by H. P. Bayne
“Okay, what?”
“Hmm?”
“You want to let me in on whatever it is you’re thinking?”
Dez rode out Sully’s responding silence, pleased when more persuasion wasn’t necessary before receiving an answer. “That break-in at the bar, where I caught the guy going through Betty’s office?”
“You think that was Waters?”
“His moves were solid. I mean, I swung a bat at him, but he dodged it and disarmed me within what felt like the same second, and he had me on the ground the next. I’ve had to throw people out of the bar on occasion, so I’m not useless in a fight, but this guy, he felt like a pro.”
“You think he went there looking for something on Thackeray?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. But why go to that much trouble for something that didn’t personally affect you? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Could be he’s got a bigger stake in it than he’s told us,” Dez suggested. “You think he might be the one who killed Betty? Could be that’s why you saw her around him. I mean, I don’t get what motive he’d have to kill Thackeray’s mother, not if his beef is with him. But it’s a thought, right?”
Sully nodded, but his verbal response was less satisfying. “Maybe.”
“You’re big on ‘maybes’ today, huh?”
Sully’s smile wouldn’t pass any tests. “Right now, maybes are pretty much all I’ve got.”
24
Just before noon, Sully’s stomach provided a noisy reminder he’d been neglecting meals.
Unfortunately, it seemed Sergeant Forbes Raynor wasn’t as troubled about food as he was the state of his investigation, his voice on the other end of the line as Sully answered his ringing cellphone.
“I thought you were going to come in this morning for a chat.”
Sully was back in the passenger seat of Dez’s SUV, his brother next to him behind the steering wheel. Still parked outside Thackeray’s house, they’d been figuring out their next move when Forbes threw a spanner in the works. The quiet, the proximity and the natural volume of Forbes’s voice had Sully holding his cell away from his ear. Dez snatched it away before Sully could stop him.
If Forbes Raynor’s voice was thunderous, Dez’s was the sound of an F-5 tornado.
“Do you have any fucking idea what we’re going through right now? Our father just died, you asshole! Give Sully a couple days, or you’ll be dealing with me instead. You hear me? … Damn right, that’s a threat. You wanna go there? ’Cuz I’m good for it.”
“Dez.” Sully restricted himself to just the one word, hoping it would prove enough. He had to repeat it a couple times, but his brother finally listened, handing back the phone while Forbes was mid-tirade. Sully waited until the man paused for a breath. “Sergeant? You’re going to have to forgive my brother.”
“I don’t forgive threats, Gray.”
“No, I mean you’re going to have to. You know what we’re going through. Any further pushing from you right now and I’ll file an official complaint. Those don’t go to the city, they go to the province. And, far as I know, your dad doesn’t hold any clout there.”
Even if Forbes reacted badly to Sully’s promise, Dez’s soft rumble of laughter made it all worthwhile. Unfortunately, Dez wasn’t likely to find Sully’s next statement so amusing.
“I’ll come in to talk to you this afternoon, all right?”
Forbes’s response sounded to be coming through gritted teeth. “What time?”
“I don’t know yet. We’re in the middle of something, right now. I’ll call you. That’s the best I can do.”
“I’m warning you, Gray. If I don’t see your ass in here soon, I’m going to find you and arrest you for obstructing an investigation, you hear me? Call me before four. Any later, you and I are going to have a problem.”
As far as Sully was concerned, they already had a problem, but he found himself with a more immediate one the moment he ended the call and returned the cellphone to his pocket.
“Why the hell did you agree to meet him today?” Dez demanded. “We talked about this.”
Sully suggested a mild correction. “Actually, you talked.”
“And, as usual, you didn’t listen.”
“Like I said before, this isn’t going away, Dez. I’m done with this hanging over me. Anyway, now that we know who it was who likely broke into the Fox the other night, I’ve got something I can give Raynor to follow. He can’t charge me with anything until he clears that lead, right?”
“Damn it. I told Waters I was giving him a pass.”
“You said you weren’t going to arrest him. You didn’t say anything about someone else doing it. Anyway, you hadn’t thought about the possibility he was behind the break-in, not until I mentioned it after.”
“Look, Sull, if it means taking the heat off you, I’ll quite happily break whatever promises Waters thinks I gave him. I just don’t want you talking to Raynor until you’re in a state to handle it.”
“That probably won’t be for months. Look, you and me, we’re probably kind of in the same boat right now, back and forth between shock and falling apart. There are moments where I think Dad’s just a phone call away. Another couple of days, once reality’s had a chance to really settle in, I don’t want to think what state I’ll be in. This is probably the best I’m going to be for a while.”
“I don’t like it, Sully.”
“You don’t have to. You just have to accept it. I’m a suspect in a murder investigation, and there’s no way around it. I’ve got to find my way through it. Look, I didn’t do it, and even if Forbes tries to twist every piece of evidence to fit, and even if he has the backing of his father, he’s still got to have something for the prosecutor to make something of in court. If there’s no way a jury’s going to buy it down the road, no chance the prosecutor will either, right?”
Dez didn’t respond, which Sully took as a win.
