Bullet Beth (George Hastings police procedural)

by James Patrick Hunt

  Bradbury said, “What are you doing?”

  “We’re going to go for a walk.”

  “I don’t want to.” Bradbury heard his breath. In and out. “I think you’ve made a big mistake.”

  Hastings said, “We’re going for a walk. Whether or not you do it with a broken nose is up to you.”

  Bradbury started walking. Hastings gestured for him to walk in front. “That way,” Hastings said and they started moving in the direction of the woods.

  Bradbury thought, he’s trying to scare me. Scare me into making a confession. It’s a game. It must be.

  But Ryan Bradbury was not a man accustomed to remaining quiet. Not when he was frightened. He said, “Man, what have you got in mind?”

  Hastings didn’t answer him.

  So Bradbury said, “You know you can’t do this. You’re a police officer. You can’t just abduct a man and take him out to the country and…”

  But Hastings still said nothing.

  “It’s not done,” Bradbury said. “You can’t do it. You can’t do this to me.”

  Hastings said, “Can’t do what?”

  “You can’t — my God — you can’t just take a man out to the middle of nowhere and…”

  “Why not?” Hastings said.

  “Because it’s not, Jesus, it’s not…it’s not in you. . .”

  “Why not?” Hastings said again. “It’s in you. Maybe we’re not all that different.”

  “Hey, now don’t kid around. You — you’re not going to — you can’t.”

  “It’s already been decided,” Hastings said.

  “Wait a minute. What do you mean it’s already been decided? What’s already been decided?”

  “You know.”

  Christ. “No I don’t. For God’s sake, tell me.”

  “I already told you. At your lawyer’s office, I warned you. You heard me.”

  “…that? But I didn’t…”

  “You did. Your lawsuit got dismissed and you got mad and then you decided to come after my daughter. I saw you there. I saw your BMW. I wrote down the tag. You saw me. That’s why you drove off.”

  “Now hold on there. Hold it right there. You don’t know what you saw. You don’t have any evidence. You don’t have any proof.”

  “I have all I need,” Hastings said.

  Ryan Bradbury sort of worked his mouth open and closed, processing the meaning of that statement. The reality of the situation was beginning to dawn on him.

  Bradbury said, “I don’t know what you…it wasn’t me.”

  “Why lie about it? Why lie about it now?”

  “Listen to me. Yes, okay, yes, I was there. But I wasn’t going to do anything. I knew you were there. Yeah, that’s it. I was just following you. I didn’t know you would be going there. It was just a game.”

  “I’d like to believe that, Ryan. I really would because I gotta tell you, when I saw you there, I don’t think I’d ever been more scared in my life. Someone like you, a thing like you, near my kid. I don’t think I’m going to forget that feeling for a long time. But…even if it was just what you would consider a joke, I just can’t take the chance.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Don’t…don’t do this…”

  “You did this, Ryan. I told you not to come within a mile of her or you would vanish. You had money, you had your freedom…you had everything. But you just couldn’t leave it alone. This is your doing.”

  They reached the edge of the woods. Ryan Bradbury turned.

  “Now wait a minute, wait a minute. You can’t do this. You must not do this. I’m — I have money. I mean, I can give you money. A million dollars if you let me go. And I swear, I swear to God, I’ll never go near your family again. I swear it.”

  Hastings said, “There’s an abandoned well in there. I think it’s about eighty feet deep. I’ve seen it before when I was here hunting duck. The well’s got a square cover that’s sort of covered with grass. But I think we’ll be able to find it without much trouble.”

  “Don’t…”

  “Hey, we all gotta be buried someplace.”

  “I’ll give you five million. Five million dollars and you will never see me again, I swear.”

  Hastings smiled and said, “If you’re the one suing me, shouldn’t I be offering you money?”

  “That’s a lot of money. For you and your kid.”

  “Yeah,” Hastings said. “But it hasn’t seemed to have done you much good.”

  They moved into the woods. The car was a good hundred yards behind them, then it was out of sight.

