‘Looking around your office,’ Sarah said, ‘I’d say you have more than enough to do.’
Amanda raised an ironic eyebrow and said, ‘You think?’
‘You print all the weekly schedules?’ Amanda nodded. ‘And the menus?’ Amanda put a thumb up. ‘How often do they change?’
‘Once a season. But the busiest part of the job here is the correspondence with prospective customers. We do a lot of outreach to selected lists, and we’re quite aggressive in our follow-up after tours. Letitia does the phoning and conducts the tours but I do most of the letter-writing.’
‘Yet despite this busy schedule you manage to take a personal day when you need it?’
‘We get four a year with pay. Anything more has to be negotiated.’
‘I see. So now tell me, Amanda – did you or did you not come to work here yesterday morning?’
Amanda cocked her head sideways, regarded Sarah with a mildly humorous expression and said, ‘That’s a funny question to get confrontational about.’
Sarah waited, and after a few seconds Amanda said, ‘Yes, I did.’
‘But you left soon after you arrived?’
‘That’s right. Because Letitia was having a problem about some records and soon after I got to work she sent me to straighten it out.’
‘Sent you where?’
‘Um, actually I went home and made phone calls from there.’
‘Why? Does the phone work better from your place?’ When Amanda merely shrugged, Sarah continued, ‘And why did I get two different stories about where you were? Letitia said you were taking a personal day, but Patsy said she talked to you in the morning but couldn’t find you later.’ Sarah looked at Amanda sternly over her glasses. ‘Were you just hiding out at your place so I couldn’t find you while I chased my tail around Ricky’s no-good driver’s license for a few hours?’
Amanda blinked thoughtfully for a few seconds and finally said, ‘If you’ve got the whole thing figured out, why are you ragging on me about it? I was just following orders.’ Far from apologetic, she actually looked annoyed.
‘I was just doing my job too,’ Sarah said. ‘The difference is I was trying to find the truth, and you and your manager were doing your best to cover it up. Is that the understanding you have with her – whatever lie she wants to tell, you’ll swear to it?’
‘Oh, now, come on, that’s putting it pretty strong. Letitia got wrong-footed by that expired license and I didn’t think it was any crime to give her some help to get to the bottom of it.’ The dimple had disappeared and Amanda’s warm brown eyes had turned cold and hostile.
Sarah’s phone chirped. For a second she thought about letting it go to messages – a cute cuddle-bunny who was also the company drudge, who demonstrated a lively sense of irony but expressed unstinting loyalty to her superior – this was not an interview you wanted to interrupt. But she couldn’t resist a peek at the text message. It was from Bogey and read, ‘Call ASAP got new puzzle.’
‘Gotta take this,’ Sarah said, and stepped into the hall punching buttons.
In the middle of the first ring, he said, ‘Boganicevic,’ somehow contriving to make it sound short.
Sarah said, ‘’Sup?’
‘Remember the dashboard that we didn’t touch when we first walked into this van?’
‘Sure. Because it was covered with blood and fingerprints that the techs were still sampling.’
‘Yes. And then we found the money and it kind of blew everything else out of the water. But Banjo got the vehicle connected to a power source a few minutes ago, so I quick-powered up my tablet which was almost out of juice. Fooling around the console made me realize I’d never looked in the glove compartment, so I did that. Took everything out, and there behind all the documents was one of those little plug-in things …’
‘A thumb drive?’
‘Yeah, that. Just now I plugged it in and read what’s on it. As much as I could. The top line says 2459 West, the middle two lines look like nicknames for street drugs, and the bottom line is just four numbers, eight four zero zero.’
‘Well … the top one sounds like an address, doesn’t it? But on which street?’
‘Don’t know. What I noticed is the bottom number is the same amount as the money we found in the jacket yesterday.’
‘It’s a dead drop,’ Sarah said in Delaney’s office later. ‘Must be.’ She had driven to the impound yard, read the message with Bogey, and called her superior. Delaney said yes, bring it in right away.
She walked in without a word, handed him the thumb drive and watched as the message scrolled out on his monitor.
