Dead Connection

by Charlie Price

  He remembered that day at Vera’s. She was barely dressed, getting ready to come across to avoid a bust when little Freaky came out of his hole to protect his mother! It’s not like Billup was going to hurt her. He was just going to give her a slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am and be on his way, until the kid spoiled everything. Well, that little shit didn’t know who he was screwing with. Billup would teach him an all-time life lesson right now. Give him something to take to the bank in case he ever considered butting in again. Of Billup’s list, that goonie was probably the nearest and the least able to cause him more trouble.

  He looked around for a weapon, a tree limb or a piece of rebar. He was going to get some satisfaction. Start by erasing that stupid little zitbag. And then, maybe he’d go teach the mother a lesson about the cost of turning a person down. Two-bit slut. Get his rocks off one last time before the damn drug prison.

  He lurched toward his truck and had a moment of clarity. If he drove when he could hardly walk, he might get busted. Make things worse. He could walk to the cemetery from here. As he stood beside his truck, he had another thought. He had a weapon! His dad’s old .32 automatic under the seat of his pickup. There was a minute of indecision. Shoot the little shit or beat him to death? Maybe a little of both! People were going to pay. That much Billup knew.

  * * *

  Billup saw he had to climb a brushy hillside to reach the cemetery. He put the gun in his waistband and used shrubs and small trees to help him clamber up a game trail. When he got to the cemetery border, he crawled under the fence, took the gun out, and walked down toward the area where he had seen the kid before.

  He stumbled on the blacktop but caught himself before he hit the ground. He straightened up carefully and continued at a slower pace, making himself focus on his balance. The more purposefully he walked, the better he managed it.

  Down past the workshop, he could hear voices. He slowed even more and moved to the tree line beside the road. Maybe a quarter mile from the city street in front, he saw the kid. But there were people with him, standing around a grave. Talking. The geek, plus the caretaker and his daughter and a tall guy. What the hell?

  The tall guy was standing facing a marker. Billup watched as the man sat on his heels to examine the stone more closely and then grabbed hold of the marker with both hands.

  “Get away from there!” Billup didn’t mean that. He had meant to say get away from the kid.

  He was running at them with the pistol out in front of him.

  THE GUN AND THE SHOVEL

  Gates had his back to the gunshot. He turned to see a man running toward them with a pistol. The man slid to a stop about forty feet away, the pistol wavering in his hand but still pointed in their direction. Gates let go of the gravestone and fumbled at his waist for his gun. The holster was buttoned.

  The man steadied the gun with his other hand and sighted down the barrel. “Don’t!” he was yelling. “Don’t move!” Everybody froze.

  Though no longer advancing, the man was weaving slightly as he stood holding the pistol. When Gates put up his hands, away from his own gun belt, he reminded himself to be extra careful. He thought the man looked loaded, maybe high on meth.

  “Okay,” he said. “Take it easy. We’re not moving. You win.” Beside him, he heard Pearl gasp.

  “Murray!”

  “Don’t move!” the man screamed again.

  Gates looked where the Kiefer kid had been standing and saw him, instead, on the ground right at his feet. The boy was holding the side of his abdomen as if he could stop the blood from spilling down into the grass.

  The man with the pistol took a lurching step forward, then turned and ran back up the hill toward the workshop.

  Pearl rushed to Murray’s side. “Help him! Help him!” she was yelling.

  Gates tore the cell phone off his belt and pitched it to Janochek. He directed Pearl to put some pressure on Murray’s wound and see if she could slow the bleeding. He told Janochek to get 911 and call for backup and medical support. Then he took off after the shooter, unbuttoning his holster and pulling out his revolver as he sprinted up the road.

  He slowed as he got to the workshop area. He followed trees for cover until he reached the side of the building, and there he examined the door. No sign of forced entry. The door was closed and the screen was undamaged. Gates thought he would have heard the screen slam if the man had run inside. Besides, he didn’t think the guy would want to be trapped. Gates figured he was chasing a stoner who was operating on pure instinct. He couldn’t hear footsteps, but he guessed the guy was probably still running away full speed, heading either for the big parking lots by the rodeo arena or due south to Bluff Street and the Oakwood neighborhood.

