Hail Storme

by W L Ripley

  “Maybe Roberts put a contract on Kennedy,” said Browne.

  “But why? I’ve asked myself that a hundred times. He wouldn’t kill the sheriff over a field of marijuana. If the heat came down he could just drop the Roberts facade, which, incidentally, would protect him anyway, and become Max Beauchamps again. It’s like Chick says, Willie Boy doesn’t do anything without a reason. He’s too smart. Probably take a legion of federal officers and a dozen U.S. attorneys thirty years to convict him of even driving near that field. I’ll bet there’s no way to link him to the marijuana even if it is his. Besides, if you were sitting on a deal worth millions, would you run pot?”

  “Penny-ante stuff,” Browne said. “So now Roberts is the only one with access to the formula.”

  “That you know of, anyway,” I said, hedging on the truth.

  “Roberts can market it without cutting Prescott in and maybe hold it over his partners’ heads.”

  “Or sell the formula to the highest bidder,” said Chick.

  “Your turn,” I said to Browne.

  “Okay. You were right about the drug dealer. Killian couldn’t have killed the sheriff .The ME said the shoulder wound would have prevented him from shouldering the shotgun, much less pulling the trigger. There is some evidence the sheriff was unprepared for the blast even though it came from the front. Death was immediate and the muscles were relaxed in the corpse. Usually, if the shot comes from in front of the victim, the muscles are tensed at the moment of death. Generally, the muscles are relaxed only if the shot comes from beyond the victim’s awareness.”

  “Such as a shot in the back.”

  “Right. Killian couldn’t have driven the truck with the shoulder wound. Manual steering and stick shift.”

  “Meaning,” said Chick, “that someone put him in the truck. Before or after shooting him?”

  “After. There was very little blood in the truck. But it threw us because it’s the type of wound that does little bleeding. Well placed. Right at the base of the neck with a .22-caliber solid point.”

  “A pro.”

  Browne nodded. “Like a former hit man. You cleared up one mystery for me. When we ran a check on William Roberts through NCIC we got nothing. The information was withheld. A mystery man. The witness protection scam explains that. Before, it was like he didn’t exist.” He looked at Chick. “Kind of like somebody else.”

  “So why trust me?” Chick said.

  “The DA in Boulder is a friend of my captain’s. We called. The DA said you were beyond a pain in the ass but a man of your word and the best skip-tracer in Colorado.”

  “In the universe,” Chick said, correcting him.

  “Said you always land on your feet. Always around when things are happening and nowhere to be found when they’re over. Said you think you can whip Mike Tyson and Steven Seagal at the same time.”

  “Plus their brothers and sisters.”

  “Said you thought it.”

  “Half the battle.”

  “We also found out who was pulling our string.” Chick got out a pack of cigarettes, offered them to Browne, who shook his head, then continued. “Senator Hobbs, a state senator from Clearmont, is a close friend of the Winston family. Apparently, Baxter complained to Winston that we were taking over the investigation. Winston complained to Hobbs, who passed it on to our colonel or someone at Jeff .The patrol is a good organization, the best of its kind, but we have some people at the top who are more politician than cop. When the wind blows, they fold.”

  “I’m shocked to hear such a thing,” Chick said, lighting his cigarette.

  Browne smiled. “It ain’t all dodging bullets and driving fast. Anyway, it turns out Senator Hobbs has a taste for teenaged boys and state funds that aren’t earmarked. The guys on the patrol are saying he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and his meat in the produce section. Which is too bad, really. Except for this, Hobbs had been good to law enforcement.”

  “So where do we go from here?” I asked.

  “I’m going to investigate this homicide, or suicide, or whatever it turns out to be, and you’re being instructed, officially, to back off, a warning that you’re sure to ignore. But it gets me off the hook if anybody asks you later. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  I nodded. Chick nodded. We understood.

  “You’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest, but it’s one that needed stirring. You need to understand that because of the witness protection net we will be unable to touch Roberts unless he makes a major mistake. You’ve got your own agenda. You can do things and go places we can’t. That’s off the record. I’ll run interference for you where I can, unofficially, but the best I may be able to do is keep you out of jail for some of your lesser crimes. With three murders and the abduction of the FBI agent, we will become more involved and Baxter less so.” He paused, looked at Chick. “That gun under your jacket registered?”

