Vapor Trail

by Chuck Logan

  She?

  Was Gloria out there ahead of him running on those strong legs, with a gun in her hand?

  He vaulted a low rail fence and heard a dog start to bark in a yard up ahead. Then he heard the animal go frantic, banging its body against kennel mesh. Broker sprinted through some thick shrubs toward the sound. He came out in a broad yard and . . .

  The shadow darted, low from behind a tall lilac hedge.

  “Halt, halt, halt.” Broker yelled as he ran, bringing up the .45. He let go of the reins and let his senses drive, all kinetics now, all reflex . . .

  The shadow ducked low, twisted, and was illuminated by the twinkle-crack of a muzzle flash. Broker felt a tiny bee buzz past his head.

  Shit. She was firing at him. Still moving, he bent forward from the waist to make a smaller target, gripped the pistol in both hands, extended his arms, aimed low at her legs and pulled the trigger.

  It was like squeezing a steel rock.

  He’d forgotten to reload when they left the casino. Now he was running straight at a shooter who was taking her time to squeeze, not jerk, the trigger.

  Like Harry had probably taught her.

  Crack-buzz-crack-buzz-crack-buzz. More bees. A window shattered in the house behind him.

  Broker dived, rolled sideways, and scrambled on all fours through a kid’s plastic play set and crawled into the nearest cover, a patch of staked tomato plants. He lay absolutely still for a whole minute, during which he distinctly remembered leaving his eight .45 rounds in Mouse’s car when they agreed to unload their guns before confronting Harry. Slowly, he caught his breath facedown in the rich black dirt, the mulch, and the thick chlorophyll fragrance of the tomato plants. He listened. But now all he heard was the onrushing cars, coming to the sound of the shots.

  She was long gone.

  Broker had other things to worry about. All the car doors slamming, the radios crackling—all the young coppers out there who’d never heard a shot fired in anger, their sweaty, overeager hands gripping their guns.

  “Don’t shoot,” he yelled. “Over here, a friendly.”

  “Who’s there? Come out with your fuckin’ hands up,” a hypertense young voice yelled back.

  “Broker.”

  “Broke who?”

  “Broker, you know,” a different voice yelled. “Cool it. He’s buddies with the fuckin’ sheriff.”

  “Oh,” the first voice said.

  “All right everybody, stand down, holster the pieces. We clear? Okay? Come out, come out wherever you are, Sheriff Friend Broker.” It was Mouse, breathing hard, but his voice unmistakable, coming in through the garage, then out onto the deck.

  Slowly, Broker rose to his feet, knocking dirt from his chest as Mouse approached, flanked by two Stillwater cops.

  “Were those shots you?” Mouse said.

  “At me. I ran into her when she came through here. She took four shots—they went high—then she changed direction and headed for the ravine,” Broker said.

  Mouse told the two cops to fan out in an area search centered on the ravine. He turned back to Broker and said, “Did you get a look at her? Was it Gloria?”

  “Too dark. Just a shape,” Broker said. He shook his head, looked into the darkness, and thought, Goddamn Harry. If he didn’t get you one way, he’d get you another.

  She had bolted when she heard someone crash through the hedge behind her; then the loud voice had ordered her to stop. She half turned and picked out his moving broken shadow against the shrubs, saw the shadow’s arms come up, extended. Trying to get off the first shot, she planted her feet, swung the Ruger up in the classic Weaver stance, and pulled the trigger.

  He went down. Out of sight. She turned and ran.

  Sprinting now, across the lawn, she hurdled over the edge of the ravine and slid through the bushes, past the chain-sawed trunk of a large cottonwood that had fallen.

  The cottonwood’s upper branches were still intact, the foliage wilted and dead. But it tangled up the bottom of the ravine with irregular lines that broke up her shape. Under the tree’s cover, she hunted for the sewer grate.

  Her hands found the slanted steel bars among the branches. She slipped off the pack, pushed it through the grate, and squeezed through herself.

  Inside, underground, dank, with sand and debris left by the last bad storm weeks ago, before the hot spell. All black where she was. No flashlight. Basically, it was a big concrete pipe that ended in a catch pond at Second Street. Every one hundred yards there was a steel ladder leading up to a manhole opening.

