The Cat Dancers cr-1

by P. T. Deutermann

  Now he definitely knew something wasn’t right: Manceford County never ran two officers in a cruiser, and he was in Manceford County. The shepherds, sensing Cam’s growing apprehension, were getting antsy and looking for instructions. He gave them both a down command to keep them flat on the backseat, then rolled down both rear windows, as well as his own. He put both his hands high up on the steering wheel and watched his mirrors. Sure enough, both men in the vehicle behind him got out at the same time and started forward. He could see white faces in the glare of their headlights, but not whether they were in uniform. Neither one had put his hat on, which was another thing a deputy always did when he got out to issue a traffic citation. Citizens recognized the hat, even when they couldn’t see a full uniform.

  These guys were not Manceford County deputies.

  The men came forward, and Cam caught a glimpse of drawn weapons, which they were holding in front of them, pointed down in two-handed grips. Wrong, all wrong. He thought about grabbing the shotgun, but there was no time and there were two targets. Rather than turning to look at the one coming up on his side, he kept his head straight ahead and scanned the three mirrors with his eyes. The instant the man on the left drew even with the rear window, Cam barked a command. Both rear windows were suddenly filled with a snarling German shepherd in the twenty-snaps-per-second mode. Frick was working Cam’s side of the truck, while Frack was doing the same routine out the other window, causing both men to jump back from the truck. The one on Cam’s side actually tripped and sprawled out into the roadway in his frantic attempt to avoid being bitten. Cam slammed the truck into reverse and drove the pickup’s protruding bumper hitch ball deep into the other vehicle’s radiator, then shifted into drive and peeled out of there, blowing gravel, grille debris, and road trash into their faces before either of them had a chance to use guns. He was doing ninety before he knew it and almost lost it on the next curve, but there were no lights in his rearview mirror just now. He slowed down and checked on his buddies in the back. The dogs were sitting up, their legs splayed due to all the maneuvers. Their claws gripped the seat tightly, but they were wearing their very best “That was fun” expressions. Cam relaxed and rolled up the windows.

  The sheriff shook his head when Cam told about being picked up on the road back into Triboro.

  “That was on me,” he said with an annoyed look on his face. “When I said, ‘You’re in Charlotte?’”

  “Who was in the room?”

  “Horace Stackpole. And Kenny.”

  “Oh no,” Cam muttered, startling the pretty young waitress who was putting their drinks on the table. Cam handed over his report package. He described what was in it and said he’d sent one each to McLain and Mike Pierce at the SBI. Before Bobby Lee could protest, Cam related what Jay-Kay had told him about the ATF-FBI split on the bombing case.

  “My take is that the Bureau is undecided about us here in Manceford County,” Cam said. “The ATF apparently has its own agenda. Something’s going on there, and I can’t figure it out. Mike Pierce will turn on the right people at the SBI. That’s why I put it in writing. It looks a whole lot better coming from me than at me.”

  “That’ll get you suspended,” the sheriff said. “That’s the first thing that’ll happen.”

  “Suspension isn’t all bad,” Cam replied. “Look, these guys have tried for me two times. So far, I’ve been damned lucky, but the next time it’s going to be a long gun, and that’ll be all she wrote. This way, we do what we do best: We bring a crowd. Make it official-warrants, court orders. And if you’re into suspensions, you’d better move on Sergeant Cox.”

  “Is she sure she’s got that right-that his name used to be Marlor?”

  “You can ask her directly, but that lady doesn’t mess around with those damned computers.”

  “And I thought women with guns were frightening,” Bobby Lee said.

  He sipped his drink. “I hate the fact that there are so damned many people into this hair ball.”

  “Politically?”

  “I can handle that,” the sheriff said, waving his hand dismissively. “I’m talking about getting these guys off the street. Did you call in the fake stop out on the connector?”

  “Negative.”

  “Where exactly did it go down?”

  Cam told him. “There should be a small lake of antifreeze out there on the side of the road,” he said, “even if they did get the vehicle moved.”

