In the window glass,
mockingbird’s worst enemy!
This guy just won’t quit!—Szan
Before the first cruiser arrives, I’ve gotten out soggy but sufficient identification. It reassures the security officer enough for her to leave me unguarded while she runs to get a blanket and her thermos. Hot coffee revives me enough to give a sketchy report to the first-responding patrolman. He springs into action, calls for another car and an ambulance. I give him the make, model, and tag numbers of my abductors’ vehicle, Hector Waltann’s gold Eterniti.
“I don’t know if the three of them are traveling together,” I say, my voice barely above a whisper. Despite the coffee, my throat is raw and sore. “If they’ve split up, Quince has a green BMW. I don’t know what Saint Clair drives. She might be headed for Atlantic City or Vegas.”
“That’s OK, sir, don’t worry about it. You just take it easy, we’ll find them,” the patrolman replies, then sets into motion the machinery that will apprehend Overshort and Company.
The paramedics who follow close on the heels of a second cruiser find me weak but lucid.
“I can walk,” I tell the young woman in white who wheels a gurney to my side, although when I move I find that muscles driven to their limit have set up hard as concrete. Scratches, scrapes, slices, punctures and bruises compete to see which can make me scream.
“Sure you can, but why walk when you can ride?” the EMT asks. To her partner she says, “On three.” They transfer me to the gurney and slide me into the back of an ambulance.
“I’ve briefed your lieutenant,” the first responding officer tells me. “He’ll meet you at the hospital. He says you have a lot of explaining to do.”
Compared to where I’ve spent the last eight hours, the ambulance is toasty and I want nothing more than to sleep and escape the pain. Instead, the paramedics poke and prod and pepper me with questions all the way to the hospital.
In the ER, they cut away ruined clothes stinking of river bottom. A nurse points to the emerald ring on my finger. “Want to hold onto that, or do you want us to put it away for safekeeping?”
I figure I’d better hold onto it so there’s no question about breaks in the chain of custody.
The doctor on duty is one of the team who brought me back from the dead the night of the Terminal Road shootout. He directs the nurse to prepare an injection. “Just a little something for pain,” he says.
“No. No drugs,” I tell him.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” he replies. “The way you look, you’ve got to be hurting.”
He’s right about that. But the pain at least lets me know I’m alive, and I’ve had enough of narcotics.
“A local at least while I operate,” he says, and I let him administer that.
“You don’t plan to make getting shot a monthly occurrence, do you?” he asks while he meticulously picks pellets out of my shoulder and back. Out of the corner of my eye I see him step away to admire his work. “The wounds themselves aren’t too serious, not like this was.” He gently pats my thigh and instructs me to roll over. Offhandedly he says, “The tattoo is new. Mind if I take a look?”
“Go ahead.”
“I wouldn’t have figured you for a body art man. No signs of infection here, at least. You got good post-operative care.”
“I’m a fast healer.”
“Well, good. This latest injury shouldn’t give you any problems, then. Oh, there’ll be a degree of residual neuralgia, but you have some familiarity in that department.”
“Yes.”
“Watch the wound and lacerations for infection. Interesting first aid technique you used, keeping them irrigated and chilled, but I would have chosen something other than river water.” He applies antiseptic to the front of my body which couldn’t be any more scraped if I’d tried to Brillo myself clean. As a fresh blanket of pain spreads across my skin I wonder why he didn’t simply set me on fire.
“We’ll keep you twenty-four hours or so, get you started on a course of antibiotics, get your electrolytes in line. You can take it from there. Nothing that rest won’t fix. A lot of rest. Understand me?”
He doesn’t have to tell me twice. If everyone would just leave me alone I’d start right now. To find the pauses between the mayday signals from the besieged battleship of my body I need to concentrate, to work with the pain.
“See me again when you want to be cleared to return to duty,” the doctor says, “although frankly, I’d advise finding another line of work.”
“I’m considering it,” I reply.
He chuckles and waves me into the care of an orderly who wheels me out. A puffy-eyed Lieutenant Crowberry stands just outside the Emergency Room door. This is no social call. He has questions and I won’t be allowed to sleep until I answer them. He follows us wordlessly to the ward, waits while a pretty nurse with bright red lipstick gets me gowned, tucked in a bed, and hooked up to an IV. Her white uniform reminds me of the costume Nikki St. Clair wore the first time I saw her.
