Watkins - 01 - Blood Country

by Mary Logue

  Claire remembered Meg trying to dig to China; she remembered Steve encouraging her, telling her that when she got there, she would see people walking upside down. She remembered the life she used to have and wondered how she got to be where she was, hunched over in a car. Then she saw Bruce’s car pull up, and knew this was it.

  BRUCE HATED DRIVING into this scuzzy neighborhood. When he had first been a cop, he saw this side of town as kind of exciting. He could feel people bristle around him when he wore his uniform and pulled them over to check their driver’s license. But that wore off pretty fast. He realized it was truly dangerous around here, although not particularly for cops.

  No, he came to see that living in this neighborhood was dangerous for the people who lived there. Their kids got shot and killed on their way home from school, riding their bikes, going for a walk.

  He turned at the Dairy Queen and slowed down as he approached Red’s house. He could see a car in the driveway. He hadn’t been by to see Red since the kid called about him killing his dog. Man, he had reamed him out for that. What a brainless crud Red could be. Tell him to keep a low profile, and he kills a dog. Certainly engender good feelings in his neighbors. Time for Red to go. No doubt about it.

  Bruce tapped his gun. He had set up this deal before he left the office, told the desk sarge that he’d gotten a call on an old informant, and it sounded like the guy might have been into some bad shit. Joe told him to watch his back, asked him if he wanted to take someone with him. Bruce shook his head no, explained that he thought he could handle it better on his own.

  Then he stopped and turned back to Joe. “Hey, you remember Claire, right?”

  “Hell, she’s hard to forget.” Joe had laughed silently, his shoulders shaking like an earthquake was happening inside of him.

  “If she calls, tell her to sit tight. Tell her I’ll be right there.”

  “Sure, no prob, Big Bruce.” Joe had turned away and then lifted a big hand and said, “You know she was just in here a few days ago.”

  That had stopped Bruce in his tracks. No, he hadn’t known. Why hadn’t he known? She hadn’t told him she’d been to town. “What was she doing here?”

  “I’m not sure. Looking through some old files.”

  Bruce thought she’d said she took those files when she left the force, but maybe not. “Oh, sure. I think she told me about that.”

  Joe gave Bruce a long look. “Not the same without her around here. Bet you miss her.”

  “Who knows. Maybe we’ll get her back.”

  Bruce thought about that as he checked out Red’s front door. Wouldn’t that be something, having Claire working on the Minneapolis police force again? But if they were going to be as tight as he hoped they would be, she probably shouldn’t work with him. It wouldn’t be approved by those in command. Plus, he wasn’t sure he would like it. He knew one thing for sure. He’d much rather feel her in the night than see her all day long. Maybe after this was all over, he could persuade her to stay in town. That would certainly be the cherry on top of the whipped cream. What a sweet, luscious cherry she could be!

  Bruce opened his car door and noted the activity along the street. Small girl left to play in the driveway. What was her mother thinking? Car parked midway down the street, but it looked empty. Nice quiet evening, sun just setting. Perfect time for an execution. He strolled across the street and walked down the broken-up sidewalk to the house. Piece-of-shit building. Metal screen door hanging half off its hinges. He knocked and waited to hear someone moving around inside. The wood door had a peephole, so he knew he would be screened before Red opened the door.

  He heard loud music playing, a guy singing over and over again, something about being a loser, and wanting to be killed. Appropriate lyrics, Bruce thought. The level of the music dropped, and he saw the peephole go dark. A moment later, the door moved open, and a lanky figure appeared behind it.

  “Hey, Hawk, what’re you doing here?” Red asked.

  “Just in the neighborhood. Wanted to say I was sorry about our last conversation.”

  With that the door swung open, and Red waved a beer bottle at him. “Don’t think a thing about it. You want a hard-boiled egg? I made a whole bunch of ‘em.”

  RED HAD BEEN having a nice afternoon. The eggs sat well in his stomach. He drank a few beers and then decided to take a ‘lude. Hadn’t done a ‘lude in a long time, but seemed like the right kind of day. He was feeling fine, and it would slow everything down. Then he had stretched out on the couch, turned on the radio, cranked it up high, and thought about masturbating, but about all he could manage on the ‘lude was to think about it. To actually put his hand down there and start to move it up and down was way too much work.

  So he had lain on the couch and tried to remember that new word he had come up with. Then he had thought about Bridget, a special memory he pulled out for moments like this. He wished that he would have gotten a little further with her, although it did kind of weird him out that she was pregnant. Maybe he would visit her again, without Hawk having to know anything about it. Maybe he should get Hawk in trouble, like plant something in his car, then call in an anonymous tip on him.

  God, that creamed him just thinking about it. It would be worth a gram or two just to get Hawk popped for drugs. He could say Hawk stopped him on the street and lifted the dope off him and then let him go. He could ask, had Hawk ever turned in those drugs? He knew what Hawk’s car looked like. Wouldn’t be that hard to do. God, it’d be nice to have that guy out of his life.