Sully managed to convince Dez to join him for lunch at a café down the road from the Black Fox, one where Sully took his breaks when he was short on groceries or sick of his own terrible attempts at cooking.
His appetite didn’t match the sounds his stomach had been making, and he was fighting nausea by the time he’d forced down a burger and fries. Lunch done, Sully held onto his last request for his brother until they were back on the sidewalk. Once they were out of others’ earshot, he told Dez he wanted to walk over to police headquarters. Alone.
He summed up with a statement he knew was sure to convince his brother of the merits of his plan. “It’ll give me time to think and to calm down. I’ll be less likely to say something stupid or step in whatever trap he’s looking to spring.”
“I still don’t like this.”
“You still don’t have to.”
To his credit, Dez did what he couldn’t have a couple years ago.
Blowing out a heavy breath, he enveloped Sully in a hug and demanded a phone call once he’d finished with Forbes.
Then Dez walked away.
If Dez thought Sully was out of his mind for wanting to face questioning now, there was nonetheless method in the madness of the plan.
Of course, returning to face Terrence Waters so soon after the man had taken both of them on in the park was its own kind of crazy.
It might have been prudent to take Dez with him to have this conversation, as backup if nothing else. But the more Sully skirted around the edges of this foggy mire he was trying to slog through, the more the mists were lifting to reveal the person standing in the centre.
Dez was going through enough already and, although he was a stronger physical presence than Sully, he was more fragile emotionally. If this went the way Sully thought it might, Lowell Braddock was going to come out not only as having set Thackeray Schuster up for a fall, but possibly also as having been behind far more than that—including the death of his own brother.
But with no proof to present and nothing but suspicion to back him, now wasn’t the time for Sully
to drag Dez into this. If it turned out he was wrong about Lowell, any accusations he was about to make could serve to distance Sully from the rest of his family—including his brother.
That was an outcome he couldn’t afford to risk.
And so he headed alone to the army surplus store, hoping Terrence Waters had made his way back there.
Sully wasn’t surprised to find the man back behind the counter. Terrence, however, was plenty shocked to see him.
“What the hell you want now?”
Sully approached at the demand, closing the gap between the two of them so as to keep the conversation quiet. “Is there somewhere we can talk?”
“We can talk here.”
“We won’t be overheard?”
Terrence’s sneer screamed sarcasm as he jutted his chin toward a so-far otherwise empty store. “Does it look like that’s a problem? Damn glad I don’t own this place. Loses more to shoplifters than to sales. So I’ll ask again. What the hell you want?”
“I want to ask you about a break-in at the Black Fox four nights ago.”
“There’ve been break-ins all over Riverview this past while. Someone tried to get in here not so long ago, too, but we keep it too secure.”
“That’s not what I was getting at. And I think you know that.”
That Terrence did know was proven as he got off the stool and, casting one more dark look at Sully, waved his usable hand at him to follow. A private office was just the other side of the staff-only area, a room consisting of two desks—one stacked with papers and boasting a computer that had likely become obsolete several years ago, and the other holding a small bank of monitors showing front and rear doors, till area and a wide view of the store’s interior. Terrence closed the door to ensure privacy, then positioned himself so he could keep an eye on the screens while listening to whatever Sully wanted to discuss, his imposing bulk and beefy crossed arms forming a dare only the truly idiotic would take.
Sully was that idiot today. “You’re the one who broke into Betty Schuster’s office, weren’t you?”
“What the hell you talking about?”
“I think you know. I confronted the guy afterward in the alley, swung a bat at him. He moved around it like a pro and put me on the ground without really hurting me. That makes me think two things: the guy’s trained in hand-to-hand combat and he either didn’t want to hurt anyone or he was directed not to. Did someone pay you to do it?”
The sneer was back, less sarcastic now, more dangerous. “Those are some pretty serious accusations you’re making there, kid. I’d be careful if I were you.”
“All you have to do is deny it.”
“I’m denying it.”
Sully opted to play the trump card early. “Did Lowell Braddock pay you to break into his own bar?”
He looked for a tell, any tell, anything to indicate he’d hit the nail. He found it in a twitch of a muscle running along the left side of Terrence’s jaw, a slight jump under the skin that came alongside a too-long break between question and response.
When Terrence spoke, it was a question rather than an answer. “Why would he want to break into his own bar?”
“My dad always told me answering a question with another question means someone’s looking to buy themselves time. It can be a sign they’re trying to come up with a good story. Why’d you do it? Did he pay you or did he blackmail you? Or did he just feed you a line that Betty had evidence somewhere her son was back at some bad stuff and that she was hiding it somewhere, trying to keep Thackeray out of jail?”
“You know, you’re in a real dangerous situation, right now. No one knows you’re here, do they? Real stupid move, laying accusations like that against a man like me. I could snap your neck right now and no one would even know.”
“But you won’t. You had a chance to kill me before and you didn’t. Maybe you’ve had more than one. I think the person who broke in was looking for a thumb drive, and they didn’t find it. So they were told to return the next day and just take care of the source of the info. If they couldn’t find the drive, they could at least buy time to look if they took out the only other person who really knew what was on it. She was a threat, and there was a real risk she would reveal what she knew. You’ve killed before, probably, had to during your time in the service. You know how to put yourself into a frame of mind where you can stay calm doing it. Killing is messy and a lot of people leave evidence behind. It takes a cool head to ensure that doesn’t happen.”