“After you’ve had a chance to rest some, I’ll come back and help you get cleaned up better,” the nurse says. She lowers her voice, says, “Can’t wait for a closer look at that tattoo,” and gives me a wink before departing.
“It never quits with you, does it, Mansion?” Crowberry sighs. “Do I have your attention now?”
All I want to do is snuggle down in these clean white sheets and pull the blanket over me. “Lieutenant, I’m beat.”
“You’ll want to hear this. We’ve got an APB out for Overshort, Quince, and Saint Clair. It won’t be long before we get them.”
Get them? Oh, right. Once I’d escaped them, I pictured them riding off into the sunset, or perhaps more accurately the sunrise, and the further they got away from me the better I liked it. Of course, our relationship has only just begun, albeit on a different plane. I only hope when I next see Heidi that I can hide my hurt and humiliation.
Crowberry spots a chrome-frame side chair with a split-pea green vinyl seat and pulls it over to the bed, settling in for a long stay.
“Mansion, what the hell were you trying to do?”
“My assignment, sir. Find Waltann’s killer.”
“I didn’t say ‘single-handed.’ It’s not a one-man job. That’s why we have a team to work on it. Maybe you’ve heard of it, we call it a ‘squad.’”
I am too tired to parry Crowberry’s jabs. “I wrote a report—”
“Ah, your report. Something about heroin and cigars I recall. Wildest shit I’ve ever read in a report. I checked that out. Yeah, looked into it myself personally. Funny thing, though. When I got to the car lot, I found it had been burned down.”
The headline on the papers I wrapped my cold wet self in this morning crawls across my brain like an electronic billboard: SMOKIN’ DEAL, CAR LOT TORCHED. Hope bubbles in my blood like fizzy tonic.
“So, no stogies, no tequila, no smack,” Crowberry says.
“No plastic bag with a cigar stub and a shot glass?” I ask.
“If there ever was one. Which I have a hard time believing. Yeah, that was some wild shit.” Crowberry laughs but his face is stormy. “Nope, not a shred of evidence. Too bad Airol Jones didn’t know that when we went to interview him.” Crowberry laughs again and this time his whole face joins in. “You know, he may be a hard charger on the court, but off it the man’s a creampuff. It was just no problem cutting a deal with him to give up Carlotta Trephino.”
Crowberry shifts on his chair. “Now what about this fraud at the jewelry store? What the hell has that got to do with anything?”
“Everything, sir,” I reply, but I don’t have the energy to elaborate. “The murder of the cleaning lady.”
“Oh, yeah. You left Grady some chicken-scratch about shell casings.”
The one Grady collected at the Jade Pagoda where Monetta, Facets’ cleaning lady, was fatally ambushed. And the ones I palmed at the Hunt Club and the bookstore. “There were matches.”
“Yes there were.”
I name the evidence case numbers I assigned to the bookstore sample and the parking lot ambush. Crowberry nods.
“They were from Overshort’s gun.” I suggest a scenario. According to Monetta’s boss at Clean Sweep, the cleaning woman went AWOL for a time, then reappeared, explaining she had fled because she was upset about the theft at Facets. Thinking the crime would be pinned on her, Monetta may have bolted after the theft, then worked out that Hector had burgled his own store, and returned. She contacted Overshort, maybe to be helpful, or possibly for blackmail. Either way it cost her her life. “Overshort killed her.”
“Or someone using his gun did,” Crowberry says, not ready to cut me any slack.
“And he killed Corcoran, the security officer. Not a suicide. Murder. Similar scenario.
Crowberry nods. “We’ve reopened the case.”
“But Overshort didn’t kill Waltann. Neither did Quince. Nor did Saint Clair, despite her having a black cape. They wanted Hector scarce, not dead.”
He leans forward in his chair. “So who did?”
“I don’t know, Lieutenant.” What’s more, I don’t care. My brain is pudding, my body hamburger. I want to sleep.
“But you’ll find out?” It’s as much a plea as a command.
“Lieutenant, I’ve been drugged, hogtied, kidnapped, hounded through the woods at gunpoint, shot, and nearly drowned. I don’t have to be told twice but apparently you do. I quit.” I let my eyelids fall nearly shut.
Crowberry remains seated.
Playing possum, I watch him through my eyelashes. We wait each other out. At last he gets to his feet. “You’ll find out,” he says with a chuckle. “I know you. A good horse’ll run at the shadow of the whip.”