  Then the doorbell rang. Just as his hand had been crawling down his chest. He grabbed the beer off the coffee table and peeked through the hole. Hawk-o-reeno in person. His sudden appearance made Red feel as if he could read his mind. Hawk did seem like he had extrasensory powers sometimes. He was spooky that way.

  He opened the door for Hawk and invited him in, offering him an egg.

  Suddenly he noticed that there was a uniformed cop strolling down the sidewalk toward them. Hawk turned but did nothing. The other cop came walking toward them and motioned them both into the house. She had a gun in her hands. It took Red a second to realize that the other cop was a woman and, most importantly, the woman—Claire Watkins. What the fuck was she doing here? Red could feel the edges of his brain slightly fizzing. He didn’t need this. What did Hawk have cooked up now?

  Hawk was asking her what she was doing here, but it could be a trap.

  “I wasn’t actually that far away when I called. You seem to know Red, Bruce. You had no trouble finding the place?” she asked, and her eyebrow lifted up at the end of the question. The gun she was holding was steady on Hawk.

  Red cursed inside himself. His fucking gun was in the bedroom. What good was it in there?

  “What are you getting at, Claire? We’re both here for the same reason.”

  Hawk had raised his voice, and it made Red’s ears feel warm and tingly. It was too loud. He didn’t like it.

  “Don’t shout!” Red yelled at Hawk.

  “Do you understand what’s going on here, Red?” Hawk had turned his back on Claire and was facing Red.

  Red didn’t like what he was seeing in Hawk’s eyes—a shifty look that meant trouble—or what he was hearing in Hawk’s voice—blame.

  ‘We’ve figured out who’s responsible for one murder and a very nasty kidnapping. Claire found you out and tracked you down. Her sister has fingered you and said you killed Claire’s husband too.” Hawk reached into his holster and pulled out a huge gun, pointing it right at Red.

  Red felt like the eggs were doing dodgem cars inside his belly. If things didn’t quiet down, he was going to blow pretty soon. He backed up as the gun came toward him. He couldn’t help it. The gun was black and ugly, and he knew what size hole it would leave as the bullet traveled through his body. Red pushed his feet backward until he hit something. He was up against the wall of the living room.

  “Hey, I didn’t do a thing. I haven’t been feeling too well this last week or s
o. I haven’t left the house. You’ve got the wrong guy.”

  Hawk laughed. “You are the right guy, my friend. And if you don’t confess to what you did, I’m going to shoot you right here and now.”

  The gun moved in closer and seemed like a cobra snake ready to strike. Red didn’t like the way it zoomed in toward him. He put up a hand to hide the end of the gun. “Don’t, Hawk,” he asked. “Please don’t.”

  “Tell this lady what you did, then,” Hawk demanded.

  “I did it. I killed that guy. Put the gun down. Please.”

  “See,” Hawk said, and turned to look at Claire.

  Red followed Hawk’s glance, and that’s when he saw that Claire still had her gun out, and it was still pointed at Hawk. She was standing over across the room.

  “Claire, you got the right guy,” Hawk told her.

  Claire kept staring at Hawk and said, “I know. Bruce, he called you Hawk. Hawk was the guy that Bridget said was behind all this.”

  “It’s him.” Hawk pointed at Red.

  Red felt the gun dip and decided he should take his chance. “Hawk told me to do it.”

  Hawk turned all his attention back on Red, and the gun pointed toward him. Hawk yelled, “You don’t know what you’re talking about, you lying fuckhead.”

  Claire didn’t move. She kept her eyes on Hawk.

  Red screamed. “Shoot him. It’s all his fault. It was all his idea. He killed your husband to get you.”

  Hawk’s hand jerked, and Red felt something explode inside his body, the room jolted red, then white, then nothing.

  CLAIRE NEVER TOLD anyone what happened next. She took the moments that followed and dug a deeper hole inside of her than her husband had been buried in, and she vaulted the moments inside. The gun went off in Brace’s hand, and she knew she had to decide. She saw the body of the skinny man called Red turn very red in his chest, and his arms flew out and his body caved in and he started falling. She knew she only had a moment or two.

  Bruce was still aimed toward Red, but then he started to turn, a slow spiral. And she was never sure if Bruce would have been able to kill her. She was never sure. When he turned toward her, his gun pointed at her, she knew she only had a moment to decide what to do. He wasn’t looking her in the eyes; his eyes weren’t smiling. He was staring at her shoulder, right where a shot might go.

  She thought of Meg walking through a field, gathering flowers, she thought of Bridget holding a new baby in her arms, a sweet handful, she thought of her husband going out to get the evening paper and dying on the grass. Bruce’s gun lifted toward her, and she pulled the trigger.

  He didn’t die immediately. He twisted and he slumped. His hand rose to his chest and came away bloody. His eyes dimmed, and he tried to find her with them. His mouth opened, and he said one word that she heard, he said, “Why,” but didn’t even have enough strength left to make it a question. The word didn’t rise at the end. It fell with the rest of him to the floor.

