by Bruce Most
“You really want to protect this slime ball?” I said.
Kane fell silent as Fitch retched up more of his stomach and struggled to sit up.
I turned my attention back to the PO. “Why kill Raschke? He must have been glad you took my partner out of the picture. He wouldn’t have talked.”
“Maybe,” he said, still trying to get his breath back. “But you showed up in my office asking questions. Then you ended up on his doorstep asking about your partner and Amache. That got him real scared.”
“So you blew him up. With a bomb you learned how to build from a parolee of yours.”
Fitch glanced sharply at me.
“That was one of the things that tipped me to you,” I said. “The first day I met you, you complained about one of your parolees going on and on about making bombs. A bomb fit Kane’s public claims that Raschke was planning to blow up schools.”
I never much liked Raschke, not a wife-beater commie like him. Yet I liked even less the discovery that my investigation signed his death sentence.
I turned away and paced the tiny room. Both men watched me, both afraid what I might do next. Suddenly I stopped and asked one of the most unanswered questions on my mind. “How did you get Benedict to come to the pawnshop? He expected someone to be there. Was it you?”
I’d long sensed Benedict knew his killer. But why would he enter the pawnshop if he knew his blackmailer was there?
A smirk spread across the parole officer’s face. “I called him masquerading as a detective from a newly formed metro-wide task force investigating corrupt cops.”
“The non-existent Detective Lancaster,” I cut in.
He nodded. “I said we’d uncovered his involvement in Zingano’s burglary ring and we’d offer him a deal and protection if he’d cooperate. He wanted out so badly by then he said he’d do anything. Atonement, I guess.”
“Did you ever talk to him in person? He would have recognized you.”
“Once. He didn’t know me well at the camp and I didn’t have my beard, and we met in the dark. It was a risk, but I took it to sell it to him. I told him that to prove himself, he needed first to set you up because we suspected you were dirty. Then we’d go after Zingano and his crew.”
I took a step back, stunned. “That’s bullshit, Fitch. Benedict knew I wasn’t dirty.”
“Yeah, he swore up and down you weren’t. Except for the usual petty shit street cops do. But I insisted he prove you were clean, or else he’d go to jail.”
Anger at my partner’s betrayal again swelled in me. Why would he jeopardize me like that? Even to save his own hide. Now I understood why Benedict said in a somber voice that night, moments before he entered the pawnshop the last time, I’m sorry, Joe. I have no choice.
“So you set up the stolen radio for bait,” I said.
“I told him I’d be waiting inside the pawnshop, and other investigators would be watching from outside. If you went along, you were dirty. If not, you were clean.”
The we Benedict said that night.
I stepped toward Fitch. “Instead you slit his throat like you were cutting a pig.”
“Your friend was willing to set you up, Stryker, to save his own ass.”
“You’re lying, Fitch!”
“You wanna put your butt on the line for a guy who’d—”
I slammed Fitch on the head again with my gun and he toppled over. I knelt by him, the tip of the gun barrel inches from his forehead. “Fuck you. I think I’ll blow your goddamn brains out right here, right now!”
“God, no!” yelled Kane. I was dimly aware of the lawmaker closing on me, but I was so enraged at Fitch I didn’t move. Kane grabbed me from behind and tried to wrestle my gun away. I tried to shake him, but the prick was stronger than he looked.
I lost my balance. Fitch lashed out with a foot, catching me near my groin and sending me sprawling in a daze of pain.
I tried to rise, expecting Fitch to jump me, but Kane kept me tangled up. We wrestled until an elbow to Kane’s midsection snapped his grip and I rolled away in time to see Fitch disappearing up the ladder. His gun was still in my hand and I fired two off-balance shots that ricocheted off the steel rungs, the noise deafening in the small room.
Fitch stumbled out the opening and disappeared. Moments later, the hatch slammed shut. I scrambled up the ladder and shoved against the hatch. It wouldn’t budge.
Kane was on his knees, gasping for air. He looked around with big eyes. “Where’s Thornton or whatever the hell his name is?”
“How do you open this fucker?” I yelled at him.