  Since the guy had a gun, he probably had a car, too. Gates gambled on the parking lots surrounding the rodeo grounds and that wooded picnic area along the river, down to the new Cascade Museum. He thought the guy could be a stock handler from one of those temporary mobiles behind the stables.

  Gates ran carefully, gun ready. Two or three hundred yards up the blacktop, close to the top of the hill, he heard the man yelp and swear. Must have fallen, Gates thought, picking up his pace. As he crested the rise, Gates saw one of those burial buildings you could put a family in, some tall old-fashioned tombstones, and, behind them, a barbed-wire fence. When he reached the highest spot, where the road turned away to the north, he saw a piece of cloth waving from the top strand of a section of wire. Looked like the guy had torn his shirt in his haste to climb through. Gates jogged up to the cloth, put his hands on the wire, and leaned over to look down the slope.

  “Freeze!” came from behind him, back near the crypt. “Drop your gun!”

  Gates let his revolver fall from his hand. It hit the wire and bounced on the other side of the fence. Shit!

  “Don’t turn around!”

  “Easy. Easy now,” Gates said, still facing the slope. “I’m unarmed but there are cops on the way, so you better get out of here.”

  “Stop chasin’ me!” the man slurred.

  Gates could hear him moving steadily closer.

  “Give me the gun!”

  “I can’t,” Gates said. “It fell over the fence.”

  “Lie down!” The man was only a few feet away now.

  “Don’t do anything,” Gates told the man, getting down on his stomach, facing the fence. “I’m not gonna move. I can’t even identify you. Get out while you can!”

  “You bastard!” the guy said.

  Gates could feel the man practically standing over him. He wondered if he should make a move and try to take the man down. He wondered if the man was starting to pull the trigger.

  Whunk!

  Gates heard the thud of metal hitting bone and rolled away to see Janochek following through on a full baseball swing with a shovel. The man was falling forward, blood pouring out of the right side of his head. And then Janochek was diving on the guy, pinning his arms to his sides.

  As he hit the ground, the man squeezed the trigger again and screamed as blood flew out of his knee. Gates was rolling back to help trap the gun. Everybody was yelling, until Janochek finished the man’s fall by burying his shoulder in the man’s spine and knocking the breath out of him. Gates got ahold of the gun and it went off one last time before Gates forced it out of the man’s hand. For a moment, everything got still.

  Gates reached for his handcuffs, and worried as he did that Janochek might have been hit. He got to his knees, aware of the metallic scent of blood mixed with liquor fumes. He got the cuffs on the man, who had stopped struggling and was making eeping sounds, trying to get some air back in his lungs.

  When the cuffs were tightened, Janochek pushed himself up and immediately retrieved his shovel. He was breathing hard and his eyes were wild.

  “Don’t you…” His shoulders were heaving. “Don’t you ever shoot at my kids! Bring a gun into my cemetery!” Janochek was spitting as he threw the words at the man on the ground.

  Gates sto
od and added his hand to the shovel handle, in case Janochek needed the extra willpower to keep from caving the man’s head in. Gates and Janochek looked at each other for a minute and then Gates released the handle and went to retrieve his gun. Below, he could hear doors slamming, which probably meant backup had arrived.

  SUICIDE RISK

  Murray woke up in a pale green room on a narrow bed. A person, an older woman, was standing beside him talking to someone else.… His mother! He was foggy, but he could see she had on one of her thin dresses that showed her underwear. She was talking nonstop, and the older woman seemed to be trying to get a word in, trying to slow her down. He couldn’t follow their talk, except that the older woman was like a broken record: “You can’t be in here. This is pre-op. You can’t be—”

  Murray tuned them out. He was thinking about what Pearl had said back at the cemetery. She was wrong. He did not have pre-sensitivity or whatever she called it. He was crazy, pure and simple.

