn’t yet sure if we could agree that this had ‘happened’ to her, or whether she was involved in more ways than Donald figured, but I wasn’t about to let him in on my thinking just yet.
Leaned back against the fender, relaxed. Two guys shooting the breeze. “That’s tough, all right. I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Hmmph.” The shocks creaked under his weight as he took a spot next to me and looked at the ground.
“Mr Beckett … Donald. Despite what you think of me, I’m not a threat to Imani. You and I both want the same thing.”
He swiveled his head and looked at me. “How do you figure that?”
“We both want to know that the kids are safe when they go to school. Right?”
He nodded slowly. “Of course.”
“Then let me speak with Imani so I can find out what happened on the day and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
He pulled in a huge breath, and stood.
“I don’t think so, Mr Rafferty.”
“Donald—”
“I said no.” A sigh. “Actually, Mr Rafferty, I don’t harbor ill will against you. In fact, what you’re doing is noble, in a way. I truly don’t think that you’ll succeed in your efforts to save that boy though, and yes, no matter what he did, I still believe he is due a just process, so your effort is commendable.”
“Then why not—”
“But you’ll be doing it without Imani’s assistance.”
“The lawyers will be doing it anyway, so what’s the harm?”
“Let the lawyers come with their subpoenas, if they must. But no-one gets to speak to her while I have any say in it. Good day, Mr Rafferty.” He headed across the street to his driveway.
“What are you afraid of?” I called after him.
He reached the driveway, ripped the lid off one of the garbage cans and rummaged inside. I patted my hip pocket and cursed myself for not packing a blackjack. Thought automatically for a second about where the Colt was and made a mental note to stop doing stupid things like heading out the door unarmed.
He was back, jabbing a soggy newspaper in my face. Good thing I didn’t have a gun to draw. I would have looked over-reactive.
“This, Mr Rafferty! This is what I’m afraid of.”
I took the paper and peeled it open. Today’s date and another front page exclusive by Monica.
WHAT IS COLUMBUS SURVIVOR HIDING? New documents reveal holes in story about dramatic rescue from school shooting.
Damn, Monica was fast. I had hoped I’d bought myself more time by burying the attendance registers deep inside the mountain of information I’d asked her for. Whether she’d been through all of it or targeted those first was immaterial. But dammit, I wish she’d waited a few more days.
“I don’t know where they get these lies from, but I will protect Imani from people who cause her harm, even unintentionally. And that means you, Mr Rafferty.”
I was about to answer him when I saw movement over his left shoulder. It took me a couple of seconds to work out what it was, and I turned my non-response into an over-exaggerated yawn and stretch, so he wouldn’t follow my eye-line.
Imani had come out of the treeline at the rear of the parkland and was halfway across the open space to her yard when she noticed us. She froze like the proverbial deer in the headlights, then crept forward as Donald continued talking.
“Am I boring you?”
I locked eyes with him and shook my head, trying to keep Imani in my peripheral vision. She didn’t move her stare from her foster-father’s back, while she crouch-ran across the last thirty yards of the parkland, pushed through the side hedge, and disappeared into her yard.
“It’s not boring to me, Mr Rafferty. I’ll be seeing my lawyers later today to start the process of suing the paper for defamation. And, as long as Imani does her part to fit into our family, I’ll do whatever I need to do to protect her. She deserves that much.”
“So there’s no chance that I can talk to Imani?”
“None at all.”
He snatched the paper from m
y hands, stalked across the road, and threw it back into the garbage can.
I leaned on the car for another ten minutes, wondering if there would be an Imani encore, but all I saw was the curtains in the living room twitch a couple of times.
Watching me, watching them.
The sun was starting to get hot, so I jumped in the car and headed for the office.
Bad move. Managed to nail peak hour dead center, but at least the Pacer was comfortable for the forty-five minutes I spent stuck in traffic. It still looked stupid, though.
Feet up on the desk, coffee cup swirling steam, and a pipe drifting smoke to the open window. Ah, my happy place.
