McQuaid's Justice

by Carly Bishop

  “Not hardly.”

  “Do you have an accent?”

  He looked at her. “That’s a weird question. Why do you ask?”

  “A lot of the words you use are total throwbacks.”

  He missed it. “Total what?”

  “Throwback.” She spelled the word.

  “That’s what I thought.” He glowered and didn’t even know it.

  “A throwback in a nice sense, McQuaid. Polite. Gentlemanly.” She smiled. “So do you? Have an accent?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t think so. Not till we moved to Colorado. The western slope. I was thirteen, belligerent as hell. It didn’t take me more’n a week to get the drift, though.”

  “What... drift?”

  “You pretty much crawled out from under some rock if you thought you could transplant yourself to Colorado and strut your redneck Texas drawl.” He grinned. “We all took our licks—”

  “We all, who?”

  “My brothers and me. Cameron’s a sheriff over in Chaparral County. Matt went back. He’s a Texas Ranger. I can hear Texas in his voice, but I don’t think I’ve got much of any accent left.”

  “So what are you now, in your heart? Colorado or Texas?”

  He drew a deep breath, squinting against fierce sunlight glinting off the field of snow, passing a glance out the window at the side view mirror. “My mother is buried in Texas. A part of my heart will always be there. But this is home now.” He sat silent for a moment. “Do you know what a Texas accent would sound like?”

  “Dimly.” Amy stared a moment across the pristine field of snow ending at the rodeo stands above the chutes. In April it would be knee-deep in mud with the spring runoff.

  She felt truly pensive now. She rarely thought of times when she could hear. Fiona’s voice had come to her in dreams and odd waking moments, and sometimes the voices Brent made for March Hare and the others.

  She looked at Cy, finding that she couldn’t keep hope from her heart. Maybe there wasn’t such an impossible chasm between them if she could remember what things sounded like. “Mostly what I remember,” she signed, “is music. Lyrics. I was thinking Texas must sound sort of like the woman who sang, ‘Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.’”

  He grinned. “That’d be close, darlin’. Though my personal favorite Texas country song went something like, ‘Kick me, Lord Jesus, through the goalposts of life.’”

  She smiled and shook her head. “I loved cowboys.”

  “You are making that up.”

  “No. I swear.” She crossed her heart.

  “Who?”

  “Billy Kidd for one. You might have heard of him. He came from Steamboat and won the downhill in the Olympics when—”

  “Oh. I see,” he scoffed. “Cowboys on skis. Billy Kidd could knock the hell out of a mountain, but a Stetson doesn’t make a cowboy.”

  “He wasn’t the only one—”

  “He isn’t even one.”

  “You’re being dumb as a post, McQuaid.” He opened his mouth, but her look must have shut him up. “It’s the character, you know? The loner, the stars in the sky for a roof over your head. The one man who always tips his hat to a lady. It’s the macho thing too, the boots and vest and chaps, all that leather. All that sexy cowboy stuff.” He was laughing at her now. “Okay, maybe it was only a romantic notion of a cowboy that I loved, but when the rodeo comes to town, every girl in town wants one.”

  He glanced at the rear- and side-view mirrors, then gave her long look. “D’you ever kiss a cowboy?”

  “Before you?” she teased. “Almost.” She wrinkled her nose. “He had chew in his mouth and it grossed me out, so...no. You are my first cowboy.”

  The painful, obvious question popped into her mind, whether she was his first deaf girl. No boy had ever said that to her, but some of the crueler girls had, apparently at a complete loss as to why any guy would take her out aside from the kiss-and-can’t-tell novelty of it.

  She took another plunge instead because she knew the question would make him angry. “How did you learn to sign?”

  He shifted his weight, stretching his stiff leg out over the transmission. “A deaf kid in rehab I got to know. He’d about killed himself in a motorcycle accident. His legs were mangled worse than mine. We both had to learn to walk again. You can learn a lot of signing when you’re together twenty-four-seven for months on end.”

