Doc Hollenbeck was making a point Luke didn’t want to hear, but he liked Doc, so he was trying to be patient. They were waiting for the other members of Doc’s Fugitive Pursuit unit to show up and working their way through the rest of the St. Pauli Girls. Doc was winding himself up on the subject of race warfare. He grimaced, leaned forward.
“That’s the thing about this town. Our new HQ? You been in the mall across the street? Can you afford to shop there? I can’t. I can hardly afford the coffee. But there it is, a going concern too. So somebody has the money. You see all that money around, and you don’t have any—”
“Doc, not from you, okay?”
“What?”
“All that Marxist crap, the downtrodden darkies, the uppity white folks. Man, I got all of that bullshit I could handle from my ex-wife.”
Doc’s face was a little stony. Luke held the beer bottle up to a shaft of light coming in through the sunroom window. It was empty.
“Doc, I’m sorry. Really, I’m out of line. Let’s drop this, okay? This shit always gets me down. My ex-wife was always on me about this kind of thing. She used to call me a ‘minion.’ ”
“A what?”
“A minion. You know, a tool, a running-dog lackey, that kind of stuff.”
“Charming broad. I’d like to know her. What was she, a Rottweiler?”
“No. Couldn’t pass the finals. How about a beer?”
Doc groaned and leaned forward, extricated himself from the wicker chair, walked over, took Luke’s empty beer out of his hand. Talking over his shoulder, he wandered into the kitchen, his voice muffled by masses of greenery and a huge vase of dried flowers sitting on the dividing bar between the kitchen and the sunroom.
“Some of the guys are coming by, but I don’t think I’m up to no damn game of flag football. How are you doing?”
“You ever see a 60 Minutes thing on Dick Butkis? How he was so banged up, he couldn’t get out of bed?”
Doc limped back into the room, handed Luke another St. Pauli. It was so cold, it hurt Luke’s fingers.
“Hell, where are you keeping these?”
“In your ex-wife’s heart. Got it back there in the kitchen. Lois uses it to freeze-dry her flowers. Yeah, I saw that show. That how you feel?”
“My body’s not a temple, it’s an arena. Is Lois home? You don’t want to introduce her to lowlifes like me?”
Doc laughed, knowing that Luke was changing the subject, letting the issue of race warfare slide.
“Lois is out, taking a course at Georgetown. Modalities of—something. Dissent, I think. She’s studying that Benning Road pool thing, that trial’s on right now.”
“Yeah, I heard about that. Last year?”
“June 22. The Alabama Avenue Crew, they call themselves. Two kids, one seventeen, the driver, and the shooter, get this, fourteen years old. They got an Uzi, opened up on a swimming pool full of children, full auto. Put over thirty rounds into the shallow end. Wounded six kids, all of them under twelve. Benning Road school.”
“Christ, yeah, I remember that. Lois a lawyer?”
“No, she’s upgrading to be a teacher. She’s studying gang dynamics. You want to see gang dynamics, Luke, you drop by the courthouse and stand around in the halls, you’ll see gang dynamics. They’re all out there in the halls, scaring the shit out of witnesses, letting everybody know, they talk against an Alabama crew member, they’re dead. They already frightened off one woman, she saw the driver. Last week somebody fired fifteen shots at her teenage daughter on the way home from school. Yesterday the woman told the prosecutors she ‘can’t remember’ what the kid looked like.”
“Why don’t the guards clear them out?”
“Constitutional rights. They get through the metal detectors, there’s no legal way to keep them out of the halls. American justice, Luke.”
Luke held his hands up, palm out, shoulders raised, his face saying clearly although silently, see what I mean?
Doc’s face hardened. “Look, all I meant about these kids is that they aren’t at the bottom of society, they’re outside it completely. If your only stake in life is respect, respect based on whatever you can deliver, then respect—”
“You mean fear.”
“Yeah, okay, fear. Then fear is what keeps you alive, it’s what gives you any power at all. So if somebody—I know you hate this word—”
“Disses you?” Luke said.
“Yeah, disses you, that’s like in normal society, you’re waiting on line, gonna get yourself a Raspberry Slurpy, a guy shoves his way into line in front of you, you say, hey man, and he says, so what, numb-nuts, fuck you. You have now been officially dissed, right. So what do you do? Say your girlfriend is there. What do you do?”
“Is my girlfriend a black belt in karate?”
“You know what I’m saying.”