Four lines here:
2459 West
Shine 24
Snow 48
8400
Now she faced him across his desk, talking fast. ‘The middle two lines are street nicknames for popular drugs. I checked with our undercover unit and they say shine is probably fentanyl mixed with some useless substance like baking powder, and snow is likely cocaine. The numbers to the right of the formulas appear to be confirmation of the number of pills, or however they’re expressing doses. And the bottom line, of course, is a price quote.’
‘It does look like it, doesn’t it?’ He fiddled while he thought – rubbed his hands together, pulled on his ears. ‘But – why the thumb drive, do you think? So risky, easy to lose …’
‘But totally off the grid. You get the message, you wipe it, it’s gone. Off the planet, like it never existed. Unlike an email or a text, there is nothing left to be traced.’
‘That’s the good news and the bad news, isn’t it? Slick but risky. Lose the message before you’ve memorized it, it’s gone forever.’ He tapped his nose a while. ‘Tell me how you think this one works.’
‘The buyer leaves one of these thumb drives at an agreed location with the order on it – he must be the middleman who’s buying for the members in this little club. The device gets picked up by the usual driver of the Fairweather van, who’s got this side job working for the seller. A day or two later, maybe at the same place, maybe not, he leaves confirmation that the order’s being filled – just like Land’s End, you know? I think that’s what we’re looking at here. You see it includes the location for the delivery and the cost.’
‘Ah,’ Delaney said, and did his thoughtful dry wash. He’s beginning to enjoy this case. Something different for once, more fun than discipline reports and budget overruns. ‘So then the buyer picks up the product at the agreed spot, and the price gets paid in cash …’
‘To the driver’s jacket pocket, that’s where we found it. Sweet hiding place, huh? Kind of like The Purloined Letter.’
‘The what?’
‘In school, remember? Edgar Allan Poe.’
He shook his head.
‘The letter was in plain sight,’ Sarah reminded him, ‘in such an obvious place that nobody looked at it.’
‘Oh, yeah.’ He laughed. ‘I remember complaining to my mother, “Why do I have to read this dumb story?” It’s so far-fetched, I said, it could never happen. But here it is, you say, working just fine. Until now.’
‘Because this time the usual driver got hit in traffic and landed in a hospital bed. Which threw a monkey wrench in the works, big time.’ Sarah stared at the message a minute, thinking it through. ‘Because nobody delivered the goodies. So the company goons came out to set things straight.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Delaney tapped out a march on his sunburned nose while he thought, and finally said, ‘Right there’s where I begin to question your theory.’
‘Because?’
‘What Ollie said. It’s too much firepower chasing too few dollars. It seems to me you’ve got two different stories here and they don’t fit together.’
‘Well … maybe. But right now I’m worried about the first part of the story. Because like it or not, there’s a dead man in the morgue, a car full of shooters still at large, and the man they must have been after is just waking up at St. Mary’s.’
&nbs
p; ‘I hear you. And that usual driver – what’s his name?’
‘DeShawn Williams.’
‘OK. I guess he’s not likely to escape for a while but we need to get him identified as a suspect and in custody right away. So you get on the phone quick before the Court House closes, and get a warrant for his arrest.’
‘But if he’s under arrest we’ll have to put a guard on his room, won’t we?’
‘Yes. Conscious or not, if he’s under arrest he’s got to be under guard. And it might take a couple of days to get him into the hospital ward at the prison, so we’re going to have to pop for twenty-four-hour guards for a while. Damn, this late in the day – I hope the chief’s still here. While he’s putting the guard squad together I’ll put the arm on one of our guys to cover the interim, and he can be your backup when you serve the warrant. Who’s around that can take an all-nighter without squeaking?’
‘Jason Peete,’ Sarah said. ‘He’s between girlfriends, he always wants the money and he has energy to burn.’
‘Good. Let’s get at it.’
Jason was a fresh eye on the Fairweather Farms case – fresh on the case, that is, otherwise somewhat worse for wear. He had spent the last two days buried, literally, in the bermed storage unit of a big house in the foothills of Oro Valley, where a bloody murder-suicide had ended the apparent happiness of the owners. All the horrified neighbors and family members he interviewed assured him they had never known a happier couple.