  Hastings pulled a nine millimeter Lorcin pistol out of his coat pocket. What gangsters called a Saturday night special.

  “You see this?” Hastings said. “I’m going to give you a chance.”

  Hastings threw it on the ground. Bradbury eyed it greedily, like a last slice of pizza. Hastings lowered the shotgun so that the barrel was pointed down.

  “You son of a bitch,” Bradbury said. “You’re just doing that so you’ll feel better. I’ll bet it’s not even loaded.”

  “Well, maybe it is. Why don’t you give it a try?”

  Bradbury looked at the gun. It was about three feet from him. Stepping distance. He was thinking about it.

  But still hesitating. So Hastings said, “Come on, tough guy. It’s just you and I now. Pick up that gun and shoot me. If it’ll make it easier for you, pretend I’m a little girl.”

  Bradbury went for it. Hastings raised the shotgun and blew a round into his midsection. It flung Bradbury back about six feet. Hastings racked the slide and put another round in his chest. That was the end of him.

  Hastings picked up the Lorcin and put it back in his coat pocket.

  “You were right,” Hastings said. “It did make me feel better.”

  Bradbury was right about something else. The Lorcin wasn’t loaded. As Hastings had said, he wasn’t going to take any chances.

  Hastings stopped at a convenience store about a hundred miles away. In the bathroom, there was a moment after he washed up when he looked in the mirror and didn’t much like what he saw. He put it aside and left.

  At the next bridge, he pulled the car over and threw his medal of valor in the river. Then he drove home.

  Turn the page for a preview of

  REINHARDT’S MARK

  “ … where books are burned, people are burned in the end.”

  — Heinrich Heine

  “I still have a suitcase in Berlin.”

  — Ronald Reagan

  People would think it strange that Peter Rathau pined for the Berlin of the past. Not the Berlin of the Cold War, the Berlin that was separated by a wall from 1961 through 1990. Rather the Berlin that was there before it was bombed into rubble in 1945. The Berlin of the twenties and thirties. The one with the cabarets, the nightlife, coffeehouses, beer, philosophy, Josephine Baker and Potsdamer Platz bustling with trams and double decker buses. That Berlin. Invariably, someone would say to Rathau, after an appropriate pause, “But you’re Jewish, aren’t you?”

  Well, yes. But there was Germany and there were Germans and there was history. And there were German Jews. Though not many in Germany anymore. As Peter had learned from another American journalist, “there may be Jews who live in Germany, but there are no more German Jews.”

  Two of those fortunate enough to escape the butchery had been Peter’s grandparents. His grandfather had been an attorney until the Third Reich made it illegal for Jews to practice law. They made it out of Europe and began another life in Chicago, Illinois and felt the mixture of luck and guilt that comes from surviving the horror. In Chicago, they had worked and saved and made a decent life running a dry cleaning business.

  Peter was the first son of the first son and from an early age, the family had pinned high hopes on him. Handsome, talented, charming, smart … a bookish young man. A seeker, not a dreamer. His family was aware of his ability, if not his nature. They encouraged the practical: a career in medicine, investment banking or law. He let
them all down when he dropped out of Harvard in his third year. His parents could not fathom it. He had shown none of the classic slacker/loser traits. If anything, he had always been earnest and hard-working; almost to a fault. But Peter Rathau was one of those people who was fortunate enough to know himself, even at a relatively young age. He knew his distaste for a lifetime of mortgages, car payments, empty status and office work was no post-adolescent phase, but a determination to avoid what he knew, for him, would be a false life.

  He left Boston and went to China with little more than a change of clothes and a camera. He had a good eye and within a year he had sold enough photos to support himself. At least in China. But as his travels extended into the second year, he realized that he liked writing more than taking photos. Not fiction writing, but writing about what was real, what was there and here if you took the time to see it, observe it. People, cultures, lives.

