He pushed himself up on one arm and ran through the options. He would need to employ some freelance help now; too many in the Opposition were involved. He had a number for a Latino man who hired out the enforcers for his drug operation. For enough money, there would be no questions asked. He had to head west and mount an assault. He got up, cursing the frailties of his body.
He had to get out of there.
Because he hadn’t found the contractor yet.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Nver bring a knife to a gunfight.
Rule One of gunfights.
Ryan Sherlock wobbled toward me with the automatic grasped tightly in his fingers while Petey locked the door to the Emerald Isle Saloon.
I kept the pint of Guinness in my hand, trying to see a way out of the situation that didn’t involve violence.
Ryan stopped when he was three feet away and pointed the gun at my head. The lunchtime buzz had done a job on him. The muzzle wavered. His eyes were shiny like fresh dimes in the low light of the bar, feverish and watery with alcohol. Even in a smoky room, I could smell the whiskey on his breath.
“Why’re you asking after my cousin?” His words slurred.
“Put the gun down.” I took a sip of beer to show how nonchalant I was about the whole thing. “I think he might be in trouble.”
“And how convenient, you just happening to know this,” Petey said as he moved away from the door and stood by the jukebox. He was a string bean, all angles and bones and sinew, maybe five-five with a thin beard and freckled cheeks. He held his hands out, fists balled in a rough approximation of a boxer in the ring. Not exactly the way to do it in a bar fight, but I didn’t figure Petey knew better.
“We just want to be left alone.” Ryan shook the pistol at my nose, his face going maroon with anger. “But you country folk won’t leave us be.”
“I’m from Dallas.” I smiled, trying to defuse the situation. “That’s the big city, if you were wondering.”
Petey said something, a few words in a language I didn’t recognize. He took a couple of steps my way, hands still in a pugilist’s stance.
Ryan blew air out of his mouth in a whoosh, cheeks tight against his teeth. The look in his eyes was disturbingly familiar, the stony glare a man gets just before he lets the monster in his soul loose upon the world.
I tossed beer in his face and leaned into him at the same instant, my left hand grabbing his right, my thumb slipping behind the trigger.
He reacted instinctively and pulled back.
I surprised him and went his direction, ramming my forehead into his nose. The impact made a crunching sound.
He fell backward.
I held on to the gun but let him fall. Unfortunately, his index finger was tangled in the trigger guard. He screamed as his digit snapped.
The jukebox switched music. Willie Nelson gave way to the Rolling Stones. “Gimme Shelter.”
“What’s a yonk?” I said. Petey put his hands up, palms out, face pasty white. The bartender and the other customer were both staring at me wide-eyed.
“Aye, look at him.” Petey nodded toward where Ryan lay on the dirty floor. “Ya broke his nose, you did.”
“He called me a yonk.” I looked at the pistol. A Bersa, Brazilian made, .380-caliber. I flipped off the safety, racked the slide back, and saw a bullet in the chamber.
“You best be leaving,” Petey said.
I shot the jukebox. Mick’s singing stopped with a crash of glass and electronic components.
Petey went down on his knees, arms over his head.
“And why am I a country folk?”
Nobody answered.
I looked at Ryan huddled on the floor, moaning. The third customer was standing with his back pressed against the far wall, face ashen.
“A man came in last night,” the bartender said. “He was asking after the Toogoode brothers.”
“What did he look like?”
Ryan groaned.
“They’re good boys, the Toogoodes.” Petey licked his lips and looked at the injured man. “Hard workers.”
“They were contractors, right?”
“What do you mean, were?”
“One of them is dead,” I said quietly.
The bartender let out a loud sigh and placed his head in his hands.
“They’re my cousins,” Petey said. His eyes were flat, his tone hard.
“That mean they can’t die?”
“How do we know you didn’t kill him?”
“You don’t.” I looked at the bartender. “But it doesn’t make much sense, me coming in here after taking one of them out.”
Petey stared at me but didn’t say anything.
“The guy last night is stalking a woman in Dallas,” I said. “Terrorizing her and her daughter. Your cousins got in the way.”
Petey looked at the bartender and nodded once.
“He didn’t look like nothing,” the bartender said.
“Thanks. That’s a big help.” I pointed the gun at a row of bottles behind the bar, maybe four or five grand worth of alcohol.
“I’m trying to tell you.” The bartender raised one hand. “He was like a nobody, medium height, maybe a hundred and fifty pounds. Brown hair.”
“What was he wearing?”
“I…I don’t remember.”
“That’s not good enough.” I closed one eye and aimed at a bottle of Bushmills. The bullet would take out an entire row of hooch.
“Put the gun down, mister.” Petey jumped between the bottle and the muzzle of the .380. “Let’s you and me go outside and have a little chat.”
“Petey!” The bartender leaned against the bar, one arm outstretched. “Are you daft, man?”
“Probably so.” Petey moved to the front door and unlocked it.
“We’re gonna walk out together.” I stepped away from the bar, gun still in my hand.
“You killed my jukebox.” The bartender pointed to the machine, sparking and smoldering against the wall.