Kane tried but with no more success. “He’s padlocked it from the outside. There’s no way.”
“Shit.”
Kane stared down at me. “My wife and kids are in the house. My, God, he could—”
“You shoulda thought of that before you jumped me.”
“You were going to kill him! In my shelter!”
I should have shot the bastard. Skipped the whole “let’s make a deal” talk. But I’d wanted the explanations behind Benedict’s baffling behavior. Truths, it turned out, I didn’t want to learn. Now his killer had escaped.
“Let’s figure a way to get out of here,” I said. “I got a wife and daughter out there, too.”
We banged on the hatch for several minutes with a hammer from a toolbox before suddenly it opened. Kane’s wife stared at us, alarmed. We scrambled out. She was holding their Husky on a leash.
“Crawford, are you all right? I heard gunshots. And the dog started barking.”
“I’m fine,” he said.
She looked at me, recognizing me from before. “Detective?”
“Those weren’t gunshots, ma’am,” I said. I’d stuffed my gun and Fitch’s weapon under my shirt. “But someone slammed the hatch on us. Did you see anyone running away from here?”
“Uh, no. I just heard the shots.”
“Not gunshots,” I reiterated. “Probably a car backfiring.”
“Who locked you in?” she asked her husband, suspicion filling her eyes. “What were you two doing down there at this hour?”
Kane glanced at me, then back at his wife. “I don’t know who did it, dear. Probably some kid pulling a practical joke.”
“I’ll check the parking lot,” I said to Kane.
Fitch’s Chevy coupe still sat by Kane’s vehicle. I’d taken his keys, so he’d been forced to flee on foot. I scanned the dark land around Eagle Greetings and the faint outline against the sky of rock formations in the Garden of the Gods. City lights sprawled in the opposite direction. Fitch could have gone anywhere. It would be useless to attempt to track him.
My worry now was my family.
I returned to the bomb shelter. Kane was in a heated discussion with his wife. I pulled Fitch’s keys out of my pocket. “I need to leave, senator,” I said, my expression warning him to keep his trap shut.
Kane’s wife looked from me to her husband. “What’s going on, Crawford?”
I sped off in Fitch’s Chevy and left Kane to conjure up a lie. Politicians are good at that.
Twenty minutes later, I reached the foothills amphitheater where the senator riled up the crowd earlier in the evening. I parked Fitch’s car, wiped down the steering wheel, and locked it. I jumped into my car and hurried down the twisty road. Along the way, I hurled Fitch’s car keys into tall grass along the side of the road. When I hit Highway 85, I hightailed north to Denver like a scalded dog. I felt confident Paula and Olivia were safe from Fitch in the motel on Colfax. He wouldn’t know where they were. Moreover, he’d escaped on foot, hampering a quick return to Denver. But I took no chances. Too many things had gone wrong.
I reached the Wagon Wheel motel and parked on the street where I could stake out Room 15. A room light was on behind the curtains. Half an hour later it went out. I wondered how angry Paula went to bed these nights, holed up in a two-bit motel on Colfax.
I staked out the motel until morning light began nudge the eastern ho
rizon, fighting to stay awake through my exhaustion. No signs of Fitch. I returned home, though not before making a sweep of my neighborhood. No signs of him lying in wait. Not that I expected him try again to gun me down, especially in daylight. If the man were smart, he’d make his way to wherever he lived, grab what he could, and flee town. Preferably the state. It wasn’t as though Senator Kane or I would put out a police alert on him.
I snatched a few hours of sleep before pulling my swing shift with Perdue. He was still on edge about Zingano and Jackson. Lou Sheppard wangled an interview with Big Z, who still swore the department set them up. But Zingano heeded my warnings and revealed no other names. That’s good news, I told Perdue. I filled him in on my confrontation with Zingano and Jackson, warning them to keep quiet and take their medicine. The department was clearly tap dancing with the issue. Every cop on the force suspected the brass would not make an example of the duo, whatever inflammatory stories Lou Sheppard wrote. Zingano and Jackson wouldn’t have to sell out anybody, if they were smart.
