Slow Burn

by G. M. Ford

  Lawrence and I had gotten as far as the top of the stairs when the cop screwed up. The pair completely ignored his command to halt, so he reached out a long arm and grabbed Candace by the neck. Bad move.

  A dull crack and a sudden burst of air were the only sounds as, in a series of movements nearly too fast for the eye to follow, Rickey Ray came down on the cop’s arm with the side of his hand, pulled Candace behind him, and then drove a single blow to the officer’s sternum.

  The poor guy went down on the carpet. When he tried to bring his hands to his chest, only one came along. The other flopped obscenely at the end of a broken forearm. I looked away. When I turned back, the cop’s face was smooth and red; he’d opened his mouth to scream but found he couldn’t take in enough air. His attempts at breathing began sounding like the braying of a tubercular mule throughout the lobby.

  People were hustling to clear out of the way. Someone screamed, “Oh, my God!”

  Candace yelled, “No, Richard, no!” but it was too late. Rickey Ray’s blood was up and the Fates, as they are often inclined to do, gave him exactly what he didn’t need. Another challenger.

  Detective Lobdell had stood stupefied as Lawrence told the cop to bring Candace and Rickey Ray back. I suspect he was so fully immersed in self-pity that not much else was getting in. He’d have been better off if he’d stayed that way.

  Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he went bouncing down those stairs out of a heroic sense of duty, rather than in a mad attempt to salvage something from the worst day of his life. Or maybe it doesn’t matter. Either way, he got the refrigerator.

  Lawrence was shouting orders into her cell phone. Sir Geoffrey, Dixie, Bart, and Brie were spread out along the marble mezzanine rail, keeping pace with the scene unfolding fifteen feet below in the lobby.

  “Come on, let’s go,” Rickey said in a low voice.

  Candace stood her ground. “Stop it.” She gave it all the authority she had. “Remember what we talked about.”

  Lobdell took one look at the guy on the floor and pulled a big silver 9mm from the small of his back. The whooping of the injured cop filled the air. Rickey showed his hands. Lobdell was in the combat position, holding the gun with two hands, inching forward on widespread legs, barking orders. “Hands on top of your head.”

  Rickey kept his hands level with his shoulders.

  “I’m unarmed,” he said. “Be cool.”

  “Don’t shoot him,” Candace begged. “Please, don’t shoot him.”

  Lobdell told him again and moved forward. And then again. Rickey wasn’t a good listener, but he was smart.

  The officer needed help. Rickey Ray held his ground.

  “No trouble, man, I surrender.”

  Then Rickey Ray backed up two steps.

  “He doan sound too good, podna.”

  Lobdell agreed, covering the remaining distance in a quick crabwalk. The big automatic pointed unwaveringly at Tolliver’s chest as Lobdell dropped to one knee beside the heaving officer. The officer’s breathing was beginning to develop ragged gaps.

  “Back off,” Lobdell screamed.

  Instead, Rickey Ray sat down cross-legged on the carpet. “No gun, man.”

  A deep rattle rose from the cop’s chest. Lobdell couldn’t help it; he looked down at the stricken man. It was human nature.

  Good night, Irene. Tolliver turned a single somersault and came up under Lobdell’s chin before the detective could so much as twitch. The impact snapped his jaw closed and propelled him all the way over onto his stomach. Rickey dove for the gun hand, landing in the middle of Lobdell’s back with both knees, driving the breath from his body. He grabbed the wrist in both hands and twisted it up behind Lobdell’s back. I don’t know which gave first, the elbow or the shoulder. I heard that, later that afternoon, the medics found both of them completely out of their sockets, but maybe that was just talk.

  Rickey Ray held the automatic by the barrel.

  “Come on. We gotta go.”

  The lobby was deserted. Two days ago, half the people sitting around were cops. Now, when we needed some…

  Lobdell retched a thick black pool onto the carpet. His wrist still rested on the back of his neck, where Rickey had left it. I tasted bile.

  “They’ll kill you, Richard. Don’t let them kill you,” Candace whispered. “Don’t let them kill you.”

  “We can make it,” he insisted. When she didn’t move, he threw the gun down on the carpet. “See? No gun. Come on.”

  Candace shook her head. “This isn’t necessary.”

  Rickey Ray’s head snapped around toward the other end of the lobby. I moved down two steps so I could see that far up the room.

  It was the two cops who’d escorted Dixie and Bart upstairs. A couple of jailers, really, on loan from the sheriff’s department. They looked like they’d been working store security for a doughnut shop, getting this assignment because they had the most seniority and hanging around a hotel was a cushy job. I was betting neither one of them had ever had his piece out before. They had them out now, though, holding the weapons way out from their bodies like somebody had passed them a weasel and they wanted no part of it.

  Tolliver walked quickly in their direction, his hands at his shoulders again. “No gun,” he said. “I’m not armed.”

