Joe Kurtz Omnibus

by Dan Simmons

  But he’d need quite a bit more hard cash. Kurtz could get fifty thousand dollars in a minute by asking Arlene to buy his theoretical share of WeddingBells-dot-com and SweetheartSearch-dot-com, but he’d never do that. She’d waited for years to start an online business like this, even if the high school sweetheart thing had been his idea in Attica.

  Well, he could always get more cash.

  Kurtz pulled on his baseball cap, slipped the .38 into his belt, and headed down to the Pinto. He had someone in Lackawanna he wanted to see.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  Lackawanna had been one of the great steel centers of the world for almost a century. Raw materials flowed in by ocean freighter coming up the St. Lawrence Seaway and across the Great Lakes, by canal barge, and by locomotive; steel flowed out. Tens of thousands of workers in Lackawanna and Buffalo owed their livelihood to Lackawanna steel for more than fifty years, and it was a good life, with higher wages than those earned at the Chrysler plant or American Standard or any of the other large employers of the blue-collar city called Buffalo. The steel business’s medical and pension plans were among the most generous to be found anywhere.

  As the market for American steel declined, the heaps of slag near the Lackawanna mills grew higher, the skies grew darker and filthier, the worker housing grew more grim, and the pension plans ate up more and more of the companies’ profits, but the idea of steel still flourished in Lackawanna. By the late 1960s, the unions had grown too strong, the technologies had lagged behind, corporate accounting practices had become mossbacked and lazy, and the mills themselves were obsolete. The unions still received huge packages. The managers gave themselves raises and bonuses. The companies diverted profits to shareholders rather than reinvest in new technology or pay for managerial changes. Meanwhile, Japanese steel and cheap European steel and Russian steel and Thai steel were running their industries with cheaper labor, newer technologies, and slimmer profit margins. The steel companies in Lackawanna cried foul, cried dumping, diverted money to politicians to get protectionist legislation, and continued with the same pay scales and pension plans and obsolete machinery. They made steel the way their granddaddies had made steel. And they sold it the same way.

  By the 1970s, the Lackawanna steel industry was on a gurney and hemorrhaging badly. By the mid-nineties, it was on a cold, stone slab with no mourners waiting around for the wake. Today there were more than a dozen miles of abandoned mills along Lake Erie, a hundred square miles of ghetto where workers’ neighborhoods had once been, scores upon scores of empty parking lots that had once been filled with thousands of vehicles, as well as black mountains of slag heaps running back east from the lake for block after block—a cheaper alternative for the defunct mills than cleaning them up—thus insuring that the city of Buffalo, with a third of its population fled seeking work elsewhere, would never spend the money to develop these lakefront properties.

  The neighborhoods in the shadow of the huge mills, neighborhoods that once housed German and Italian and some black skilled laborers, now boasted crack houses and abortion clinics and storefront mosques as even poorer blacks and Hispanics and Middle Eastern immigrants flowed into the vacuum created by the fleeing steel workers.

  Kurtz knew Lackawanna well. He’d lost his virginity there, lost any illusions about life there, and killed his first man there, not necessarily in that order.

  Ridge Road was the main east-west street through the heart of Lackawanna, past Our Lady of Victory Basilica, past Father Baker’s Orphanage, past the Holy Cross Cemetery, past the Botanical Gardens and Lackawanna City Hall, then over the narrow steel bridge built more than a century ago, then “back the Bridge,” south, into the warren of narrow streets that dead-ended against the walls and moats and barriers bordering the mile-wide no-man’s land of railroad tracks that ran south to everywhere and north into the grain-mill industrial area near Kurtz’s Harbor Inn.

  Parolee Yasein Goba’s address was south of the old Carnegie Library and the nearby Lackawanna Islamic Mosque. The house was a leaning, filthy gray-shingle affair at the end of a littered cul-de-sac. To the right of and behind the house was the high fence of a salvage yard; to its left was the rusted iron wall and barbed wire fences marking railroad property. Freight trains heaved and clashed in the rainy air.

