And Leave Her Lay Dying

by John Lawrence Reynolds

Headlights flashed in the distance, somewhere to the east. McGuire moved quickly to his car, slipped it into gear and swung the vehicle to the other side of the road, heading west, back towards Laredo.

  The sound of the pickup’s horn faded with the distance, an endless moan grieving for the two dead men he left behind.

  “I seen more of you than I seen of the sun today.” The teenage gas station attendant slammed the trunk shut. “Looks of things, I won’t be seeing you again for a spell. You heading somewhere into open country?”

  “Kind of,” McGuire replied, handing him money. “Know where I can get some hamburgers this time of night?”

  “How you want ’em?”

  “Thick and juicy.”

  “Fat Frank’s. ’Bout a mile up on your right.”

  McGuire slipped behind the wheel. “You’re a tribute to the Texas tourist board,” he smiled as he drove away.

  Precisely at midnight, McGuire stood in a telephone booth directly across the street from Bledsoe’s Mexican Bazaar. He dropped a coin in the slot and dialled a number.

  In the lighted living quarters above the rear of the warehouse, a shadow moved behind a drawn blind.

  “Bledsoe,” a man’s voice growled in McGuire’s ear.

  “I just killed your dogs,” McGuire said.

  “Who the hell is this?”

  “Your dogs, Bledsoe. They’re dead. At the front of your yard. Right at the fence. Haul ass out here and see for yourself.”

  He hung up, dropped another coin in the slot and dialled 911.

  “There’s a fire at Bledsoe’s warehouse on San Bernardo,” McGuire said to the woman who answered. He measured his words carefully, knowing they were being recorded—“Now,” he added, and hung up again.

  Leaving the telephone booth, he walked casually across San Bernardo to stand in the darkness near his car, arriving just as Bledsoe emerged from his apartment carrying a rifle. His eyes sweeping the yard, Bledsoe reached out a hand and pulled a large electrical switch near the doorway.

  Suddenly quartz lights flooded the open area in a harsh green glare. Gnomes, cartoon characters, flamingos, rusting armour, Venus de Milos—thousands of plaster creatures stood and pranced in the brilliance of the floodlights like denizens of a grotesque miniature world.

  Near the locked gates at the San Bernardo entrance lay the two dogs, the remains of several hamburgers in their stomachs, each heavily laced with the cocaine McGuire had taken from Colin’s jacket.

  At the sight of the dogs, Bledsoe looked furiously around him, stopping only once to smell the air and frown at the smell of gasoline drifting over the complex.

  “Where you at, hoss?” Bledsoe shouted. “I find you, you’re lizard shit, hear me?” He looked around again and clambered down the stairs, running to his dogs.

  McGuire stepped from the shadows and crossed to the side gate. He stopped at the wet trail leading under Bledsoe’s stairs through the hole in the wire fence he had forced with a tire iron as the Rottweilers lay dying.

  Casually withdrawing a match, he lit it, watched it flare, and dropped it into the dampness at his feet.

  The gasoline ignited into a path of fire which raced through the fence to the five-gallon can directly under Bledsoe’s wooden stairway. With an explosion of flame that momentarily rivalled the glare from the floodlights, the fuel erupted into the air and began consuming the structure.

  McGuire turned his back to the inferno. He could feel the heat through his jacket. He could hear Bledsoe running and screaming in panic through the yard, colliding with plaster gnomes and stumbling over ceramic birdbaths in his race to reach the stairs.

  The Ford started easily. McGuire drove slowly, methodically away, without looking back.

  He woke the next morning in a motel room on the edge of town. The air conditioner clattered at the window, its decorative grille cracked and dusty. He showered, dressed and stepped into the heat of the late morning.

  In a coffee shop across the street he ate breakfast and eavesdropped on the conversation of men sitting astride chrome stools at the counter, men who pushed their greasy caps up from their foreheads before speaking and stirred sugar into their coffee with exaggerated arm motions. They all spoke in lazy drawls separated by long periods of silence, as though they were assembling their sentences in precise order before voicing them.