  “Yes.”

  “How about the one in the ankle holster?”

  “You’ve got a good eye.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “No I didn’t,” said Chick. “Really want to know?”

  “Hell no,” said Browne. “I don’t want to know anything you guys are up to, not even what you held back when you were telling me ‘everything.’ There’s a lot of dirty money involved and you guys aren’t as cute as you think, so be careful. These people will not be nice.”

  “This isn’t about money,” I said. “Roberts has money. Winston has money. They’re only interested in the money so they can accumulate power. Power is what Willie Boy Roberts is all about. Winston, too.”

  “You may be right,” said Browne. “I’ve got work to do, so get out of here and stay out of my hair.”

  “You mean you’re not going to take us downtown and beat us with rolled newspapers?” said Chick.

  “I’ve got your statements,” said Browne. “But, like they say in the movies, don’t leave town without telling us. Another thing. Watch yourselves. A couple of K.C. guys, wise guys, are in town. May be shooters. Hope you aren’t the target. They may have done Prescott. This is the major leagues, boys. Now, go polish your comedy routine somewhere.”

  We left him to his reports. There were two more patrol units outside the motel when we left him, and a Ford County car, too. People were standing outside the truck stop. We walked through the parking lot to the Bronco and got in, and I eased the Bronco through the tangle of official cars and curious onlookers. We headed back to Paradise on Highway 61. Yes, it could be easily done. Out there on Highway 61.

  Chick retrieved a beer from the cooler. “Got a present for you,” I said. I dug the wad of bills out of my wallet and handed them to him. “Finder’s fee you got cheated out of. Compliments of the dear departed. It’s only one-fifth of what you had coming, but we do what we can.”

  “Where’d you get this?”

  I told him what I hadn’t told Browne, including the part about the dreamsicle formula.

  He looked at me, the apostrophe eyebrow raised, and said, “And all this time I thought you were just another dumb jock. How do you know Prescott didn’t make this money teaching ghetto children how to read?”

  “A chance I’ll have to take.” I watched him flip through the money. He counted out five hundred and handed it back to me. “No thanks,” I said. “Already peeled off a grand for myself.” A lie, of course.

  “Really? Where is it? There’s no lump in your jacket, and the one under your zipper’s very small.” He opened the glove box, put the money in it, shut it, and said, “Equal partners—fifty-fifty.”

  “What if I said I don’t need it?”

  “What if I said I don’t care? I’m not a charity case, and you’re not Robin Hood.”

  “And you’re stubborn.”

  “How can we fail? What’s our next move?”

  “We deal ourselves in. We put the dreamsicle formula on the market. But because we’re good people with a sense of fair play, we give
Willie Boy first shot at it.”

  “You got a plan?”

  “Always,” I said.

  THIRTY-TWO

  “I’ve got a copy of the formula,” I said, into the pay phone at the back of the Silver Spur Lounge, where my freewheeling associate, Charles Easton, and myself were dining on giant cheeseburgers and onion rings, having shunned the cuisine and clientele of the Truck Hangar. One must draw the line somewhere or risk being taken for a lout. “Want to buy it back? Only fifty-three shopping days ’til Christmas.”

  “Who is this?” said the voice of Willie Boy Roberts, aka Max Beauchamps.

  “I want two hundred and fifty thousand in the usual small denominations, like on television cop shows. If you’re not interested, I’ll peddle it elsewhere.”

  Roberts laughed his throaty, good-old-boy-from-the-bayou laugh. He was good. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, me.”

  “Dreamsicle.”

  “That means nothing to me,” he said, but hesitated a beat before saying it.

  “Guess you won’t mind if I sell it to someone else, then.”

  “Do as you wish, you. You have the wrong person.”

  “Wonder what the guys with the vowels at the ends of their names will say when they find out they don’t have an exclusive.”

  “There is no formula.”