  Kurtz backed the Pinto out of the cul-de-sac, swung it around, drove east a block, and parked it near Odell Playground, the only bit of grass and open space within miles. He made sure the Pinto couldn’t be seen from the main north-south street, Wilmuth Avenue, or from Yasein Goba’s house. Black and Middle Eastern faces peered at him from passing cars and from between sooty curtains as he tucked the .38 in his belt, took a long-bladed screwdriver from the glove box, locked the Pinto and walked the two blocks toward Goba’s gray house.

  Kurtz cut right a block and came at the house along the salvage yard fence, approaching from the north. The smoke and noise from the rail yards were almost melodramatic: steel couplers crashing, machines grunting as they hauled heavy loads, men shouting in the distance. More crashes and bangs came from the huge salvage yard beyond the fence.

  Kurtz paused when there was nothing but open field between him and the house. Except for one small window on the north side here, all the house’s windows looked east up the empty street or west over the railyards. There was no car parked next to the house and no garage, although several abandoned cars, wheels missing, littered the street.

  Kurtz pulled the .38, held it loosely against his right leg, and walked behind the house.

  The back door wasn’t locked. There was dried blood on the steps, the stoop, and the door itself. Standing to one side of the glass, Kurtz opened the door and went in crouched, .38 extended.

  The blood trail went up some stairs. A perfect red handprint was in the middle of the half-open door at the top of the inside stairway. Kurtz used the pistol to swing the door open wider. A kitchen. Dirty dishes. Garbage stinking. More blood on the cheap table and chipped tile floor. One of the chairs had been knocked over.

  Breathing through his mouth, Kurtz followed the blood trail through a living room—filthy shag carpet with blobs of dried blood, sprung couch covered by a filthy sheet, big color television. The blood trail went up a narrow flight of stairs in the narrow central hall, but Kurtz checked the other two downstairs rooms first. Clear.

  Yasein Goba was sprawled half across the grimy tub in the little bathroom at the head of the stairs. The blood trail led there and ended there. Goba had been hit high in the right ribcage—the wound looked consistent with the nine-millimeter slugs O’Toole had loaded in her Sig Pro that Kurtz had been firing—and the man had poured his life’s blood half into the tub and half onto the bathroom floor. The bottom of the tub was solid brown with dried blood. There was blood all over the sink and blood on the mirrored door of the medicine chest. Bottles of pills, rubbing alcohol, and Mercurachrome were scattered on the floor and broken in the bloody sink. It looked as if Goba had tried to find something to stop the bleeding, or at least something to dull the pain, before he fainted onto the tub rim and bled out.

  O’Toole’s file said that Yasein Goba was twenty-six years old and from Yemen. Making sure not to step in the dried pools and rivulets on the floor, Kurtz crouched next to the corpse. The young man may have been an Arab, but the loss of blood added a paleness under the brown skin and tiny black mustache. His lips were white, his mouth and eyes open. Kurtz was no medical examiner, but he’d seen enough corpses to know that rigor mortis had come and gone and that this guy had probably been dead about forty-eight hours—since a few hours after Kurtz and O’Toole had been shot.

  Lying in the tub was a Ruger Mark II Standard .22-caliber long-barreled target pistol. The checkered grip was mottled with blood. Kurtz lifted it carefully, letting his gloves touch only the end of the barrel where there was no blood. He held it up into the light, but the serial number had been burned off with acid. He knew it had a ten-shot magazine and he imagined that the mag
would be empty, or near so. Kurtz set the gun back in the tub where the grip had been outlined in dried blood.

  He stood and walked into Yasein Goba’s bedroom. On a high bureau was a sort of altar—black candles, worry beads, and a blown-up photograph of Parole Officer Margaret O’Toole with the words DIE, BITCH written across it in red magic marker.

  On a cheap desk by the front window was a spiral notebook. Kurtz flipped the pages, noted the dated entries and the Arabic writing, but some passages were in scrawled English—“…she contenus to prossecute me!!” and “purhsed fine pistol today” and “the Zionist bitch must die if I am to live!” The last page had been torn out of the notebook.

  Some sense made Kurtz look up, pull open the filthy curtain a bit with the barrel of his .38.