  He developed a style that was honest, clean and unpretentious. His “dispatches” did not center around him, but around the people he interviewed and the things he had seen. He kept his place. After a couple of years, he put his essays together to form a book. The book was published and critically well-received. At the age of twenty-eight, he had made a name for himself. During a visit to New York, he overheard someone describe him as a freelance journalist. It made him smile in a self-conscious way — was he supposed to start wearing safari jackets now? — but he had never been a creature of false modesty and he knew he had earned the title.

  Over the next couple of years, he continued to travel and write. His pieces were in Esquire and Atlantic Monthly and Vanity Fair. His second book was published after he spent a year in the Balkans. He acknowledged a debt to Rebecca West and her timeless Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. But John Steinbeck was probably a stronger influence, particularly his dispatches in Once There Was a War. Rathau believed that few had ever done it better than that.

  Peter Rathau was not a man who took himself too seriously. He liked to laugh and relax. But he took his work very seriously. Like the honest historian, he believed he had a duty of good faith to his readers. He would assign himself projects. Pick a place in the world, preferably a place undergoing strife and change and tell the reader about it the way you would tell a friend. China, Bosnia, Iraq. And now Germany. There was a story in each place. It just had to be discovered.

  Elliott Thetford wore his hair over his ears in that way that makes an Englishman distinct from an American. He was a relatively young man, in his thirties. But to hear him speak was to hear traces of the British Empire. Confident and self-assured in a country that was not his own. When Peter Rathau was with Elliott, he remembered another Brit who had told him, “I’ll tell you how I communicate with foreigners when I’m in Paris. I point my finger and make my voice very loud.” Elliott ordered his tea from the German waitress and made no attempt to speak German when he did so. The girl made something of a face and Rathau ordered a cup of coffee and a sandwich.

  Rathau had met Elliott in Bagdad. They had both interviewed the British brigadier general who had been accused of torturing Iraqi prisoners. A well spoken man who had made a point of telling his soldiers before the war that their conduct would reflect not only on them but their families. Rathau liked the man and was glad when he was eventually cleared. Elliott was now stationed in Berlin and not seeming to like it much.

  They sat in a café in the Weinhaus Huth on Leipziger Platz, one of the few buildings on Potsdamer Platz to survive the Allied bombing raids. It was a typical Berlin day in November: gray, cold, with drizzling rain. From their table they could see Rauschenberg’s sculpture of red and blue bicycles, mating like seahorses.

  Elliott said, “I’m here because I’ve been assigned here, Peter. It’s not necessarily what I would have decided.”

  Rathau said, “Right.”

  “It’s a bloody awful place, really. Particularly for an Englishman.”

  Rathau thought, this from a man who would have been born about twenty-five years after the Germans rained bombs on London.

  Elliott seemed to detect it. He said, “It was my country, you see. In England, there are two minds when it comes to Germany. Not always, but mostly those born after 1950 say, ‘It’s bygones. The Germans are our friends now. And not all Germans are Nazis. Forget the past and move on.’”

  “Okay,” Rathau said.

  “And the others, those who were around during the war, they remember, you see. One of them, a respected writer, he said something to the effect of, ‘well, it may not be the case that all Germans are Nazis, but I’m reasonably sure that most of them are Germans. And that’s the point.’”

  “What’s the point?”

  “The point is that men like him remember in a way that men like us cannot. We’re too young, you see. Sometimes I wonder if we don’t give the past generation enough credit on the subject.”

  “Perhaps not,” Rathau said. “I’m not here to dredge up that sort of thing.”

  “I understand you’re not,” Elliott said. “But … “ Elliott hesitated. He was British after all and they often tended to speak bluntly on matters of race in ways that Americans did not. Rathau could tell that Elliott had been about to say, “But you’re a Jew.”

  Rathau said, “But why did I come here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well I’m not here to search for ghosts. It’s the present that interests me.”

  “Peter, the Germans love to travel all over the world. But they don’t much like being hosts. You’re an American and a Jew.”

  “But I have roots here.”