  “A moment ago, you didn’t know what I was talking about. I know about Prescott. He’s dead in his motel room. Phony overdose. A little sloppy, Willie Boy. Prescott kept a floor safe your goons didn’t find. The police are already investigating. Your hourglass has a hole in it and the sand is running out. You want to deal, or do I go door-to-door like a Fuller Brush man?”

  Chick was flirting with a young lady at a nearby table. He had a Busch long-neck by the throat, leaning it against his hip like in the commercials. She was deciding if she was interested. Nice blonde, late twenties, green eyes, freckles sprinkled across her nose.

  “You have nothing that interests me, podna,” said Roberts.

  Chick winked at the blond. She smiled, then looked away. Smoke from several cigarettes hovered and drifted. Speaking into the phone, I read a couple of the ingredients from the paper in my hand so the customer would know I was sincere. It was quiet on the other end. Chick mimicked a fisherman setting the hook. Then Roberts said, “I would be glad to discuss any business proposition that would be mutually beneficial. If you will tell me where you are, I’ll have an employee pick you up—”

  It was my turn to laugh, so I did. “Nice try, but my mom told me never to accept rides from strangers. No. You and me, tomorrow morning at ten o’clock. I will call you at nine A.M. at your house to give you the location. If you don’t answer or you’re not home, the deal is off. Get the money together and wait for my call.”

  “I’ll need more time to get the money together.”

  “You don’t have any more time,” I said, then hung up.

  Chick said, “He ain’t buying nothing from you. He’ll try to take you out. Make him look bad if you soak him.”

  “That’s the way I’ve got it figured, too. But he’ll have to be home at nine o’clock tomorrow morning for sure.”

  The blond got up and walked to our table. Chick smiled as she neared. “Excuse me,” she said to me. “You look familiar. You a baseball player or something?”

  “No,” I said. “Too violent. Chess is my game.”

  The girl joined us. Her name was Melanie, and she soon figured out it wasn’t baseball or chess I had played. She was a big football fan. Nice kid. She drank a beer with Chick, then left to keep an appointment with a friend. She gave Chick her phone number.

  We finished our cheeseburgers, which were enormous and filling and delicious and fattening. I could almost hear my arteries clogging. When this was over it would be salad and broiled fish. Chick, a walking bad influence, downed another beer, then took to drinking Wild Turkey from shooters, a glass of water beside them. He was actually becoming tipsy for the first time since I’d met him. The weather was changing outside. The evening sky had turned weepy and dark, threatening rain. The waitress brought me coffee and Chick had another knock of the Turkey. We talked about several things. College football, old girlfriends, old friends, Matt Jenkins. Then the conversation turned to Vietnam. At first it was about old war buddies and where we went for R and R. Then Chick’s face began to go slack, flushed with the red glow of Kentucky whiskey. He became serious, a departure for him. The thing nibbling at him took another bite.

  “I’d just come off a mission,” he said. He lighted a cigarette off the nub of the one he’d been smoking. His eyes were swollen and red-rimmed. “One of the guys, a captain, had scored a lid of Cambodian and rolled a J size of a Cuban cigar, cutting the smoke with San Miguel beer and Jack D. There were a couple of Green Berets and a spook there. Spook drank wine, the snake-eaters drank the whiskey straight from the bottle. They were so ripped an air strike on the hootch would’ve been a reason to get off on the colors…”

  He dragged on his cigarette and took another hit from the bourbon. His capacity for alcohol was incredible. And disturbing. I didn’t know if he was fanning the flames or trying to quench them.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I hadda do an NVA colonel who had a thing for B-girls and Dom Perignon champagne. He had a favorite girl. Seventeen years old. Her foster parents were rice farmers.” He blinked and looked over my head, as if looking for something he’d lost or left somewhere. “Shit. How could they farm? We were blowing the place up, Charlie was burning and looting it. What a mess…” He rubbed his jaw and chewed the corner of his lower lip.