  The sheriff got out his cell phone and made a call. He instructed the Southside district office to get a forensics unit out to the location to see what they could find, then report directly back to him. While they ate, Cam explained his theory on how to correlate the phone booth records with the cowboy list, and Bobby Lee told him he’d already started the ball rolling on developing the list. As they finished, the sheriff’s cell phone chirped. He answered, listened, and then said to get every piece of debris bagged up.

  “They found it?” Cam asked.

  “Yep. They spotted a coyote lapping something up in the vicinity and found the antifreeze, plus a lot of plastic bits and a piece of radiator core. There were some big truck tracks ahead of your scratch marks, so they probably called a wrecker. We’ll canvass the tow guys in the area. This isn’t going to be that hard.”

  “That’s one dead coyote,” Cam said. He knew that farmers used to put out bowls of antifreeze when coyotes and other predators began killing livestock. The animals couldn’t resist it, and they died horribly. The biggest problem was that it killed everything in the woods that got within scent of it.

  “How are you going to handle Kenny?” Cam asked after the waitress cleared away their plates.

  “When will SBI get your package?”

  “The Bureau will have it first thing tomorrow, SBI by noon.”

  “I’ll call Mike Pierce first thing in the morning, give him time to read your reports, and then set up an interview with Kenny tomorrow afternoon with the SBI in my office.”

  “If he’s one of them, he’ll know about what happened tonight,” Cam said.

  “Maybe, maybe not. If your theory’s correct about them not operating on their home turf, he might not. I think we have a day. By then, we’ll have something on that vehicle.”

  “I guess it could have been undercover state guys,” Cam began.

  The sheriff shook his head. “They’d have shown ID. Made the usual apprehension noises. And there’d have been runner reports all over the place, somebody got away from troopers like that. I’d have been beeped by now.”

  Cam nodded. In a way, he’d have preferred that there was another explanation.

  “Where will you go tonight?” the sheriff asked.

  Cam shrugged. “Back home, I guess.” Even as he said it, he realized that that would be a dumb idea.

  “Get a motel somewhere,” the sheriff said. “Hell, stay right here. This is a hotel.”

  “I’ve got the dogs with me.”

  The sheriff looked around. “That’s why God made side entrances and service elevators,” he said. “Actually, you can probably get ’em in on that parking garage sky bridge on the second floor. Sounds like they saved your ass tonight.”

  Cam nodded. He wanted to go home, get a change of clothes, see what, if anything, had happened to his house, but the sheriff was right.

  “When would you want me in tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Go home in the morning, get cleaned up, and then come in. We’ll have us a crowd of helpers going by then.”

  “I don’t look forward to this,” Cam said.

  The sheriff stared of across the lobby for a moment. Cam thought he’d aged in the past week. “We’ll recover,” he said finally. “But probably not before we tar some good people.”

  49

  He arrived back at his house at five o’clock the next morning. The dogs had become restless in the hotel room around 4:00 A.M., and he’d decided that was a good time to get them and himself out of there and home before the morning rush hour st
arted. It was still dark when he pulled into his driveway, and there was a thin mist hovering in the trees. He left the truck in the driveway and put the dogs into the backyard, where he watched to see what they’d do. If there was someone in the house, they’d react just as soon as they cut strange scent crossing the backyard. They didn’t do anything but their normal yard patrol, so he let himself in through the front door. The alarm system beeped at him when the door opened, but he hadn’t set the intrusion alarm before bailing out the night before last.

  He went through to the kitchen and turned on some lights, threw his overnight pack into a chair, and cranked up the coffeemaker. He pulled one of his army mugs out of the cupboard and was just turning to take it to the table, when a voice in the doorway asked him to make it two.

  It was Kenny Cox, standing in the entrance to the kitchen. He was dressed in civilian camo hunting clothes, but he had his police utility belt and sidearm. His face and clothes looked like he had spent the night asleep in one of Cam’s living room recliners. Cam straightened up and tried not to show his surprise.