I shrugged and walked out, one hand on Petey’s elbow, the other holding the .380 pressed against my thigh.
Once outside, Petey yanked free of my grip and turned around. He didn’t say anything.
“You wanted to chat?” I stuck the gun in my back pocket.
“Leave us be.”
Two guys on Harleys throttled by. I waited until they had passed. “All I’m interested in is the guy who came in asking questions.”
Petey shook his head.
“I get him and I’ll leave you alone. You guys can go back to whatever it is you got going on.”
Petey closed his eyes.
“You’re one of those Travelers, aren’t you?” I pointed to the bar. “An Irish pub. Contractors. Supposed to be a bunch of you living together on the west side of town.”
Travelers were a close-knit, clannish group of people of Celtic origin, almost tribal. They originally made their living as tinsmiths and knife sharpeners, the trade giving them one of their better-known names, tinkers. In the United States, they’d branched out into home repair, especially roofing and resurfacing asphalt. They traveled to ply the trade, hence the name. Another reason was to avoid the legal fallout from some of the shoddy work performed. Most law enforcement officers I knew regarded them as being similar to Gypsies, that is, petty thieves and con artists, even though the Travelers were fair complected and bore no resemblance to the dark-skinned Roma.
“You don’t understand us, so don’t pretend.” He crossed his arms.
“I don’t care if you’re running a flimflam on the queen of England. I just want to find the guy that came in last night.”
“This is bad.” Petey chewed on his lip and stared at nothing. “Brings attention to us.”
I ejected the clip from the Bersa and removed the slide from the frame, then tossed all three pieces down a sewer grate.
“There’s a place near here.” He leaned against the wall by Bono’s nose. “He might have gone there.”
; CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Petey rode shotgun while I drove the VW, top still up and air-conditioning on high. He gave directions, zigzagging us across narrow residential streets in a more or less westerly direction. The houses in this section of Fort Worth were old and unkempt, yards filled with weeds, clapboard siding in need of fresh paint.
“What’s your name?” Petey said as we passed an El Camino resting on cinder blocks.
“Oswald.”
“And this woman you’re helping. Why?”
“She hired me to.” I slowed as a Hispanic man stooped with age pushed a wobbly ice cream cart across the street.
“So you’re like an investigator?”
I nodded.
We were both silent for a few blocks. Then Petey said, “You ever think about doing something different?”
“Only on days that end in y.”
“Ryan’s a hothead, just so you know.” Petey ignored my answer and stared out the window as the blighted core of Fort Worth, Texas, dribbled by. “He thinks all country folk are bad.”
“What’s a country folk?”
“You.” Petey turned and looked at me as if I weren’t getting a simple math problem. “An outsider.”
“I don’t get the country part.”
He sighed. “You have a country. Not like us.”
After fifteen minutes we came to a larger street, Las Vegas Trail. I stopped at the light.
“Turn right.” Petey pointed to the north.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll know when we get there.” He smoothed his hair back with one hand.
Ten minutes later I passed the city limit sign for White Settlement, a suburb on the western fringes of Fort Worth named long ago for the desired ethnicity of its population as opposed to the color of its buildings.
My navigator gave more directions, and pretty soon we were driving down a two-lane cul-de-sac, both sides of the street lined with pines and post oaks. At the end, a gate was partially open.
Petey hopped out of the VW, opened the chain-link gate wider, and motioned for me to enter.
I did so and found myself on the edge of a modest tract of land, maybe two acres, a small grove of live oaks in the middle, surrounded by a concrete street looping the entire property. To the right were six or eight houses, big and expensive-looking for this particular section of western Tarrant County, two-story brick structures with circular driveways surrounding fountains and outdoor statuary.
To the left was a series of driveways leading off the main street. At the end of each drive was a cluster of pipes sticking out of the ground. After a few moments, I figured out what they were: utility hookups for RVs.
But there were no Winnebagos or travel trailers parked there, just like there were no people anywhere.
Petey got back in the VW. “They’ve all gone.”
“Where do you live?”
“Not here.” His voice was tight.
The houses were gaudy, the paint on the trim a little too bright, the flowers a little too densely planted in colored plastic pots that flanked the front entrances ornate to the point of tacky.
“Oh sweet Mary.” Petey grabbed my arm. “Stop the car.”
He jumped out and ran away from the houses, toward a small cluster of trees and what looked like a vegetable garden.
I followed him. I passed a newish Ford Five Hundred parked underneath a live oak tree and stopped when I saw Petey kneeling beside the body of a woman.
She was dead. Her face was white and waxy except for the dark trail of blood across her forehead from the bullet hole.
Petey rocked back on his heels, face ashen. “That’s Theresa, Sean’s mother.”
I nodded but didn’t say anything.
“She’s my cousin.”
A spray bottle was on the ground a few feet from a small puddle of vomit covered with ants. Petey must have seen it at the same time. He jumped up.
“What the hell?” he said.
I looked at the dead woman. She’d dropped instantly from a bullet to the brain, too far away for the disgorged contents to be from her stomach. She could have tossed the bottle that far, or dropped it and vomited there only to die a few yards away, but her lips, a sickly purple now, were free of stomach debris.
