Dead Stop

by Barbara Nickless

  Bounding toward us was a monster out of a children’s tale.

  The beast was nearly three feet at the shoulder and broad across the back, with an immense, barrel chest, long legs, and a large snout and ears. I figured it at a hundred pounds or more. Its fur was smoke-gray tipped with black and its eyes glowed green in the artificial lights. It moved in and out of the pools cast by the security lights, hurdling suddenly into sight then vanishing into the shadows.

  My hands fumbled with the gun. I screamed at Clyde to get down so I could fire off a round. But no amount of training would make him obey an order to lie down in the face of so great a threat. He lowered his head and his bark was a harsh series of sharp challenges.

  The wolf dog disappeared into shadow again, then emerged in midleap.

  I screamed as Clyde—an arrow loosed from a string—hurtled forward to meet the animal. The two went down in a rolling tangle of fur and teeth and claws.

  “Aus! Aus!” I yelled, racing toward them, trying to get Clyde to break free. “Out!”

  The animals fell apart and I raised my gun.

  Then they were at it again, a seething mass of fur and muscle so intimately wound I couldn’t tell them apart.

  “Damn it, Clyde!” I screamed, my entire body shaking. “Out!”

  When the animals separated again, Clyde spun and rushed for the wolf dog’s throat. But the beast skirted sideways, dodging Clyde’s lunge and whirling to bite Clyde’s exposed flank.

  Just before the great jaws closed, I fired.

  The beast’s forward motion stopped. It turned its head, snapping at the unexpected pain. Clyde danced forward and then back, not closing in, sensing that the game had changed. I fired a second time.

  The wolf dog sank to its haunches, then slumped onto its side. The immense eyes went blank.

  I dropped to my knees. Clyde sniffed at the wolf dog, prancing in and out of the beast’s range as if daring it to rise. I called him to me; he came, tail wagging. I ran my hands over his body, checking for injuries, my fingers coming back lightly stained with his blood. He licked the tears from my face.

  I looked up when a shadow blocked the nearest security light. Albers squinted down at me.

  “The fuck was that?” he asked. “A werewolf?”

  DAY THREE

  CHAPTER 27

  Home is where you stand on the front porch and wonder which would be worse. To go inside. Or to walk away.

  —Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.

  I’d been to Joe’s Tavern a lot when I was a kid. First my father, then later my mother, had taken me there. My father to meet friends. My mother, I think, just to get out of the house. I’d sit at the end of the bar with my book, while a series of bartenders, none of them named Joe, gave me a Coke with a straw and a maraschino cherry. My mom or dad would play pool or darts or sit around one of the big tables with the half-sloshed day drinkers who made up the bulk of Joe’s clientele. I never thought about the fact that a bar was no place for a child. Joe’s Tavern was warm and friendly, and if I didn’t enjoy the company of my parents as much on the way out as on the way in, it was better than being home alone, or dropped off with a sitter.

  I hadn’t lived in the neighborhood for sixteen years. But Joe’s Tavern was a fixture from my childhood and, like a toddler to her mother, I flew back there whenever I was distressed.

  “You two sure that’s all you want?” Ralph asked.

  Mac and I were sitting in a booth near the front door, nursing our Cokes. I had a headache severe enough that half my face felt numb. The heartache was worse.

  “You got burgers?” I asked. “Clyde’s hungry.”

  Ralph grinned, pleased to be able to offer something. “Coming right up.”

  It had been hours since Roman disappeared. While the paramedics had taken care of Albers, and the ME arrived to deal with Veronica Stern, and Cohen and Bandoni started processing the scene, Clyde and I had joined the army of uniforms who were fanned out through the woods and along the streets, hunting for Roman. But we’d found nothing. Of course we hadn’t. Roman had forced me to choose between running him down or protecting Clyde. He’d been gone within minutes.

  At police headquarters, I’d repeated the entire sequence of events for the record. Then Mac and I sat with Cohen and Bandoni and the rest of the team, turning over every stone, following up on every lead, however remote. Finally, unable to think in the panicked bustle, Mac and I had walked out the door and ended up here, not long after midnight.

