The Betrayers

by James Patrick Hunt

  The kid, whose name was Eddie Cunningham, gripped the steering wheel like he was hanging from it. He didn’t know if the man next to him had a gun on him now. He had seen Jimmy with guns before. In a storeroom at the back of a bar and grill, Eddie had once seen Jimmy stick a gun in a guy’s mouth. Eddie thought it was funny then. The guy with the gun in his mouth had gone double or nothing on a Lakers’ game, lost, and was tardy with the payment. The amount owed was eight hundred dollars—pocket money for them—but these guys were serious about having debts paid. Jimmy let the guy go so he could come back the next day with the money plus another hundred, apology money. Too bad; Eddie had never seen a guy get shot through the mouth.

  From the backseat, Dillon said, “Jimmy, relax, will ya? You’re makin’ it worse. Eddie, just drive like we’re going home from a ball game.”

  Eddie Cunningham slowed the car down for the next stop sign. They were still in a residential neighborhood, dark and tree lined. A narrow street with cars parked on the sides, the brick houses set close to each other.

  Dillon said, “That’s better.”

  Dillon looked into the rearview mirror. Nothing. He slipped the machine gun into a black leather bag. He closed the bag and slipped it behind his feet.

  Eddie made a right turn onto another neighborhood street, more stop signs. Just signs, but he was approaching them like they were checkpoints now. Slow and cautious. Finally they crept out of the residential area and turned north on Watson Road. Took that to Litzinger and went west on that until they reached 67. Eddie stopped at the light, waited for the traffic light, and turned north again. He drove above the speed limit, but made sure he was not going faster than the other cars. He blended in. Going home from a game.

  Jimmy Rizza lit a cigarette. Using the electric switch, he cracked the window. He held the cigarette in his right hand, resting his elbow on the armrest. The breeze caught the smoke and pulled it out of the car. No rain got in, but they could feel the cool and the moisture inside and hear the sounds of night traffic.

  Dillon said, “Feeling better now, Jimmy?”

  “Yeah. I’m okay now.”

  It was a joke between them. One time in a bar in Chicago, an off-duty state trooper had called Jimmy a mick—Jimmy’s mother was Irish—and Jimmy had exploded. Dillon pulled him out of the bar before he killed the trooper and got them all pinched. Once outside, Dillon and his friends had calmed Jimmy down, persuaded him that mick was a term of endearment. “Not from someone like him,” Jimmy said. A few minutes passed and Jimmy lit a cigarette and looked at the bar window and said, “Okay, I feel better now.” Making fun of himself, maybe.

  Now Dillon said, “You’re doing good, Eddie. Right, Jimmy?”

  In the front seat, Jimmy Rizza turned and looked at Eddie. “Yeah,” Jimmy said. “I’m sorry I yelled at ya. I got a bad temper. It’s nothin’ personal.”

  “It’s all right,” Eddie said.

  “It was those fuckin’ cops,” Jimmy said. “Got me all riled up.”

  Dillon said, “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Callin’ me ‘slick.’”

  After a moment in which no one spoke, Eddie said, “That ain’t right.”

  Thirty-five minutes later, Eddie wheeled the Pontiac into the parking lot of an abandoned racquetball club in Bridgeton. There were two other cars in the lot: a black Oldsmobile that, from a distance, looked similar to the Pontiac and a green two-door Jeep Cherokee. Eddie parked the Pontiac a few yards from the Olds.

  Jimmy looked at the Cherokee. “That your car?”

  “Yeah,” Eddie said.

  Jimmy threw his cigarette out the window, pressed the electric switch, and closed it.

  Jimmy said, “You weren’t supposed to park it here. You were supposed to park it someplace away from here and walk to it.”

  “It was raining when I got here,” Eddie said.

  In the backseat, Mike Dillon took a .22 revolver from his jacket pocket, put it to the back of Eddie’s head, and pulled the trigger. Eddie slumped forward and Dillon put another four bullets into his head.