‘Please let me drive,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a head full of ugly pictures I need to blow off. Rush hour traffic in Tucson should be just the ticket.’
‘Fine by me,’ Sarah said. ‘Knock yourself out.’ After thirteen years in the department, she had pretty well worn down the rough edges of resentful male colleagues, so she no longer insisted on driving her own car when she was primary on the case. And Jason was a buddy – they had developed rapport in the course of several shared cases. He hadn’t heard any details about the Fairweather Farms shooting, so this was the chance they needed to get on the same page. She relaxed in the passenger seat and let him deal with the motorized barbarians on I-10 while she filled him in.
He loved the story about the company van that nearly killed the gardeners, and the fantastic chance of the driver getting shot and losing control just in time to bury the corporate vehicle in its own garage door.
‘God, you can’t make this stuff up, can you?’ he said. ‘But how come we’re serving the warrant on the guy who wasn’t there?’
She told him about the money.
Jason said, ‘Aahhh,’ and nodded his shaven head contentedly. Money made it all add up – or it would soon. The crazy chase and the van stuck in the garage door were not so flat-out looney if money was at stake. All of Sarah’s fellow officers could cite casework showing that when it came to crime, money was almost as big a motivator as love.
On the second floor at St. Mary’s they went to the nurses’ station, where Sarah was pleased to learn that Judy, the unsinkable head nurse she had met here before, was on duty and would answer a page. Stoic as always but keenly attuned to the suffering all around her, Judy guided them down two long halls toward the room where DeShawn was waking up.
During the walk Sarah explained the warrant she was about to serve, and her need to place the patient under arrest. Judy agreed to help communicate with the patient if he seemed strong enough to respond without jeopardizing his health.
‘But you understand my first responsibility is to the patient,’ she said, as they walked through the big double doors into the Intensive Care Unit.
‘Of course,’ Sarah said. ‘And mine is to the safety of the community, so we have to try to fit—’ She stopped talking because Judy had abandoned her in mid-sentence.
Inexplicably, Judy had grown the bristling look of a junkyard dog and was walking quickly toward a thin young man in scrubs, who as far as Sarah could see was blamelessly pushing an empty wheelchair into a room three doors away.
‘What are you doing?’ Judy asked him. ‘I didn’t order that.’ She reached the blue-clad attendant while he was still in the doorway, peered into his face and demanded, ‘Who are you? What are you doing on this floor?’
He swiveled the chair and pushed it hard into her, knocking her down. He looked around, saw the two detectives staring at him, and in one fluid motion he released the chair and turned to run. But Jason had pulled his taser off his hip, stepped forward to get a clear field of fire and shot the stranger in the chest as he turned.
The jolt threw him writhing to the floor, yelling in pain. As he went down, just before Jason jumped on top of him, Sarah noticed that his arms were covered with crude and violent tattoos. An orderly with jailhouse tats? He landed near Judy, who was struggling to rise.
‘Judy, stay down,’ Sarah said, not too loud because this was a hospital, but urgently because another man in dark blue scrubs was coming out of the room the wheelchair man had been going into. He had his right hand in his pocket.
Sarah just had time to wonder what’s he got in his pocket? when he pulled it out. He twirled something that gleamed in the light and looked like a shiny snake, or – then his hand stopped moving and the snake became a knife.
Jason was on Sarah’s left, busy cuffing the man on the floor, who was resisting, rolling around. Judy was on her knees between Sarah and the man with the knife. He was big and well-built, moving straight toward Jason, who was too busy to think about his unprotected back. Judy must not have heard Sarah’s warning. She was getting up in between Sarah and the moving man. There was no clear field of fire for a taser shot and no room here for mace. Sarah had her Glock in her hand in one smooth second and she said, ‘Put the knife down now or you’re dead.’
He turned sharply toward her voice. She wasn’t wearing a uniform, so the weapon surprised him. Sarah watched him hesitate, stop moving for a second with both hands in the air in front of him, his dark eyes shining and his thin-lipped mouth open, sucking air.