Don’t let anyone else know that I actually said that.
Stared out the window in thought. What was Imani doing this morning? Whatever it was, she clearly didn’t want her foster-father to know about it. He talked a lot about protecting her, but he also said that she had to live up to her end of the bargain. I assume that referred to his dictums about drugs and school attendance. Too early for school, so what else was I to assume?
I found an old Dallas city map in the bottom desk drawer, underneath a handful of .38 cartridges, two empty Borkum Riff cans, my braided leather and shot blackjack, and a stack of gun shop catalogs. Almost got sidetracked flicking through the catalogs, but instead spread the map out and located the Beckett house.
According to the map, behind the adjacent parkland and treeline, a narrow greenbelt followed a small stream west for a few hundred yards before opening out into a lake and more parkland.
File that one away for later.
With Imani effectively out of the picture for the time being, I grabbed a fresh cup of coffee from the percolator and gently prodded my thoughts toward Bradley, hoping his mother and uncle could get something useful from him.
I’d take anything from specific details on how he wasn’t involved through to a full confession. Yeah, I gunned them all down, copper. I did it, and I’d do it again, too.
Cheesy lines from movies notwithstanding, that scenario just didn’t play for me. And, as much as I liked my soundbite of ’three bags for three shooters’, it wasn’t that hard to conjure a scenario where the two dead shooters humped all their weaponry to the school, hid in the service area while they got ready, and decided that they could cause enough destruction even with leaving some of their play toys behind.
Plus, I just didn’t see Bradley as the gun-wielding type. Maybe it was the stories that Ray had told me about the aborted family hunting trips. Maybe it was the way he handled the gun when I watched him in the schoolyard.
Still, not being confident, or cocky, with a firearm doesn’t preclude a person from firing it. I watched him fire off a round, even though he didn’t look particularly comforta—
Wait a minute.
Took me a couple more to get Ricco on the phone.
“I shouldn’t be talking to you.”
“Yeah, yeah. I get that all the time.”
“No, seriously, Ed will have my guts he finds out.”
“Well, shut up and let me tell you what I need so you can get off the phone. You guys cataloged all the ballistic details from the rec-area, right?”
“Yup.”
“How many casings?”
“What? A shitload.”
“No, not how many total, just how many different types?”
“That’s a little easier. Let me check.” The low hum of the DPD machinery—both human and mechanical—blew into my ear for a few minutes until Ricco came back. “We found casings from four different calibers: Twelve-gauge shotgun, nine mill and five-point-seven mill, and forty-five.”
“The forty-five would have been the one that Bradley dumped.”
“Ballistics says so.”
“How many forty-five casings did you find?”
“Ummm, it says here, one.”
“Only one?”
“Outside, yeah. That’s what you were asking about, right? Inside, there were, ahhh, six casings found. Inside that hallway. You know the one that looked like a knife fight inside an abattoir.” Ricco chuckled.
“Never mind that. So, the shot from the forty-five fired in the rec-area … what did it hit?”
The chuckle turned to a full-throated laugh.
“Man, we picked up over three hundred casings throughout the school, and you want to know where a single one of those bullets went? Must be true what they say; you are the last of the dreamers.”
“C’mon, Ricco. You said there was only one forty-five slug fired in the rec-area. It can’t be that hard to work out which of the impact points or injuries out there was caused by that bullet. I assume the techs ran the trajectories.”
“Ha! More than three hundred rounds fired, over a hundred bodies running around all over the place, some got hit and dropped, some got hit and kept running, some got hit by ricochets or bullet fragments. You actually think we strung the entire scene for each and every shot?”
My mind was trying to picture what that looked like and ground to a halt. I couldn’t blame them.
“’Sides,” Ricco said, “don’t forget that there coulda been someone hit with one of the rounds from the forty-five inside, who then ran outside. What do you think then?”
“Christ, Ricco, I don’t know! Can you at least just look into it for me?”
“Like I don’t got better things to do. I … Fuck, here comes Ed. I’ll get back to you.”