  “Stay where you are,” the cop on the left shouted.

  Rickey Ray kept right on walking.

  When Candace started after him, I made my move, taking the last two steps in a single stride and then running for all I was worth over to the silver automatic on the carpet. Lobdell was trying to roll over.

  I picked up the auto, checked the safety, then held the big weapon down by my side. “Rickey,” I shouted.

  He stopped walking and turned sideways so he could see both ends of the lobby. I saw a head pop up behind the reception desk and quickly disappear.

  The way the old guy on the right was waving his piece around, nobody was safe. I spoke to the cops.

  “Go downstairs,” I said. “Get some backup.”

  “Put the gun down,” yelled the cop on the right.

  “Go get some backup,” I said again.

  “Down!” he screamed.

  I stood still. I could feel the skin on my face tingling from the tension, so I tried to breathe deeply.

  “Go on. Do as he says.”

  It was Lawrence, standing just off my right shoulder.

  She didn’t have to tell them twice. One after another, still waving the guns around, they backed onto the down escalator and electronically slid from view. Lawrence was now kneeling by Lobdell, telling him to stay down, that there was nothing he could do now except to relax and breathe. Help was on the way. I wasn’t so sure.

  Rickey Ray dropped his hands. “You gonna shoot me, Leo?”

  “Not unless you come near me,” I said.

  Candace rushed to his side. “Stop,” she told him again.

  Sharp voices filtered up from below. I crossed the room, angling over to the north wall, moving all the way past the pair to the top of the escalator. At the bottom, black-clad SWAT cops checked me out through rifle scopes. I turned back to Rickey.

  “This is it, man,” I said. I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. “All the cops in the world, partner.” I began to ask Lawrence for help in keeping the cops at bay, but it was too late. Two SWAT team members lay prone on the carpet behind me, their rifles propped and ready. I glanced at Rickey. Candace was whispering into his ruined ear while a red laser spot burned its way into his forehead.

  “Listen to your sister,” I said. “Don’t be stupid.”

  The more she talked, the more often he nodded.

  Candace walked over to me and looked down at the mass of cops in sniper position on the floor. Three red laser spots danced about her chest. I tried not to think about how many were trained on me. She leaned close and spoke very softly. “Richard got that face from his first foster father, a Georgia Baptist farmer named Zachary Clyde. He w
as ten. The Godfearing Mr. Clyde threw him through a glass patio door for leaving the light on in the barn. You know what he did then?” She didn’t want an answer. “He used his boots to grind Richard’s face into the glass, that’s what he did.”

  “I’m sorry” was all I could think to say.

  “Just so you know about Jack Del Fuego.”

  “Okay.”

  She looked over at her brother. “He says they’ll kill him anyway.”

  “No way,” I said. “He needs to lie down with his hands over his head. If he does that, there won’t be any problem.”

  I went over and told Rickey what he needed to do. He was almost back to Rickey Ray the friendly cowboy, but he didn’t like it much.

  “Fuckers’ll waste me anyway. They get crazy when you fuck up cops.” The puckered area beneath his eye looked angry and new.

  “Then just go running down the escalator, man. That’s all you gotta do. They dragged all that crap over from the station. They’d just as soon use it.”

  It took another minute, but we got him down on the floor. I walked back to the escalator, moved the safety to on, and set Lobdell’s gun on the angled piece of marble separating the up escalator from the down. I let the auto go. It slid right into the hand of the nearest SWAT cop. “He’s ready to surrender,” I said.

  I held my hands over my head and turned back toward the lobby, where two sharpshooters had mutated into five. I moved toward them with my hands in the air. I kept walking. Past the snipers, to where a couple of EMTs were inserting an airway tube into the skinny cop’s throat. When I looked back, Sheila Somers’s kids were already in custody and on their way downstairs.

  “Bravo, Waterman. Splendid, I say,” Sir Geoffrey said from the mezzanine. At least somebody was having a good time.

  They’d loaded Lobdell facedown onto a gurney. I guessed they didn’t want to move him. Lawrence sat ashenfaced in a red velvet wing chair, her cell phone in her lap. The hotel was coming back to life around us. Hotel personnel peeked out from their hiding places and then scurried together to trade stories. Every cop in North America was lumbering about the lobby. Somebody opened the Seneca Street door and the whine of sirens came storming in.

  “That thing still work?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “The phone.”

  She nodded.

  “Why don’t you use it?”

  “For what?”

  “For my crew,” I said.

  For a moment, she didn’t get it.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, yes,” she said finally, and began to dial.

  “And, Lawrence…”

  She looked up at me.

  “You probably better let Jack go while you’re at it.”

  All twelve of them were seated around a single circular table. I’d have taken a seat, but that would have made thirteen. Tonight, after what had happened with Candace and Rickey Ray, I couldn’t make up my mind whether I felt more like Jesus or Judas, so I stood up instead.

