“Yeah.”
“I think we’re about to take Carmel home,” Sherrill said. “This is obscene.”
“Not a flicker out of her, huh? Not a move?”
“Nothing. Damnit, Lucas, we might have lost the chance.”
“I know; but we’ve got to hang on for a while,” Lucas said.
“And I’m getting kind of lonely.”
“So am I,” Lucas said. “But I’m not going to invite you over.”
“I wouldn’t come anyway,” Sherrill said.
“Good for both of us.”
After a pause, Sherrill said, “Yeah, I guess. See you tomorrow.”
Ten minutes later, Carmel came out of the house and walked briskly to her car. A little too briskly, on a nice night like this, a little too head-down, Sherrill thought. Of course, everything Carmel did was slightly theatrical; there was no way she could know she was in the net . . .
THE NEXT DAY was brutal: Lucas talked to Mallard, who had nothing new, and checked on the Carmel net a half-dozen times, and got cranky with everyone.
Carmel talked with Rinker twice on the magic cell phone. “See you at ten-fifteen,” she said.
Carmel went home at six, as she usually did; called Hale Allen at six-thirty, and told him that she’d have to work on the Al-Balah case that night. “I’ve got to go back to the office. Jenkins ruled that the cops can have the tire as evidence, and I’m trying to put together an instant appeal.”
“Well, all right,” Allen said. She thought she might have detected just a hair of relief in his voice. “See you when? Thursday?”
“Maybe we could catch lunch tomorrow . . . and I’ll give you a call tonight.”
“Talk to you,” he said.
CARMEL GOT OUT of her business dress, put on a shorts-leeved white shirt, jeans, tennis shoes and a light red jacket. She pushed a black sweatshirt into her briefcase. This was July, but it was also Minnesota. She didn’t feel like eating, but she did, and carried the microwave chicken dinner to the window and looked out over the city. If they were actually watching her, from one of the nearby buildings, they should see her.
When she finished, she tossed the tray from the chicken dinner in the garbage, went back to her home office, disconnected the small answering machine from her private line and stuck it in her briefcase with the sweater. A little after seven o’clock, she rode the elevator down and walked out of the front of the building, looking at her watch, carrying her briefcase. She wasn’t absolutely sure the cops were there, but she thought they were: not looking around, trying to spot them, nearly killed her. She walked to her office building, enjoying the night, used her key to get in the front door, signed in with the security guard and rode the elevators up to her office.
The entire suite was silent, with only a few security lights to cut the gloom. She turned the lights on in the library and in her office, turned on the computer and went to work. Jenkins, the judge in the case she was working, had ruled the cops could have a spare tire owned by Rashid Al-Balah, and, unfortunately, there was blood on the tire. The only good aspect of it was that the cops had had the car and tire for almost a month before the blood was found, that they’d often taken it out for test drives—once to a strip joint—and, Carmel argued, the blood could have been anybody’s, given the general unreliability of DNA tests. Or even if it did belong to Trick Bentoin, Bentoin could have cut himself before he disappeared, and simply was not available to testify to the fact . . .
She got caught up in the argument, moving back and forth from the library to her office, and nearly jumped out of her skin when the security guard said, “Hi, Miz Loan.”
“Oh, Jesus, Phil, you almost gave me a heart attack,” she said.
“Just making the rounds . . . you gonna be late tonight?” She could already smell the booze: Phil was an old geezer, but he could drink with the youngest of them.
“Probably. Got a tough one tomorrow.”
“Well, good luck,” he said, and shuffled away toward the entry. She heard the door close, and the latch snap, and looked at her watch: twenty minutes. Time to start moving.
She got the answering machine out of her briefcase, carried it into the library and plugged it into the phone there. Back in her office, she pulled the black sweater over her head. She left the computer on, and turned on the small Optimus stereo system. The system played three disks in rotation, and would play them until she turned it off. She left the red jacket draped over her chair.
Ready.