His partner was on the floor squealing like a pig, saying Jason was killing him, kneeling on his legs like that. The knifeman ignored the two men struggling on the floor and kicked Judy aside. She fell flat with a grunt and rolled away, and her assailant strode through the cleared space toward Sarah.
‘Drop the knife now!’ Sarah made her voice mean and sharp, hoping to startle him into rationality. But as she watched his eyes and his hands, she saw in a despairing instant that the macho arrogance he wore like armor was leading him to make the wrong decision. He grew a smirk that said, What the hell, she’s a woman, she’s not gonna shoot.
He lunged with the knife in both hands, the blade coming down at her taut and shiny, and she pulled the trigger.
SIX
Tuesday–Wednesday
The roar of the shot in the confined space made her deaf. She felt in her gut what she could barely hear – shock waves echoing down the hall.
The bullet hit her attacker in mid-leap, and in one incredible mini-second she saw the light go out of his eyes. The force of the point-blank shot blew him over backwards. It knocked the knife out of his hand, too, and the gleaming blade nicked her forearm and kneecap, going down. He landed with a smacking thud and lay motionless, his feet six inches in front of hers.
Sarah felt vertigo for a terrible few seconds, and willed herself to stay erect. When the world stopped whirling, she stepped forward and crouched by his chest, feeling behind his ear for a pulse.
Nothing. She stood up, drew a shuddering breath, and watched bright red drops of her own blood fall on the dead man’s face. That was the image that stayed with her – his pale face of no obvious ethnicity, growing younger as the contempt went out of his features and her blood spattered on his softening cheeks.
For the first time, she noticed his pale hair, tightly curled in short dreadlocks. Odd, she thought, you don’t see many blondes in dreads. He seemed to grow younger as she looked. God, he’s really just a boy.
Then Judy was beside her with a s
tethoscope slung around her neck, saying, ‘Here, let me see …’ in a strange muffled voice Sarah could barely hear. Sarah pointed at the man on the floor and said, ‘I checked, I couldn’t find …’ and Judy said, ‘What?’ Both deafened by the shot, they stared at each other, each shocked by the faint surreal voice they were hearing.
Judy crouched over the body on the floor, listened to her stethoscope a few seconds, shook her head and said, ‘He’s gone.’ She stood up, yelped at sudden pain, said, ‘Oh, my hip,’ and stood rubbing it. Then her eyes fastened on the blood dripping off Sarah and she said, ‘Let me fix your cuts.’ Sarah felt a cool swab on her wrist and knee, the brief sting as it penetrated the wounds and then bandages going on.
Jason propped his still-protesting prisoner against the wall and began talking to him. Sarah vaguely heard him say, ‘Quiet down now, this is a hospital. What’s your name?’
‘Ow, ow, you hurt my legs.’ His prisoner made a tragic face. ‘Gimme something for the pain.’
‘Your legs are all right; they’ll stop hurting soon. What’s your name?’ But the man began to mumble and then lapsed, or pretended to, into a semi-conscious state. Jason abandoned the effort to identify him, stood up, and asked Sarah, ‘You OK?’
‘Yeah.’ She pointed to her ears. ‘Deaf.’ Then she said, ‘Better call Delaney,’ and began patting her pockets, forgetting she’d put her phone in her day pack.
‘I’ll do it,’ Jason said. ‘Jeez, I’m almost deaf too. Damn Glock sounded like a cannon in here, didn’t it?’ He looked down at the body on the floor as he dialed, and then back at his prisoner, who was slumping toward the floor. ‘What the fuck did we walk into here? Who are these guys, do you know?’
‘No idea.’ She slapped her forehead as a terrible thought struck. ‘God, I hope this guy didn’t use that knife on the driver we came to—’ But Jason was already talking softly into his phone.
Turning, Sarah saw that Judy had just remembered her patient too. She had left off rubbing her hip to hobble, groaning, toward Room 278. Sarah faintly heard her asking, ‘DeShawn? Did that man cut you, or just rip out all your … Oh, dear, he made a real mess, didn’t he? Let me get some help in here and we’ll fix you up.’
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