  Kemper’s and King’s unmarked car had stopped half a block away on the next street over. They were approaching Goba’s house the same way Kurtz had, and if it hadn’t been for the bare trees and the angle on the alley, Kurtz couldn’t have seen them even from this high up. Stopping behind the unmarked detectives’ car were two black Chevy Suburbans. Eight black-garbed and helmeted SWAT team members carrying automatic weapons boiled out of the Suburbans.

  Detectives Kemper and King deployed the SWAT teams, sending them toward the house through alleys, backyards, and along the salvage yard fence. King talked into a hand radio, and Kurtz assumed that there would be more SWAT squads coming from the next block over to the south.

  Kurtz folded up the spiral notebook and slipped it into the cargo pocket of his jacket. Then he left the bedroom, went down the stairs, through the kitchen, down more stairs, and out the back door. Because of the slight angle of the backyard and the heavy rain falling, the first of the SWAT guys weren’t visible yet.

  There was a rusted and abandoned Mercury at the back of this weedy strip, abutting the salvage yard fence and Kurtz ran at it full tilt through the rain and mud. He leaped to the hood, jumped to the roof, heaved himself up and over the fence, and dropped into the salvage yard about five seconds before the first SWAT team loped into sight, the black-vested gunmen covering each other as they ran, automatic weapons trained on the windows of the late Yasein Goba’s house.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  Kurtz stopped by the Harbor Inn to change out of his muddy, wet clothes and to oil his .38, and then he drove back to the office. It was almost dark now, and colder, and the October rain was coming down hard. The clubs, restaurants, and wine bars along Chippewa Street were beginning to attract patrons and every color of neon reflected on the slick streets.

  Arlene was at work, arranging weddings, receptions, wedding dress fittings, and wedding cake designs with happy brides all over the eastern and central United States, but she wiped all that from the screen, lit another Marlboro, and looked at Kurtz when he came in, hung up his leather jacket, and leaned back in his swivel chair. He pulled the pistol out of his belt in the back to keep it from digging into him, and set it in the lower right drawer next to the bottle of Sheep Dip scotch.

  “Well?” said Arlene.

  Kurtz hesitated. Usually he told Arlene almost nothing of his activities outside the office—much of it was illegal, just as this afternoon’s breaking and entering of the dead Arab’s house had been, and as far as he knew Arlene had never had so much as a traffic ticket—but she’d already broken the law last night for him, passing herself off as a County D.A.’s assistant, not to mention breaking and entering O’Toole’s office and stealing her riles. So what the hell, thought Kurtz.

  He told her about finding Yasein Goba and the Yemeni’s little revenge altar, about taking his diary, and about the pistol.

  “Jesus, Joe,” whispered Arlene. “So do you mink it was one of your shots in the parking garage that got him?”

  Kurtz nodded. “We won’t know for sure until the coroner digs the slug out and they run a ballistics test, but I know that I hit the first shooter.”

  “So that’s the motive,” said Arlene. “He was mad at O’Toole for some reason.”

  “I read just enough of his diary—the parts in bad English—to see that he blamed her for ruining his life, something about not being able to marry his childhood sweetheart because he was treated as a felon by the ‘Zionist bitch.’”

  “‘Zionist bitch?’” said Arlene. “Didn’t this idiot know that O’Toole was Irish?”

  Kurtz shrugged.

  “Well, that ties it all up in a knot, doesn’t it, Joe?”

  Kurtz rubbed his cheeks and then his temples. The headache felt like someone tapping, not very gently, on the back of his head with a two-pound hammer wrapped in a thin sock.

  “They weren’t after you,” continued Arlene. “You were just unlucky to get in the way when one of Peg O’Toole’s crazy clients came after her.”

  “Yeah.”

  “There was nothing in O’Toole’s file on Goba that suggests that he was hostile or angry at her—the last several meetings she had with him sound easy, even upbeat. But if he was crazy, I guess it makes sense. Maybe it even ties in to that old Lackawanna Six terrorist thing. There are some crazy people down there in Lackawanna.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Now you’re free to investigate this other thing.” Arlene waved her cigarette toward the map on the north wall with its twenty-two pins, seventeen red, five blue.