  At my feet, Clyde huffed. He was willing to tolerate the bar as long as it made me happy. Or at least kept me from screaming. But I wasn’t the only one who felt twitchy; he’d been up and down like a yo-yo all night. The vet who had come to see about the wolf dog had checked out Clyde’s injuries, declared them minor, and given me some ointment. But the beast had sunk its metaphorical teeth into Clyde, just as it had with me.

  Both Mac and I had our phones on the table, waiting for any news. Outside, across the city, searchers still crisscrossed Denver, looking for Roman and Hiram. Denver’s crime lab people were running a DNA test on items taken from Jack Hurley’s apartment to see if Roman Quinn was, in fact, Hiram’s son. Whatever their actual relationship, no one looking for Hiram had much hope that he would be found alive. Roman’s goal seemed to be to eradicate every trace of Hiram’s kin. Hiram—or maybe Lucy—would presumably be the last to go.

  “That was a hell of a shot you made,” Mac said. “A wolf. That must have been something to see.”

  “Wolf dog,” I reminded her.

  “Still.”

  “Clyde was terrified,” I said. “But he didn’t even pause.”

  We both leaned over and gave Clyde a respectful glance.

  I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the animal since it first appeared out of the dark. The green glow of its eyes in the light and its eerie grace. The way my gut had clenched and the hair had gone up on my neck. The way I’d felt like prey caught way too far from the campfire.

  “Let’s hear it for electricity,” I said.

  Mac nodded as if she understood.

  I looked down. Clyde had finally gone to sleep. But his paws kept twitching.

  “I couldn’t go after Roman,” I said, for what was probably the thousandth time that night. “I couldn’t leave Clyde.”

  “I know,” Mac said. “I would have done the same.”

  In the dusty yellow light of the bar, she looked as though something deep inside had cracked. Nothing visible, exactly. She still appeared composed, if you overlooked the black eye and the way her blouse had worked its way free of her jeans. It was more a fragility in her posture, a sense that the only thing propping her up at the moment was some dimly registered sense that falling down in a bar like Joe’s was something she couldn’t allow herself to do.

  “You need to come work for the Feds,” she said. “You’d make a great agent.”

  My laugh was strung high. “Because I’d fit in so well? Me being a team player and all.”

  She leaned across the table, gave me her serious face. “You are wasting your talents. You should apply.”

  “Mac. No.”

  “Yes. It takes a year to run a background check. Do it now.”

  To distract her, I said, “Tell me the third reason.”

  She knew immediately what I meant. The brief animation in her face vanished. “It’s not a good story.”

  “Then it will fit with the night.”

  Mac pushed her glass away and rested her chin on her clasped hands. Her eyes turned bright and she blinked and looked down. Tears, I realized.

  “Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry. Let’s talk about something else.”

  But Mac said, “It was my second case. A child in Mobile was snatched on her way to school. She was raped and tortured for two months, then chopped into pieces, the body parts dropped in sewers across the city.”

  “Jesus.” My fingers slipped into my pocket, touched the photos of Lucy and Malik.

>   “She was eight.”

  The headache exploded across the back of my skull and chewed down my neck like it had teeth. “Like Lucy.”

  Mac nodded. “We had no suspects, zero leads. So for two fucking months, this guy is torturing her, and we have no idea how to find her. We know she’s still alive because he’s sending notes and photos to the newspapers. I went a little crazy. Quit eating. Quit sleeping. My entire life became that case. I did everything I could, but in the end, I couldn’t help her.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “My marriage ended after that. Who wants to be with a fucked-up, crazy-obsessive woman? That was the worst part of it. Chris and I had survived so much together.”

  “He was a coward to leave you.”

  “It’s a cautionary tale, Sydney. About not getting emotionally involved in our cases.”

  “You’re emotionally involved with this one.”

  “And it’s a mistake. It doesn’t help Lucy. It only slows us down.”

  I drank down half my Coke, hoping the caffeine would take the edge off the headache. “What about later? Did you meet someone else?”