  “Ah, of course. An American from German Jews. Well if you think that will cut any mustard here, you’re mistaken. I know you and I know you don’t have any personal scores to settle. But they won’t see it that way. They’ll think you’re here to judge. And they’ve had enough of that. Not many Nazis left, you see. Most of the generation that fought the war has died or is dying. The people that came after, particularly the second generation born in the sixties and thereafter, they don’t feel they should be held responsible for the war and the holocaust. And though I can’t stand bloody Germans, I can’t say I blame them. I don’t believe in collective guilt. Certainly not the sort that should be handed down several generations.”

  “I don’t believe in collective guilt either.”

  “I know you don’t, Peter. But they won’t know that.”

  Peter Rathau smiled. “Why Elliott. Are you afraid I’ll get my feelings hurt?”

  “You know about the poll done by the European Commission, a few years ago. Sixty five percent of Germans think the biggest threat to world peace is Israel. Not North Korea, not Hamas, not Iran, not these bloodthirsty Muslims in Denmark, but Israel. What does that tell you?”

  “It doesn’t tell me much. That percentage is higher in Austria and the Netherlands. And aren’t you contradicting yourself? You say you don’t believe in collective guilt, but then you’re sympathetic with old Englishmen who say they’re not going to forget bombs falling on London.”

  “Oh, I suppose I am contradicting myself. And perhaps I’d see the thing from a different point of view if I were a Jew. But I’m not and I can’t pretend I understand it as if I were. Christ, I don’t even understand what you Americans find funny about bloody Jerry Seinfeld.”

  “Well,” Rathau said, “in any event, I’m not here because I have issues with my German Jewish identity.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting that.” Elliott leaned away from the table, holding the saucer in one hand, his teacup in the other. “Peter, you’re one of the best journalists I know.” Elliott smiled. “Certainly the best American journalist. But there’s no conflict here. And you thrive on conflict.”

  Peter Rathau was looking out into the street. Brightly colored cars and buses, their tires whisking through wet pavement. Young Germans on the sidewalks dressed in black looking like they had just gotten out of bed. The nightclubs stayed open all night and many of Berlin’s aspiring artists kept
vampire’s hours.

  Elliott was looking at him. He said, “Or is there?”

  Rathau said, “Is there what?”

  Elliott said, “Is there something simmering in this land of sausages and dark poetry that you’re not sharing with me?”

  Rathau smiled, but kept his thoughts to himself. It was bad luck to discuss a book before it was done.

  He said, “We’ll see.”

  One of the things you noticed about the city is that it seemed incomplete. Rathau had been told that it was more vibrant when the Wall had been dividing it. Ironic, perhaps, but there it was. A built in tension that made an island of West Berlin. Now the Wall was gone and Berlin seemed to be a couple of million people short. The Island now a part of Greater Germany and little more. After the Wall came down, they moved the capital from Bonn back to Berlin. Yet there remained a sense that it had not fulfilled its potential. Rent was cheap, too cheap. And the people seemed to be waiting for an economic miracle to arrive. It had happened for the rest of West Germany after the Second World War, but there had not been a similar outcome for Berlin after the Cold War. Sony and DaimlerChrsyler had come and built their modern superstructures, but there were still the wide open concrete spaces, vestiges of Communist East Germany.

  The yellow tram car stopped near the old Checkpoint Charlie and Rathau got off. He walked for about half a mile before hailing a taxi. The taxi took him further east until the driver stopped at the address Rathau had given him. It was dark when they got there and the rain was falling steadily. Rathau paid the driver and then he was alone.

  Berlin. What difference did it make? They could build modern corporate offices and massive American style malls and fill it with stores, but it wouldn’t take away the pervasive gloom, the melancholy. Rathau remembered seeing the movie Wings of Desire, while he had been in Hong Kong, oddly enough. Filmed in Berlin before the Wall came down, it was about an angel who falls in love with a mortal and wants to go back. Never a movie buff, Rathau had thought it bleak and ponderous. But he had been amused by the scene where two of the angels, dressed in dark overcoats and scarves, had sat in a BMW convertible and waxed nostalgic about what they missed about being on earth. And what was it they said they missed?