  “Yeah.”

  “But you don’t buy the Goba thing for a minute, do you, Joe?”

  Kurtz closed his eyes. He tried to remember if he’d eaten anything since the half donut with Rigby King at Broadway Market that morning. Evidently not. “No,” he said at last. “I don’t buy it.”

  “Because you remember two shooters,” said Arlene.

  “Yeah. I told Rigby King about the second guy when I saw her this morning.”

  “If someone other than Goba was driving the car when it busted out of the parking garage, they’ll probably find the bloodstains in the backseat,” said Arlene.

  “The car wasn’t there at Goba’s,” said Kurtz.

  “You said it was a rough neighborhood. And Goba had been dead two days. Car thieves were probably just waiting to pounce on a vehicle left unattended for two days.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t buy that either?”

  “I don’t know,” said Kurtz. “But I know there was a second man in the parking garage Wednesday. And odds are that the second man was driving the car when it crashed out Goba didn’t get home by himself. I don’t think he could even have got into the house and up the stairs by himself.”

  “You said you saw bloodstains and trails everywhere. His handprint on the kitchen door.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you said it looked like he’d rummaged through his medicine chest hunting for bandages or painkillers?” Arlene exhaled smoke and tapped at one fingernail with another.

  “Yeah,” said Kurtz.

  “Any strange footprints in the blood or extra handprints anywhere?”

  “No,” said Kurtz. “Not that I could see. Whoever dragged him in the house made it look like Goba crawled in under his own power.”

  “A friend maybe?”

  “Maybe,” said Kurtz. “But why wouldn’t a friend haul Goba to the hospital? He was hurt bad.”

  “GSW report?” said Arlene.

  Kurtz knew that she was right Doctors and hospitals had to report gunshot wounds to the authorities.

  “I bet there are Yemeni doctors in Lackawanna who might’ve kept it quiet,” said Kurtz. “I know for a fact there are medics down there that’ll patch you up without reporting it. For a price.”

  “Goba was poor.”

  “Yeah,” said Kurtz.

  “Joe,” said Arlene, looking at the map with all the pins, “there’s something you’re not telling me about this heroin-addict killer situation. About why you agreed to work for Gonzaga and that woman, but why you don’t want to do it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s something.” />
  Kurtz shook his head. The action made him dizzy. “Arlene, you want to order from that Chinese place down the street? Get takeout?”

  She stubbed out her cigarette. “Have you eaten anything today?”

  “Sort of.”

  She made her snorting noise again. “You stay here, Joe. Catch a couple of minutes rest. I’ll go down and order in person, bring something back.”

  Arlene patted him on the shoulder as she left. The contact made Kurtz jump.

  He was half-dozing when the phone rang.

  “Joe Kurtz? This is Detective Kemper. I just wanted to let you know that it looks like we’ve found the man who shot you and Officer O’Toole on Wednesday.”

  “Who is it?” asked Kurtz.

  “You can read about it in the papers tomorrow,” said the black cop. “But it looks like the guy was just after Officer O’Toole. If we find any connection between the shooter and you, I’ll be the first to let you know.”

  “I bet you will,” said Kurtz.

  Kemper disconnected.

  Kurtz took Goba’s diary out of his jacket pocket and flipped through the pages. The scrawled entries were all dated, although Goba put the day first, then the month, and then the year, in the European manner. Much of it was in Arabic, but the English entries screamed out Goba’s hatred of Parole Office “Zionist Bitch” O’Toole, how she was stealing Goba’s future, keeping him from getting married, forcing him to return to a life of crime, discriminating against Arabs, part of the Zionist conspiracy, blah, blah.

  The entries were made in a hard-tipped ballpoint pen, which was good. Kurtz flipped to the missing page. Only a ragged fringe remained. He found a pencil in his desk and began gently shading the next, empty page. The impressions from the heavily pressed ballpoint came up immediately.

  Kurtz was asleep sitting at his desk when Arlene returned with the food, but she woke him gently and made him eat something. She’d brought two cold bottles of iced tea with the Chinese food.