  She could hear them ganging up out there. Think. They’d block the other end, seal her in.

  She wiggled back out of the grate, took off the pack, and used one of the latex gloves to remove the makeshift silencer. She tossed it in through the grate.

  Then, very carefully, stepping on rocks where possible, she backed away from the sewer entrance and slowly crawled up the far slope through the thick brush. Behind her she heard the cops moving down into the ravine from the street.

  Very slowly, she emerged from the ravine and slipped across a dark dead-end street and went through another yard. The controlled panic of being hunted gave way to a warm sweat of elation. As she started down the bluff toward Main Street, she took in deep breaths of the sweet hot air.

  It was time to call it quits. Maybe after she was gone, someone else would take up the cause.

  Not her. She was done.

  But if she was finished, she intended to have some control over the way her life ended. She wasn’t going to be snared like a rat in a . . . sewer.

  She had thought about this in great detail. And now she knew exactly what she had to do.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Men and women in uniforms, barefoot civilians in shorts, men without shirts, kids—they all came out from the dark houses to see the cops cordon off the entire North Hill around the ravine.

  They got somebody trapped in the sewer.

  They hoped. Broker leaned forward, forearms planted on a steel rail running along the limestone wall that overlooked the ravine. Not far away, Lymon sagged against a car. There was never a good time for a situation to totally unravel, but the heat definitely made it worse. The adrenaline jag of the chase had blown back on them, and now a knot of cops sulked around the woman Lymon had pursued through the woods. Freed from her handcuffs, she stood with her arms crossed, listening to an officer who took great pains to explain the murder, the description of the suspect . . .

  “We’re really sorry about the mix-up,” the patient cop said.

  “I know my rights. I want everybody’s badge numbers,” she said.

  Another group of cops was talking to a teenage boy with a skateboard under his arm. Benish was with that group, scribbling notes in a pad in the bad light.

  Down the wall from Broker, flashlights played over an old limestone sewer spillway. The newer underground storm sewer intake was located about thirty feet farther down into the ravine. Cops had strung crime scene tape and were searching the area around the sandy apron in front of the intake grille. The branches of a fallen cottonwood obscured the grille and made it hard to see.

  The shouts went back and forth.

  “There’s this clay-type dirt. We got a fresh cleat pattern from a running shoe. She crawled in here.”

  Another cop gingerly fished a green pop bottle out from inside the sewer intake and held it with a pen stuck through the neck. “What do you make of this? It’s got punctures and duct tape . . .”

  And: “She definitely slipped into this sewer intake. We got people blocking the other end.”

  Mouse—arm up, neck scrunched to the side in cell-phone silhouette—walked up to Broker. “Somebody has to go in there,” Broker said.

  “Yeah, somebody young. And that ain’t you or me,” Mouse said. He gestured with the phone. “We got it sealed. SWAT’s on the way. We’ll watch this end, and the manholes on top. They’ll go in on Second and push through. If she’s in there, we got her.�
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  The cops fanned out along the length of the ravine and waited for the SWAT team. Broker sat down and adopted a wait-and-see attitude; he did not directly think of Gloria hunkered down under the ground gripping a pistol. And he didn’t revisit the experience of being shot at point-blank in the dark less than half an hour ago.

  He was past the adrenaline spike of the chase, coming down. He fingered the deputy’s badge in his pocket. He tried to stay in the moment. And at the moment he smelled like tomato plants and fresh dirt.

  Then the tension cranked up again when the SWAT members went into the sewer. The radios cracked, and everybody leaned forward, waiting . . . and . . .

  “Get ready, something’s coming. Ready, ready . . .”

  Hisses and chittery growls came from the sewer, and then three raccoons scrambled between the bars of the grille and raced through the blocking force.

  One of the SWAT guys popped his head out of the intake and said, “She ain’t here.”

  The gathered cops dispersed in a wider search pattern. Broker accompanied Mouse, who went over to Benish and told him to locate Gloria Russell and find out where she was tonight.

  “Where’s she live?” Benish said.

  “How the fuck do I know?” Mouse said. “You’re a cop, find her. Take Lymon. Hey Lymon, c’mere.”