  She nodded. “I went to a boarding school for deaf children, but I was still pretty little. I loved to sign.” Then, though, she thought, it must have seemed an adventure because she still thought she was only pretending to be deaf. “What was his name?”

  “Seth.”

  “Did he make it out?”

  “Everyone makes it out, Amy. You either make it or you don’t Sooner or later they bounce you.”

  “No, I mean—”

  “Did he walk again? Yeah.” He crumpled his sandwich wrapper and stuffed it in the paper sack, checking the mirrors again.

  “Is that just a habit of yours?”

  He looked at her.

  “Checking everything out. Looking in the mirrors.”

  He frowned. “Yeah, it’s habit.”

  “Is someone following us?”

  “I wouldn’t rule it out.” He drew his leg back under the steering wheel, put in the clutch and turned on the truck. “Just a feeling.”

  “YOU’LL NEVER GUESS who turned up at the house this morning.”

  “Are you on a secure line?”

  “No,” Brent cracked angrily, kicking a box out of his path, the cell phone in one hand and a Bloody Mary in the other. “I went looking for a phone anyone could tap into.”

  “Calm down. Tell me what happened.”

  “Amy happened. All these years, you never expected that, did you?”

  “If you can’t deal with your sister, Brent, maybe you ought to just go blow your head off and get it over with.”

  Pacing the stock room of the bar and packaged liquor store, Brent swore. Stupid SOB would like that, wouldn’t he? Solve all his problems. “It’s the G-man hanging out with her I don’t trust. The guy’s filling her deaf-and-dumb little head with all kinds of crap.”

  That gave his uncle pause. “McQuaid?”

  “That’d be the one. You said—”

  “I know what I said,” Perry cut him off. “Nothing has changed. The truth is exactly what it always was. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot. We’ve cornered the market on the truth.”

  “We have.” His uncle sighed. “You’re going to be better off if you remember that, Brent. I don’t have to remind you it’s your neck in the noose, do I?”

  “No, you don’t. But you always manage to, don’t you?” His chest felt like it was about to explode. Like the night his mother accused him of hurting Amy, his heart pounded till his ears filled with the sound of it, till he thought he’d stroke out.

  Why did she have to say that? Why did she have to make him so mad? Couldn’t she see all he wanted, all he ever wanted was to have things back the way they were before—

  No. Things were well and truly screwed up enough. He couldn’t...he couldn’t let himself get sucked down into the nightmares, couldn’t let it happen. No. He had to keep it together. He’d been doing it all these years, he could do it now.

  Screw Amy.

  Screw her lover.

  They couldn’t make him lose it, not if he—

  “Brent!” Perry’s voice commanded. “Are you there?”

  He swallowed. Couldn’t believe the stench of fear on himself, the cold sweat soaking his shirt. “I’m here.”

  “You’ve got to hang tough, boy,” Perry soothed. “The truth is what you’ve always told. What I’ve always said it was. There is no evidence to the contrary. None. You’re safe. No one can ever say anything else happened because nothing else did happen. No one can prove any different. Are you with me?”

  He wanted to believe this so badly tears sprang
to his eyes. “You don’t know what it’s like. You don’t—”

  “It was an accident, son.”

  No, it wasn’t. “I hit her. I meant to hit her. I didn’t mean her to—”

  “It was an accident,” Perry repeated, his voice gentle, firm, commanding. “Say it. Come on, Brent. Say it. It was an accident.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “There you go. Say it again. It was an accident.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “Again. ‘My mother’s death was an accident.’”

  “My mother’s death was an accident.” Now, if he could only believe it... Believe he hadn’t killed her. Believe it. But he’d been saying those words like a mantra for too many years and he knew better. Saying so didn’t make it so. He had all the demons in hell in his dreams, taking him dragging him, kicking and screaming itwasanaccident.

  Chapter Ten

  “Another week or two, Brent. That’s all you have to get through, and then you’ll be home free.”

  “You never counted on Amy.”

  “Amy is nothing. She can’t hurt you. Listen to me, now. She can’t hurt you. There is nothing she can say or do that will take you down, son.”

