Hot Shots (A Willows and Parker Mystery)

by Laurence Gough

  The phone started ringing again. It sounded much louder than before, startled Willows and made him gulp his coffee. He put the mug down on the table and pushed back his chair and went into the bedroom.

  “Willows.”

  “I need you,” said Claire Parker. “Can you come over and see me?”

  Willows could hear a siren in the background, the static of a car radio.

  “Where are you?”

  “North end of the Granville Street Bridge, down by the water.”

  “Twenty minutes,” said Willows.

  “Just enough time for me to change into something comfortable,” said Parker. The siren rose to a shrill scream, died.

  At the foot of Granville there was a turnaround with a raised circle of river stones in the middle. Behind the turnaround there was a gravel parking lot surrounded by a chain-link fence with an open gate. There were half a dozen cars in the lot. Narrow access roads led down to a second, lower parking lot. The ground was fairly steep. The two lots were separated by a four-foot drop, sloping ground covered with a scrim of wild grass and weeds. The road on the right was gravel, but on the left there was pavement. Willows turned left, drove down to the second parking lot, past a third lot that was empty except for several large power boats that were up on blocks.

  There was another chain-link fence, an open gate that provided access to a coffee shop and the waterfront.

  Willows eased the front bumper of the Oldsmobile up against a NO PARKING sign, dropped his sun visor so his POLICE VEHICLE notice was in plain view, got out of the Olds and shut and locked the door.

  The lower parking lot was in the shape of an inverted T, and the bottom of the T butted right up against one of the huge concrete columns that supported the deck of the bridge, a hundred feet or more above him. Willows walked past a rusty orange dumpster. Knee-high concrete barriers had been placed around the perimeter of the parking lot, and one of them had stopped a pale blue Pontiac from making the ten-foot drop into the harbor. Willows heard a shrill twittering. He glanced up, frowned.

  There were three cars in the parking lot: the squad car and the Pontiac and a brown Oldsmobile Cutlass. The Cutlass had been backed right up against the concrete tower leg. It was a four-door, and the right rear tire was flat. As Willows drew nearer he saw that the car was covered in bird droppings and fragments of undigested red berries. The car had no licence plates. The bird droppings were so thick he couldn’t see through the windshield.

  He turned his attention to the Pontiac. It was straddling one of the cement barriers and the barrier itself had been pushed badly out of alignment by the force of impact. It looked as if someone had tried to run the car over the barrier and into the water. The attempt had failed, but not by much. The Pontiac was balanced like a teeter-totter, the nose of the car out over the water. A little more speed and momentum would have carried it over the barrier and into the depths.

  Willows looked down at the calm, milky-green surface of the water. An iridescent abstract of oil lay quietly on the surface. A foam coffee cup spun slowly in the breeze. Willows fished a bright new penny from his pocket, flipped it into the water. Visibility was five or maybe six feet. He wondered how deep the water was. If the car had vanished beneath the surface, would it ever have been found? He heard the crunch of gravel and glanced up and saw Parker walking towards him. She smiled. He nodded, but didn’t say anything.

  “Morning, Jack. Hope I didn’t get you out of bed.”

  “Is that what I look like, as if I just climbed out of the sack?”

  “How would I know?” said Parker. She gestured towards the Pontiac. “While you were enjoying your nap, somebody got shot to death.”

  Willows stared at the car.

  “I think,” she amended. Then added, “All that’s missing is the body.” She glanced past Willows, out across the water.

  Wooden stanchions and bright yellow crime scene tape kept away a gathering crowd of construction workers from a nearby building site, people who worked on the docks or lived in the nearby condominiums. Willows looked for Mel Dutton and saw that he had already positioned himself up on the slope and was using a telephoto lens to discreetly snap candids. Willows tipped one of the stanchions and stepped over the tape, held the tape down for Parker. He followed her to the Pontiac. The passenger-side rear door was open. He tucked his tie into the breast pocket of his jacket to keep it from getting dirty, leaned into the car.