  Dillon said, “Help me put him in the trunk, uh?”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy said. “You got shovels?”

  “In the Olds.” Dillon sighed. The mist was still with them. Dillon considered himself. He was in good shape; he still worked out with weights, watched what he ate, avoided second helpings. At fifty, he still had the flat stomach he’d had when he was a twenty-five-year-old prison inmate. Still strong, but fifty now, and he could feel it in his legs and back when he got out of bed in the morning.

  “Well,” Dillon said, “at least the ground will be soft.”

  THREE

  In the same hour that the two policemen were murdered, two other police officers were in a room in Barnes-Jewish Hospital. One of them, George Hastings, sat in a visitor’s chair reading a People magazine; the other, Joseph Klosterman, lay in the bed, recuperating from surgery. Both of them were homicide detectives for the St. Louis police department; Hastings, a lieutenant, Klosterman, his sergeant.

  On many levels, they were quite different men. Klosterman was big in the chest and shoulders and he wore a thick mustache. Because he was a detective, he had not worn a uniform in years. But anyone looking at him would guess that he was a policeman. Which was fine with Klosterman. A policeman was all he had ever really wanted to be. He was raised in a cop family. Dad, uncles, cousins—there were many Klostermans in law enforcement. He liked to tell jokes and stories … liked performing. His bearing and common use of the standard cop profanity—turd, douche, fucker, and motherfucker—belied his absolute devotion to his wife and children. People who knew him well noticed that Joe Klosterman never used the vulgar language in front of his wife or children and he was a regular churchgoer. This dichotomy is not uncommon with policemen or soldiers. He was in his middle thirties, but he looked older.

  George Hastings, in contrast, was quiet by nature. A good listener, which is important for a detective. He was thinner and shorter than the sergeant and he had never worn a mustache. Unlike Joe and most of the other detectives on their squad, Hastings did not take much of an interest in sports. He did not keep track of how many games the Rams won and lost. But it was Hastings who had the athletic background. He had once been a promising baseball player and had attended Saint Louis University on a full athletic scholarship. A knee injury in his last year of college had put an end to any real thought of a professional baseball career and when he graduated with a degree in something called communications, he found he was without any serious prospects. He did know that he did not want to return to Nebraska and work in a meatpacking plant.

  So he tended bar at a place called Jack Taylor’s, one of the West County clubs with an eighteen-month shelf life where the owners never paid taxes and didn’t like customers who asked a lot of questions. The job wasn’t bad. It was a great way to meet girls and the money was okay in the short term. But it was unsatisfying work. He didn’t enjoy making small talk with the customers and he was particularly depressed by the notion of becoming the proverbial ex-jock bartender. You could only stretch the game so far.

  One day, Hastings arrived at the bar to find that it had been robbed. Money had been removed from the safe and from other places he didn’t know about. He was interviewed by a detective about the robbery. It turned out the detective was from Omaha. The two of them talked about a Nebraska-Oklahoma game they both had seen that pissed them off and their mutual admiration for coach Tom Osborne before the detective, with some apparent reluctance, moved onto questions about the break-in. After the questions, the detective looked around to see if anyone was listening, then lowered his voice before speaking again.

  He said, “You seem like an all right guy, unlike most of the turds associated with this place. So I’m gonna tell you something and I want you to listen real close: it’s really not a good idea for you to be working here.” The detective looked at Hastings then in a way that left no doubt that the owners of Jack Taylor’s were into s
ome dirty shit. Hastings did not follow up with any questions of his own, but the look on the detective’s face scared him enough that he resigned the next day. He took care not to offend Jack when he did it, because Jack had always been good to him. Hastings had wanted to quit sooner or later anyway and he did not think he was going to get a better sign that the time was right than the expression on that detective’s face.

  A few months after he quit, Jack Taylor was arrested and charged with a litany of crimes including but not limited to drug trafficking.