Do their time, pay for their sins, and put it behind them.
Hell, maybe some of the stolen money would be returned to victims like Alma Blair. Sell off their fancy laundromats and homes and Zingano’s shiny green Hudson.
None of this reassured Perdue. It would be a while to trial and sentencing, assuming it got that far, he asserted as he dragged on yet another cigarette. Too damn much could go wrong.
The truth was, I wasn’t any more reassured than he was. Even if they went to prison, they’d be as dangerous as caged animals when they got out. But when it came to that, I’d deal with. I still held information that could potentially send them back to prison, and that information would go to Sheppard if something happened to me.
My immediate concern was Fitch. As long as the parole officer remained in the wind, I couldn’t count on what he might do—not a man who’d brazenly murdered my partner in front of me, and who’d killed three other people.
The next day, I got luckier than I deserved.
After fishing the Sunday Rocky Mountain News out of my bushes, I sat reading it at the kitchen table next to a bowl of corn flakes. At the top of page three ran a small story that a hiker in the Garden of the Gods had stumbled across the body of a man. Colorado Springs police tentatively identified the victim as a Denver parole officer, Simon Fitch. He’d bled to death from a gunshot wound to his right side.
I set down my spoon and sat back in my chair in disbelief and relief. One of my ricocheted shots off the metal ladder must have caught him. Nicked a major blood vessel or organ. Lou Sheppard’s story in the Rocky was thin on details, such as whether the medical examiner found a bullet in him. Even if he had, they didn’t have the gun, and I would make damn sure they never would.
The hard, well-trampled ground of the Garden of the Gods, along with high winds, made it impossible to track Fitch’s footsteps any distance or determine where he was shot. Nothing to trace the shooting back to Kane’s home located maybe a mile and a half away. No one reported hearing a gunshot that night, including, apparently, Senator Kane’s suspicious wife. But then I imagine most politicians’ wives are as compulsively secretive as their husbands.
Did Fitch’s gunshot wound leave blood around Kane’s bomb shelter during his escape? In the dark, I wouldn’t have seen it. If Kane found any the next morning, he hadn’t called me. I prayed he had enough sense to clean it up.
With Fitch dead, it would be safe for Paula and Olivia to return home, though I couldn’t tell Paula the real reason why. I would have to make up yet another story. Whether she would buy it was an open question, or if she did, whether she would still choose to remain away. The foundation of my life and my relationship with Paula teetered on a wobbly foundation of lies.
The same for Detective Bock and Lou Sheppard and Ellen and Perdue and all the others I’d lied to.
The parole officer’s death brought me justice but not peace.
Chapter 35
The waters of the South Platte River flowed black and quiet under the half moon. I dumped the four remaining rounds from Simon Fitch’s .38 into my gloved hand and looked around. No one. It was late, after I’d finished my shift with Perdue. A desolate stretch of the river south of the city. Even the vagrants didn’t sleep here.
I edged toward the river bank between two cottonwood trees and hurled the rounds one by one into the dark waters. They made tiny sounds.
It had been three days since the hiker stumbled across the body of Simon Fitch. Each day, I apprehensively scanned the Rocky and listened for cop gossip as to what the Colorado Springs police, working with Denver investigators, were turning up.
They’d found the parole officer’s Chevy coupe at the amphitheater where I’d left it. No official explanation for why his body was so many miles from his vehicle, in the Garden of the Gods dead from a gunshot wound. One speculation was someone kidnapped him, drove him to the park, shot him, and left him to die. But police offered no clue as to why. And they admitted investigating other scenarios, which they refused to elaborate. That’s the kind of stuff that worried me.
A search of Fitch’s apartment turned up a rifle. I figured that even if investigators test-fired it, they wouldn’t know to match the bullets to those buried in my car. Investigators noted his officially issued .38 was missing. Thankfully, he hadn’t left any dynamite or bomb-making paraphernalia in his apartment. That might have linked him to Raschke’s death, and that would be a nightmare for me.