  There was blood on the front seat, more blood on the steering wheel and dashboard, blood splashed across the radio and glass of the instrument panel, clots of blood and something else, bone or gristle, sticking to the windshield. There was a lot more blood on the door panel, down low. He could see from the pattern that it had impacted with force. It looked like someone had been shot, all right. But you never knew. Knives were always a popular item. If a major artery had been severed, the effect would have been similar. He said, “Who owns the car?”

  Parker closed her notebook, dropped her pen into her purse. “MVD says it’s registered in the name of Barry Ulysses Crawford. Mr Crawford is twenty-eight years old and the address MVD gave us is suite two-zero-niner, five-two-six East Eighth Avenue.”

  “But?” said Willows.

  “But at the moment and for the past six months he’s been residing at five-seven-zero-zero Royal Oak, in the lovely suburb of Burnaby.”

  Willows nodded. The address she’d given was of the Lower Mainland Regional Correctional Center, a.k.a. Oakalla Prison.

  The interior of the Pontiac was suddenly bathed in a cold white light. Mel Dutton smiled at Willows through a side window. He triggered the electronic flash on his Polaroid CU-5 fixed-focus ‘fingerprint’ camera, and there was another burst of light.

  “Hold it a minute, Mel.” Willows took another look around the interior of the car. There was a clump of hair and white splinters of bone on the door panel. And something that glinted beneath the gas pedal — a shiny brass tube wedged between the pedal and floor carpet. He crouched down, peered into the dimness.

  The brass tube was a spent .25 calibre cartridge.

  The pros liked to use small-calibre automatics filled with hollowpoints, get in close and blast away, three or four shots to the head. More often than not there were no exit wounds. But the bullets packed enough punch to turn the victim’s brain to pudding. Willows took a long, slow second look at the splash of blood on the door panel, the bone splinters, hair and fragments of tissue.

  There were two more spent cartridges wedged between the cushion and backrest of the front seat. Both of them .45s.

  Mel Dutton had capped the Polaroid and switched to his Nikon. “Cheese,” he said, and crouched and took a quick candid of Willows glaring at him.

  Willows bagged the spent cartridges and went around to the front of the car to see what Parker had found to put in the plastic evidence bags lined up on the Pontiac’s hood. There were three bags. The first held a misshapen chunk of lead alloy and the second contained a single black leather glove. Willows picked up the third evidence bag. He held the bag up against a shaft of sunlight that slanted down through the bridge girders, made the chrome grill of the Pontiac sparkle brightly. The bag held a small quantity of dark green plant material that looked like spinach.

  “Seaweed,” said Parker. “That’s what it smells like, anyway. The glove and spent slug were on the ground on the far side of the car. Dutton’s already photographed them.” She was wearing a plain white blouse and a suit, dark blue with pinstripes. The skirt was pleated, the jacket cut to fit close to her body, but with a little padding in the shoulders. Her hair danced in the wind. The light shining off the water made her eyes seem even darker than usual. Willows thought she might have passed for a banker, if she hadn’t had such great legs.

  He put the evidence bag back down on the hood and stepped back to take a look at the front of the car. A headlight had been smashed. The bumper had been pushed into the grill, puncturing the radiator. There was a residue of rusty water on the
ground. The Pontiac had probably been moving at fifteen or twenty miles an hour when it had hit the concrete barrier. He tried to think how it might have happened, pictured a struggle, the victim grabbing the wheel ... Maybe the shooting had been an accident, the gun discharging when the Pontiac hit the concrete support column. But that would only explain one shot, and especially not two or more shots from two separate weapons. More likely, the shooting had come first and then the killer had tried to run the Pontiac into the drink. When that hadn’t worked he’d dragged the body out of the car and dumped it in the water, hoping the tide would carry it out to sea.

  He stepped up on the sagging front bumper, gingerly tested it with his weight. The metal made a creaking sound, but held. He walked across to the far side of the car.

  The heel marks leading from the front door across the gravel towards the water were faint but perfectly clear. But whoever had dragged the body to the water’s edge had left no footprints, no visible traces. Still, it was always possible the Ident squad would turn something up.

  In theory, anyway.

