I shoved my chair back. Thanks to the fax revolution, the intelligence division had accumulated a great deal of information on short notice. They even had statements from arresting officers and the army provost marshal. I flipped through them, aware that the SWAT team was on its way now.
The provost marshal reported that Private Frake had escaped by leaving a blanket made up to resemble a sleeping human body in his cell. He’d decked the M.P. who’d come to investigate and gone out wearing his uniform.
Sergeant Doyle of the St. Louis Police Department stated that his attempt to serve the warrant had failed and that he was later told by his informant that Frake bragged about watching Doyle through binoculars as the policeman tried the wrong address.
The sheriff of Los Angeles County had conducted an investigation and concluded that the prisoner had escaped by exchanging identities with a man about to be released for simple theft.
Sergeant Doyle reported that a long-term informant named Izzy Kaye had been found dead of knife wounds in an abandoned tenement in East St. Louis. Illinois authorities were investigating.
Clipped to the file was a report on an Orleans Parish murder that an informant had attributed to Frake in 1980; the case had been dropped for lack of evidence. It explained how he knew his way around so well.…
I stared down at his mug shot, taken within the last five years, and I tried to read something into the face, but his expression was blank. I took out the copy of the ancient news photo and stared at Max. What connection could there be?
I closed the Frake file, got up, and went down the hall to the coffee machine. Suddenly I knew, beyond any whisper of doubt, that the SWAT team would come up empty. I started to go back, ask somebody to contact Mancuso by radio. But something held me.
I took out the photo of Max and looked at it again.
For the first time something started to make sense.
I decided to wait and let the SWAT team go through its exercise.
In the meantime, I found the Captain’s office and a duty lieutenant named Leblanc who looked like he’d been around forever and was waiting out the days until his pension. He didn’t seem disappointed that the captain had left him here on the big raid. When I came in, he just kept working his crossword and grunted.
It was five minutes before he agreed to lay it aside. When he saw that all I wanted to do was bullshit, he opened up.
Things had really gone to hell on the force, he said. I remembered a gunnie in ’Nam who’d said the same thing about the Corps. Within twenty minutes we were calling each other by first names (his was Antoine, but he liked Tony), and by the end of the hour he’d pulled out his old academy book and shown me himself as a cadet. Jake Kelso, he told me, had been his training officer. I looked down at Kelso’s picture and saw a man caught between youth and middle age. I started to ask him about the case of Helen, whose grave Kelso had showed me, but didn’t. Maybe Tony had his own case to haunt him. We were still perusing the pictures when the call came.
I knew what it was as soon as the duty sergeant put down the phone.
He headed in my direction, hunting for somebody to blame.
“Strikeout,” he accused.
Leblanc looked up from his album.
“No shit.”
“I told Sal not to listen to this dickhead,” the sergeant said.
Tony Leblanc frowned and then nodded.
“Yeah.”
It was clear I was no longer welcome. I said I’d enjoyed meeting them and left.
I drove back to my place. It was dark and looked like nobody had ever lived there. I was beginning to wonder if I ever had. I turned on the window air conditioner and sat in the darkness. I still didn’t know if Max was dead or alive, but I had a partial solution to the puzzle. I called Sandy and told her what had happened and what I thought.
“Jesus,” she said.
“Yeah.” I told her what I wanted her to do.
“You’re sticking your neck way out,” she said. “And you don’t even know …”
“I’ve got to try,” I said.
“Maniac,” she muttered, and hung up.
Then I called Jake Kelso and waited.
He answered on the first ring, as if he’d never been asleep.
“I need you,” I said. There was no other way to put it.
Half an hour later I heard him on the stairs. I opened the door and watched him come, a bear of a man who filled the tiny passageway.
“Good for you, boyo.” He squeezed my hand in both of his. “We’ll show the bastards. You know what Mulvaney tried to do?”
I thought of the captain with the walrus mustache.
“I can imagine.”
“He wanted to lock me up. Arthur Mulvaney that I trained and bailed out of more than one scrape. When I said I’d go to the press I thought he was gonna have a stroke right there.”
“Sounds like you did all right,” I said.
“Maybe. But he called Elaine. I had to listen to her all afternoon. You’d of thought I killed the woman.”
“Then maybe it’ll help if we can bring in the person that did.”
“Now you’re talking.” He patted his coat. “They took away Big Blue, but I keep an extra.”
“I may be wrong about everything,” I said.
“There may be a fucking earthquake tomorrow, but that don’t keep me from getting up in the morning. I say let’s give it a try. Your idea makes sense to me. And if we bring him in, Arthur will have to swallow his tongue and enjoy it.”
“Remember, he’s got to be alive,” I said. “A dead man won’t do us any good.” I got you.
I reached into my desk and took out a small flashlight and a case of burglar tools.
“Like the old days,” Kelso beamed. “What you got under that windbreaker on such a hot night?”
“A white shirt,” I said, and he grinned.
I didn’t feel as optimistic as he did. I’d done some harebrained things in my life, but this was near the top.