  Then a couple of months after that, Hastings ran into the detective. They were standing in line at the Kenrick movie theater, Hastings with a date, waiting to see a movie. Weird. The detective seemed different in that setting; standing with his wife, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, looking like a high school coach. Hastings thanked him for what he had done and the two ended up talking about police work in general. Hastings expressed an interest in it, particularly that sort of police work where you got to use your head. The detective said, “You understand that you don’t get to be a detective right away. You have to put years in on the street, on patrol. And even after years of that, there’s no guarantee.”

  Hastings said he understood that and the next week, took the entrance exam.

  That was sixteen years ago.

  A lot had happened since then: marriage, a moderately successful career at the Department, fatherhood, divorce.

  Hastings was thirty-nine now, older than Klosterman. It was the younger policeman who was now in the hospital bed, looking older and frightfully thin. They had removed a tumor the size of a softball from Klosterman’s stomach and then afterward told him it was benign. For several days up till then, Klosterman had believed he was going to die.

  Klosterman said, “The doctor says I should be back to work in four to six weeks.”

  Hastings thought, yeah, maybe. And with about forty pounds back on. Jesus, Klosterman was thin. Hastings had been scared too and hoped he had succeeded in hiding his fear. He said, “That’s great news. The sooner you get back, the sooner I can get rid of your replacement.”

  The replacement was Sergeant Robert Cain. And Hastings truly did not like him. But he wanted to lift Joe’s spirits too, showing no doubt that he would be back.

  Klosterman said, “You holding up all right?”

  “What?” Hastings said. “You mean the divorce?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, I’m all right. Eileen agreed to joint custody.”

  “Yeah?” Klosterman seemed unsure. He and his wife had never liked Eileen Hastings, had always suspected that she would leave George for another man—another man with a hell of a lot more money—which is exactly what she did. But they also knew that George had genuinely loved her, for reasons they could not comprehend, and would not heal anytime soon.

  “Hey,” Hastings said, “you’re the one in the fucking hospital.”

  “Yeah, I know. But Annie worries about you.”

  “Well, tell her not to worry. Eileen could have fought me on custody of Amy and she didn’t.”

  Still defending her, Klosterman thought. Well, it was what it was. He said, “But you adopted Amy.”

  Hastings said, “Of course I did.” And Klosterman decided to let it drop.

  Hastings looked out the window at the hotel across the street. At the intersection of Forest Park Parkway and Kingshighway below, cars were descending down a small tunnel underneath the boulevard and coming out the other side into Forest Park. The cars’ headlights cut fuzzy beams into the nighttime mist.

  Klosterman said, “Christ, I’m depressed.”

  “It’s natural,” Hastings said.

  “What?”

  “It’s natural. When you have a death scare, you get depressed about it. Didn’t your doctor talk to you about it?”

  “Maybe,” Klosterman said. “I don’t remember. You’d think I’d be used to it. Death, I mean. Because of the work.”

  “It’s not your death you investigate.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “You having second thoughts?”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. About coming back to work?”

  “Coming back to work?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “No, you’re not having second thoughts?”

  “I am not having second thoughts,” Klosterman said. “I look forward to coming back to work.”

  Hastings felt a modicum of shame. It had been a selfish line of questioning on his part. Joe Klosterman was one of the few friends he had; it made work easier. Hastings had no plans to resign if Klosterman did not come back, but his absence would change his perspective about the job. It would make the drive to work longer. He felt relieved to get confirmation. Having received it, he gave his attention back to the pretty people in colorful magazine photos. Television stars posing with movie stars at a charity event in Malibu, each subspecies seeking something from the other.

  Klosterman said, “I feel like a coward.”

  Hastings looked up from a photo of Jennifer Lopez’s tight bottom. He shook his head.

  Hastings said, “Why?”

  “I just didn’t think I’d feel so afraid.”

  “Well, you thought you were dying. I’d’ve been scared too.”

  “I don’t think you would’ve.”

  “Yeah, I would’ve.” Hastings stood up. “Listen,” he said, “you need to get over these am-I-a-pussy issues. No one thinks that. You hear me?”