  Lymon walked over to them, then stopped, plucked his Palm Pilot from his pocket, and hunched over to read something off the tiny screen. His face tightened; then he reached out and grabbed Benish’s arm so hard Benish said, “Ow.”

  Broker and Mouse joined closer with Lymon and Benish. Lymon thrust the small screen up for them to read: LYMON, I’M SO SORRY. GLORIA.

  “Go, go!” Mouse shouted, pounding Lymon on the shoulder. He grabbed Broker, held him back. “John just arrived at the victim’s house on Beech. I ran it down about Harry and Gloria. He wants to talk to both of us.”

  One of Sheriff John Eisenhower’s favorite maxims was that nothing good happens at the end of a car chase. He arrived at the address on Beech Street to find cops, paramedics, and some citizens already openly discussing the Saint.

  Broker and Mouse parked down the block and walked toward the lights.

  The medical examiner was there and the Stillwater mayor with his police chief. The state crime lab van from BCA had backed up to Carol Lennon’s gated yard, an area that was now as brightly lit and tightly secured as a space shuttle launch.

  The crowd of citizens swelled, some of then grinning the kind of rubbernecking smiles that reminded Broker of old photographs of gawkers at a lynching. At least one Saints baseball jacket was being worn in the impossible heat.

  It was starting.

  Sally Erbeck moved swiftly toward the sheriff. As she passed Broker she gave him a quick wink. It was truly amazing to see the way the lines of her face streamlined forward; it was a fresh kill, and she was on the scene. Broker wondered if she had a police scanner surgically implanted in her ear.

  John Eisenhower held up a hand to halt Sally, signaling with his fingers that he’d talk to her in five minutes. He detached from a knot of coppers and walked over to Broker and Mouse.

  “Mouse told me,” John said. “What a mess. You had to go round and round with Harry. And she took a shot at you—could you ID her?”

  Broker shook his head. “Too dark.” He took the deputy’s badge and ID card from his pocket and handed them to John.

  “Not now, Broker,” John said. He pushed the badge and card away and then warmly squeezed Broker’s arm. He turned to Mouse. “This here”—he indicated the crime scene—“is BCA’s now. But we have to find and question Gloria. She’s ours.”

  “Benish and Lymon are looking for her right now. We’re gonna need a warrant, the whole schmeer,” Mouse said.

  Art Katzer, the lean head of Investigations, had also returned. He pushed through the crowd with a cell phone glued to his ear. He said, “Somebody from the governor’s staff just called; he’s thinking of coming out here if it’s the Saint.”

  “Great,” John said.

  Broker felt deformed. He was the only nonuniformed person in a ten-yard radius who didn’t have a cell phone growing from his ear. Now Mouse was on his again. Broker watched Mouse’s lined face tighten. At the same time, he heard a spike of radio static ripple through the crowd. The uniforms started melting away toward their cars.

  Mouse had this look on his face, as if thinking: Why am I always the guy who has to tell the kids their parent is dead?

  “They found her,” he said.

  John and Katzer lowered their cell phones. “You mean they’re questioning her,” John said.

  “No, they found her,” Mouse repeated. Then he raised his right hand, extended his index finger, curled his other three fingers, made his thumb into a hammer, pointed the finger at his head, and let the thumb fall forward.

  “She ate the gun.”

  The address was on the South Hill, an imposing two-story redbrick school building constructed during the New Deal. It had been remodeled into condominiums. Benish sat on the steps of the entryway with a baleful guard-dog look in his eyes. Elbow planted on his knees, he was methodically pulling on a rubber band he wore around his wrist.

  Broker had ridden over with Mouse. They parked in front. As they walked up the sidewalk, Mouse paused and stared at the letters chiseled in stone over the door. The tiny glow of recognition flared in his eyes, then faded back to sorrow. “I went to elementary school here,” he said in a quiet voice.

  Benish snapped his rubber band, exhaled, got up, and said, “Second floor, top of the stairs on the right.” He raised his chin at the cop cars converging on the street.

  Broker watched some neighbors stand frozen in the red slap of the flashers. The sudden police presence transformed them into shell-shocked refugees in their own yards.