  She gave a rueful laugh. “Ninety-five percent success rate, remember? I’m married to my work.” She pushed free of the booth and stood. “Speaking of which, I’m heading back to the command center. You?”

  “Five minutes behind you,” I said. “Clyde’s got a burger coming.”

  She pulled on her suit jacket, threw a five-dollar bill on the table. “Stop beating yourself up.”

  “Because you have.”

  “Don’t think of me as a role model. Think of me as someone who’s made mistakes so you don’t have to.”

  I watched her head out the door. I could have gotten Clyde’s food to go. But something was niggling at me and I decided to wait a little bit, see if it went anywhere. I’d done some of my best thinking in this place.

  Ralph appeared with Clyde’s burger on a paper plate. He set it on the floor, and Clyde woke and all but inhaled it. At least the wolf dog hadn’t ruined his appetite.

  “Dang, should I bring him another one?” Ralph asked.

  I shook my head. “He needs to pace himself.”

  Ralph slid into the booth across the table from me where Mac had just been and set a bottle of brown liquid and two shot glasses on the table.

  The bar was almost empty. A couple did a slow, drunk dance to Johnny Lee’s “Lookin’ for Love” playing on the corner jukebox. Two men sat at the bar, their gaze riveted to the muted television set as if they were lip readers. And an older woman was hunkered down in a back booth, nursing a glass of something clear. I’d bet my uniform it wasn’t water. In the back kitchen, someone was banging pans around.

  “You look like you could use some company,” Ralph said. “And a drink.”

  “You ever get depressed working here?”

  “All the time. That’s what the whiskey is for.”

  The niggling continued. Whiskey. Bourbon. Something to do with bourbon.

  “Actually, I love my job,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the stories I hear.”

  He hoisted the bottle, but I shook my head. “None for me.”

  He raised an eyebrow, shrugged, then poured himself a glass and held it up to the light. “Nectar of the gods.” He drank it down. “The gods sure know how to live.”

  There had been a bottle of Rebel Yell in Raya Quinn’s car. My dad had drunk Rebel Yell. Called it the best of the bottom shelf.

  Hiram had offered me bourbon when we talked.

  “What do you know about Rebel Yell?” I asked Ralph.

  He poured a second shot and cocked his head. “It’s bourbon. Used to be cheap, but then they fancied up the bottle and the price. It looks different now, but it’s the same stuff.” He pulled his phone from his pocket and tapped on the screen. “It was introduced in Kentucky in 1936. Stayed in the South. Wasn’t distributed nationally until 1984.” He looked up at me and grinned. “So there you go. You want to try some?”

  “No,” I said, barely hearing him. The niggling became an itch I had to scratch. If only I could locate it.

  I stood. “I’d better get going.”

  “Something I said?”

  “I’m just restless.” I pulled out my wallet. “What do I owe you?”

  Ralph raised his hands, palms out. “It’s on the house. I know you’re working that case.”

  I thanked him and said goodnight, and Clyde and I pushed out the door, letting it fall closed behind us.

  Outside, the night was mild, the air humid, and for once the sky was clear. I let Clyde off his lead, and while he explored whatever interesting scents he found nearby, I leaned against my truck and lit the last of Engel’s cigarettes. The headache backed off a little; I no longer felt like someone had clamped my head in a vise.

  I sucked in the deep, sweet burn and tilted my head back, looking for shapes in the stars. The North Star. Hercules, the hero. Another hero, Perseus. There was Cygnus the swan, the form Zeus had taken when he seduced Leda. After that seduction, Leda bore Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world. The woman whose face launched a thousand ships, whose kidnapping started a war.

  I brought the cigarette to my lips. Watched the flare and fade of the ember. A car pulled in and parked nearby, a couple exited, and the door to Joe’s opened. A spill of light and laughter fell into the night like a glimpse into another universe, then disappeared again when the door fell shut.

  My eyes followed Clyde sniffing along the edge of the property in the faint moonlight. I would never regret my decision to stay with him instead of pursuing Roman. But I’d also never forgive myself for letting Roman get away.