The building had a five-story parking garage. Carmel stepped out of the suite, checked to make sure that the security guard had moved on, and then trotted briskly down to the stairwell at the far end of the hall and down seven flights of steps. The cops might be watching every entrance and exit to the parking garage, but, she thought, they couldn’t be watching all of it. Of course, if they were, she was screwed . . .
But it was a good bet, she thought. She poked her head through the door on the fourth floor, saw nobody. A single empty car, a red Pontiac, sat halfway down the ramp, but she’d seen it before. Not a cop. She glanced again at her watch: one minute. She waited it out, hearing nothing at all along the concrete corridors of the building, and then opened the door again.
Here was the only spot that she’d be in the open: she walked quickly across the top of the floor, and stepped into the corkscrew exit ramp. She heard a car moving up the entrance ramp: had to be Pam, she thought. She listened, heard the car turn into the exit spiral, and nodded. The car started down, made the turn toward her. A gray-haired old lady was looking through the windshield. Carmel recoiled, then saw the hand waving her forward: “Get in.”
“That’s you?” The car stopped, just for a half-second, and Carmel jerked open the back door and flopped on the seat, pulling the door shut without slamming it. “Get under the blanket,” Rinker said.
Carmel was already doing that, rolling onto the floor, her head on the driver’s side. She pulled the blanket over her legs and lower body and lay quietly beneath it. The entrances and exits from the building were on opposites sides, and even at this time of night, there were always a few cars coming and going. With any luck at all, the cops on the entrance side—if there were any—wouldn’t be calling out the cars coming and going, so the cops on the exit side wouldn’t notice the odd fact that a gray-haired old lady in a Japanese car had gone in one side and come right back out the other.
She heard Rinker lower the driver’s-side window; heard the cashier mutter something, and a minute later, they were rolling out of the building.
“You can get up on the seat,” Rinker said a minute later. “But I wouldn’t sit up, yet. Let me take a few side streets, see if there’s anybody back there.”
“If there are, there’s nothing to do but run for it,” Carmel said cheerfully.
“Yeah, well, just stay down for a few minutes anyway.” Rinker didn’t know anything about throwing off a following car, but she’d watched enough cop shows on television to know that they might be both in front of, parallel to, and behind her. She took the car across the Washington Avenue bridge to eliminate the parallel cars, a block the wrong way down an empty one-way street to eliminate the forward cars, and then quickly along a one-way frontage road in the warehouse district, looking for followers. She didn’t see anybody, and that was the best she could do.
“Best I can do,” she told Carmel.
“I can’t think of anything else,” Carmel said. “Pull over; let me get in the front.”
• • •
MAX BUTRY CAME from a short line of mean cops; his father was one, and so was Max, the meanness beaten into him from a tender age. “You don’t stay alive long on the streets unless . . .” his father would say, following with a lecture about a specific point of manhood in which Max was faltering: “You don’t stay alive long on the streets if you hide behind your hands. What if some greaser’s got a shiv, huh? He’ll cut your hands right off.You gotta come down on those boys.”
And h
is father would come down on him, show you how you beat a guy right into the ground by getting in close and on top of him, and fuck all your cherry greaser knives.
Butry carried the attitude onto the force; and on this night carried it into the bus station. A desk clerk had called to say that two guys were smoking dope in the john, and the smog was getting so thick nobody could get in to take a leak. By the time Butry arrived, though, the smokers had gone, and he turned around and banged back through the door.
Outside, three skaters were practicing slides off a planter onto a curb. There was nothing illegal about this, but Butry considered skateboards one symptom of the decline of American civilization, and himself, by virtue of the badge in his pocket, one of the pillars of that civilization. “They don’t gotta respect the man—hell, they probably don’t even know you—but they goddamn well gotta respect the badge,” his father said. “If they don’t respect the badge, the country starts caving in. Look what they got with the niggers down in Chicago. There are places in Chicago where you can’t even show the badge or the niggers’ll carve you up like the Christmas turkey. And you know how that started? It started when the first fuckin’ nigger saw the badge and didn’t show respect and nobody called him on it. And from there, the word got around, and the next thing you know, the world caves in. You got that? Huh?”