I close my eyes completely and try to sleep but the unfamiliar sounds, the stiff bed, and the pain conspire against me. The stink of the river gives way to the sharp smell of disinfectant so strong it hurts to breathe. The harder I try to sleep, the more it eludes me and the more desperate and exhausted I become until the effort of trying to be with the pain, ride its tides, finally wears me down into unconsciousness.
It isn’t hunger, pain, or thirst that wakes me. It’s an irritating rasping noise, like mice in the walls. I crack open an eye. Carlotta Trephino sits in the side chair, filing her nails.
“Honey, no one has a right to look that good in a hospital gown,” she says.
“Carlotta. I understand your place made headlines.”
“Ah, the fire. Yes, seems Shrike is tad upset with me about Hector.” She studies her manicure, gives her left ring finger an extra swipe. “You’ll excuse me, honey, won’t you? Got to do something with my hands since they won’t let me smoke.”
“No, they won’t. Nor snort, either.”
“Hmph. Speaking of which, you know I never would have sent you to Shrike if I thought you were going to turn righteous on me.”
“I’m sure.”
“You’re a regular Boy Scout, Will Mansion.” Carlotta gets to work on the nails of her right hand. “Seems the gemstones Hector was paying Shrike with were fake. If I’d been able to find Hector, I would have encouraged him to correct that mistake, but the man had to go and die and leave Shrike holding the bag—a bag of marbles for all the stuff is worth. Apparently Shrike thinks this is now my problem and lit up my car lot to call it to my attention.”
“What a shame.”
“Yes, a great loss. Especially the trailer. I had some things in my desk I wish I could have saved.”
“Like a shot glass and a cigar stub?”
“Yes, like that. You lucked out, Honey. So much for insurance. Ah, there are few safeguards in life, especially the kind I lead.” She sighs and whittles another nail. “Well, it was obviously arson, so now there’s investigators crawling all over the place. I can’t get a thing done. I’d take a vacation—a long vacation, way out of town—but I’ve been told to stick around. Little matter of a certain cigar club. Some bright-eyed ADA is accusing me of non-payment of import duties or some such nonsense.”
They’re going to try to get her in civil court. Not a bad idea. It worked with Al Capone.
“So why are you here?” I regard the silvery nail file with trepidation. It’s sharp-pointed, and in the right hands, could do some damage. Like stab a man?
“I was hoping you could put in a good word for me. We’re still friends, aren’t we, Honey?” When I don’t respond, she takes my silence as negative. “I see. One thing I don’t understand. Why ever would you bust us when you knew you would go down too?”
I could tell her what I’ve known for some time but haven’t had to articulate until now: karma. What goes around, comes around. There’s no escaping it. Not for her. Not for me. Not for anyone. Not in this life. Not in the next.
“Like I said, you’re a regular Boy Scout.” She opens her purse, drops in the nail file, and closes it with an angry snap.
From mule to Boy Scout in a single week. Now that’s what I call right living.
Carlotta isn’t long gone before a familiar face peeps inside the door.
“Hey, buddy,” he calls softly.
“Hey, Swbyra.”
He edges into the room and lowers his lanky body into the side chair. “You keep coming back here, they’re gonna start charging you rent.”
“What can I do for you, Swbyra?”
“No, no, it’s what can I do for you?” He scoots forward on the chair until his knees almost touch the bed. “I would have come to see you sooner but we’ve been trying to settle the dust you stirred up. In fact, it’s not settled yet, but Grady said he’d hold down the fort so I could get over here. He’ll be along later.”
As if I haven’t suffered enough.
“We got Overshort and Quince in custody. They were on their way to Bradley International. Would have made it, too, if it had been closer.”
Sometimes not having a local airport is a real liability.
Swbyra gives me that picket fence smile. “Man, you are something. You wrap up in one night what we’ve been working on for fuckin’ weeks—months, even. The cleaning lady’s ambush at the Jade Pagoda, Corcoran’s bogus suicide, that whole drug ring. We’ve got Carlotta Trephino where we want her now, yessiree.”
“Yeah, but look where it got me.”
“True,” says Swbyra, sobering. “So how you doin’? You OK?”
“Nothing rest won’t fix right up, according to the doc,” I reply, but Swbyra doesn’t get the hint. He remains glued to his chair.
“And you deserve it. So, anything I can get for you? Water? You got plenty of water?” He lifts the lid of the jug on the bedside table.
“I’m fine. Look, there is something you can do for me.”
“Name it.”
“Go down to the hospital property locker, get my stuff out.”