Not much more that I could do at the office, so I drained my coffee cup, flicked off the lights, then—heeding my words from earlier in the morning—went back to grab my blackjack from the desk drawer, and headed out to lunch.
Chapter 26
After lunch, and as I turned into the Wright’s street, I thought everything looked the same. The closer I got to the front yard, the more I realized I was wrong. The crowd had swelled in the last twenty-four hours; there must have been nearly eighty bodies on the front yard and standing space was at a premium.
I parked as close as I could, reprised my shotgun routine from a few days earlier, and walked towards the house. The crowd didn’t part this time, as much as swell away from me.
Realized my brain was now thinking ‘mob’ instead of ‘group.’
No smiles, no singing, no-one carrying signs. I saw Dark Hair and Buddy front and center of the group, heads together and whispering as I walked past.
I made it up on the porch before the first rotten tomato whistled past my ear and shlupped against the front window. A few little spatters of tomato blowback got me on the side of the face. I turned, pumped a round into the chamber, and pointed it at the crowd. The skinny guy at the front of the crowd, with a Peterbilt cap and a dripping fistful of tomato, became my focus. My gunsights found him, he found the gunsights, and stopped mid-motion. I tilted my head and backed up against the front door, kicked at it with my boot heel. Felt it open behind me, and backed my way inside.
Cowboy closed the door and a fusillade of grocery items spattered against the house. The front windows splashed red and trembled under the onslaught.
“Seems like the discontent of the huddled masses might be on the increase,” I said.
Cowboy nodded. “Ah yuh. And here I din’t think to bring my potato gun.”
I walked through to the kitchen, keen to get away from the windows. I didn’t expect they could do much more than make a mess with their greengrocer-inspired version of The Blitz but, the less we were in their face, the better.
I slumped into a chair, shotgun across my legs. Cowboy peered out the back windows. “Don’t look like they’ve got to the chapter ’bout outflankin’ the enemy.” I nodded. “But I reckon it might not be long, ’fore one or more of them tries sumpin stupid.”
“You got anything left in the truck you wanna bring in before it gets dark?”
“An old monkey wrench and a pocketknife. Don’ imagine they be much use.”
“All right, then. We’ll get this place squared away and hope those folks out there ain’
t as stupid as they look.”
“Hope in one hand, spit in the other,” Cowboy said. “See which fills up faster.”
“I know. That’s what worries me.”
Charlene walked past us to the sink with an empty glass.
“How did it go at the hospital, Charlene? How’s Bradley?”
Charlene set the glass down on the countertop as softly as laying a newborn into a cot, stood there with her hands flat on either side of the sink and bowed her head.
I waited.
She shook her head, and I could see teardrops landing on the edge of the countertop.
“Charlene,” I tried again.
She reached across the counter and plucked a tissue out of a box, turned around to face me and dabbed at her eyes.
“It was terrible, seeing my boy lying there. I’d almost forgotten what he looked like with the bandages and the machines but to see him like that again …”
“What did he say?”
“Hardly anything.”
“That can’t be right. How long were you there?”
She sighed and took a seat at the table. “A long time, Mr Rafferty. Almost four hours, all told.”
“He’s more out of it than I thought.”
“It wasn’t that. The majority of the time we were trying to get in, the policemen were stopping us, Paul was yelling, the hospital staff were telling us to quiet down or they’d call security …” She gave me a wan smile. “Lucky Mimi was there to calm everyone down.”
I imagined Mimi’s method of diplomacy to involve less peace talks and more Uzi but, hey, whatever works.
“In the end, I think Mimi got the policeman to take pity on me and he let us in for ten or so minutes. I was so frazzled by then that I spent most of that time just holding Bradley’s hand and crying.”
“He must have told you something.”
“He told me to stop crying.”
“And?”
“And that was all.”
“What?”
“I tried. Ray tried. Hell, even Mimi talked to him before we got thrown out again. She’s so sweet, and she looks so young, you know. Like the sister Bradley never had.” She leaked a sad smile. “But, nothing.”
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