  “You hear how much money they found up there?” The speaker was thin and wiry, dressed in a faded rodeo shirt with fancy stitching and silver trim on the collar and cuffs.

  “Millions,” replied another. He was fat and balding with a black beard, thick and wild on his chin. “And that’s what weren’t all burnt to hell. Most of it’s ashes now.”

  “Fellow I know on the fire department, he says the floorboards were all stuffed with money like an old maid’s mattress.” The speaker was out of McGuire’s line of vision. “Thing I’d like to know is, where in hell did Mister Bledsoe get himself so much money anyhow?”

  The fat bearded man laughed over his coffee. “Shee-it, Henley. What’d you do, get yourself raised by armadillos? Hell’s bells, everybody knows where he got that money. Just never knew he’d be such a damn fool to keep it all together up there.”

  “I had that much money, I’d be gone,” said the man in the rodeo shirt sadly. “I’d just be gone to some place where I could sit by the ocean, watch people fish, and have young women bring me drinks all day. Wouldn’t stay in this dust bowl.”

  “Hear he’s hurt bad,” someone offered.

  “He’ll live,” another suggested.

  “Guy on the fire department, he says it took three of ’em to keep Mister Bledsoe from going back in there. Said his shirt was near burnt off him and he was still trying to get upstairs.”

  “It’s all tied in with those two dudes they found out on Highway 59,” the bearded man added. “Colin what’s-his-name and that Warren guy. You know, Booker’s cousin.”

  “Couple of white trash,” someone said bitterly. “No loss.”

  “Deputy Morrison, he’s telling everybody it was a settling of accounts,” the bearded man continued. “Drug stuff. Probably Mexicans or them crazy Colombians. Says Bledsoe probably didn’t pay for a shipment or something. Says it looks like that to him, and he don’t plan to break any speed records hunting down that scum. Probably halfway back to South America by now anyway.”

  “Let ’em all kill each other off,” somebody observed. “Damn well shouldn’t waste taxpayers’ money chasing them,” he added amid a chorus of murmured agreement.

  McGuire finished his coffee and left.

  He took a side road north of Laredo, cruising slowly through dusty towns with names like Asherton, Carrizo Springs and Crystal City. In Uvalde he turned east to drive through Sabinal and Hondo and Castroville, where the highway became a four-lane expressway. McGuire almost regretted the disappearance of the brown desert wasteland replaced by strips of gas stations and billboards.

  At the San Antonio airport, the rental car attendant questioned a bullet hole in the Ford’s rear fender.

  “Drive through a lot of open country?” he asked, and when McGuire replied he had, the attendant nodded. “Probably deer hunters. Can’t find a buck to shoot at, they’ll bury a slug in a car fender for kicks. Looks like somebody dinged your front bumper too. Good thing you took the collision coverage.”

  “Good thing,” McGuire agreed.

  McGuire waited for his flight to Boston in the bar drinking beer and thinking of nothing, remembering everything.

  Two hours later he watched the dry Texas landscape grow smaller beneath him as he flew home, north towards a cold sun.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The sun followed McGuire home. He awoke the next morning to discover it shining through his bedroom window, melting the last of the snow that had fallen three days earlier.

  An hour later he was greeted at t
he door of the house in Revere Beach by Ronnie Schantz, who thrust a mug of coffee in his hand and kissed him on the cheek. “Missed you,” she said. “And guess who else has?”

  “How many laws do you think I broke?”

  Ollie Schantz had listened in silence, arching his eyebrows at McGuire’s description of the incident at the mine and the deaths of Warren and Colin. His right hand continued to squeeze the tennis ball, whose surface had split from the constant flexing. The muscles and sinews on the back of his hand, once withered and weak, now stood out in relief. A new speaker-phone sat on the bed near his right hip.

  “In Texas, probably none,” Ollie replied. “Except maybe drinking Mexican beer instead of Lone Star. So what are you going to do now?”