The Fitch story didn’t escape Moroni Perdue. “Jesus, Joe, don’t you find it strange that both Diaz and his PO were murdered?” he pointed out while we cruised Larimer Street. “Remember when Fitch came to you looking for Diaz?”
I shrugged. “One of those coincidences.”
Moroni probably didn’t buy that, but he didn’t know about Fitch’s connection to Benedict. And I like to believe that even if Moroni knew, he’d keep quiet. He owed me.
Unfortunately for Perdue, Fitch’s murder was one more thing to stew over. Perdue remained convinced his involvement in multiple burglaries would unravel someday. He was right to worry, but I wouldn’t try to figure if or when it might unravel. If the other burglars in blue—maybe dozens for all I knew—were smart, they would lie low until the public and the department’s attention blew over. But they would surface down the road. The temptation and the pickings were too easy. Maybe someday, under the right police chief and the right circumstances, it would blow up again and the department would be forced to tear out the rotting apple tree by the roots.
Perdue would not be one of those dark riders. He tries to take his mind off what has passed by searching for flying saucers, and we both pay for our coffee now. He might make a good cop yet. If he remains a cop. His guilt and fears of revenge from Zingano makes me wonder whether he will remain on the force.
I wondered the same thing myself. Two dead partners. Constantly lying to conceal my investigations. Jeopardizing my marriage. Endangering my family. A department with more than its share of genuinely dirty cops.
Still, I felt loyalty toward my fellow officers—the honest ones, anyway—along with an innate sense of justice. However frustrating and stressful, however poisonous police work was to my marriage, somebody had to do the damn job. I’d fought Hitler’s boys in the war and I still wanted to fight the scum in my homeland.
My decision to remain or go might not rest in my hands, however. If investigators didn’t make uncomfortable discoveries about Fitch’s death, there was still Lou Sheppard and Detective Luther Bock to make my life hell. It hadn’t taken long for Lou to point out in a story that one of Fitch’s parolees was Hector “Jailbait” Diaz, himself a victim of a gunshot to the head. The same Diaz who was the prime suspect in the murder of a highly-respected Denver cop. Lou on the scent of a story was a dangerous animal.
One scent I hoped he wouldn’t pick up was Fitch’s fingerprints. Inevitably, investigators would discover that his real name was Neil Thornton and that he’d once wo
rked at Camp Amache. His work at the camp would mean little to the Springs police, but if Sheppard got wind of the Amache connection, he’d clamp on to it like a rabid dog. Based on my revelation about the scam of Jap internees, Lou would put two and two together and drag in Raschke and Senator Kane. Kane could become a suspect in Fitch’s death, considering the body was only a short distance from his house. At that point, Kane would finger me.
As for Detective Bock, he liked me for Diaz’s murder. Maybe Benedict’s. Why not Simon Fitch, too?
The detective confronted me one day before roll call. The sight of him turned my stomach into knots. Had he discovered a link between Fitch and me? Someone at the parole offices remembered my visit to Fitch?
“Something still smells with you, Stryker,” he said. For someone who should be riding high for arresting Zingano and Jackson, his face sagged as if he wasn’t sleeping much these days. “Someone doubled-crossed those two slugs and locked them in The Tuscany basement. My bet is that the someone was you.”
“Why would I do that? I read that the money was found with them. Why wouldn’t I have taken it if, as you claim, I’m a big bad burglar?”
“I don’t know. You’ve weaseled out for now, Stryker. But you’ll make a mistake someday and I’ll be waiting.”
At least I found reassurance in his tirade. He didn’t bring up Fitch, and it was clear that neither Zingano nor Jackson had breathed my name.
Which convinced me more than ever that nothing would be gained by confessing to the brass what really happened. Benedict was dead. His killer was dead. My confession would accomplish nothing but close the official paperwork—along with my career and Benedict’s reputation. And maybe result in prison time, alongside Zingano and Jackson. Bock would see to that.
I revealed none of this to Ellen Greene as we sat in webbed lawn chairs in her backyard, while Timothy played on a swing his dad erected two years ago. She didn’t know about Simon Fitch, or his connection to her husband as Neil Thornton, and I intended to keep it that way.