  Parker stayed close to Willows as he followed the heel marks down to the water’s edge. He could smell her perfume. In the rich, syrupy light of summer’s day Parker’s skin was flawless and pale, her hair black and glossy as a raven’s wing. She caught him looking at her, smiled. Willows gruffly looked away.

  A concrete breakwater kept the ocean at bay. A wooden float went all the way around to the far side of the pier. On the other side of the float there was open water and then a small marina, about thirty power and sail boats. Willows looked for signs of life, but the boats were quiet, deserted. He wondered if any of them were liveaboards. There’d be a wharfinger nearby; he’d have to find him and ask.

  A tug pushed beneath the bridge, riding an ebb tide towards open water. An enclosed barge rode on the end of a short towline. The barge had no markings, other than an eight-digit number. Willows had no idea what the cargo might be. A man in jeans and a windbreaker came out of the tug’s wheelhouse. Willows resisted an impulse to wave. What if he was snubbed? The tug’s bow wave made the sailboats shift restlessly. He listened to the musical tinkling of the aluminum rigging, watched the masts sway to and fro.

  Across the water, the Granville Island Market was on his right. To his left were the huge concrete holding towers of LaFarge Cement. Another cute place to hide a corpse.

  The pools of blood in the car had been a hard, glossy brown. The car’s engine had been cold. Willows turned to Parker. “Any thoughts?”

  “You could use a haircut.”

  Willows was wearing a crisp white shirt, tan pants, white leather Stan Smith tennis shoes. He kind of liked his hair a little on the longish side. “I thought it made me look kind of artistic,” he said.

  “Artistic?”

  “Sensitive,” Willows explained.

  “Oh,” said Parker. She watched the flow of water under the bridge. It looked glacial, that milky green. “Barry Crawford,” she said. “We ought to check, make sure he really is in the slammer.”

  “Yeah, I suppose so.”

  Willows turned and began to walk diagonally across the parking lot.

  “Where you going?” said Parker.

  “Nowhere in particular.”

  “I’ve already been over every square inch of ground,” said Parker. “I worked out a grid and went over it with the guys from the squad car. Nothing.”

  Willows nodded but didn’t stop walking. Hands in the back pockets of his pants, head down. He whistled a few notes from an old Beatles tune. Abruptly, the whistling stopped. He took his hands out of his pockets, glanced up at Parker.

  “What is it?” Parker hurried over to where Willows was standing. There was a small round hole in the hard-packed ground, as if someone had recently removed a rock about the size of a cigarette package.

  “We better get Dutton to take some pictures, Claire.”

  “Right,” said Parker. She went back to the Pontiac. One of the local radio stations had sent a car. The vans from the major networks would be arriving at any moment. Parker remembered the first time she’d been interviewed. She’d watched herself on the eleven o’clock news, and her mother had even made a videotape. But notoriety had a price — half her neighbors weren’t talking to her because she refused to fix their parking tickets. And the other half wasn’t quite so friendly either, now they knew she was a cop.

  Willows finished scouring the lot. He went over to Mel Dutton and said a few words and then walked up and thumped the Pontiac’s trunk.

  “Had a look inside?”

  Parker didn’t say anything. She could feel herself blushing. Christ, it could be full of Girl Guides, for all she knew. What a day she was having.

  “Not yet,” she said.

  Willows got a pry bar from the squad car, wedged the thin end of the bar up under the lip of the trunk. He applied force and the bar slipped free. His hand banged into the rear bumper. He swore, sucked a knuckle.

  One of the uniforms wandered over. Lambert. All freckles and big white teeth. Lambert had made a name for himself by being the only cop on the force to shoot his own squad car. Maybe that’s why he was interested now — because he specialized in automotive mayhem.

  “Want a hand?”

  Willows gave him the pry bar. Lambert drove the bar home, braced himself, applied downward pressure. The lid popped open. Willows let Lambert get his hands dirty pulling out the spare tire. Underneath the tire there was a jack and a wheel wrench, jumper cables.

  “Just like Howard Johnson’s,” said Lambert.

  Willows tilted an eyebrow.

  “No surprises,” said Lambert. His bright blue eyes admired Parker’s legs.