  “I dusted the colonel and the girl saw it, so I brought her back with me. We were supposed to ‘neutralize’ witnesses, but I couldn’t do it. Chick Easton, the assassin with a heart of gold. I didn’t finish the guy on the first shot. I was off just a hair and he didn’t die right off. Flopped on the floor, digging at his throat with his hands. Looked like a fish thrashing on a boat. She was screaming and crying by the time I put one behind his ear. A beautiful little girl. Some French blood in her. Hair was the color of flax, unusual for a B-girl. Her eyes were Asian dark but round like a Caucasian’s. She was prime, grade A, number one, and it made me glad he died hard.

  “So I brought her back. God knows why. She spoke little English but spoke French very well. I speak a little French. Got her calmed down. She was afraid the VC would think she killed the colonel and hurt her family.” He drank some more bourbon, then placed his forehead against a palm and ran his hand through his hair. Swallowed, then looked around the room. I waited, not knowing what to say. The dinner crowd was gone, leaving the party people and the hard core to breathe in the gray smoke, their ears pelted by the jukebox, seasoned campaigners against the night. The bathroom door swung open and slammed shut.

  “There was a guy, VC, a sapper they’d caught and were interrogating with a car battery and a pan of water. Nice guys, huh? Smokin’ dope-a-wana and jump-starting gooks. We were for-sure sweethearts. Good thing we were the good guys or I’da got confused and thought we were doing something wrong.” He tilted his head back to swallow more whiskey; his Adam’s apple bobbed. He pursed his lips and gritted his teeth.

  “So, they juiced the guy too much and he died, y’know? ‘Hey, I thought this guy came with a three-year warranty,’ says one of the snake-eaters. ‘That’s the trouble with these foreign models, they’re all six volt. Hard to charge up.’

  “Then they took the guy out and threw ’im in the river. The girl is shakin’ and turnin’ pale now. A whiter shade of pale, man. She’s a B-girl and seen things, but nothin’ like this. She’s thinking she’s next.” He turned in his seat and then put his elbows on his knees and stared at the floor. The muscles in his jaws flexed and worked.

  “We don’t have to do this,” I said. “We can go home.”

  “I couldn’t leave,” he said, to the floor, “because I was waiting to be debriefed. Also ’cause I was scared. These were hard guys. War, ya know
, is bad fuckin’ business. I smoked some guys. But I didn’t torture nobody. Those bastards juiced the sapper for recreation, man. He didn’t know nothin’, dig? Totally out of control.” His eyes filled with the memory of it. “They came back after they’d tossed the guy in the water and one of ’em said—check this out now, Wyatt—one of these cold mothers says, ‘Y’know what you call a gook floating in the delta? Bob,’ he says. So, now they’re all laughing like it’s the funniest thing ever, the dope screwing up their heads. Now, I already got a bad taste from the girl watching two hard killings, and I’m straight, waiting to be debriefed so I can take the girl back to base, get a shower, something to eat. I don’t want nothing to do with these twisted assholes, anyway.”

  It was building inside him, bubbling and simmering, working its way to the top. His eyes were shiny dimes, and his knuckles were bloodless and pale as he clenched the shot glass. The apostrophe eyebrow was the color of bruised cherries. No stopping it now. He’d shaken it loose and it boiled up, spilling over.

  “I was trying to keep it together,” he said, taking a deep breath. “You know what it was like over there. Ride it out. I’d seen grunts stoned out and riding the dragon before. But I could feel it was wrong this time. Besides the GBs and the spook, there were two grunts and the dope captain. They were treating the Green Berets and the CIA crazoid like they were celebrities. Death groupies. They started eyeing the girl. Talking shit at her. ‘How’s about a little gook pussy, Blackjack?’ they asked me.” I reasoned that Blackjack was Chick’s code name. “ ‘Get that little Your-Asian pull a meat train.’

  “I got no stomach for that crap. I tried to keep them off her, but a couple of ’em grabbed me and held me while they took turns on her. It was fucking miserable. The worst moment of my life.” His breathing was shallow now. “You have no idea what a bad trip is until you watch six guys gang-rape a teenaged girl who can’t speak your language. After a while she didn’t even cry anymore, just let them have their way. Once in a while she’d look at me. Maybe she thought I’d brought her there to be attacked, I don’t know. I’ll never forget the way she looked at me. Never. I can’t wash it away. No end to it, man. No end.