Thrilling Thirteen

by Ponzo, Gary

  “I don’t want anything from you, Troy,” Sandy said. “I just want you to pick up that knife and take care of business.”

  “Why?” Collins asked, sobbing out the word.

  There was a time when Sandy would have answered that question. He thought that even a condemned man deserved an explanation. But after a while, he learned that all it did was delay matters. They knew why. They all knew.

  “The knife,” Sandy repeated. “Or I go to work with Sam Colt here.”

  Collins searched out his face, looking for mercy or a lack of conviction. He found neither one. Reluctantly, he reached out for the knife. He stared at it for a long moment. Sandy waited patiently. Finally, Collins moved the blade over until the tip was poised over his left wrist.

  Moment of truth, Sandy thought. Which way will he go?

  For a second, Sandy thought that Collins might make it easy for him. That he might actually plunge that blade into his own wrist and jerk it back like a samurai committing seppuku over a matter of some dishonor. If he did that, he would bleed out in just a few minutes. When the police eventually came, maybe days from now, they’d find a grisly suicide.

  But it was not to be.

  Sandy saw the decision in Collins’ face, probably before the drunk man even realized he’d made it. He rose from the couch, cocking the knife back and stepping toward Sandy.

  Sandy fired twice. The gun gave out a muffled bark, punctuated by the clacking sound of the slide. The bullets slammed into Collins’ chest, driving him backward. He flopped onto the couch, staring at Sandy in surprise. His mouth hung open but no sound came out.

  Without hesitation, Sandy raised the gun and fired a third shot. It struck Collins in the forehead and shut out his lights forever.

  Sandy transitioned immediately to cleanup. First he retrieved the three casings that his gun had ejected. He dropped them into his bag. Then he took the knife from Collins and dropped it in the bag as well. Lastly, he removed a small plastic baggie from his bag. A white powdery substance filled one tiny corner of the baggie. He tore a hole in it and sprinkled the methamphetamine on the coffee table.

  It wasn’t the greatest staging he’d ever done, but the less elaborate something was, the fewer things that could go wrong. Right now, most homicide detectives would survey the scene and figure that poor Troy Collins got robbed of his meth stash. It happens every day in the big, bad city. Especially when you run with bad people.

  Sandy found the bathroom. He checked around the bathtub for loose tiles. The second one he tried moved. He lifted the tile and pulled the bag out from inside the hole. The bag had about a dozen different pieces of jewelry. Sandy went through the list of stolen jewelry from the police report in his mind as he perused the contents of the bag. The only item that he was sure belonged to Thompson was a thin gold ring with a small red ruby. He took it. Then he put the bag back in its secret place. Just for good measure, though, he left the tile a little bit cockeyed.

  Maybe the detectives will find it. They’ll figure the killer was after dope and missed Collins’ little treasure trove. Maybe some people will get their stuff back. Maybe they’ll tie Collins to some more of the bad shit he’d done.

  Or maybe not.

  Either way, Sandy was finished here.

  Walking just as calmly as he’d approached, he slipped out the back door, through the yard and down the alley. He reached his car without feeling eyes upon him. Without pause, he started the car, drove south on Lincoln past Chelan, down another block, then cut over to Post. Once he hit Post, he turned north and drove in a straight line, listening for sirens.

  There were none.

  Sandy shrugged. He’d gotten away clean. That meant it might be a while before anyone else learned that justice had been served on Troy Collins.

  FIVE

  The pounding noise started in Sandy’s head. It took a while for him to realize it was coming from his door and not between his temples.

  “Just a second,” he called from his couch. He swung his legs over the edge and planted them on the floor. His head swam momentarily. His stomach lurched. He took a breath and swallowed.

  The pounding continued.

  Sandy slid his gun from beneath the cushion and stumbled to his feet. At the door, he avoided looking through the peephole, just in case. Instead, he hid the gun behind the door, angling it directly at where he suspected the noisemaker was standing. Then he jerked the door open about a foot.

  Brian Moore stood outside, poised and frozen mid-knock.

  “Were you sleeping?” he asked, feigning innocence.

