At Their Own Game

by Frank Zafiro

  Matt tried to clear his throat again but didn’t have much more luck. He swallowed with some struggle. His lips made a clacking sound. “The detective said the guy had one of those aneurism things and he died. He said that I was going to be charged with murder and get life in prison. But he promised me that if I cooperated, he’d work a deal where it was just manslaughter.”

  “You stupid son of a bitch,” I muttered.

  “Please, Boss,” he croaked up at me. Tears rose in his eyes and streaked down his dirty cheeks. “I didn’t have a choice. He had me trapped.”

  “You should have come to me,” I said.

  “There was no time,” he said. “He hit me with it and then made me decide right there.”

  “You should have told me. You know I could have fixed it.”

  “Not this,” he said. “There was no way.” He hung his head and let out a sob. “Jesus. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  I lowered the gun and stared at him. He looked like a little kid who’d been playing trucks in the dirt all day and was late coming home.

  I wanted to tell him that there was no aneurism. No dead victim. I was sure of it. Whatever paperwork Falkner showed him was manufactured bullshit. He’d been conned. But what did it matter? The damage was the same either way.

  “What did you give him?” I finally asked.

  Matt looked up hopefully. He wiped away his tears. “Nothing! I didn’t give him shit.”

  I raised the gun again.

  “Okay, okay!” Matt said, holding up his hands and turning away. “I told him little things, okay? But nothing big. And some of it was bullshit. I just jerked him along, you know?”

  “No, I don’t know. Tell me.”

  Matt met my gaze. “I fed him crap, Boss. I made shit up. I told him what he wanted to hear.”

  “Does he know about the storage facilities?”

  Matt’s face fell. “Y-yes. But just the empty ones. I didn’t tell him about the ones in Airway Heights or the ones off Argonne. I just told him about the empty ones.” Tears sprang anew in his eyes. “I had to give him something he could believe, you know? Something he could prove, so he didn’t realize all the rest was lies.”

  Christ. How much did he inadvertently give away in the process?

  “What else?” I demanded.

  “Nothing more. I swear.”

  “And what was your deal with him?”

  “Information,” Matt said. “That’s it.”

  “Testimony?”

  He squirmed. “Well, yeah. That, too.”

  “And for that, for ratting out your partners and agreeing to testify against them, what did you get? Huh, you stupid fuck? I’ll tell you. You got a nonexistent murder charge bumped down to a nonexistent manslaughter charge. Nicely done, dumb ass.”

  Confusion crept into Matt’s eyes, something I was getting more and more used to seeing there. “No. No way. The guy died. He showed me pictures.”

  “Christ,” I muttered. “You really are stupid.

  “No,” Matt said. “No, it’s true. I had no choice.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his grip tighten on the shaft of the shovel, his knuckles whitening.

  “Everything’s a choice, Matt.”

  The shovel twitched slightly. “Boss, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I –”

  “Me, too,” I grunted, and squeezed the trigger.

  The first round slammed into his chin. His knees buckled. He dropped the shovel as his hands flew to his face. Surprise and pain replaced the confusion in his eyes.

  I fired three more times in rapid succession. All three shots ripped into his skull. His body swayed, listed, and collapsed in the soft earth. Blood gushed out onto the dark earth, turning it black.

  I stared down at his body, watching while his foot twitched a few times and then became still. Then I slid the gun back into my waistband. The heat of the barrel radiated through my clothing. Carefully, I searched the ground nearby and recovered all four ejected shell casings. I put them in my pocket.

  Covering the hole went quicker than digging it. The first ten or fifteen shovelfuls landed on his clothing and skin, making an unnatural sound. After that, though, it was just dirt on more dirt, and I liked the sound of that just fine.

  When I’d filled it to the top, I stamped on the loose dirt, tamping it down. Then I used a branch full of leaves to wipe away the tread marks from my boots. I threw some more dirt on top, evened out the areas as best I could, and gave it another wipe with the branch. Then I spent a few minutes tossing debris over the top of the grave.

  When I’d finished, I stood and looked at my handiwork. To anyone but a hunter or a woodsman who was looking for it, the grave would be undetectable. And it was deep enough to keep animals from digging it up. Sure, if the cops knew the area to look in, they might find it, or use thermal imaging to detect the decomposing body. But there was no reason to believe they’d be looking for Matt, for a while at least, and no reason they’d be looking for him here.

  I thought about saying a few words over his buried body. But he was a fucking Judas, and as far as I was concerned, he got exactly what he deserved, and nothing more.

  TWENTY-SIX

  After I threw the empty shell casings down a storm drain, I stopped by my house to pick up my cell phone. I wasn’t entirely sure if what I told Matt about the cops using GPS was true or not, but I had been serious about not wanting to risk it.

  An oversized manila envelope was taped to my front door. I thought for a moment it might have something to do with the earlier search warrant, but the return address was for a Seattle area law firm.