  The reason we hadn’t been able to find Harold and Ralph was because they were already back in the can. Half an hour after George had let them go, they had gotten in a fight at Steve’s Broiler and had been summarily pinched for being drunk and disorderly.

  Sir Geoffrey Miles had been adamant. “These people have been incarcerated on my behalf. I insist. Would you send me home from your country feeling as if I were in debt? Surely not.”

  We were at the extreme top rear of the Washington State Convention Center, high above the banquet floor, in a room which Sir Geoffrey said was generally used for staff luncheons. Tonight, it was the crew’s private banquet hall. They’d stood along the rail, looking down into the vast banquet hall, listening attentively as Sir Geoffrey Miles delivered his keynote address, and had been among the most frenetic in their applause.

  Following Sir Geoffrey’s third curtain call, a brigade of waiters marched in, carrying the finest fare available on the planet. Not only were the twelve stuffing their faces, but, early on, the gods had provided them with a snooty salad waiter.

  When Earlene complained of the sharp taste of the Belgian endive in her salad, the guy looked down his nose at her and said, “Perhaps Madame is not accustomed to the finer greens.”

  The minute he turned his back, Mary reached up, pulled a long gray hair from her head, and stuffed it into her salad.

  “What in hell is this?” she demanded.

  The waiter squinted down at her plate and was horrified.

  “Oh, I am so sorry. Allow me to—”

  “Ya shoulda give her a comb instead of a fork,” George said.

  “What’s the house dressing? Minoxidil?”

  They were rolling now, banging on the table and each other.

  “She said romaine, not Rogaine,” added Red Lopez.

  This one reduced them to jelly. The waiter ran for his life.

  My night had two highlights. The first was when Sir Geoffrey and Señor Alomar had insisted on paying me the five-grand bonus for rescuing Bunky. I didn’t see how I’d earned it, but according to them, the conference had been adjudged to be such an unqualified success that I somehow deserved the cash. I protested briefly.

  The other highlight had been when Sir Geoffrey made his way around the table, shaking hands and thanking the crew for their contribution. To Ralph he said, “My warmest thanks, Mr. Batista. Your services have been invaluable.”

  “Don’t mention it, your kingship,” Ralph slurred. “The pleasure was all mine. I normally don’t meet people unless I already know them.”

  We knew what he meant and Sir Geoffrey did a good impression.

  The case never made it to trial, so we’ll never know for sure whether the sob story Sandra and Richard Somers told the grand jury was true or not. What had happened to Richard’s face was a matter of public record, so that part was at least accurate. As to the story of the intrepid young woman searching for and finally locating her long-lost brother and how, together again for the first time in over twenty years, they had sought to reclaim their family legacy, I’m reserving judgment on that part. They claimed that they’d gone to introduce themselves to Reese and he’d pulled a gun on them. According to them, Reese had been killed during a struggle for the gun. Self-defense.

  I, for one, have always been bothered by the fact that the cops didn’t find one fingerprint on Mason Reese’s Best Steak House list. I’ve never been able to work up a clear picture of how to type, fold, and put something into an envelope without once touching it, but maybe that’s just me. It didn’t seem to bother the cops a bit.

  I think it’s a whole lot more likely that the siblings were afraid Reese was going to see Candace with Jack sometime during the week and put two and two together. Or maybe they were trying to get Reese on board, and he wasn’t willing to go along with screwing up Jack’s life. And those are the good possibilities. A cynical man might assume they killed Mason Reese and left a bogus list in his room, solely for the purpose of pinning the murder on Jack Del Fuego. Who knows? Maybe it doesn’t matter.

  Either way, a busload of smart lawyers plea-bargained them both down to manslaughter two. It was, after all, Reese’s gun. Four to six. Sandra served nineteen months and was released to a halfway house. Richard did the same nineteen for the killing, and, last I heard, was serving the three-plus years he got for assault. Abby’s Angus is packed seven nights a week. The FeedLot is now a video arcade. Last I heard, Bunky was at stud, somewhere back in Virginia. I think of him every time I see the winking bull on the sign for Abby’s Angus.

  Whatever his many faults, Jack Del Fuego made a lasting contribution to the urban folklore of the Pacific Northwest. For a hundred miles around, every soul with any kind of visible scar or birthmark will try to tell you he got it that day when it rained fire and brimstone on Third Avenue, but don’t you believe ’em.

  Photograph by Skye Moody, 2004

  G.M. Ford escaped teaching English at a community college to write full time. He never (well, rarely)
suffers fools, and he enjoys music, cooking, eating other people’s cooking, boating, golfing, and arguing about everything under the sun. He is the author of more than a dozen novels, including Cast in Stone, The Deader the Better, Red Tide, and The Nature of the Beast.