  “Give the Cornell file back to Kavander. Maybe with my badge on it. And then get away from this cold weather. San Antonio’s a long way from heaven, but at least you can live through November down there. There has to be some place just as warm but nicer.” He stood up. “I’ll drop back later, let you know what happened with Kavander.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  McGuire turned at the open door. Ollie was frowning at him, his hand squeezing and releasing, squeezing and releasing the tennis ball. “Snyder, he was in the car when her mother died?”

  McGuire nodded.

  “Broke his ankle?”

  “That’s what he told me. The old man wasn’t hurt at all.”

  “And he’s hobbling on it when the Cornell woman comes down for the funeral?”

  “What’s the point?”

  Ollie rolled his head to the side. “Who said there was one?”

  McGuire shrugged and left the room.

  “I’m back.”

  Jack Kavander lowered the memo he had been reading and glared over the sheet of paper at McGuire. “What’s this, you doing an impression of MacArthur returning to the Philippines?” he growled. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Away.” McGuire sat in the chair opposite Kavander’s desk. “I needed to get away. To think.”

  “Other guys go fishing or sit in a bar to work things out. McGuire, he has to go away to think. What the hell do you think they invented bathrooms for?”

  McGuire tossed a thick brown manila envelope on the desk.

  Withdrawing the toothpick from his mouth, Kavander used it as a pointer. “What’s this? Your lunch?”

  “The files, Jack. The grey files from the Cornell murder. You can have them back. I’ll attach a NETGO form on them. I’m stumped.”

  Kavander’s eyes narrowed. “Never thought I would hear you say that. You were always like a bull terrier when you got your teeth into a case.”

  “Well, I was younger.” McGuire leaned back in the chair, his hands behind his head. “Even bull terriers lose their teeth when they get old. And this one’s going to spend a week on a warm beach somewhere. Maybe the Bahamas. Bernie Lipson once told me about some little towns in the out islands where you can sleep in the shade all day and eat conch fritters and drink beer in a quiet little pub all night, just watching the sun go down.”

  “Yeah, another day shot in the only life you’ll ever live.” He waved his hand across the desk, wiping away the thought. “What the hell, McGuire. Do it. It will give both of us less to worry about.”

  “Rosen’s having me followed,” McGuire said softly.

  Kavander stared at him. “You sure?”

  “He told me himself. He has me pegged for breaking up Janet’s marriage.”

  “Rosen threaten you?”

  McGuire nodded. “With two witnesses who will swear he didn’t. He wants me to walk, Jack. If I do, he drops all the charges. And if I walk, so will Wilmer at his retrial.”

  Kavander turned and studied his wall. “Leave it with me,” he said after a moment.

  “You going to back me against him, Jack?”

  Kavander reached for another toothpick.

  “Are you going to back me, Jack?” McGuire repeated.

  “I’ll have to discuss it.”

  “With whom?”

  Kavander shook his head in silence.

  “You bastard,” McGuire spat at him. “Somebody upstairs wants to throw me to the wolves, don’t they? Who? Who is so pissed at me that they’ll use me to get out from under a lawsuit and let the crazy kid back on the streets—”

  “Joe—”

  “—the kid who gutted that poor girl like an animal?”

  “Nobody is throwing you anywhere, McGuire. Your problem is that you always work on the surface of things. You never see what’s going on underneath.”

  “Yeah, I’m a lousy politician,” McGuire responded bitterly. He stood up and waved his arms as he spoke, feeling himself becoming more agitated and refusing to fight it this time. “Hey, I’m proud of that. Damn proud. You know why? Because the world needs politicians like it needs a second rectum. You, the commissioner, Don Higgins, the rest of them, you’re all politicians. You’re all smart enough to win the game and dumb enough to think it’s important.”

  Kavander smiled indulgently, like a parent waiting for a small child to finish his tantrum. “Maybe you shouldn’t waste any time picking up your ticket to the Bahamas,” he said.

  McGuire thrust his hands in his pockets and stalked from the room.

  “Ralph says you left Max.” McGuire entered Janet’s office, closing the door behind him. “Is it true?”