  “What do you think?” Sandy said evenly.

  Brian gave Sandy a quick once-over. “My guess would be that you fell asleep on your couch after putting away a miniscule, sissy amount of whiskey.”

  Sandy grunted and turned away from the door, leaving it open for Brian to enter. He strode back to the couch and flopped down onto it.

  “Did you have that thing pointed at me from behind the door?” Brian asked.

  Sandy glanced down at his right hand, which still held the .45. “No,” he told Brian. Then he flicked the safety back on and set the pistol on the coffee table next to an almost full bottle of Wild Turkey.

  “Liar,” Brian replied. He reached down and picked up the bottle. He gauged how much was missing and cast an appraising eye toward Sandy. “You're such a lightweight, Banks. You always were.”

  “I should be an alcoholic?”

  Brian shrugged. “A lot of cops are.”

  “I'm not a cop anymore. Haven’t been for a long time.”

  “True,” Brian said. He settled into the only other place to sit in the living room, a rocking chair made of dark wood. He looked at Sandy and waited.

  Sandy returned his look, saying nothing. After a few moments of silence, Brian finally asked, “You finished with your fishing trip?”

  “I am,” Sandy replied.

  “Thus the whiskey,” Brian added.

  It was Sandy's turn to shrug. He didn't ask Brian how he coped or if he even needed to, so he didn't feel the need to explain himself to the younger man. Maybe Brian enjoyed what they did. Maybe all three of the other Horsemen had. Or maybe, like Sandy, they understood the difference between enjoyment and righteous satisfaction.

  Brian grinned and shook his head slightly. “Fishing trip. What a crafty little code, huh? Remember when it was necessary to have some kind of cover story for what we do? How Hank and Bill had to lie to their wives about some bullshit fishing trip to Michigan or Wisconsin or wherever?”

  “Minnesota,” Sandy corrected. He stifled a yawn.

  “Yeah, Minnesota, that's it.” He shook his head again. “I even used that line on Paula a couple of times. I guess I wasn't as good at lying as the rest of you, because she figured out I didn't go fishing. You know what she did? I ever tell you about that?”

  “No.” Sandy rose from the couch and went to the kitchen for some water.

  Brian stayed put, raising his voice slightly. “She put a pair of her panties in my tackle box. She used them to wrap up a sexy note about what she was going to do to me when I got home.”

  “Devious,” Sandy said, filling a glass and taking a drink. He started to scrounge around the cupboard for some aspirin.

  “Yeah,” Brian said. “Except that when I got home and didn't say anything about the nasty things in the note, she got suspicious. All it took was one look in the tackle box to verify things and that was that.”

  “Huh,” Sandy grunted, wondering why in the hell Brian was so chatty today. He never lacked for conversation, but usually became more talkative when he was nervous about something.

  “I tried lying to her about it,” Brian went on, “but she knew I was lying. Of course, she figured I was cheating on her. I told her I wasn't, which was true, but it's not like I could tell her what I was off doing, right?”

  “Uh-huh,” Sandy said.

  “Uh-huh?” Brian asked. “Are you even listening to me?”

&nb
sp; “Unfortunately,” Sandy answered. He found some Tylenol and popped three in his mouth, washing them down with tap water.

  “I'm trying to talk to you, man,” Brian said. He sounded strange to Sandy, like he was irritated but also like there was something else going on.

  Sandy took another deep breath and let it out. He wasn't really in the mood to play therapist to Brian. “I'm not feeling too talkative this morning.”

  Brian glanced at his watch. “It's one-thirty, man. It's afternoon.”

  “Then I'm not feeling too talkative this afternoon.”

  Brian sighed. “You're a strange dude, Sandy. You always were.”

  “Strange is a relative term,” Sandy replied. He wandered into the living room again and sat back down on the couch. He sipped his water and eyed Brian carefully. “What's up with you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You're acting weird.”

  “No, I'm not.”

  Sandy nodded. “Yeah, you are. And I'm asking you what's up?”

  Brian opened his mouth, then closed it again without saying anything. He turned and stared at the old-style world map Sandy had framed on the wall.