  Brent’s throat tightened. Most of the time Perry calling him “son” simply galled the piss out of him, but now the word just made him want to curl up and die. He was nobody’s son and he had his mom to blame for that too.

  Why’d she have to get rid of my dad?

  He swallowed on the stinging, bitter bile staining his throat. Resolve curdled inside him. He didn’t need this shit, didn’t need the judge’s brownnosing, nothing, toadying brother telling him what to do, treating him like some dullard half-wit offspring he could hardly tolerate.

  What a freaking fool. Amy knows nothing. Amy can’t hurt you. Like hell.

  He folded up the cell phone, disconnecting the bastard who had both held his mother’s death over his head and protected him from the consequences all these years. He hurled the phone into a trash compactor filled nearly to the brim with empty bottles and cardboard packaging.

  Amy knew.

  He couldn’t understand a word she signed, but he could see with his own eyes when it had hit her what he’d done to her and how he’d done it. If she remembered that, God only knew what would trigger the next thing and the next thing after that.

  No. Amy knew plenty. He’d seen it in her eyes.

  SLOUCHED INSIDE his rented car down the street from the Ski Town USA Saloon, Zach had just learned a lot. On the seat beside him was surveillance equipment anyone could lay their hands on with a particle of ingenuity. With it he had picked up Brent Reeves’s whiny phone call to his uncle, all but confessing to the murder of Julia Reeves.

  What a moron. A cell phone was no more secure than bellowing at each other over tin cans connected by string. Even if Brent Reeves knew better, he didn’t care, and not caring who heard that call made him a fool—and a dangerous one. A loose cannon.

  Zach plucked the pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, lit up and took a drag. He let the smoke drift out his nostrils, thinking what he was going to do with this story now.

  The plot was sure as hell not shaping itself into the blistering exposé of the judge that Phillip Gould expected to see. That angle was, in fact, a big nothing, a pathetic shadow of what it had promised to be.

  No one cared. Not Jessup’s family, not the DOJ, not the public, not even story-starved TV news mags or the typically salivating producers of unsolved crime shows.

  With the results he was getting, he didn’t have to wonder why. Another riveting read, Zach thought sourly. A notch above tabloid fodder, not much more. Still, he couldn’t quite give it up. He was just perverse enough to believe that in this case, less was promise of more.

  There was something here deeper, meatier, nastier than he knew right now, but he intended to find it. Whatever it was.

  Crushing out his cigarette, he spotted McQuaid and Reeves’s daughter coming out of the county office building into the painfully bright sunshine. He felt his spirits rise a bit, his interest piqued. Why the hell would McQuaid be escorting Amy Reeves around unless she was the cache of real gold in all of this?

  No reason Zach could think of. He had to hatch a plan that included weaseling into the good graces of Cy McQuaid. At least negotiate a trade. Quid pro quo.

  Brent Reeves’s taped confession for an answer to the real puzzler in all this. Despite traipsing all over the country, questioning every lead, angle and player, Zach still didn’t know why Senator Gould had his shriveled, creepy little heart set on scuttling Byron Reeves’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

  He straightened, turned the ignition of the rental car, and smiled grimly to himself. He would have to force McQuaid’s hand. A risky proposition with an armed and dangerous hombre like McQuaid, and not likely to earn Zach any warm fuzzies. But once he had McQuaid’s undivided attention, the straight-arrow lawman would surely see the upside of a little collaboration.

  CY SPOTTED THE GUY tailing them within about fifteen seconds of leaving the County Hall of Records. Ducking low inside a parked dark blue Nissan sedan now, their pursuer had been driving a white utility vehicle with a rentalagency logo on its bumper when he finally passed Cy’s truck on the downhill side of Rabbit Ears Pass. Cy might not have made the connection, except that he’d seen the sedan in passing when he pulled up and parked at the end of the rodeo grounds.

  He switched sides with Amy so that he was between her and the inept jerk following them. When they reached his truck, he unlocked her door and helped her in. From where the sedan was parked, Amy was safe once inside and he didn’t tell her what he was doing till he got in, pulled out onto the street and pulled a U-turn headed toward the middle of town—which the sedan immediately copied.

