by David Daniel
“He’s got what you couldn’t find,” Loftis told him. “I want you to get it.”
He put his automatic into the double shoulder rig and stepped closer. He probably knew who I was. At least, he’d known enough to send gunfire through my kitchen window, no doubt at Loftis’s suggestion. He kicked hard at the sole of my foot, and I saw his work boot and realized that the bloody print I’d seen in the judge’s house most likely had been left by Sok, sent there to snip loose ends when Carly Ouellette had chickened and run.
Without warning, Sok pointed the Taser at me, worked the safety slide, and shot me.
I convulsed as the charge hit my chest. I fell back, limp. It was a nonlethal hit, the charge generated by a nine-volt battery, but it had the effect of knocking the body’s electro-muscular system out of pulse—weakening an opponent enough to allow the shooter to apprehend even the most unruly combatant.
Loftis didn’t seem to approve or disapprove. “Where is it?” she demanded.
I tried to get up, but I could barely move. I wasn’t sure that I could even speak.
Sok tossed the Taser aside and with a fancy cross-armed move straight from DiNiro, drew his pair of SIGs. I had no doubt that he would shoot me where I lay. This is it, I thought. This is how I’m going to die. And I knew how it would play: “Blood Feud in the Mill Yard”—both Duross and me found dead. Loftis was likely thinking along the same lines, making strategy.
“No,” she said. “Get Duross’s nine.”
I swallowed hard at the sick dread in my core and forced my gaze past Sok to Loftis. “You want the evidence I’ve got,” I rasped. “Where’s Nicole?”
“Close by. Your turn.”
I propped myself onto an elbow. The effects of the shock were fading. “I’ve got Travani’s files in my car.”
Just then someone shouted, “Police!” It was followed by a boom.
The three of us looked toward the tunnel and there was Stinson, fifty feet away. He had his .44 pointed in the air, the barrel as long as his forearm. I didn’t waste time noting anything else. Summoning strength I wasn’t sure I had, I drew one leg up and kicked out hard, crashing the sole of my foot against Sok’s shin with force enough to shatter the bone. He yelped a high, screeching cry and staggered back. But he didn’t drop his SIGs. He pointed one at my head.
His chest broke apart like a watermelon kicked by a Clydesdale, the insides vaporizing in a pale red penumbra. The concussion from Stinson’s .44 reached me an instant before Sok’s corpse hit the ground.
Loftis didn’t even turn. She bolted.
I rolled to my feet, not easy to do on a bad knee. I picked up the Taser, which lay beside Sok’s body. I wasn’t even sure it could be reused. But I didn’t want Loftis dead. Waving Stinson off, I went after her.
She was a runner, and I felt dead-legged, but I gimped along after her. Although the courtyard was the size of the Roman Coliseum, there really wasn’t anyplace she could get to that I couldn’t reach, too, in my own time. She turned to look back, still running, and stumbled on some debris, but she didn’t go down. I saw again how fit she was, how strong. Even after all the destruction and violent death, there was something strangely alluring about her. That didn’t blind me to her danger.
She was running toward the far end of the courtyard, and it occurred to me that if she could reach the far wall of the Lawrence mill, she might get through a spillway gate, or scale a low fence, and be gone. I pushed myself harder—but so did she. I was too far away to use the Taser, which might work at twenty feet, though six or eight would be better.
All at once, she appeared to try to stop, skidding slightly in the weeds—and I realized that she had suddenly come upon the canal. Too late to stop, she changed her mind. She surged ahead, stepped on the granite sill of the canal, like a long jumper hitting the board, and launched herself into the air.
It wasn’t too wide—twenty feet or a little more—but she wasn’t Marion Jones. She would fall. She put her hands out, to try to break the impact or catch hold some way, but she was moving fast. She slammed into the granite wall on the other side with a sickening thud that I heard from ten paces away, a long whip of blood and broken teeth lashing away from her mouth and nose. But she hung on, clinging to the wall. I got there, totally winded.