  Janet Parsons swivelled in her chair, the telephone receiver at her ear. “What?” she mouthed to him silently. “Yes, I’m listening,” she said aloud into the receiver.

  “Did you leave him? Is it over?”

  She rolled her eyes to the ceiling and began scribbling on a yellow legal-sized pad, thrusting it at him when she finished.

  McGuire leaned across her desk. “What’s it to you?” he read from the paper.

  “Yes, I’m just getting that down now,” she was saying into the telephone. She pulled the pad back. Beneath her message to McGuire she wrote an address and telephone number. “You don’t happen to know what kind of car it was, do you?”

  McGuire seized her hand and yanked her towards him, staring into her eyes.

  “Excuse me just a moment, will you please?” she said in an apologetic tone. Carefully setting the receiver on her desk, she pressed the “hold” button before raising her hand and slapping McGuire’s face. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded through clenched teeth. “Maybe you and Ollie Schantz can lie around playing private-eye games but I’ve got a lead on a Murder One suspect here and I’ll be damned if—”

  McGuire grabbed her free wrist in his other hand, pulled her towards him and pressed his lips against hers. “You twitched,” he said when they separated, smiling back at her green eyes flashing with anger. “You were trying hard, but I definitely felt you twitch.”

  “Let me go, damn it, or I’ll have you charged with assault,” she said softly.

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Where were you?”

  He relaxed his grip on her wrists. “In Texas. On my own. I was following a lead.”

  “I mean for me. Couldn’t you see what I’ve been going through for the past week? Couldn’t you tell I needed you to help me through this damned mess you were part of?”

  He stood up and looked away. “Some things you have to work out for yourself—” he began.

  “That’s your opinion. Not mine. Not something like this.”

  “I’m going to the Bahamas.” He looked down at her. “As soon as I can get a booking. Tomorrow, the next day, whenever. I’ll make reservations for both of us in some quiet place on the out islands. Thanksgiving weekend is coming up. You could squeeze a couple of days out of here and tack it on. We’d have almost a whole week together, but we have to do it now. Tonight.”

  “I’m busy tonight.” She picked
up the receiver.

  “With what?”

  “Having dinner.”

  “Anybody I know?”

  She smiled like an errant child, teasing him. “Ralph Innes.”

  “Ralph?” McGuire looked around her office as if he had just awakened from a lengthy sleep. “A date with Ralph? Where, in the back seat of his car? Ralph Innes? Jesus, Janet.”

  She pressed the “hold” button and swivelled in her chair.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” she said into the receiver. McGuire was left staring at her back. “There are just a few more questions I need to ask.”

  Two hours later, McGuire had opened his second beer, loaded a Paul Desmond CD into his player, and sat down to a chopped sirloin dinner heated in his microwave.

  A knock on his door disturbed the mood.

  “I brought lunch.” Janet Parsons stood holding a paper sack smelling of hot cheeseburgers.

  “I’m just having mine,” he growled at her. “Besides, I wouldn’t want to ruin your dinner tonight.”

  She brushed past him, tossing the bag of burgers on a chair. “I do detect a hint of jealousy in your voice.” Sliding out of her coat, she tilted her head towards the stereo system. “The late Paul Desmond. Wonderful music to make love to. I understand he sounds especially good on warm nights in the Bahamas.”

  “What the hell are you up to?” McGuire muttered from the open doorway.

  She began unbuttoning her blouse. “You,” she smiled.

  She lay against his shoulder, one leg out from under the covers, the knee resting on his hip. The music had ended long ago.

  “What happened to your Murder One lead?” he asked.

  “Came up empty. Mistaken identity. I’m back where I started.”

  “And your husband?”

  “It’s over. I guess. One day it’s over, the next day he wants to try again. For now, it’s over.” She looked up at him with her green cat’s eyes. “Are you really going to the Bahamas?”

  “Do you really have a date with Ralph Innes?”

  She rolled on her side and rested her arm on his chest. “He’s amusing, in a coarse way. Kind of like a naughty little boy. Underneath, I really think there’s a decent guy.”