Unfortunately, if Terrence possessed a cool head, he needed reminding. Sully couldn’t get the door open before the other man was on him, good hand seizing a handful of his shirt and slamming him into the wall. Sully’s back was still tender after the run-in at the park earlier; he grunted in pain as he met the wall and was held there in the solid grip.
“You ever kill a man, boy?”
Sully opened his eyes, found narrowed dark eyes piercing his. Sully had looked into the eyes of killers before, had once met a man who hadn’t just killed, but had enjoyed it. There had been both steel in that gaze and the watchfulness of a snake looking for the best moment and location to strike. And there had been enough chill there to make anyone standing close enough shiver.
Terrence was not that man. These eyes, from this closer-than-comfortable view, were surrounded by a fine web of lines that spoke more to a life of strain than laughter. There was heat rather than cold. And there was something else, something it took Sully a moment longer to put a finger on. He’d seen it before, in the wide-eyed stare of a disembodied stroke patient housed at Lockwood Psychiatric Hospital.
Terrence Waters was haunted.
“I asked you a question. You ever kill a man?”
Sully shook his head.
“Let me describe it to you. Taking a life at a distance, that’s one thing. You watch the body react to the impact of the shot. Maybe he keeps coming at you so you gotta spend another round. Maybe he drops right away. But that image stays, even if you can’t see his face. Now, you kill a man close up, that’s something else altogether. You see the moment he realizes he’s hit. Sometimes he feels the pain right away, sometimes it’s just shock at first. A head shot’s quick and clean, ends things before they begin. Then you just gotta deal with the memory of the body lying there, head opened up, eyes—if he’s still got ’em—staring up at you.
“Most times, managing a head shot’s just not possible. There’s pressure in the moment, people move. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you get him in the heart. Even then, some people can run damn near a full football field before they drop. Takes the heart a while to clue in, enough time for the guy to give you something to remember late at night when you’re trying to sleep. The visuals, that’s bad enough. Standing that close, you see it the moment the light goes out from his eyes, the moment the chest stops moving, limbs stop twitching. But it’s the sounds that can get you, the gasping, the gurgling, sometimes the screaming. You have a grown man in front of you, a tough, well-trained soldier, crying like a baby, begging not to die, that sticks with you. You take that with you, carry it so it comes out at the worst times. I can’t go to funerals, I can’t go to action movies, can’t watch the news. I hear a man crying, I go back to Afghanistan.
“I heard how that woman died at the Fox, how some bastard went in and blasted her with a shotgun. I’m not cold enough to kill a woman, and I’m not strong enough to kill anyone, not anymore. Those days are behind me. You kill out of necessity in a war zone, and you take it with you all the same. Unless you’re a fucking psychopath, your humanity's been torn out of you, or you’re in the middle of a PTSD episode, most of us will do anything to never have to feel those things again. I didn’t kill that woman. I’m not capable of it.”
With those statements, and the level of pained truth behind them, the fear left Sully. Sure, Waters might still be plenty capable of dishing out another beating, but Sully could cope with that. In fact, there were a variety of moves he could pull to get away from Terrence if he wante
d. But there was no reason, because Terrence had been telling the truth. He hadn’t killed Betty and he wasn’t about to kill Sully.
And so Sully felt less anxiety about his next statement. “But you did pull off the break-in.”
Terrence fixed him with one more heated glare before roughly releasing him. “What if I did? You just said nothing was taken. You gonna tell the cops it was me?”
Sully had been aiming in that direction, but that was when he’d suspected Terrence of pulling off both the break-in and the hit on Betty. Now he was back to square one on the shooting. “The lead investigator on the murder thinks I did it.”
Terrence didn’t bother to ask if he had. He just burst out laughing.
Sully took it as a compliment.
“Kid, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard all year. You’re about as capable of killing as I am of becoming a member of Cirque du Soleil.”
“There are at least a couple people who would celebrate an early Christmas if they could lay a murder charge on me. The problem is, if they can’t get me on it, there’s always you to fall back on. Someone killed Betty, and if it wasn’t me and it wasn’t you, then that’s got me wondering who it actually was.”
“There’ve been a lot of robberies around here. People are saying that’s what happened, robbery gone bad.”
“I was there. The guy didn’t say anything. Just came in, masked and armed, and fired almost as soon as Betty came into frame.”
“Wasn’t an accidental discharge? Some of the crappy guns around here have hair triggers. Feather landing on them would set them off.”
Sully was forced to concede at least part of that point. “He and I were struggling for the gun—or, at least, I was struggling. He felt pretty strong to me.”
“So maybe the gun only went off because of that.”
Which was exactly what Sully was dreading. “Maybe.”
Sully’s gaze had dropped to the floor, but he looked up at the sound of Terrance’s voice. The man had his arms crossed, head tilted. “That’s why you’re so bent on figuring this out, huh? You think it might be your fault.”