Niggers, skateboarders, transgender migrants, yuppie scum, all the same stuff. People without respect. Butry swerved out of line to cross with the skaters. One of them, the toughest-looking kid, maybe sixteen with the baggy pants and the chain billfold and a ballpoint pen tattoo on his forearm, saw Butry coming and there was no respect at all in the way he looked at him.
“Hey, dickhead: get them boards outa here. This is a bus station, not a playground,” Butry said.
And the oldest kid said, “Fuck you, asshole.” Butry pulled his badge with one hand and his gun with the other, which would have gotten him fired if anybody else had been around to see how early it came out. “I’m a fuckin’ cop, wiseass. See the badge? Now sit on the fuckin’ ground and put your hands over your heads, all three of you.”
The smallest of the kids, who looked like he might be fourteen, and had the bony look of a boy who hadn’t eaten right for a month or maybe a few months, that lonely, hollow-cheeked glow of hunger like a personal portrait, said, “Fuck you, fat boy.” He pulled up his t-shirt to bare his belly, and to show off a half-dozen steel rings that pierced the skin around his belly button. “Here: you want to shoot me? Here, shoot me, asshole.”
Butry was fast, faster than the kid, who may have been slowed by hunger: Butry’s hand lashed out, open but heavy as a ham, a slap that knocked the boy off his feet.
“On your goddamn knees,” he screamed. “On your goddamn . . .”
At the very last second, he began to realize that he was over his head, but that very last second was too late. The young kid had come back up, on the toes of his ragged black tennies, and in his hand that pointed toward Butry’s nose was a piece-of-shit two-barrel Crow derringer; you couldn’t, as one of the gun magazines noted, expect to hit your target at six feet. But the gun was only nine inches from Butry’s face when the kid pulled the trigger, and the .45 slug went through the bridge of Butry’s nose and out the back of his skull.
His father had forgotten to tell Butry that you don’t fuck with people who have nothing to lose.
The three skaters froze at the impact of the blast, at the sight of the falling cop; then the oldest said, “Run,” in the harsh semi-whisper of panic, and the three scooped their boards and were running across the street through the moving cars like a pack of starving terriers.
SHERRILL AND BLACK were slumped in her car, and Sherrill was talking to Lucas on her cell phone: “I’m starting to feel like a country song,” she said. “There’s something wrong about not feeling right . . .”
Then their radio burped and Black picked it up and Sherrill-said to Lucas, “Just a minute,” and then a dispatcher was screaming something about a cop down, shot at the bus station, three men running away, everybody available get to the bus station, looking for three youths possibly carrying skateboards and last seen running toward Loring Park . . .
“We got a call, there’s a cop down, shot, we’re going,” Sherrill said. And to Black, behind the wheel: “Go-go-go . . .” and Black was already going.
CARMEL SAID, “Listen, Pam . . .”
“It’s Clara,” Rinker said. “My name is really Clara. Rinker.”
“Clara?” Carmel tasted the name for a second. “I like that. Clara. Better than Pam.”
“Anyway, you were saying . . .”
“You are looking at this from the wrong point of view. People have always been allowed to kill in self-defense, and my dear, this is exactly what we’re doing. We’re trying to defend ourselves: Davenport has put us in this position, and we really don’t have much option. So what I’m saying is this: I don’t understand how you could kill for money, and not feel bad about it, and now you can feel bad about killing in self-defense.”
“I think it’s because I know these people, or, anyway, I know about them,” Rinker said. “They’re not dirtbags who deserve it. They’re just people who are in the way.”
“No, no, no, they’re not in the way; they’re simply essential to us. We could not kill them, but that would leave us exposed. I’ll tell you what; if you want, I’ll do all the shooting.”
“Who actually does the shooting is hardly the point, if we both cooperate in setting up the killing.”