“Okay, okay,” Luke said. “I guess I make a point of it, get him to understand that he’s not staying there in front of me.”
“How far will you go?”
“Up to him. I guess, I have to, I’ll deck him.”
“Over a spot in line?”
“It’s more than that,” Luke said.
“Yeah, you’re gonna lose what?”
“My self-respect, I guess. I mean, the guy’s an obvious asshole.”
“And if he comes back with a piece?”
“I’ll protect myself, I guess.”
“Kill the guy?”
Luke could see where this was going. “Look, Doc, this guy started it, he escalated it, this is his thing, not mine. I’m just—”
“You’re just going to kill a guy rather than let him get a Raspberry Slurpy before you do. That’s what you just said.”
“What you’re saying, this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. These schmucks down at the courthouse, they do this every day. I’d say that’s different.”
“In degree, maybe.”
“No, it’s not just that. These kids defile themselves, they choose to be assholes. Just like the guy getting in between me and my Raspberry Slurpy. He knows the rules, just like me. He made a choice, that’s all. He chose to get in my face. Then he chose to prod me. That was his thing. I was just a consequence, that’s all. I was a piece of cosmic machinery in that buttwad’s karmic cycle, whatever. If growing up in a bad neighborhood was enough to make you a criminal, Stanley Crouch would be doing life in Attica. A lot of kids in the hood don’t go that route. All those middle-class black families, we just don’t hear about them. Look, Doc, I understand what you’re trying to do here, and I appreciate it. But I’m not into accepting bullshit excuses for brainless killings. Any society that shows more creativity in making up excuses than it does in fixing things isn’t going to be around very long.”
Doc sat back and laughed out loud.
“Good one. I’ll use it on Lois. But the little picture is, getting dissed and letting it go, for a gangbanger, that’s like you start pissing blood, you look down and say, whoa, gotta cut back on the cranberry cocktail. It’s a warning, and everybody knows it. In that world, you let it slide, they all close in on you, and next day, bam, you’re a speed bump in somebody else’s fast lane.”
“I know that, Doc. But that doesn’t mean I cut that guy any slack at all. That’s not my job. Yours neither. You oughta leave their souls to God.”
“You think he cares?”
“If he doesn’t, why should I?”
Doc shook his head. “You’re damn close to burned out, Luke. You need to be careful.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. Your light, I guess.”
“My light?”
Doc looked at him for a while.
“Maybe we better drop this, hah?”
Luke looked at him, puzzled.
“Yeah, maybe we better.”
In the difficult silence that followed, they heard voices at the door, someone laughing, and then the bell rang. Doc got up to answer it, leaving Luke alone for a time to consider the state of the nation and his personal relation to the infinite. Say what you want, Doc was an interesting guy.
Irritating, but interesting.
Doc came back into the sunroom followed by three other men, two of them in blue sweats with the five-point star of the U.S. Marshals Service on their chests, and a third man in jeans, cowboy boots, and a white T-shirt. Luke stood up as they came down through the hallway, still laughing.
“Okay, guys, this is Luke. Luke, these are my guys. You know a couple, I think.”
The man in the jeans and white T stepped forward, put his hand out.
“Luke, I’m Walt Rich. We met a couple of times at the Four-Six.”
Rich was short, maybe five nine, solid across the chest and belly, with skinny slightly bowed legs and close-cropped bright carrot-red hair, a freckled Irish face, green eyes, and a badly dented nose, the bridge pushed almost flat. As soon as Luke saw him, he made the connection.
“God, yeah. You used to be Bronx Vice, didn’t you? You knew Coles, those guys. We worked once on that Ching-a-Ling thing, when was it?”
Rich’s smile was thin. He held his right hand up to show Luke his gold detective’s ring. “It was in eighty-nine. You popped Jugo Sarpente with a twelve-gauge. I got this ring outta that project. Gold Shield. So did Darcy Coles.”
“You’re a deputy now?”
“Yeah. They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. A living wage.”
“You made good money in New York.”
“Not enough to live there. I’m out in Jersey now, and my kids don’t need an armed escort to get to school.”
“So you’re going back?”
“Yeah. I’m taking your job, so I hear. I’m gonna work with Grizzly Dalton.”
“He’s a good man. A great street operator. You’ll like him.”
“I know him. I met him when I was in Bronx Vice. He was always coming around trying to horn in on our snitches. Guy’s a bloodhound.”
“I know. I worked with him until last year. How long are you here?”