  And then somebody else came in and they wheeled him away.

  * * *

  Billup had been taken by separate ambulance to the same hospital and admitted for surgery to reattach his ear and reconstruct his knee. He would be under guard, with additional suicide precautions, until he could be transferred to a clinical holding cell at the jail. Who knew what he would do when he sobered up and realized what had happened?

  Back at the cemetery, Gates had read the man his rights. He asked him who he was, what he had been doing in the cemetery, and why he had attacked them. Gates got nothing but swearing in return.

  At the hospital, after staff stopped Billup’s bleeding and before the surgeon arrived, Gates was present when Drummond identified the man as Billup and began interrogating him about the Parker girl. Billup was still drunk. He seemed surprised, even confused by the inquiry. He refused to answer any questions at all and asked for a lawyer.

  The cemetery had been too chaotic to have a clear talk after Drummond arrived for the mop-up. Gates caught him in the emergency room after the interrogation, after Kiefer had gone into surgery. As far as Drummond was concerned, Billup was their new prime suspect for Parker, but the police didn’t have enough evidence to indict. Right now, they didn’t need to, because Billup was up on attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and a host of other charges. Along with the current charges, the possibility that he might be a flight risk and a suicide risk would keep him in jail, probably without bail, for the next few days, if not months.

  Drummond was frustrated about the motor-pool Ford. His partner had found out that the car had undergone three maintenance washings and vacuumings in the six weeks since the disappearance, and the preliminary examination they had just finished turned up nothing. He sent the car to the Department of Justice crime lab at the college.

  Together, sitting in uncomfortable plastic chairs, Drummond asked Gates what he had been doing in the cemetery in the first place.

  “Kids. False lead, I thought,” Gates said, “but now I’m not sure.”

  On his way out, Drummond assured Gates that they would get this guy. “Crime lab will come through,” Drummond said. “We’ll buttress up your eyewitness, and that asshole will plea-bargain the body location to stay away from death row. Just a matter of time.”

  Gates wasn’t so sure. If he himself had done it, he would stonewall till hell froze. It would be very, very difficult to get a conviction without the body. Reasonable doubt: Nikki Parker might have run off and could still be alive.

  He shook hands with Drummond and went to the cafeteria to look for coffee while the policeman went to the station to start on the written report. Gates would leave the hospital as soon as Kiefer was out of surgery if, and only if, the kid was going to be okay. He felt honor-bound to sit vigil for someone who had taken a bullet that he thought was meant for him.

  When Kiefer’s doctor gave him the thumbs-up, sometime around dawn, Gates dragged out to the parking lot and got in his pickup. On the drive home, he made a plan to see Robert tomorrow. He would tell him the guy in the car that he remembered seeing was now in jail, and he would renew his offer of a sundae. Bruce, too, if he wanted to come along.

  * * *

  Murray woke up again some time later. He was in bed in a room that was pretty dark, except for some small colored lights around him. Monitors. Someone was talking. He felt like he was underwater. He tuned it in the best he could. His mother. She was still motormouthing to somebody he couldn’t see.

  “… and then when I went to hear his Tuesday morning service, he was standing in the vestibule holding hands with that frizzy skank, Linda what’s-her-name, and acting all lovey-dovey, and so that’s when I said, ‘Frank Walton, you can kiss my ass.…’”

  Murray tuned her out and slid away to think about Blessed and how she used to sneak food she didn’t like from her dinner plate to her pockets so her dad would think she had eaten it all and let her leave the table. Sometimes she’d forget she’d done it, she told Murray, and her room would start stinking. And she’d have to figure out something else to cover that up. She reminded Murray a little of Pearl. Funny, clever, tough.

  * * *

  The next time he woke up, as far as he could tell, it was day, and the sky outside his window was gray. He could see rain streaking the glass. He turned his head.

  Janochek was sitting in an armchair on the other side of the tray table, near the foot of his bed; Pearl was in another chair, reading a book. Murray meant to say hi, but some garbled sound came out and both of them looked up.