I turned off the air conditioner and headed for the door.
“Let’s go.”
“I’m with you,” the old man vowed, then stopped and laid a big paw on my shoulder: “And, son …”
“Yes?”
“Thanks.”
The address was in an older neighborhood, the houses dating from the late fifties. Kelso drove slowly, cruising past the houses as I strained to read the numbers.
Which one they had raided was clear enough: There were still a couple of neighbors out front, and an unmarked car was at the curb.
“Fucked up,” Kelso chuckled. “Rousted a bunch of citizens. That’ll be in the paper tomorrow, for sure. See anything on the other side?”
“Yeah. I think we’re in luck. Take a right and park on the next street over.”
There’d been a FOR SALE sign on the house across the street. I wasn’t surprised.
We turned onto the cross street and then turned again. Kelso slid into the curb a couple of houses from the corner.
“We’ll have to find a way through the backyards,” I said.
I checked my watch. It was after two. All decent people should be asleep, but there are always a few insomniacs.
He motioned into the darkness and I followed. We moved slowly along the side of a house; I smelled sweet olive. A vagrant memory from childhood sprang up, and I was young again, playing war with my friends in Charleston. The memory was gone as quickly as it had come. There was a fence in front of us.
Kelso put out a hand to stay me. I knew what he was thinking.
Dogs.
He reached down and picked something up and tossed it into the yard. There was no movement in the darkness. I heard a door slam somewhere in the next block and tensed. Kelso shook the fence lightly. Still no response from inside.
He reached down and unhooked the gate latch.
I followed him in.
The darkness swallowed us, but I knew it was illusory: I’d spotted the floodlights on the corne
rs of the house. A flick of the switch from inside and we’d be bathed in daylight.
I listened to the grass crunch under our feet and hunched as I went, waiting for the animal to spring out of the night.
A finger of light stabbed out from in front of me and played on the shrubbery at the far fence line.
“Over here. We’re catercorner to the house we want,” Kelso whispered.
I followed the light, watching it bob and weave. We came to the border of monkey grass and stepped into the garden. Now I was assailed by the cloying sweetness of flowers; I felt them brush my legs as I stepped through them.
The flash fingered a fence in front of us and then searched overhead and found a tree limb, I knew what Kelso was thinking. He switched off the light, stuck a foot into the wire links, and pushed himself up, catching the branch with his right hand. He pulled, his feet clattering against the fence for a second and then coming down on the top bar. Then, with one hand holding the branch over his head for support, he reached his other hand down and pulled me up. I dropped onto the other side and a moment later he came down beside me.
We started forward again. The house we wanted now was on our left, one backyard away. We were still taking a big chance, because there might be a dog in this yard, but our luck held. The two yards were separated only by a row of hedge; we found an opening and ducked through.
Kelso pointed and I knew he was telling me this was the place.
He moved forward and I followed, feeling the high backyard grass brush my legs. The back porch was a screened affair, barely visible in the darkness.
His head leaned over toward mine and I felt his lips brush my ear.
“If he’s inside, he’ll be in one of the front rooms, looking out at the street. But there may be traps.”
I nodded. Something glinted in his hand; I heard a rending sound and knew he was cutting the screen. We would crawl through the hole he had cut and thus avoid the rickety wooden steps, whose sounds might give us away.
He bent back a patch of screen and then pulled himself up onto the porch. I followed, grabbing his hand, and when I’d gotten onto the boards, he leaned over and pulled the screen back to cover the hole he had made. At night it would be hard to see without a flash and it wasn’t likely Frake would risk that.
We went toward the back door on hands and knees. The porch smelled of dust and mildew and I fought the urge to sneeze. Kelso’s hand reached up and touched the door. The door moved.
Why had he left it unlocked?
Kelso pushed the door back enough to let us through and we crawled in, one at a time.
The door was unlocked and the hinges hadn’t made a sound. I smelled something wet and familiar and suddenly I had the answer to half the question: It was oil. Somebody had oiled the hinges.
The hair went up on the back of my neck.
We were in the kitchen. Something scampered away at our approach and a stale smell assailed me. Pent-up heat lapped at me as I moved, and I felt my clothes starting to stick to my body under my several layers of insulation.
Kelso was in the hallway now, moving toward a door that had to lead to a bedroom. I slid up against the kitchen doorway and drew my revolver, waiting. A second later he reappeared, still on hands and knees.
The house was a small one, two bedrooms from the looks of it. That left a bathroom, the master bedroom, and the living room.
I watched his form inch along the hall, toward the second doorway. A board squeaked loudly and I tensed. But after what seemed forever there was still no sound from any other part of the house. I sensed Kelso starting forward again.
He came out of the other bedroom and made his way into the bath. When he came out of it, there was only one room left.
I rose slowly as I sensed him coming to his feet, and tiptoed down the dark corridor toward the front.
For a long time we stood at the entrance to the hallway, listening for the sounds of breathing, but there was nothing. The lights across the street had gone out now, leaving only a thin glow from a street lamp to stripe the front half of the room.