  I took the envelope inside and tore it open. The cover letter was printed on expensive stock. I scanned the lawyer speak, reading quickly, then stopped and began to laugh.

  Peter Trammell was suing me.

  “Perfect,” I muttered, and tossed the packet onto the counter. “Just perfect.

  My laughter tapered off. The house was silent. I stood in my kitchen, my ears straining for any sign of someone else being there. I don’t know what I expected. Maybe Helen leaving her hotel early to come here. Or Brent, wondering what was going on with things. Even more likely at this point, Kyle Falkner, looking for revenge.

  But it was just me. The regular creaks and ticks that the house made were present, nothing more.

  I sat down at my computer and realized the tower was missing. Falkner had seized it along with my gun, jewelry, and anything else he could stretch into saying it was part of a criminal enterprise. I went to the closet in the spare room and hunted for my old laptop. I found it inside the soft carrying case.

  So much for detectives being great searchers.

  I brought the laptop out into the living room and fired it up. Then I opened the browser and went to the local newspaper’s website. In my experience, a police officer being arrested would be front page news, joyously reported by the paper.

  But there was nothing.

  I scratched my chin, thinking. The state patrol was about as straight-laced of a law enforcement agency I’d ever encountered. I’d fully expected them to make a news release accompanying Falkner’s arrest. But that obviously hadn’t occurred.

  Did they even arrest him?

  They had to. Falkner might have been able to feed them some bullshit about being in foot pursuit of me over some contrived offense. He could have even claimed I’d had a gun and must have dumped it during the pursuit. I’m sure they’d really want to believe him, too. But there was no way the state patrol could have ignored the audio evidence that I gave them with their own equipment.

  But did that mean they actually had to arrest him?

  I sighed.

  Probably n
ot.

  Hell, my own case was evidence enough that you didn’t have to arrest or charge someone right away. But that was six years ago and I hadn’t thrown shots at someone for personal reasons.

  Even so, Falkner was still a cop. He’d get the benefit of the doubt for as long as possible. And who was I? At best, a disgraced ex-cop under the shadow of suspicion. At worst, I was everything Falkner claimed was true about me.

  The state patrol would do the right thing. But they’d take their sweet time in making sure it was the right thing. And if the right thing meant jamming up Detective Kyle Falkner, they’d delay that undesirable decision until the last possible moment.

  Just to be sure, I checked the WSP website for a news release.

  Nothing.

  Finally, I entered a different search item.

  Spokane County Jail.

  Almost instantly, I was at the main page. Sheriff’s green was on prominent display.

  I clicked on current inmates , and did a quick search.

  No Falkner.

  So he probably wasn’t booked. Or he was booked and released already. Or they were somehow keeping him out of the system. I didn’t think the last was very likely in this day and age, so odds were that one way or the other, he wasn’t in jail.

  I didn’t know whether or not vengeance was on his mind. Scratch that. After all this time, I fucking knew vengeance was on his mind. But I wasn’t so sure it would be on his agenda right now, given recent events.

  Not that it mattered, given my plans.

  Driving to the house should have made me nervous. Falkner had always been a bit of a wild card, and now that I’d effectively ended his career, all bets were off. But instead, the trip made me recall all those times sneaking around with Helen under his nose. Maybe that was why I grew more confident the closer I got.

  The neighborhood was familiar even though I hadn’t been there for nearly a decade. Not much changes in Spokane. Or at least not enough changes fast enough to matter. I recognized almost every house on the street until I reached Falkner’s. It looked virtually the same, too.

  As I cruised past slowly, I noticed several lights were on. There weren’t any vehicles in the driveway but the place had a three car garage, so that didn’t mean much.

  I parked around the corner and half a block away. Then I walked casually down the street and right up his walkway. I stood right in the center of the doorway and rang the bell.

  For a while, there was no answer. I rang the bell again. Then a third time.

  Finally, the door swung open. Falkner stood in the doorway, clutching a beer bottle. His hair was slightly askew and his eyes were red-rimmed. I put him at seventy-five percent of the way through a full-on drunk for the ages binge. Which was not only appropriate for the situation but might play into my favor, if he didn’t kill me first.

  His glare bore into me, not even registering any surprise. “What in the fuck do you want?” he growled at me.

  “I’m here to save your ass,” I told him. “Now let me in.”

  Falkner surprised me. He didn’t slam the door in my face. He didn’t try to crack me upside the head with his beer bottle or reach for my throat. Instead, after he considered for a long minute, he actually stepped aside so I could enter.

  Once I was inside, he surprised me further by not reaching for a gun and capping me right there in his living room. The only thing that would have surprised me even more is if he’d offered me a beer, but he stopped short of that.

  “You’ve got about two minutes,” he told me, his gruff voice slightly slurred. “Then I call the cops about an intruder and I fucking shoot you in the head.”

  I didn’t bother sitting down.