“Where’s Nicole?” I called.
She half turned, and the sight was ghastly. She appeared to be wearing a red mask. Her entire face was slick with blood, and one of her eyes had come out of the socket. Bits of shattered teeth flecked her chin.
“Hold on!” I cried, hoarse with panic. I looked around for some way to reach her. Or for something to extend for her to grab on to. Unlike many of the canals that crisscrossed the city, which were stagnant, this was flowing fast, rushing the final fifty or so yards to the Merrimack.
Her grip failed, or she simply let go. She dropped ten feet and hit the water with a clumsy splash. She disappeared for a moment, then reappeared. She may have been conscious, ready to struggle, but the current took her. She banged limply through the heavy, corroded timbers of the locks and was swept headfirst down a stone spillway, gathering speed as the water tore her toward the river. I lost sight of her.
Stinson’s shout drew me back.
“This one’s alive!”
He was crouched beside Duross. I limped back. “I’m calling for help,” he said. He got the walkie-talkie from Duross’s belt. I opened my mouth to instruct him, then shut up. Stinson had been a cop a lot more recently than I had. He activated the unit and said the right things—an officer down, a man dead, gave the locations …
“Tell them about Loftis, too,” I said.
He did. He never offered his own name, or mine. When he’d finished, we stayed beside Duross awhile. He was unconscious and bleeding, but breathing. He’d been smart enough to wear his vest. In the weeds nearby, Vanthan Sok was already drawing flies. Stinson had made an amazing shot, and it had saved my life.
“Have you got paper for the howitzer?” I asked him.
“Kind of not. I think I’d better get myself gone.”
We rose, both of us still adrenalized. “It’d be a good idea. Take my car. I’ll catch a ride with someone.”
He looked at me and tugged his black windbreaker down and pushed a hand through his hair, as if getting ready to meet his public. “Later, then.” He started off.
“Stinson,” I called. He turned. “Thanks.”
He tipped a finger to his head, in an old cowboy salute, I guess, and headed for the tunnel, walking fast. In another minute, in the distance came the whining of sirens. I looked around, a sudden hollow feeling overcoming the pain I’d begun to feel, and I remembered that I didn’t know what had happened to Nicole. Then a glint of light from the roof of one of the mill buildings gave me an idea.
Randy Nguyen was waiting as I opened the freight elevator and stepped into his world. “Holy smokes!” he exclaimed, waving excitedly at his bank of monitors. “What was that?”
It answered my first question, unasked. The old hosiery mill was one of the properties his company did security for. “You said these keep a taped record.”
“Yeah, three days.”
“The woman officer—”
“Jill Loftis. I checked her out in the PD files. There’s a story there.”
I cut him off. “I believe she brought someone with her.”
“Yeah, the hoodie with the shiny bang-bangs.”
“Earlier, back around three this morning.” My God, that was how many hours ago?
He instructed the system with voice commands. “It won’t take long,” he told me.
Fifteen minutes later we hacked a padlock off an old storage shed at the north end of the mill yard. Nicole squinted into the light and saw me and started grinning like a bridesmaid who’s just caught the bouquet. “I knew you’d find me,” she said, plunging into my arms, the feather weight of her nearly buckling my left leg. “I just knew it.”
49
I encountered Gus D
eemys coming out of police headquarters as I was limping up the steps. The surgeon had promised the limp would be temporary, the result of arthroscopy to remove torn cartilage from my knee. The DA looked like he’d had a lot more taken out of him. His linen suit was wrinkled, his tie loose, and he had none of the cocky attitude that he liked to project. I had a brief temptation to needle him, the way he always did others, but you didn’t prevail over your opponents by becoming them. Deemys couldn’t let it be, though. He moved to block my path, keeping the upper step, so that in theory he’d be glaring down at me, but the extra inches it gained him only brought our eyes even. His were red with fury and fatigue. “Hear me, Rasmussen—if there’s any way I can do it, I’m going to carve you in strips. I’m going to subpoena your records on this case. As of ten minutes ago I’ve requested a gag order be put on you. You can forget about grabbing headlines. You can’t even talk on the record about this or you’ll face charges. That’s just for starters. I’m going to clamp you down hard.”