  “There’s a deputy in the lobby with the tenants. I’ll try to keep the crowd down, but it’s going to be a zoo in about three minutes,” Benish said.

  Broker and Mouse entered the building, nodded to the copper who was questioning a small crowd of people gathered in the lobby. Then they climbed the stairs, broad slate with heavy oak blond banisters and black wrought-iron filigree. At the top of the stairs, on the right, the door to number six was open. The doorway was very tall, splendid with old wood, with a wide glass transom window on a chain.

  Mouse ran his hand down the varnished wood of the doorway and said simply, “I learned to read in this room.”

  Lymon met them. Broker noticed that his eyes were hard and steady, as if he’d aged ten years in the last two hours. “In here,” Lymon said.

  As they stepped through the door, Lymon said, “She’s in the bathroom. But we gotta be careful; there’s feathers all over the place.” They edged past a small kitchen and down a hallway.

  Lymon raised his hand. They stopped. He pointed at the claycaked soles on a pair of running shoes that lay casually strewn, one on its side, on the hallway oak flooring.

  The gunshot-ripped pillow lay on the bathroom tile floor. As if in a miniature snowstorm, the sink and tub were carpeted with the white lint.

  “I guess she used the pillow to muffle the shot,” Lymon said, then stepped aside so they could see. Moving cautiously, they eased in the bathroom door.

  A pair of dirty gray running shorts, a sports top, and a pair of grimy socks lay on the floor. A wafer of dark plastic lay next to them. The Palm Pilot.

  Like someone who didn’t want to make a mess, Gloria Russell lay toppled into the bathtub. And, like Carol Lennon, she was naked. Unlike Carol’s face, hers was turned away. A scum of dirt and tiny bits of leaves formed a swirl of sediment in the bottom of the tub. As if she’d showered first. The tiny feathers had drifted down and settled on the bare soles of her feet. There were abrasions on the left knee consistent with scraping through thick brush.

  There was very little blood, just the single entry wound above her right eyebrow. Her right index finger was still tangled in the trigger guard of
the gun she’d used, a Ruger .22 automatic that lay under her twisted arm.

  Lymon pointed to the gun. “Look at the barrel housing, on the end.”

  They looked and saw a gummy residue and tiny pieces of frayed duct tape.

  “The exhaust fan was on, and the door was closed when I got here. I turned off the fan with a pen; it was blowing the feathers around. Maybe the fan helped suppress the sound of the shot, like the pillow. The neighbors didn’t hear,” Lymon said. They carefully backed out of the room. “The closet,” he said.

  He led Broker and Mouse back to the entryway hall and pointed to the askew folding closet door. A canvas gym bag sat inside. Using a pen, Lymon lifted the flap on the bag. Inside there were several crumpled pieces of paper, one of them with blood on it. Broker knelt and tried to make it out; a computer printout of a kid, dancing maybe. Beneath the paper Broker saw a wig, a portion of a Saints logo peeking from the folded material of a jacket.

  “What’s that other stuff?” Mouse said.

  “Some kind of padding, I don’t know. I didn’t want to dig around,” Lymon said. “And there’s this.” He poked a pencil flashlight into the pack.

  Broker craned his neck and saw a plastic baggie in the bottom of the bag, a glint of tiny chain links and silver.

  “But no thirty-eight,” Mouse said. “We’ll have to tear this place apart looking for it.”

  Broker had had enough; he stood up. “I don’t see any reason for me to stick around here,” he said, moving toward the door.

  Lymon followed him into the outside hall and said, “Remember when you asked me about the night Moros was killed, where she was?”

  “Yeah,” Broker said.

  “I saw her in the gym. But I split, and she stayed. So she was alone. There would have been plenty of time,” Lymon said.

  Mouse joined them, and they looked down the stairs at the lobby filling up with the sheriff, the mayor, the police chief, the state guys, and a dozen blue and tan uniforms.

  “That whole game Harry ran on folks, drawing the Saint rumors to himself—he was trying to protect her,” Lymon said.

  “Yeah. Ah, Christ, now somebody has to tell him in the hospital,” Mouse said.