  “Here it is,” I told him. “Here’s what I can do for you.”

  He listened carefully, not interrupting. He stood transfixed. He didn’t sip from his bottle or ask any questions. I don’t think he even blinked during my entire pitch.

  When I’d finished, he continued to stare. I couldn’t tell if he was running through the viability of my proposal or my veracity. Either way, I waited.

  And I was glad for the reassuring weight of my gun in the small of my back.

  Finally, he grunted and took a short sip of beer. “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, you do.”

  “Fine. I think I’m a genius. Does it matter?”

  “Yeah,” Falkner said. “It does. Because when a guy thinks he’s smarter than everyone else, he gets overly confident. That’s when mistakes happen. That’s when you misjudge people.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like coming here.”

  The tension in the room shot up. Falkner’s hard gaze locked onto me and we stared at each other some more. I used my peripheral vision to scan the room for any weapons, wishing like hell I’d been smart enough to do that earlier. Falkner wore a pair of jeans and a tucked in T shirt, so if he had a gun on him, it was either in an ankle holster or was small enough to fit in a pocket.

  “I came here because I saw a way out for both of us,” I said carefully.

  “You came here to rub my nose in it.”

  “No. I came here to make peace.”

  “Peace?” he scoffed. “You fuck my wife and drive her away, and you want peace? You destroy my career and you want peace? What fucking world do you live in?”

  “The world we’ve made for ourselves,” I told him. “Yeah, I fucked your wife. But it’s not like I raped her. She was just as much a part of that as I was.”

  “You took advantage,” Falkner snarled. “She was vulnerable and you—”

  “Either way, I’m sorry. All right? It was wrong, and I’m sorry.”

  “Fuck your sorry.”

  I shrugged. “Yeah, sorry’s a little weak, isn’t it? But it’s all I’ve got.”

  Falkner took a sharp, snapping swig of his beer, glaring at me.

  “You kind of evened things up, though,” I said. “Coming for me after all these years. And you backed me into a corner, which is why we ended up here.”

  “This is my fault?” Falkner asked, his voice rising in indignation.

  “Part of it, yeah.”

  “You’ve got some balls, coming in here and blaming me for all the shit you’ve pulled. I ought to—”

  “You ought to kill me,” I finished for him.

  Falkner stopped and stared at me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You ought to kill me. In another day and age, maybe you already would have. But we don’t live in that world. We live in this one. And at the end of the day, we’re not bad guys, you and I. We don’t kill people over personal vendettas.”

  I ignored the hypocrisy of what I just said and watched Falkner. He set his beer bottle on the top of his television, then turned back to me. “You’d fucking deserve it.”

  “I probably do.”

  He clenched his jaw and shook his head. “You piece of shit.”

  “Maybe that’s true, too,” I said. “But you know I’m right.”

  “Fuck you.”

  I ignored that. “So what I’m offering you is a way out of your current situation. And it solves my problem, too, so we both win. All you have to do is lay off of me. Permanently.”

  He stared at me, rage and hatred swimming in his red-rimmed eyes. But there was intelligence there, too, and in the end, that was what won out.

  “All right,” he finally conceded. “All right, motherfucker.”

  He didn’t have any fancy wires like the state patrol did, so we settled for a small voice recorder that could fit in my pocket. I performed a quick test r
ecording, counting to five, then I played it for him.

  He nodded wordlessly.

  I pushed the recorder into my left jacket pocket. “You made the right choice,” I told him. “You bring in a big fish like this, the brass will have to back off. It’ll confuse things. And when I refuse to cooperate with the Staties on their case, they’ll take the path of least resistance and just drop the whole thing. Hell, they’ll be happy to. You might take a five day rip over throwing shots, but that’ll be it.”

  “Listen to you,” Falkner said. “A fucking expert on police affairs.”

  “You know I’m right.”

  “You should leave before I change my mind and just fucking shoot you.”

  I shrugged. I thought about offering my hand to seal the deal, but I figured he’d refuse and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. So I just turned around and left.

  Even so, I could feel his eyes burning into my back as I walked away.

  Falkner might play ball, but he’d never forgive, and he’d certainly never forget.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Brent met me at Hays Park. We sat alone at a picnic table as far away as possible from the kids playing on the playground equipment. Several lights showered down on the play area, making it a safe environment for the little ones, but only a weak amber streetlight forty yards away gave us any illumination.

  I made sure to sit with my back to the light so I could see his face. It was an exercise in futility, though. Brent gave very little away with his flat expression.

  “Is Matt coming?” he asked me as he sat down.

  I shook my head. “Matt’s out.”

  “Out?”

  “Yeah. Out.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “It means I fired him. He was a fucking rat.”

  “How do you know for sure?” Brent asked me, his eyes watching me carefully.

  “You know how I told you I was meeting Ozzy at 12:30 at Niko’s?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I told Matt one o’clock at Marconi’s.”