“No problem.”
Swbyra dashes from the room and I grab some winks until he returns with a yellow clasp envelope. Inside are my keys, my badge, my wallet—itself zipped into a plastic bag because it’s still damp.
“Thanks. And take custody of this, will you?” I twist the emerald ring off my finger, still somewhat shriveled and pruney.
“This little sparkler looks just like the one that goes with the report you did on the Facets fraud complaint,” he says.
“It’s supposed to. Or, that one’s supposed to look like this. Hector Waltann gave this to Nikki Saint Clair. She pawned it for getaway money. I think you’ll find this is the real McCoy. I’m betting once Overshort got control of the store and got rid of Terry Waltann, he bought cheap imitations that he sold as the real thing and pocketed the difference.” When Hector burgled the store for jewels to trade for drugs, he got a bunch of glass instead and made an enemy out of Shrike. “With Quince as a certified gemologist vouching for their authenticity, they would have gotten away with it except someone went and got a second opinion.”
“Some scam. I’ll be damned. Killing Waltann wasn’t part of it?”
“No, I don’t believe it was.”
“So who did?”
“I don’t know.” Maybe Marybeth Waltann deserves a second look. Or Shrike. The very thought of him makes my skin pucker.
“Well, soon as you’re up to it, we can get back to work on it.”
“Start without me.”
“Make me laugh, ‘start without me,’ that’s good. You said I could do two things. What’s the second one?”
I hand him my keys. “Could you bring me some clothes? You know, like the last time? In the ER, they took—”
“Oh, yeah, I know the drill. Shoes?”
“Yeah, shoes.”
“Shaving gear, too?”
“Sure.” Rounding up all that stuff should keep him busy.
“I’ll be back before you know it.”
A small price to pay.
No sooner do I drop lids over eyes grainy with exhaustion than Grady shows up. The little side chair creaks under the big man’s weight.
“You just missed Swbyra,” I tell him.
“That a fact? We got Overshort and Quince charged with fraud, assaulting an officer, and two counts of murder. Wanted to make it three.”
“Could have made it three—three assaults on an officer.”
Grady frowns. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“That shooting I was telling you guys about. Behind the Metro?”
His frown deepens. “You’ve known about Overshort for over a fuckin’ week and you didn’t say anything?”
“I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure who was behind it, not until yesterday.”
“You could have filled us in.”
“I tried to, Grady, but—”
“But what?” He’s using that tone, the one that says, “don’t fuck with me, slimebag,” which he employs to good effect on suspects.
“I just ... I thought I’d get a little more to go on, that’s all.”
Up to this point he has been motionless in the chair, but now he bunches his shoulders. His already-broad upper body seems to swell. “Is that what you’re planning to do with Waltann’s killer? We wanted Overshort and Quince for that, too, but the lieut’ says you nixed that.”
“I just don’t think they did Waltann, that’s all.”
“So who the fuck did?”
“I don’t know.”
His big hands grip the chair arms. “The fuck you don’t. You’ve been on this thing for weeks. You gotta have some idea. Why won’t you tell us?”
“Because I don’t know!” The heat of his anger sparks my indignation. “And what’s more, I don’t care!” I rise halfway to sitting. “I quit. Q-U-I-T, quit! What part don’t you people understand?” Tension puts my body back on full alert. Bells clang, whistles shrill, and I collapse against the pillow.
“If you knew what was good for you, you would!” Like air from a leaky balloon, the anger vents out of him. His body seems to deflate and he sounds weary. He picks himself from the side chair and plods out the door looking as tired as he sounds.
I’ve worked up quite a head of steam fighting with Grady but when that dissipates I am even more feeble than before and drift off. When I wake, I find that while I slept, someone turned off the overheads. Sunset veils the room in golden light. Apparently Swbyra has come and gone. My keys rest on the bedside table next to my badge and the door to the cupboard at the foot of the bed stands ajar to reveal a set of clothes and a pair of shoes.
Someone is sitting in the side chair.
“Lix?”
“Come to check up on you.” He sits rigidly in the chair. His wavy hair falls to the cowl neck of a bulky black sweater topped by a quilted vest, purple with lime racing stripes. The sweater is snagged and years have worn the sheen off the vest parka. Like everything else I’ve seen him in, it has the look of a costume. This ensemble gives him the appearance of a ski bum on a decidedly downhill run.
“How did you know—?”
“OFFICER DOWN. Big news.”
“How’d you know where to find me?”