“I been here a year, taking computer training. I’m going back to New York in September. They got an operation planned. Grizzly’s gonna run it, along with Rico here. You gonna be in on it?”
“Not if I can help it. I’m assigned to HQ here. Got moved after the Sunrise operation.”
“Yeah? Full time? I’m impressed. You’ll hate it here.”
One of the men in the blue sweats stepped up, offered his hand. Six feet or more, very slender, his skin was deeply tanned, almost mahogany in tone, with a growth of dark beard and a haggard, starved-looking face. His cheekbones stood out, and his black eyes rode far back in the skull, but his grip was strong and his skin hot and dry. His teeth were uneven, as if he’d grown up in a place without dentistry. His voice had a faint Latin accent.
“I’m Rico Groza. I heard they call you Snake, La Culebra.”
Luke grinned back at him. He’d heard of the guy. Groza had worked undercover in Central America on loan to the DEA in various drug-interdiction operations. There was a department story going around—probably mythical—that Groza had spent six months in Mexico hunting the men who had tortured and murdered DEA agent Enrique Camarenas, and that when he left on the hunt, they found his ID case and his star on his desk. When he came back and picked up his ID again, there were rumors of two men missing down in Zihuatenejo and one man crippled in Ciudad Obregón.
Watching Groza at his ease in the sunshine, the sunken depths of his black eyes, Luke wondered about the man, about departmental secrets, about his own secrets.
“You brought in Zamarro last year, didn’t you?”
Groza smiled.
“Not by myself. Good to meet you, Luke. Call me Rico. This ugly guy here, he’s Slick Stevens. Give him your paw, Slick.”
Stevens put out a hand the size of a pot roast. He was a large white man with a completely bald head, round red cheeks, and heavy brows, but his eyes were a blue so light, they were almost clear. His skin was darkly tanned, and a radius of white creases fanned out across both temples.
“Luke, good to know you.”
“I saw your picture in The Pentacle, didn’t I? You were on that sweep down here, back in 1989? Operation STOP?”
“Yep.”
Doc laughed as he brought out some beers and handed them around. “Slick’s a man of few words.”
“Deeds, not words,” said Stevens, pulling up a white stool. Luke watched him lower his weight onto it, braced for disaster. Groza looked at Doc’s clothes, and then over at Luke in black slacks and a blue denim shirt. “Somethin’ tells me we won’t be playing football today?”
Doc groaned. “Hey, Luke and me, we kicked some serious butt last night, while you guys were sitting around playing with your—”
Walt Rich snorted. “Serious butt? I heard you stepped on your dicks real good with that Rona buttwad. Luke ends up under a car? You learn that at Glynco, Luke?”
Doc frowned. “That was later—numb-nuts had a scanner. Who knew?”
“You shoulda,” said Slick, grinning.
Walt was still laughing. “My wife calls me in, you’re on the eleven o’clock news. I fell over, Slick, it was priceless. They showed a film of those kids, some D.C. cops shoving them into a transport van. The look on their faces, man.”
Luke grinned, remembering. “Yeah, they came up the steps, I don’t know what they were thinking.”
Doc broke in. “Yo, we bad, we bad, we—whoops, we fucked—that was about it. Luke just stood up and went down into them, one of them goes for something—”
“Probably his rosary,” said Walt Rich.
“Luke just stuck this huge stainless—what is that thing you carry, anyway.”
“It’s a Taurus.”
Rico Groza’s voice was low and raspy.
“They said you still had that guy’s piece. Am I right?”
“Sutter. Yeah, I have it. Who said?”
Stevens, who had been watching the group and quietly putting away most of his beer, leaned forward. The stool groaned underneath him. Silhouetted in the slanting sunlight streaming in through the windows, his face in shadow, his voice seemed to come from a stone well.
“I said. I knew that asshole.”
“Sutter? From where?”
“He did a job on a friend of mine, a Wells Fargo guard. In 1986.”
Luke focused on the man now, his mind working. “Grand Island, Nebraska. The Wal-Mart?”
Stevens nodded.
“What happened?” asked Walt Rich. Stevens looked at him, then down at the beer bottle in his hands. It looked like a dark green salt-shaker, lost in those massive hands. He told the story in a flat monotone, the way people do when the story is a bad one.