  He turned to her. “Someone is following us.”

  “Who?”

  Keeping an eye on the traffic, he told her hadn’t gotten a decent look at the face.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked, abbreviating her form.

  “Park,” he answered, his gaze constantly moving, “and double back on him. I want you to duck down and stay down till you see the whites of my eyes. Clear?”

  She nodded.

  He told her there was a small handgun in the dash and asked her if she knew how to use it.

  “Never held a gun in my life.”

  That was probably just as well. He didn’t expect to let the guy get within shooting distance. He drove until he found a setup he could work with and pulled into the lot. He waved Amy down, got out, shut the door of the cab and crouched low. From the right front corner he watched the sedan pull over on the street next to a fire hydrant.

  He wouldn’t stay there. Cy figured him to be trying to make up his mind whether to circle around the block or make the left-hand turn that would put him on the street to the side of the lot. Then the guy shrugged his shoulders and turned off his ignition.

  Cy pulled his sidearm from his shoulder holster and took advantage of the guy’s indecision to move closer, staying low, but a woman shoved out of the dry cleaners, spotted him and started screaming her head off. “He’s got a gun! Oh, my God, somebody! He’s got a gun.”

  He swore under his breath, stood, pointed his firearm at the creep in the sedan. “You. Don’t move. Do not even breathe.” Two bruisers and an old man came running out the door of the package liquor store, the old man carrying a sawed-off shotgun aimed straight at Cy. His sidearm trained on the cretin in the sedan, he shouted at the guntoting old man. “FBI. Put your weapon on the ground. Nobody’s gonna get hurt here. Do it! Now!”

  “I don’t see any freakin’ ID—”

  “You are looking at the inside of a cell if you don’t back off and get that shotgun on the ground.”

  It wasn’t his threat that made the guy back off, but Amy moving slowly, fearlessly, aiming the empty handgun at the old man, holding up the jacket from his pickup with F.B.I. in nine-inch yellow let
ters on the back of it.

  The two wise guys backed up and opened their arms. The old man stooped low and put his deadly sawed-off relic on the iced-over pavement.

  Amy waved the gun in a direction that ordered all three men back where they’d come from. The woman got up and bolted for her car, sobbing hysterically. Amy backed up till one of the parked cars shielded her body from the storefronts, positioning the gun over the roof.

  Cy approached the parked sedan and broke out the driver’s window with the butt of his gun.

  “Get out. Make it slow. You make one stray move and it’ll be the last one you ever contemplate.”

  When Cy saw who it was climbing out, it took everything in him not to double up his fist and rearrange every internal organ Zach Hollingsworth possessed.

  And busting Amy for impersonating an agent and putting herself in the middle of it wasn’t a far distant second thought.

  CY HERDED HOLLINGSWORTH after Amy through the swinging doors of the Ski Town USA Saloon, sent Zach a make-my-day look and turned to the barkeep. “You got a back room?”

  “Yeah.” The spare, ponytailed bartender dried his hands on fresh white towel. “But it ain’t open, pardner.”

  Cy pulled out his FBI credentials and let them fall open where the barkeep could get a real good look. “It is now.”

  “Sure, but it’s gonna cost—”

  “Where is it?”

  The barkeep jerked his head toward the far end of the bar.

  “Fine. I want a pitcher of beer, three mugs, chips and salsa and an hour.” He drew a fifty from a money clip and tossed it on the slick, polished patina of the bar top. “This ought to cover it.”

  ONCE AMY, CY and Zach Hollingsworth were sitting in a back room and served with a pitcher and chips, she took the initiative. “What were you thinking, Mr. Hollingsworth?” Cy sat with the front chair legs high off the ground, his arms folded over his chest, and repeated her question to Hollingsworth. “Were you trying to get yourself busted?”

  “Were you?” he tossed back. “Because I’ve got to tell you, Amy, from where I sit, Mr. McQuaid here is about as put out with you as he is with me.”