  A chill rose on my skin. The Six were here. I could sense them nearby in the dark, a palpable evil created out of my own scrambled brain. A moral injury, like the chaplain had said. Guilt as a harsh companion.

  I tapped ash loose.

  On the other side of town, Ben Davenport lay on the edge of death. Someday, maybe, he would wake up and learn anew what he’d lost, if that loss wasn’t already with him on whatever silent paths he wandered. Maybe when he woke and found himself alone, he’d think about what he’d done and seen in Iraq, about whatever moral injury he’d suffered there. He’d consider the terrors he’d brought back with him and see the wreckage of his life here.

  Then his thoughts would wander to the whiskey. And the gun.

  Those who are the least guilty are the ones who feel most at fault, Hiram had said.

  My mind was a tumble of contradictory thoughts. Raya’s clothing had been covered with what was probably dog hair, even though her mother owned cats. Lancing grew up with dogs; maybe Hiram had kept dogs as well. There had been bourbon in her car, and Hiram drank bourbon. But maybe Alfred Tate did, too.

  In his journal, Tate had written that he thought Hiram had killed Raya. But as Mac and I had speculated, maybe he’d lied. Or been confused about what he saw.

  Bull had been there that night. He had to know something, if only I could find him. Was he missing of his own volition? Or had Roman killed him, too?

  I watched the stars again, wondering what Bull lived for with his rundown house, his gambling, the stacks of empty beer cans, and a truck that he was afraid to use. What had sent him to Gillette, Wyoming? What was there, other than a shitload of pronghorn antelope and a giant rock formation that had once been the setting for a movie about extraterrestrials? For all I knew, Bull had gone there to commune with the aliens. Maybe he’d ascended from his truck into the mothership, never to be heard from again.

  And never to be missed, presumably, by anyone other than Delia, his employer at the Royal. He didn’t have a wife or children—I wondered if he had any family at all. Brothers or sisters, nieces or nephews. I remembered his southern accent, a softness that hadn’t matched his brutality or the cold gaze of his good eye.

  Rebel Yell. Raya had died in 1982. How had Raya—or her killer—gotten a bottle of liquor that wasn’t so
ld in Colorado before 1984? How, unless someone who’d recently been to the southern United States brought it to her?

  I thought about the blood money Hiram had paid to Esta all these years. And then I considered the money regularly paid into Bull’s bank account from an unknown source.

  I finished my cigarette, smashed it out, and dropped the butt in a plastic bag I kept in my truck.

  “Where are you, Bull Zolner?” I said aloud. “Because I’d sure like to talk to you.”

  At the sound of my voice, Clyde came trotting back. I slipped him a treat from my pocket, and he sat down next to me. I rested my hand on his head.

  What if Bull wasn’t actually in Gillette? What if he just wanted someone—and my money was on Roman—to think he was? If you needed to hide, be it from a hired gun or a psychopathic killer, what better way to disappear than to make them think you’re somewhere else?

  Denver to Gillette is a ten- or eleven-hour round-trip drive. Far enough away to keep people busy. But close enough to get there and back in a single night. And of course you’d take the old black pickup. Not the flashy red F650 super truck, which would attract a lot of notice.

  Cohen’s words about Gillette came back to me. Its biggest claim to fame is some massive rock formation called Devils Tower, he’d said. Which was made famous by that sci-fi movie back in the seventies.

  The bartender at the Royal, Delia, had been wearing a T-shirt when I’d talked with her yesterday morning. A T-shirt with a little green alien and something about close encounters. And with a plastic sticker still on it, indicating the size—as if she hadn’t bothered to wash the shirt before pulling it on. The shirt had been exactly the kind of cheap thing you’d pick up at a gift shop. Or an all-night gas station.

  I dropped my cigarette on the gravel lot and ground it into the dirt. I touched Clyde’s head.

  “Let’s go, boy. The fat lady hasn’t sung yet.”

  CHAPTER 28

  You get to the point where you’re just empty. Empty of feelings and thoughts. Of bone and flesh and blood. Empty of hope and despair.