“Ain’t like there’s a hospital on every corner.”
His voice is stiff, almost petulant, and doesn’t invite casual conversation. We sit in silence for a moment. The gloom deepens.
“You lied to me. Again,” he finally says.
“I didn’t—”
He picks up my badge, tosses it lightly in his palm. “I asked you if you was a cop. You said ‘no.’”
Though I might have expected, even preferred anger or resentment, he sounds only wounded.
“It’s hard to explain. I’ve sort of been drafted.”
He thinks that over for a minute. “Like a deputy. In a Western.”
“Kind of like that, yeah.”
He gets comfortable in the chair. “So how are ya?”
“I’ll live.”
“That’s good.”
“That’s better than good, that’s great. And I aim to keep it that way.”
He favors me with a small smile. “Great. Yeah.”
Another few moments pass in silence that is neither tense nor awkward, but rather companionable.
“The doctor said you did good work, Lix. On the tattoo.”
“You told him about me?” he asks eagerly.
Well, not in so many words. Why not let him think so if it makes him happy? “Nice post-operative care, he said.”
“Nice post-opera ... ,” Lix echoes. “Yeah.” He nods, a small smile on his face.
“You’re the best.”
“Damn straight.” He nods some more, then his smile fades. “So, you gonna keep on doing this cop thing?” He takes up tossing the badge again.
“I don’t know. Someone killed a guy—”
“Hector.”
“Yeah. I want to find out who did it.”
“Why? He’s nobody to you. You said. Unless that was a lie, too.”
“No, you’re right. He’s nobody to me.”
“So is it, like, some mass murder thing?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I need to find out more about it.”
“So you’re gonna keep looking.” He holds the badge toward the window, catches the sunset glow on the shiny surface and wiggles it, making sundogs on the wall.
“I want to know.”
“Bad enough to sleep in a pine box?” he asks.
“Um, maybe not that bad.”
“Good. No, great.” His smile broadens. White teeth gleam against lips that look glossed with licorice. “I don’t like thinking about you being dead.” He lays the badge on the bedside table face-down. “Be seein’ ya, Will Mansion.”
“See ya, Lix Gemini.”
He leaves the room as silently as he came.
Night settles on me like a blanket. I lie in the dark and wonder, what will I do? The job is not done. There is still a killer out there. Crowberry, Swbyra, and Grady all take it for granted I will shoulder the charge again, talk as if I have no choice. Only Lix Gemini sees the danger, sees it as I do: a choice between long life and early death.
Just thinking about it makes me sweat, though the room is cool. My heart accelerates, muscles tense. Like paint fumes, the hospital smell is making me brainsick. It triggers associations. I feel the queasy, room-spinning warning signs of a flashback. I’ve got to get out of here.
The nurse enters the room, turns on the light, and catches me sitting up and picking at the tape over the needle that tethers me to the IV stand.
“Ready for that sponge bath?” she asks with a cheerful smile. “Hey, leave that IV alone.”
“I want out.” The imperative to flee is stronger than the conviction that there’s no place to run to.
“Oh, no way!”
“The doctor said I could leave when I felt like it and I feel like it now.”
She props her hands on curvaceous hips. “Doctor said twenty-four hours and it hasn’t been nearly that.”
“He said to rest and I’m not getting any here.”
“I don’t understand, you have the room all to yourself.”
“Yeah, but you wouldn’t believe the parade of people that came through here today. I’m not hanging around for more.”
“There’s a ‘No Visitors’ sign on your door.”
“That didn’t stop any of the ones I got. Now I want to go home.” I wiggle the hand with the IV needle. “Get this thing off me.”
With obvious reluctance, she releases me from captivity. “You’re sure I can’t give you that sponge bath? For old times’ sake?”
“Thanks. Some other time.”
“If you’re going to wash up, you should let me help you. You shouldn’t get your bandages wet.”
“Really, I’m fine. Thank you.”
She shrugs and continues on her rounds.
Forget about bathing. Simply getting dressed is an ordeal. My body has completely seized up: my trunk is stiff as a double-starched shirt, my shoulders are a steel I-beam. Spine and hamstrings seem to be several inches shorter and I can’t bend past a fifteen-degree angle. Inch by painful, creaking inch I get clothes on. Swbyra brought everything I need—underwear, socks and shoes, jeans and a sweater, the leather jacket that, like me, has seen better days.
I get myself discharged, submit to a wheelchair transport to the front door, and hail a cab.