“Okay if I scratch my ass once in a while?”
He scowled. “You really bitched things up. I hope you know that.”
“An innocent man cleared? How do you figure?”
“The Pepper thing I can live with. But Loftis falling down? That’s going to make one holy mess. The county is going to have to reexamine every collar she was part of, and reopen cases where Travani presided. You can bet your ass they’ll all be appealed, and some of the guilty will walk.”
“And you’re here to add insight to injury.”
His jaw lumped. “I’m holding you personally responsible.”
I didn’t point out that that was the system he had sworn to uphold. That Jill Loftis had, too. I clapped his shoulder. “Maybe it’ll all turn out like tropical storm Gus in the end—just a lot of wind.”
Ed St. Onge was in his office, copying words out of a book. An English-to-Khmer dictionary. I could see the curlicue scratches on the yellow pad. “That’s ambitious,” I said, “though I read that in California they’ve got these little handheld units that can read people Miranda in about forty languages.”
“Yeah, they also elect old movie stars to public office.” He set his pen aside. “I figure it can’t hurt to try to meet some of these gang kids halfway Though you didn’t have that option with Vanthan Sok. Nobody would have.”
I sat down.
“The weapon fired through your kitchen window was the same one used on Travani and the Ouellette woman. It was one of the SIGs recovered at the mill yard.”
I gave it a sober nod. He did, too. One sure sign that summer was over was when he put away the heavy woolens for something breezy and light. I’d seen him wear seersucker in January. Today he had on a blazer in pale blue polyester—“powder blue” they would’ve called it in the decade it had been made—with brass coin buttons and darker blue piping on the lapels. Give him a glockenspiel and he’d have fit in at halftime over at Alumni Field. I didn’t say boo. He seemed somber. “I’m surprised you’d want to see the inside of this place again,” he said.
“It’s not the place, it’s the people.” I told him about my encounter with the DA.
“He’ll get over it. Even Deemys wouldn’t find much joy in sending up an innocent man. Say what you want about the guy, once he cools down he’ll work it hard and fair. He’s here looking into whether any other officers were involved. So far it checks out as just the one.” He grunted. “Sounds strange to say, but in a lot of ways, she was a damn good cop. Hardworking, smart. Tough.”
“Just ask my knee.”
“She had a way with the kids out running with the wolves, knew how to talk to them. They respected her. Which is most likely how she crossed paths with Sok. I figure he served her because she asked him to, and he’d have been glad to, wanting to stay on her good side. She kept him out of prison. Maybe he had the hots for her, too. My hunch about Travani is he once tried to proposition her, and she’d have told him not in this life, put him in his place. Which could’ve made her job hell anytime she appeared in his session, but they came to see advantages in being allies. When she went before his court, her collars stuck.”
“And the judge got women for his private chamber, eager to atone for sins.”
“Between Loftis and Carly Ouellette pimping, he was well supplied. We may never know the full story.” He scratched at his mustache, which seemed to have grown grayer than I remembered. “There’s still a matter of ballistics on some of the gunshots in the mill yard, but I imagine that’ll get sorted out in due course. Your piece, at least, wasn’t one of them.” He opened his desk drawer and took out my .38. “Here.”
I snapped the holster onto my belt.
“More perplexing, though,” he went on, “is that nine-one-one call. It came from the judge’s house, on his phone, but we haven’t been able to identify the caller.” Looking at me. “Maybe some civic-minded individual who was just passing by.” I kept quiet. “Well. Not that big a deal, I guess.” He gave it a wave of dismissal, wincing slightly as he moved his arm. “Damned arthritis.” He took a pill, swallowing it with water. “I’ll be off them soon. They don’t want to keep you on those for too long or you end up with a face the size of a medicine ball.” He capped the plastic vial and put it back in his desk drawer. I was ready to leave when he said, “You know how you sometimes wonder if things might’ve gone differently?” He’d been chewing on something since I came in, working it with his mind. I waited. “Like if maybe no one had talked O.J. out of shooting himself when he sat holed up in the Bronco after the chase. Saved everyone all that hassle.”