  “How long you been here?” he asked.

  “Since about two-thirty,” Kenny replied.

  “And the object of the social call is?” he asked.

  “Talk. We need to talk to you.”

  “We.’ So it’s true, then.”

  Kenny came into the kitchen, pulled a chair away from the kitchen table with his foot, and sat down heavily. His. 45 thumped against the back of the chair. He was so big that the chair creaked audibly when he put his weight on it.

  “Depends on what you mean,” Kenny said. “We didn’t do the bomb. I want to get that right out on the table. That wasn’t us.”

  Cam just stared at him. He was still absorbing the fact that Kenny Cox really was one of them. That it was all true. Kenny saw the disappointment on Cam’s face, shrugged, and rubbed the back of his head with one massive hand. “I know,” he said.

  “You know what, exactly?” Cam asked, trying to keep the anger out of his voice. He wondered if Kenny was alone in the house. The damned shotgun was still in the truck, the shepherds were outside, and his gun belt was upstairs.

  “I know what you’re thinking. Relax. There’s no one else here, and I’m just here to talk.”

  Cam crossed his arms over his chest. “So talk.”

  “We knew it was only a matter of time, once that bomb went off,” Kenny said. “We were comfortable that you’d finger Marlor for the minimart creeps, but once the attacks on Bellamy started, we couldn’t be sure.”

  The coffeepot maker quit making its noises and Cam got another mug out of the cupboard. “You helped Marlor find them?”

  “Hell yes. Got him the blanks, even ran covert backup for him when he snatched up Flash. Talk about funny.”

  “Not for Flash,” Cam said.

  “And not for Marlor’s wife and kid,” Kenny shot back, showing some teeth. “Those pricks got precisely what they deserved.”

  Cam poured out coffee for both of them. “We’re meeting this morning. This thing is coming together. We’ve identified fifteen possible victims since you guys got going.”

  “Victims’?” Kenny said in a nasty voice. “The real victims came first. Korean shopkeepers murdered for fifteen dollars. The young mother raped in the mall parking lot during a carjacking. The baby thrown out of the car on the interstate during another carjacking. The pizza delivery boy who gets his throat cut-not for the money, but for the fucking pizza. The all-star high school basketball athlete who takes a round in the throat from some asshole doing a drive-by, just because he was standing at the wrong bus stop at the wrong time, or because some young dick needed to make his bones to join the Crips. The foreign tourists who get the shit beat out of them and their rent-a-car stolen just because they turned down the wrong street. Those are your victims.”

  “And how are you guys any different?”

  “We’re the guys who square the accounts, Cam. The old gods who used to handle retribution are in a nursing home in Florida. Don’t you dare call these assholes victims. They were professional slimeballs. All we did was help them run smack into that big sword Madam Justice carries, because the scales don’t work so good anymore. And there’ve been eighteen, not fifteen.”

  “Kenny,” Cam began, but Kenny wasn’t done.

  “Don’t lecture me, man,” he said. “You’re still part of the problem. I worked out the right and wrong of it a long time ago. We have, and we’re comfortable with the equation, okay? Every one of those assholes was a stone-cold doer, and every one of them had been let off by some prissy police work or some weak-assed judge, and they’d bragged about it. It’s the brag that brings the dancers, Cam.”

  Cam sat down at the table. “Well, it’s over now.”

  “What, you’re gonna tell me you got a list of names?”

  “You guys used phone booths to communicate, right? Remember Ms. Jaspreet Kaur Bawa?”

  “The princess?” Kenny said. “Absolutely.”

  “Well, the princess sicced those two mainframes of hers on you personally, Kenny. Bobby Lee’s talking to his counterparts in every county in the state, asking for a list of cowboys. He’s gonna get a statewide list of candidates, and she’s correlating phone booth locations with the call history of your other cell phone. The one in your former name?”