They weren’t exactly arguing: they were exploring, Carmel thought. Rinker—Clara—was feeling some qualms, while Carmel felt none at all. They were working together through the gray ethical areas of murder . . .
“THIS IS the place—the brick house, with the white shutters,” Carmel said, pointing across the dashboard as they rolled past the house. “We’ve gotta decide now: I don’t want you coming in unless, you know, at some level you believe, that you know, that what we’re doing is necessary. We’re not doing it out of madness, we’re doing it out of forced necessity.”
“I’m not objecting so much from any kind of definable, rational viewpoint; I’m saying that I feel a little different about this,” Rinker said. “I even worry about the effect it will have on you. ”
“Don’t worry about that.” Carmel took the car to the curb, killed the engine. “Are you in or out?”
“I’m in,” Rinker said.
• • •
LUCAS ARRIVED at Hennepin County Medical Center to find Sherrill standing with a group of cops on the sidewalk by the emergency entrance. When she saw the Porsche, Sherrill broke away from the group and walked into the headlights just as Lucas shut them off. “He’s dead,” she said as Lucas got out of the car.
“Damnit. I was afraid this would happen someday,” Lucas said in a low voice. “Butry was an asshole and not too bright. It’s a bad combination.”
“Yeah, well, he was a cop.”
“Yeah. They got a line on the shooters?”
“They’re gone. Desk clerk said there were three skateboarders, kids, outside the station who might’ve seen something, but they took off right after the shooting. We’re looking, but we ain’t finding.”
“What about Carmel?”
“She’s locked up in her building. I’ll head back there as soon as I’m sure there’s nothing I can do with this thing.”
“Probably no point,” Lucas said. “It’s so late now. What about Butry? Who’s his next of kin?”
“Haven’t found anybody yet,” Sherrill said. “His folks are dead, no brothers or sisters, far as we know. Never married . . . hell, there might not be anybody.”
“Must be somebody.”
“I hope so,” Sherrill said. “If there turned out to be nobody . . . that’d be the worst thing I ever heard of.”
TWENTY-TWO
Carmel and Rinker stood on the porch steps, each of them holding a phone book, and leaned sideways to peer at the curtained
windows. The windows were dark, and nothing was moving. Nobody home. As stupid as it was, it was something they hadn’t counted on. Plan B was going down.
“She’s gotta be around,” Carmel complained. “I called her office today, and she picked up the phone.”
“She’s probably off visiting her mother or something,” Rinker said. They were both a little deflated, and wandered back down the dark sidewalk toward the car, carrying the phone books.
“Visiting.” Carmel stopped in her tracks. “Yeah, I bet she’s visiting . . . C’mon.”
“Where?” Rinker was puzzled.
“Up to Hale’s place.”
“But I thought we were going to take Clark first. If we don’t take her, there’s no point in . . .”
“I think she’s at Hale’s place. I’ll bet you a dollar.”
“Hale’s?”
“Yeah. Hale’s.”
• • •
AT HALE’S, Carmel cruised past, slowly. The back window, Hale’s bedroom, showed just the faintest glow on the window shade. “She’s there. He’s got this votive candle . . .”
“What an asshole,” Rinker said. “I mean, you’re talking about marrying him? And he’s still sleeping with his ex-girlfriend?”
“Sneaking,” Carmel said. “Can’t say he’s not sexually active.”
Carmel continued around the block, and pulled to the curb fifty yards up the street from Allen’s house, where they could see the back window. She punched up her car phone, and on the second ring, a light came on in the bedroom. A moment later, Hale Allen picked up.
“I think I can get out of here, darling,” Carmel cooed. “I’ve got to stop at my apartment for a minute, then I’ll be over.”
“Maybe I should come to your place . . .” Hale said.
“No, no, I’m already in the car. See you.” And she hung up.
FIVE MINUTES LATER, Louise Clark squirted out of the house like a wet watermelon seed. She jogged down the sidewalk and climbed into a silver Toyota Corolla.
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