“You’re globalizing. Give the focus knob a twist.”
“That kid died. The one who tried to quit the gang.”
I hadn’t heard it. “I’m sorry.”
“Last night.” He spread his hands. “What if he’d been able to come in here and tell us what he had in mind and maybe we’d been able to get him out of town till things cooled? Or if there was some way to meet with the rival gangs … a big conference room, coffee … talk things over before they … Ah, I’m just thinking. About Travani, too. What are we to make of him, spanking the bad girls who came before his bench? A judge, for God’s sake.”
He’d had a reputation as a man of probity, a sound and fair-minded jurist, yet he had elected to throw it down the toilet. He had abused my good will. Worse, he had abused his power. Worst, he had been willing to send two women to their graves and an innocent man to prison because, apparently, he never managed to bring to trial the adversary inside his own mind. Yet I could not get all the way past the thought that he’d been the boy in the old photographs I’d seen in his house, or that I had been there as he drew his final breaths this side of the void. Of course, I couldn’t say that. Besides, what St. Onge was really asking was, what if the judge had realized he was messed up and had turned himself in before it went so far? I chose to put the question into the realm of metaphysics, and I left it there. No good could come of my wondering how things might’ve played out differently. I was happy to be right here, right now, because I almost hadn’t been. “Dogs whose lives are lived on a short leash sometimes slip the collar and kick their heels up extra high,” I said.
“I guess.”
“How’s Duross?”
“Still at All Saints, but not for much longer. He’ll be out soon. He was wearing his vest, which probably saved him. Anyway,” he said after a pause, “the city is safe for carnivals again. Maybe they’ll give you free rides all day.”
I glanced at my watch. “They’re pulling out this afternoon.” I rose.
“While I think of it …” From the floor underneath his desk he pulled out a cylindrical box, gift-wrapped in gold paper and topped with a shiny red ribbon. “Housewarming gift,” he said. “Belated.”
I judged it to be a fifth of something tasty. “Good for a cold night, when the frost is on the pumpkin?”
“Something to cheer you through the long winter.”
“Much obliged. There’
re probably enough drinks in it for two.”
“Don’t be hasty.”
“You won’t be taking those steroids forever.”
He grinned and shook his head.
I drove out the parkway under a cloudless afternoon sky. The trees lining the riverbanks and distant hills blazed with furnace light. I had the window open, and the air carried a faint scent of burning leaves. It was illegal to burn them anymore, but somewhere leaves were burning anyway, and it was a magical smell that wanted to bring me back to childhood and happy times. On the calm water above the Pawtucket Falls dam, one of the National Park Service’s tour boats was bumping slowly upriver, a fan of wake unfolding behind it. A ranger stood in the stern, declaiming through a bullhorn to a thinned crew of visitors, probably talking about how for centuries the spot had been a meeting place for the Indians, and how later the falls were the force behind the city’s mills. It wouldn’t be too long before the season would end and the boats would be hauled out and stored, the itchy woolen uniforms packed in mothballs, and a couple months from now, ice would begin to turn the river to clabber and there would be no smells at all in the air, only snow. But for now, golden autumn held sway.
Most of the carnival had pulled out already, the trailers and vans gone, leaving the big mowed meadow to a line of Portojohns awaiting pumping, and the duffers who’d be back soon, driving golf balls. Pop Sonders’s motor home was still parked off to one side, though it was facing the boulevard now. Several bare-chested jacks were lashing the last of the amusement rides on a flatbed. Moses Maxwell was standing by a dusty blue Econoline van, his porkpie hat tilted back, his face tipped toward the sun.
“Howdy, Mr. Maxwell,” I said.