  Claire stood in the silence that filled the room and left her own body for a moment. She felt the world black around her, dark and despairing. She saw down a long, dark hallway with no doors and knew it was her life and she would have to keep on walking, that there would never be any way out of it. Then she fought her way back into it. The world took shape again, and she felt light, as if something evil in her had flown away and was gone.

  Two men were dead in the room, and neighbors had probably heard the shots. She had work to do. She had to take care of Bruce and save herself. She wiped off the gun she had inherited from her dad and that there was no registration on, and put it in Red’s hand. She rubbed her right hand on Red’s, so he would have some of the powder residue from the shot on his hand.

  Then she walked over to Bruce. She was on automatic. This all had to get done, and quickly. He was so big and so heavy, but she needed to move him. She turned Bruce so he faced Red, and then she moved in on him. She put her hands on his chest as if to stop the flow of blood. She tried to resuscitate him. She slapped his fece. Her hands were bloodied, and she had polluted the crime scene horribly. Just what she wanted.

  When she was sure that the men were just the way she wanted them, she went to the kitchen sink and scrubbed her hands down with the Scotch Brite sponge. If it would scour pans, it should take care of her hands. Then she walked to the phone. She called directly through to the desk and got Howard. “Officer down, Joe. Shit, it’s Bruce.” Her voice broke. She gasped. “I think he’s dead. Send over a squad and an ambulance.” She gave him the address.

  Then she sat very still on the edge of the couch and waited. When she heard the siren, she made herself think of all the people she loved who had died, Bruce among them, and she cried. The police found her hysterically sobbing, bent over near the man she had worked with for years, her partner.

  31

  I don’t know how he did it.” Claire spoke the words through sobs. “He was shot, but he still pulled the trigger and killed that guy. He saved my life. And now he’s dead.”

  The atmosphere was tense and sober in the small, dark living room that Red had occupied. But there was also a sense of pride and justice in what Bruce Jacobs had managed to do before he went down.

  The bodies were still in the house. They had been photographed from every angle. Plastic bags had been taped around their hands. No one had even suggested that Claire be checked over. She had apologized for making a mess of the crime scene. No one had been critical. Everyone had treated her like she was porcelain. She wasn’t sure they were wrong.

  Clark Denong, a homicide detective whom Claire didn’t know very well, was taking her statement. He had still been in the ranks when she left and, at twenty-eight, was fairly young to be made detective. With his slicked-back black hair and eyes that were too wide apart in his head, he had the demeanor of a bull but was actually, from all she had heard, a very nice man.

  He told her, “I remember a cop telling me a story like this—you know, where a guy managed to get a shot off before he caved—but I never thought I’d see anything like it.”

  Claire just shook her head. She figured she had said enough. She had been questioned off and on for two hours. She had said the same things over and over again. Bridget had identified Red as her kidnapper; Claire had called Bruce and asked him to meet her here; he had gone in before her; when she saw he was in trouble, she had gone in. Red had shot Bruce, and Bruce, in a superhuman moment, had in turn shot Red before he died.

  She would add nothing to it. Less was always better when you were lying. She had learned that from the felons she had worked with. Now that she had given them the framework, they could piece the picture together, and for a dead officer, it would be as pretty as they could make it.

  “Let’s get you out of here.” Denong helped her up. She had been perched on a metal chair they had pulled in from the kitchen. “I’ve got your statement. This is no place for you to be.”

  Claire let him walk her out of the house and then ask her where she wanted to go. “I need to get home,” she told him.

  “Sure. Are you going to be all right to drive? You live down in Wisconsin now, on the river, right?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be fine. I’ll go get a cup of coffee, and I’ll take it easy.” Claire looked up at the sky. It was dark with the orange cast of the city’s ambient light. “You’ll keep me posted.”

  “You better believe it. I’ll call you right after the chief.”

  She laughed, then snuffled. “Okay. Take care of him.”

  “We try to take care of our own,” Denong said back to her. It struck her as sounding as awkward as what she had said. They were both babbling, trying not to show how bad they felt about what had happened.

  She walked down the street and crawled into her car. She headed to an old familiar spot, the Perkins on Lake Street, open twenty-four hours a day. Bruce and she had gone there often. She slid into a booth and ordered what she always ordered: a short stack of pancakes, a side of bacon, and coffee. But w
hen the food came, she stared at it and then shoved it around her plate. She managed to eat a few bites of the pancakes, feeling she needed some sugar in her for the ride home. Trying to distract herself, she picked up the paper. She couldn’t go back and change what she had done.

  At this thought, the paper started to shake in Claire’s hands, and she stopped eating. She put the paper down and stared at the spot Bruce should be sitting in. She understood so little of what he had done to her. How had she ever thought she had known him? What had made him think he could get away with it? Because he was a cop, did he come to believe he was above the law?

  She sat in the booth and made herself think about what she had done. She knew after this night that she would try to push it out of her mind, but now she needed to face it. Once she had worked on a case that involved horrible child abuse. A father was beating and raping his little girl. When Claire questioned the girl, it was clear that the seven-year-old loved her father. All she would say was, sometimes he was mean, but she talked as if that were a different person.