  Sandy waited. He tried to put his finger on Brian’s jumpiness, but he couldn’t. He felt a strange twinge of suspicion.

  “I guess,” Brian said after a while, “I'm just feeling kinda nostalgic, you know?”

  “No,” Sandy said matter-of-factly. “I don't.”

  Brian dropped his eyes from the picture on the wall and met Sandy's gaze. “I mean, there used to be four of us, right? The Four Horsemen. Like in the Apocalypse. You remember that? Remember when we worked as a team? None of this solo shit.”

  Sandy said nothing. He twirled his index finger, urging Brian to get to the point.

  “We did some great work, huh?” Brian said. “Nailing those scumbags who slipped through the system? What we did, it was what needed to be done. Don't you think so?”

  “What's your point?” Sandy asked. He wondered if maybe the problem was that Brian wasn't as okay with things as he had always assumed he was. Maybe he was having a crisis of conscience all at once instead of in little bite-sized pieces like Sandy did every time he finished a job.

  “My point?” Brian asked, his face turning harder. “My point, Sandy? My fucking point is that we killed a lot of people, okay? Are you saying you're all right with that?”

  Sandy didn't reply right away. Then he shrugged. “This is your confessional. Say what you want if it makes you feel any better.”

  Brian inhaled deeply, then let out a long shuddering breath. His anger seemed to dissipate almost at once. His expression grew wistful. “I don't know if I can feel any better. Hell, part of the reason I feel like shit is because I don't feel bad about some of the guys we took out.”

  Sandy nodded. That he understood. He took another sip of water.

  “Remember what Bill used to say?” Brian asked. “About how we shouldn't have decided to be the Four Horsemen but should've just called ourselves Karma, Incorporated?”

  Sandy felt a slight smile tug at the corner of his mouth. Bill had been a funny guy at times.

  Brian leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. “He used to say that karma was a real thing in this world. No, in this universe. He said that what goes around, comes around.” He smiled. “Then he would always add that, for some people, sometimes you had to be the one to bring it around.”

  He chuckled, shaking his head.

  Sandy wondered briefly if Brian had been drinking himself. He hadn't detected the odor of booze when he answered the door, but he'd been half asleep.

  “You drunk?” he asked Brian.

  Brian looked at him without leaning forward, drooping his eyelids to do so. “Me? Nah. Just...thoughtful, like I said. I miss Bill, may he rest in peace.” He crossed himself sloppily, shaking his head. “Dying of a heart attack just four years after retiring off the job. It's a shame. No other word for it. Just a shame.”

  Sandy raised his glass in silent tribute, but didn't drink.

  “Then we lose Hank,” Brian said, staring up at the ceiling again. “Funny, the way that went. He leaves our merry little band of assassins for a woman. He told me he was just tired of lying to her. After what happened between me and Paula, her deciding to call it quits, I found Hank's decision to be kinda ironic, don't you think?”

  “The world is full of irony.”

  “Where'd he head off to?” Brian asked. “Do you know? He never said.”

  Sandy shrugged. “No one knows.”

  The twinge of suspicion he’d felt earlier began to grow just a little. Something wasn’t right. As the sleep cleared from his mind and the Tylenol began to kick in, his instincts started chiming louder and louder.

  Something was up.

  “You know who I miss most, though?” Brian asked.

  Sandy shook his head.

  “Cal,” Brian said. “I miss Cal. He was more than just the Keeper. He was the core of it all, don’t you think?”

  “Cal was a good man,” Sandy agreed, his voice almost reverent.

  “He was more than that,” Brian said. “He was our moral compass. He was the one who made all of this craziness make some kind of sense, much less the guy who made sure the mechanics of it all worked out. When he died…” Brian trailed off, shaking his head. “I don’t know. Something changed.”

  “Everything changes,” Sandy said. “That’s life.”

  “Yeah, but it made more sense to me when I knew it was Cal pulling the strings. After he was gone, it started to seem a little wrong somehow.” Brian was quiet for a few moments. Then he asked, “Who do you think he made the Keeper after he left?”

  Sandy shrugged.