I knew what he was thinking: It would be so much easier to flip on the lights and catch him unawares.
But the electricity was probably off, and even so, we couldn’t risk it with the police car outside. The last thing either one of us wanted was cops blundering in and adding confusion. There would be time for them when it was over.
He stooped again and started moving along one wall.
He was halfway there when he tripped on a glass and sent it rolling across the floor like a grenade.
I braced but there was no other sound. I heard him breathe then, a long sigh of relief, and his light flashed on.
Now we knew: The house was empty.
We settled down for the long wait. One of the front windows had a pane out and an occasional breeze stirred the hot air. I heard Kelso sigh and then everything was silent again.
It had been nothing but a hunch, but it had turned out right: Frake had been a master of escape, and according to the records he’d once misdirected an informant by giving him the address of the house across the street. I’d wondered if he were doing the same thing now; finding a vacant house across the street from the place the police had raided only lent confirmation.
And the smell of stale food told me someone had been staying here.
I wondered what the man across the room was thinking. Then I told myself not to worry about that, to worry about what was happening now, and what might happen in the next five seconds.
I’d been on ambush before. The smells had been different—the rich odor of green foliage and wet earth. In the clearings there was an umbrella of distant stars and in the forest itself the texture of night was deeper. But the principle was the same.
My clothes were wet all the way through now, and sweat was pouring down my face. I moved my hand to wipe away the perspiration and sensed a corresponding movement across the room.
I was getting careless; the wrong movement could get you killed.
I’d gone on five missions with a man named Nguyen before they told me he was suspected of being a VC agent. He disappeared shortly afterward. But I never forgot the nights squatting alone with him in the jungle, and how I might not have come back. Trust is a funny thing. But luck is even stranger.
For most of my time in ’Nam I’d been lucky. I hoped I’d be lucky again tonight. It wasn’t much to go on.
I sensed Kelso shift slightly. It had to be even tougher for him, an old man with aching joints.
I shut my eyes for a second and then opened them again. The dial of my watch said we’d been here less than half an hour. I began to wonder if he was coming.
Another quarter-hour passed and a mosquito found me, began to buzz around my head. I resisted the urge to reach up and swat it away.
Discipline.
I heard a noise somewhere outside.
A limb scraping against an eave. Except there was no wind tonight.
He was outside now.
I tensed, let my hand creep over to my pants, blot away the sweat from my palm, and then found the comforting cold steel of the revolver.
A board creaked.
He was on the back porch.
I came slowly to a squatting position, my back against the wall. I sensed a whisper of movement across the room and hoped Kelso had heard it, too.
A hot breath stirred against my face: Stale air from the back was being displaced by a foreign body.
Something brushed the wall in the hallway. My hand rose, pointing the gun toward the corridor.
Time froze. I wondered if he knew we were here. He was a hunter, and he knew, also, what it was like to be hunted. Could he smell us? Could he sense the difference in the darkness?
A faint hiss seeped out from the hallway.
He had sighed, ever so slightly.
A board creaked and at that moment he stepped into the room and for the first time I saw the outline of his body.
And he saw us.<
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CHAPTER 24
His flashlight stabbed on, pinning Kelso in its glare. Before Kelso could fire, a shot exploded from Frake’s direction and red sparks showered onto the floor. Kelso grunted and slumped back against the wall. I swore to myself and fired at the doorway. But I only had a .38, and if I hit him it didn’t stop him from turning toward me and blinding me with the beam.
He and I fired at the same time and I felt his bullet slam into my chest, knocking me back against the wall.
A third shot came from somewhere outside the room and I heard him grunt in pain. He wheeled toward the new assailant; I raised my revolver and slowly fired three shots, double action, at his outline.
His form seemed to deflate and I realized he had collapsed onto his knees, then toppled over. A second flashlight raked the room from the hallway.
“Micah?” It was Sandy’s voice.
I pushed myself to my feet, flinching from the pain.
She bent over Frake for a second and then straightened up.
“He’s dead. How are you?”
“Okay, thanks to the vest,” I said, rubbing my midsection where the Kevlar body armor had protected me.
“And the Chief?”
She flashed the light over to the corner.
Kelso slumped, eyes half-open, hand pressed over his shoulder.
“Bastard shot me,” he said in dismay. “How do you like that?”
I pried his hand away. There was a small, clean hole under the collarbone.
“I’m sorry, Chief.” I straightened and felt the shakes coming back. The cops outside had heard the shots and now they were banging on the door. Sandy went to let them in. I walked into the hallway, stepping over the body of the dead man, found the bathroom, and threw up.
They began by telling us we were in a lot of trouble, but by the middle of the next morning their attitude changed to one of quiet resentment. Sandy and I had shot a man and the case would go to the grand jury. But the other man had a gun and was wanted by half the world. We could be prosecuted for breaking and entering, but the case was an embarrassing one for the police on both sides of the river and they decided to let it drop. The D.A. in Jefferson was less obliging, but John O’Rourke called and put in a good word.
The Last Man to Die (The Micah Dunn Mysteries) Page 18