  “Yeah, I hear you.”

  “You want to talk to a counselor?”

  “Fuck, no.”

  Hastings hesitated. He wanted to leave and felt ashamed for it. But he wondered if he was embarrassing the man, hanging around. He said, “You want to watch television?”

  Klosterman smiled and shook his head.

  “George, get out of here.”

  Hastings took the elevator to the hospital lobby. Walked past a night janitor mopping the floor and out to the parking lot. Once outside, he could hear the sounds of traffic on I-64 nearby, a sound that gave him some respite from the gloom. He liked the city. He still remembered coming to St. Louis for the first time, seeing the arena that was close to Barnes Hospital that was then called the “Checkerdome” and thinking it was the biggest sale barn he had ever seen. He’d been a farmboy then, waiting for the Midnight Cowboy theme music to cue up as he walked city streets, wanting to go where the weather suits my clo-oh-othes. But the feeling of being an outsider soon passed. People from home thought it strange that he adapted so quickly to it, but he did.

  He walked to a chocolate brown 1987 Jaguar XJ6. It was his police unit, the product of a seizure made pursuant to the RICO Act, which the Department had given to his homicide division. The previous owner had replaced the British six-cylinder engine with a Corvette V8. It was a fast car and it made a beautiful burble even when it idled.

  Hastings had just unlocked it when his cell phone rang.

  He answered it and said, “Yeah?”

  “George. It’s Karen.”

  Karen Brady, his captain and supervisor.

  “Hey, what’s up?”

  “Have you heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “Two county deputies were shot to death on Manchester Road. Machine-gunned.”

  If she had just said “shot,” perhaps it wouldn’t have stopped him so. It happened every couple of years or so; shots fired, officer down. But she hadn’t just said “shot”; she’d said “machine-gunned.” It suggested, perhaps irrationally, something worse. A societal breakdown, when they were using machine guns. Perhaps too deliberate, too savage.

  Hastings said, “Jesus Christ. When?”

  “Within the past thirty minutes.”

  “Is it our district?”

  “It’s close enough for the chief,” she said. “Bobby Cain is already there.”

  Hastings said, “Why?”

  “I don’t know. He sai
d the chief called him … George, I don’t know.”

  “Ohfff—” George bit off the word before saying it aloud. He liked Karen, but past experiences had taught him that he could not entirely trust her. Certainly not to the degree that he was comfortable telling her what he thought of Bobby Cain. Hastings said, “Don’t you think he should have cleared that with me first?”

  “Yeah, maybe. But he said the chief of detectives advised him of it and …” She trailed off. Hastings realized she had not even spoken to the chief of detectives about it, but she would not question Bobby Cain because she was aware of his influence and she was afraid of him. Afraid of a twenty-six-year-old punk two ranks below her. Jesus.

  Hastings said, “So you want me out there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Tell me where it is.”

  She told him and he said he’d get in touch with her later. Karen said, “Well, tomorrow will be all right.”

  And Hastings thought, well, yeah, for you, you lazy shit. But again he kept his mouth shut.

  He started the car and let the engine idle as he dialed a number.

  “H’lo.”

  “Howard. It’s George. There’s been a murder. Two murders, two … St. Louis County deputies machine-gunned.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. I think it may be out of city limits, near Rock Hill maybe. But Karen’s sending us in. I need you there.”

  Detective Howard Rhodes said, “Okay. Where is it?”

  “The intersection of Manchester and Bryant Place. That’s Place, not Avenue. Close to Somerset Lumber.”

  “Got it.”

  “Hey,” Hastings said, “do me a favor and call Murph. I’ll need both of you.”

  “Done.”

  Hastings clicked off, dialed another number. He put the Jag into gear and drove to where the parking lot exited onto Kingshighway. He felt relief when he heard the man’s voice.

  “Bailey.”

  “Jeff, it’s George Hastings. Listen, I need you.”

  “Is it about the two deputies?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, I just saw it on television. God.” Jeff Bailey said, “You’ve been assigned?”