“Two o’clock in the afternoon, right there in the parking lot in front of the main doors. Sunny day, just like this. A Saturday, too, kids running all over the place, an ice cream truck sitting there with families lined up for a Sno-Kone. Hundreds of people saw it happen. He must have been sitting in that brown van for a coupla hours, tinted windows, you couldn’t see inside. Up comes the Wells Fargo truck. They have a pickup to make. You know Wal-Mart, that one in Grand Island, that’s a money-mill. They said the take was almost two hundred thousand. Small bills.”
Doc was interested. “What’d he do?”
“Lone wolf operation. He sees the truck come up, right there by the double doors. Guard in the back, driver up front. And one guy to go in there, carry out the bags. Two of them.”
Rich groaned. “One in each hand?”
Stevens’s massive bald head lowered once.
“And no cover. They were farm kids, a bunch of half-trained cherries. Sutter got out of the brown van. Came up behind the Fargo truck, waited until the outside man came through the doors. Then he throws a set of cuffs around the rear door handles, steps around the truck, the guys in the truck are just now tumbling to it. They said Sutter just walked up beside the guy, no words, no yessir nossir. Put a big revolver right up against the side of the man’s skull, the guard said no, turned his face away from the muzzle. Sutter flew his face off. Parts of it stuck to the ice cream van, splattered the kids in the lineup. He was twenty-four, two kids. Less than twenty feet from the Wells Fargo truck, both inside guards just staring at him, totally in shock, and the guy’s down on his back, blood running out like a big red lake.”
Luke believed him.
“Did they get out, try to take him?”
Stevens shook his head, held up his empty beer. Doc got up and took it from him. The other men were silent, seeing the thing in the hot midwestern sun, the body shadowless, splayed, the glitter of red like taillight glass, spreading out in rivers and lakes at the feet of the children.
“No. The cuffs held the back door, and the driver froze. The inside man got a shot off through the gun port, broke a plate-glass display window. Sutter ran to his van, threw the bags in, was onto 1-80 in a minute. They found the brown van two miles down the line at a rest station. Empty.”
Groza wanted to know how they had identified Delbert Sutter.
“Videotape. The Wal-Mart security cameras picked up the whole thing through the glass doors. FBI made him from VICAP files.”
Stevens nodded again, a single inclination of his big bald head, his face still in darkness. He lifted his beer to Luke.
Luke returned the salute, considering.
“The piece he used, it wasn’t a Taurus was it?”
“No. A Colt Delta.”
“Good.”
Doc’s phone rang, a short sharp trill. He limped off down the hall to answer it. The talk went around in a casual way; finks, chasers, warrant work, runners, the next big career criminal sweep—rumored to be set for sometime in the coming winter—cases they knew or wanted to know about, gossip about the brass down at HQ, speculation about the new director, about Janet Reno and her heavy hands on the Justice reins.
Doc came back into the room and motioned to Luke. They walked back into the kitchen together. Doc leaned against the counter, glanced out at the other men in the sunroom, and spoke in a soft voice, an official voice.
“That was Brewer in Ops.”
“Yeah?”
“You know a Treasury bull named Canaday? Bolton Canaday?”
“Yeah. I know him.”
“He’s over at 600 Army Navy right now. Waiting for us.”
“For us? Why?”
“He thinks he’s got some news for us. He heard about our go-round last night, apparently. He knows we’re after Paolo Rona. It seems Treasury agent Canaday wants to help us out.”
Luke was interested but not impressed. Bolton Canaday was a bloodless career guy with the ethics of a Tanzanian stoat. If he wanted in on the Rona thing, it was for his own reasons. Treasury reasons.
“It seems they had a big takedown just now, on Constitution, just by the monument. They were rolling up a buy-and-bust. One of the guys had a piece and showed it, and they dropped him.”
“Rona?”
“The face was wrong. The picture on the license was not the guy on the ground.”
“But it was Rona?”
“That’s what they’re saying. Canaday wants to meet us at HQ and fill us in. Wanna go look? Or do I tell him to fuck off?”
Luke was going through a number of emotions, some of them hard to pin down. Doc watched him in silence. Out in the sunroom the guys were listening to Walt Rich tell a story about a body they found up in Crotona Park, had no head, no hands, and no feet, and was also skinned. But it wasn’t a murder and it wasn’t suicide, and in the end it wasn’t even indignity to a dead body. So what was it?
Luke knew the answer, but his mind was somewhere else. Maybe this was very good news for Aurora Powys.
“Yeah,” he said, finally. “Let’s go see him.”