  “Mr. Kiefer may have rejoined the living,” Janochek said, smiling and approaching the bed.

  “Well, if it isn’t old Wounded-in-Action.” Pearl was standing, too. “I hate to admit it,” she said, “but I was actually worried about you.”

  Murray tried to smile, but he stopped because his lips cracked.

  “Don’t try to talk,” Janochek said. “We’ll talk to you. But first let me get a nurse and tell her that you’re awake and apparently alert.”

  He left the room and Pearl stepped closer to Murray’s bed until she was against it. He wished she would hold his hand.

  Her dad came back with a nurse in a white uniform, who politely asked them to leave for a minute so she could talk to the patient and assist him. When they left, she turned down the covers and inspected a plastic tube.

  “Is your catheter bothering you?”

  Murray didn’t know what it was, so he guessed it wasn’t. He moved his head, no.

  “Can you speak?”

  He croaked a yes.

  “Do you remember being shot?” she asked, covering him up and touching him lightly on the shoulder as she looked into his eyes.

  He nodded.

  “The bullet entered your side and went out your back. It doesn’t seem to have hit anything vital, but we’re going to keep you here and watch you closely for the next couple of days or so. It may have grazed your kidney.

  “I don’t want you trying to get up. Anything you need, and I mean anything, you push this button here on your rail and one of us will come.” She showed him a small cigarette-lighter thing with a round light on the end. “Are we clear?”

  “Clear.”

  She stopped at the door. “It may not feel like it at this moment,” she said, “but you are very lucky.”

  CLAIRVOYANT?

  The day after Kiefer regained full consciousness, Gates paid him a visit. Janochek was sitting in the vinyl armchair at the far side of Kiefer’s bed. Janochek gestured toward the folding chair on the near side of the bed. Gates declined and approached the bedside.

  “Son, I am sorry you were injured. I’m also sorry that I was so hard on you in the cemetery, but finding the Parker girl is real important to me and, most of all, to her family. I came here hoping you would tell me the truth about what’s been going on at the cemetery.”

  The boy turned away from Gates and looked out the window. He appeared to want time to think. In the distance, an uneven line of haze topped th
e coastal range with scatters of thick clouds beyond, nearer the ocean. Gates got the sense that Kiefer was weighing the risk of his words.

  “It was just a hunch,” he said, turning back to face the law officer. “The date was such a coincidence and all.”

  Gates could feel the lack of connection with or trust from the boy. “What about what the girl said?” he asked, persisting.

  “Pearl?”

  Gates nodded. He could feel the boy being careful.

  “Uh, we’re kind of friends, spending a lot of time in the cemetery and all,” Kiefer said.

  Gates said nothing. Waited.

  Finally the boy offered more. “She thinks I … she has a lot of faith in my hunches. More than I do, probably. She’s only in ninth grade,” he explained.

  “Tell me about your hunches,” Gates said.

  The boy shifted his weight. Took another moment fiddling with the covers. “I sometimes try to imagine what the, uh, the person in the grave was like. Like how old they were when they died and what might have happened to them.”

  “I can understand that,” Gates said, sitting down in the metal chair next to the bed. “I sometimes do that myself at graveyards.”

  “Cemeteries,” Kiefer corrected.

  “Cemeteries,” Gates amended. “Have you ever been out to the beautiful one with all the colored paper decorations out by the Whiskeytown Dam?”

  Kiefer shook his head.

  “So what got you to thinking about the Parker girl and where she might be buried?”

  “Everybody’s been thinking about her.”

  “True,” Gates agreed, evenly. “But most people don’t have hunches about where she might be located.”

  “Well, I guess it’s just natural for me, it being a cemetery and all, and then the date being the same.”

  “I suppose,” Gates said, keeping his voice soft and his posture relaxed. “But again, not many people now, in December, can remember the exact day she disappeared without looking back in the paper. Most people would know middle of October, but not the seventeenth, for example.”