  “No idea?” Brian asked.

  “Nope.”

  “You ever wonder?”

  “Nope,” Sandy lied.

  Brian pursed his lips and shook his head. “I wonder about it. But I figure it’d be the last person any of us would ever suspect. Cal was a crafty old bastard. He wouldn’t have made it obvious.”

  “Cal was smart,” Sandy agreed.

  “Yeah,” Brian said. “Smart.” After a few moments, he went on, his voice thick with nostalgia, “We’ve had a run, huh, Sandy? Just the four of us coming off the job all at once, full of piss and vinegar to set the world right. And if we couldn't do it within the rules, well then to hell with the rules, right? We'd get the job done because it was right, even if it wasn't legal.” He cast another glance at Sandy. “Even if it was, basically, you know...murder.”

  Sandy didn’t answer.

  Brian seemed not to notice. “I was never much of a religious man, but jee-zus, Sandy. Thou shalt not kill? That’s kind of a biggie in most religions.”

  “Thou shalt not murder,” Sandy said quietly.

  “Huh?”

  “The commandment is ‘thou shalt not murder.’ Not kill. Murder.” Sandy gave him a hard look. “And a righteous kill is not a murder.”

  “Funny how we can talk ourselves into that, isn’t it?” Brian asked. He shook his head, a strange mixture of disgust and nostalgia in his expression. “Why did we do it, Sandy?” he asked. “Why do you think?”

  We all have our demons, Sandy thought. And our demons become our reasons.

  The battered, frightened face of a woman flashed in his mind. Her frightened eyes. He pushed the thought away, but another replaced it. This one was kinder, but his memory was fuzzy around the edges.

  His mother.

  Sandy gave his head a small shake. Goddamn Brian and his nostalgia. He didn’t need it. He opened his mouth to say so, then noticed the manila envelope in Brian's hand. Instead of answering, he pointed and asked, “What's that?”

  Brian roused himself and looked down at the envelope as if seeing it for the first time. Then he said, “It's a job.”

  Sandy gave him a puzzled look.

  Brian watched him carefully. Then he waved the envelope in the air. “Yeah, I know it’s against the
rules, bringing it here.”

  “So why do it?”

  Brian didn’t reply right away. Finally, he simply shrugged the question away. “It's a goat rope,” he told him instead.

  “Yeah?”

  Brian nodded. “Yeah. You remember Detective Randall Cooper?”

  Sandy thought for a moment. A picture of the hulking, lumpy detective formed in his mind. “Yeah, I think so. Not the sharpest crayon in the box, if I remember.”

  “That’s no shit. He was always messing up one little thing or another. Couldn’t keep his paperwork straight, missed his deadlines for filing return of service on his warrants, kept evidence in his desk instead of putting it on the books, all those kinds of things. Still,” Brian said, smiling slightly, “Coop always did have his head on straight when it came to the facts of his cases. He knew who was lying and who was guilty. Son of a bitch solved cases.”

  Sandy shook his head. “He didn’t solve cases. He figured out what happened and who did it. That’s not solving the case. Solving the case is putting together something that the prosecutor can win at trial.”

  Brian’s smile faded into a small scowl. “Come on, man. I’m not talking about perfect police work here. I’m just saying that the man always had a keen sense of justice.”

  “Most people outside of the legal profession do,” Sandy said wryly.

  “Touché,” Brian allowed. “Anyway, this case is one he bungled up pretty good. He doesn’t qualify his informant for the PC for his warrant. Then the warrant itself is weak. It sounds like he denied the guy his lawyer for a while and may have even tuned him up in the interrogation room a bit.”

  “Good police work for the 1930s, sounds like.”

  “The problem is still the same,” Brian argued. “Whether the cop makes it easy for the judge or not, the situation is that a very guilty piece of shit bad guy got off scot free.”

  “Why are you telling me about this?” Sandy asked.

  Brian leaned forward and dropped the file on the table next to Sandy's .45. “Because it’s yours. The retainer is still in there.”

  “Mine?”

  “Yours.”

  Sandy shook his head. “Uh-uh. You catch it, you clean it.”