  A CKVU TV crew arrived in an Econoline van, began to unload their equipment. “Do me a favor,” Willows said to Lambert. “Ask them to get some footage of the crowd.”

  Lambert trudged across the gravel towards the van.

  Willows stared out across the water. It’d be a hell of a place to drag. The guns might be down there, but the victim was probably way out in the harbor somewhere, or the wind and currents might have taken him twenty miles out to sea. Exactly what the city needed, another unsolved crime.

  An airhorn sounded and the loose cluster of newspaper reporters, minor television personalities and techs moved aside to let a Buster’s towtruck crunch across the gravel in a wide circle, then back slowly towards the Pontiac. When the Ident team was finished with the car, it’d be towed to the police compound for a more leisurely and thorough examination. He made a mental note to give the crime lab a call, see if he could inject some slight sense of urgency into Jerry Goldstein and his team of myopics. He watched the towtruck driver climb out of his cab and then said, “Hungry?”

  “Depends who’s buying,” said Parker.

  The towtruck driver had on greasy striped coveralls, a black sleeveless T-shirt and a Yankees baseball cap. He needed a shave. The cigar clenched firmly between his teeth was the same color as the grime impacted beneath his fingernails. “Okay, I admit it, I asked him first,” Willows said.

  “But he turned you down.”

  “He already had a date.”

  “Or he lied.”

  Willows grinned.

  “I wouldn’t mind a coffee,” said Parker.

  On the east side of the parking lot, separated from the road by a chain-link fence, there was a low wooden building about the size of a mobile home, green-stained vertical cedar boards on a concrete pad. Willows led Parker through a gate, down a narrow concrete walkway, past a row of dwarf cedars in wooden barrels, towards a sliding glass door. He pushed open the door and they went inside.

  The floor was linoleum, waxed and shiny. Bright green metal tables and bright blue plastic and tubular metal chairs were arranged alongside the window that faced the harbor. Five-gallon aluminum cans were ranged along the windowsill. The cans had once contained German beer or German pickles, but now served as pots for overgrown tomato plants.

 
Willows scrutinized the menu, which was chalked on a blackboard. A woman approached the table. She was small and tidy, with a pale complexion, the kind of skin that seems to turn powdery with age. She wore her hair in a bun, black shot through with gray. No makeup or jewelry, except for the half-dozen gold wedding and engagement rings that crowded the fingers of her right hand. Willows caught himself looking at the rings and thinking about Mannie Katz, a contract killer with a fatal fondness for jewelry. Willows had shot Katz to death a little more than a year ago, and still hadn’t stopped dreaming. He cleared his throat, smiled up at the woman. “Still serving breakfast?”

  “All day long.”

  “I’ll have the Special. Eggs easy over.”

  “Wholewheat toast?”

  Willows nodded.

  “Coffee?”

  “Please.”

  The woman turned to Parker.

  “Just coffee,” said Parker. “I’ll eat his toast.”

  “Strawberry jam okay?”

  “Perfect.”

  Outside, a yellow-painted gangway led down to the wooden walkway that started on the far side of the pier. A sign over the gangway advertised the Aquabus, the tiny ferry that made the short run across the water to the shops and farmer’s market of Granville Island. Sunlight splintered on the waves. The woman brought coffee, and Willows found himself staring at her rings again, the bands of shining gold, bright spark of diamonds. Mannie Katz leapt out at him from the darkness. His snubbie exploded, the muzzle blast staining Mannie’s face pale orange. Mannie’s eyes were wide with shock, already glazing.

  Willows’ hand shook as he dumped a plastic container of cream into his coffee. His spoon rattled against the side of his mug. Parker was staring at him. Their eyes met. Embarrassed, full of wisdom and sympathy, she looked away.

  Willows drank some coffee, scorched the roof of his mouth.

  The woman brought his breakfast to him on a wide oval plate. The eggs had been done just the way he liked them, and the hashbrowns were home-made. Willows looked at her hand again and this time all he saw was a bunch of rings. No hallucinations. He peppered his eggs — no salt — and started eating. Parker helped herself to his knife. She spread a generous helping of strawberry jam on a slice of toast, chewed vigorously.