  Kenny blinked. He sipped some coffee, eyeing Cam over the rim of the mug.

  “They’re all cops, right?” Cam said. “Either active or former cops?”

  Kenny nodded.

  “And James Marlor? Brother? Cousin? What?”

  Kenny smiled. “You’re doing pretty good so far; you tell me,” he said.

  “Don’t know. But we will.”

  “Okay,” Kenny said. “But you’ll never understand it. Not you. Not Mr. Straight Arrow.”

  “You’re right about that, Kenny.” Cam heard the shepherds moving around out on the back deck. But of course Kenny’s scent wouldn’t have put them on the alert. Kenny was a buddy. “And this cat-dancing shit-going face-to-face with a mountain lion? What the fuck’s with that?”

  “You wouldn’t understand that, either,” Kenny said.

  “Try me.”

  Kenny looked away for a moment. “We needed a certain kind of guy, someone who was emotionally worn-out from playing by the rules. You said you’re looking for cowboys, but we’re not cowboys. We’ve been through our cowboy phase. This is another level all together.”

  “Judges, juries, and executioners?”

  “Something like that. We needed serious anger at the system and the capacity to face certain death and laugh at it. To fully and truly not give a shit. And when you face one of the wild ones? That is an acid test, by God. And the biggest rush I’ve ever experienced.”

  Cam shook his head in wonderment. “I guess it’s a good thing you don’t give a shit, because the system is going to grind you up.”

  “Maybe,” Kenny said. “But you’re going to need evidence, and evidence is going to be hard to come by. That system you’re so hot to defend is going to make it really hard to take us down.”

  “And that’s what your life’s all about these days? A bigger rush? Hunting down dumb-ass criminals and executing them? And how many cops have you taken out, Kenny? Guys who got a sniff of what you were doing and maybe asked questions?”

  “None,” Kenny said. “Never.”

  “Really? Your bunch tried for me twice. What’d they have in mind, tea and crumpets?”

  Kenny frowned. “You were warned. What White Eye was supposed to do was scare you, and I admit that went off the tracks. But that was it. You say twice?”

  Cam enumerated the warehouse attack and the roadside stop. Kenny shook his head. “White Eye was acting for us. That other shit? Not us.”

  “Or your group is coming apart,” Cam said. “Someone’s scared and acting on his own.”

  Kenny shook his head again. “Negative,” he muttered. “Negative.”

  It was Cam�
��s turn to look away. Either Kenny was lying or he really didn’t know what was going on within his little group of assassins. Cam knew he hadn’t imagined these incidents. “And you didn’t put the elephant-gun round through Annie’s house?” he asked.

  “Negative. We didn’t plant that bomb, either. In fact-”

  “In fact what?”

  “Like I said, that’s when we knew. I got that same feeling when Jimmie killed himself. We always knew that it couldn’t go on forever. And after what happened on Catlett Bald, we agreed to go deep. Everyone agreed.”

  “All seven of you?”

  “Six, after Jimmie. I-we-really didn’t expect that. I could understand it, sort of, after the fact. But it still came as a shock.”

  “Jimmie-He was your brother, then?”

  “Yeah. Shit. Jimmie was my older brother. He was the one who started the thing with the big cats. He was up there in the western mountains all the time, working for Duke. You have to understand, now-Jimmie was always a little far-out. That’s why I had to leave the army. He and I did some crazy shit and they found out about it.”

  “But the vigilante bit-that was your idea, wasn’t it?” Cam said. “Especially once you realized you had a pretty much foolproof way to prove candidates for your hit squad. If they could face the cat, then they were men enough to whack bad guys and never reveal it.”

  Kenny nodded. “You called us cowboys. We’re not.”

  “You know what I mean. Guys in law enforcement who ride the edge all the time. The cops who want to draw their weapons. Who live to draw their weapons. The cops who hate the bad guys. Who substitute passion for professionalism.”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” Kenny said.

  “Got that right. Like I told you, we’re meeting this morning. You coming in?”