“Did she …” Petey pointed at the puddle on the ground.
“I don’t think so.” I looked at the corpse and the Ford a few dozen feet away. “Our guy’s a pro, but he loses his lunch over this? That doesn’t make sense either.”
Petey seemed to notice the car for the first time. He got up, walked over to it, and stopped, waving a hand in front of his face. “Cripes, something stinks.”
I rattled the handle on the driver’s side. The car was locked, windows up, but the odor was strong and reminded me of what the woman would smell like in a day or so of Texas heat. I picked up a rock the size of my fist, busted the driver’s window, and popped the locks. I found the lever for the trunk by the front seat and pulled it.
The smell got infinitely worse. Petey covered his mouth with one hand. I tipped open the trunk with my foot and saw the bloated corpse there. Male. Age hard to determine. He’d been wearing a white dress shirt and tie, both of which were stained from the decomposition process. An open carton of what looked like pharmaceutical samples lay next to him. I slammed the trunk and jogged a few yards to get away from the smell.
“What the hell is going on?” Petey said.
“That makes three people this guy has taken out.” I took deep breaths through my mouth.
“Why?”
“Because your cousins saw him when he didn’t want to be seen. Now one of them is dead.”
“What do I do now?”
“Where’s your other cousin?”
Petey opened his mouth but didn’t say anything.
“My guess is that he can ID the shooter,” I said. “If I can get there first and find out what this guy looks like, your cousin might have a chance.”
Petey shook his head.
“Okay, then call him.”
The wind picked up, carrying with it the odor of rotting flesh.
“You don’t grasp the situation, do you?” Petey said.
“I’m trying to save a life or two; what’s so hard to understand about that?”
“You’re a yonk and country folk,” Petey sneered, “and we like to keep to our own. How many times do I gotta tell you?”
I rolled my shoulders and sighed. “You’re gonna have to trust—”
“Screw you, yonk.” A knife appeared in Petey’s hand.
He lunged, the blade aimed at my stomach.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Knife fighting was a skill that Petey had yet to master fully.
I sidestepped the thrust, grabbing his wrist with one hand, bringing the elbow from my free arm up to his mouth. The blow wasn’t hard, but it wasn’t soft either. I felt his teeth gouge into my flesh.
Petey yelped, dropped the knife, and fell to the ground next to the Ford.
I grabbed the front of his shirt and yanked him to his feet. He stood in front of me, wobbly, both hands pressed against his mouth, eyes as round as half-dollars, skin pasty white except on his chin where the fresh blood meandered down.
“Aye, Petey, there’ll be no kissing of the Blarney Stone for you tonight,” I said.
“Uggh.” His voice was muffled behind his hand.
“Here’s the deal.” I pulled harder on his shirt until our eyes were only inches apart. “There’s a pro on the loose, and he’s hurt or sick or something. That’s a very bad thing, kind of like a wounded lion you’d see on the Discovery Channel.”
“W-w-what do you want?”
“This should be review, but let’s go over it again.” I let go of the shirt and grabbed his neck. “Collin Toogoode.”
“No. Not a chance.” Petey shook his head. Blood from his lip splattered on my hand. “We don’t like outsiders messing in our affairs. It’s been this way for centuries.”
“Jaysus, would you let me think.” He began to shake as if he were cold.
I let go of him with a shove.
He stumbled a few feet and then ran, heading for the nearest house.
“Aw, nuts.” I kicked at the dirt before taking off after him.
He had about a thirty-foot head start. I was taller and faster and caught him when he got to the front door of a beige brick home with statues of Pluto and Dumbo in the front yard.
I dove and tackled him and together we fell into the door, knocking it open. I landed on a pink marble floor with Petey on top of me. The tile was cold and hard where it connected with my temple.
Petey jacked his elbow into my stomach. I curled into a ball for a moment, waiting for oxygen to return. When I had my breath, the entryway was empty.
“Petey?” I walked into the living room, wheezing. “Where the hell are you?”
No response.
The main living area of the house was decorated in neo-disco revival. White shag carpet. Maroon velour sectional sofas along two walls, bracketing an oval-shaped piece of smoked glass resting on a brass wagon wheel. The air smelled like cinnamon and vanilla and stale cigar smoke.
The highlight of the room was a picture of the pope.
On black velvet.
“Petey.” I cupped my hands and shouted toward the stairway. “I’m not leaving.”
A floorboard creaked upstairs.
I figured Petey was contained for the moment, so I did a quick search of the ground floor. A dining room with more white shag and smoked glass.
One bedroom with a waterbed and an orange, zebra-patterned comforter.
A kitchen with neon green cabinets.
One corner of the kitchen had been set up as a tiny office. Papers were scattered everywhere, some trampled on the floor. Since the rest of the place was clean and tidy, I started there.
I found current bills for electric service and water for A. Carroll, a payment due notice for a landline in the name of Carroll Remodeling, and not much else personalized other than catalogs for various mail order houses that specialized in gaudy clothes and cheap makeup.
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