Pookie stood inside the apartment, looking down on Susie’s body. She was on her back, eyes wide open, an expression of shock etched onto her still face. Something had punched a half-inch circle through her chest and into her heart. Her pajama top had been driven into the hole as well; the blood-soaked fabric lined the newly exposed flesh and bone.
Outside, patrol cars blocked the street. An ambulance had already arrived, but the paramedics had made quick work of declaring all three bodies dead on the scene, and all three as homicides. Crime-scene investigators were on the way, as was someone from the ME’s office.
Such insanity. The things Pookie had seen — the jumper, the guy with the mask, Issac’s head turned the wrong way — hard to process it all. Alex Panos was poison. Whoever wanted that kid had followed him here, and now his mother was dead because of it.
Pookie looked up as Bryan walked through the apartment’s shattered front door. Bryan paused to look at the exposed white wood where the hinges had once connected, then down at the cracked door lying on the living room carpet. He seemed to mentally catalog these things, then walked over to join Pookie at Susie’s body.
“I called in a BOLO on the perp,” Bryan said.
“Really,” Pookie said. “And how did you describe it?”
“A guy in a green cloak, maybe six feet tall. Carrying a bow. That about right?”
Pookie nodded. He kept staring at Susie’s corpse. Maybe she wasn’t the best mother, but she’d tried. She didn’t deserve this.
“Sammy and Jimmy are here,” Bryan said. “Jimmy is down with the bearded guy. Sammy’s on his way up here.”
Bryan knelt next to the body.
“She looks really pale,” he said. “Maybe like she’s lost a ton of blood.”
Bryan was right. Pookie had seen the corpses of people who had bled to death. They looked a lot like Susie.
Bryan pointed to the hole in her chest. “Who did that to her?”
“A guy wearing a blanket and a mask came out the window and chased Issac up the fire escape. Maybe the guy had just finished doing this to Susie.”
Bryan nodded. “This the same guy that twisted Issac’s head the wrong way?”
“Could be,” Pookie said. “Either him or the bowman.”
“You’d have to be strong to break someone’s neck like that. This guy with a mask … you sure it was a mask?”
“Not now, Bryan,” Pookie said. “I can only handle so much of this shit at one time, you know?”
Bryan held up his hands palms-out. “Easy, Pooks, easy. Just tell me what the mask looked like.”
It looked so disturbing my balls hid inside my chest was what Pookie wanted to say, but he didn’t. “Ever see the pictures of those plague masks doctors wore in the Dark Ages?”
“I think so,” Bryan said. “Long, pointy nose that points down? Kind of like a beak?”
“Yeah,” Pookie said. “Kind of like a beak.”
Bryan pointed to the hole in Susan’s chest. “Something stabbed her there. You think this mask could have been strong enough to do that?”
Pookie knew what Bryan was getting at — how likely was it that a hooked-beak mask could punch through a chest? About as likely that the fake teeth of a werewolf mask were strong enough to rip off an arm.
“Pooks,” Bryan said, “I know I’m the last person in the world who should ask a question like this, but are you sure you saw that bowman jump across the street? The world-record long jump is something like thirty feet — the space between the two buildings is at least twice that.”
“I know what I saw,” Pookie said. “Believe me, I wish I hadn’t seen it at all. I don’t know a damn thing about archery, but that guy hit the perp from across the street, ten stories up, in a rainstorm, at night, and he put that shot right over your shoulder.”
Bryan nodded. “Unless he was aiming at me, and missed.”
Pookie thought back to his brief shootout on the rooftop, to the cloaked man pulling two guns and blazing away. He’d had Pookie dead to rights — how could someone be that good with a bow and that bad with a gun from point-blank range? The answer was: he couldn’t be. He hadn’t killed Pookie because he hadn’t wanted to kill Pookie.
“The archer wasn’t aiming for you, Bri-Bri. He was aiming for Bobby Pigeon’s killer.”
Bryan’s eyes narrowed. “Are you saying that since the guy is Bobby’s alleged killer, it’s okay to put an arrow in his heart?”
“Did I say it was okay?”
Bryan stared, then shook his head.
“The archer is just another murderer,” Pookie said. “Far as we know, he killed Issac, too. It gives us one more person to look for — Rex, Alex and the archer. We have to focus and get what info we can, because Robertson could show up at any minute and kick us out of here.”
Sammy Berzon walked into the room, a metal case in each hand.
“Fellas,” he said. “Never a dull moment with you two around, eh? Jimmy is heading up to the roof. I got seniority, so his bitch-ass gets the rain. Boom. We’re done with the stiff down on the sidewalk. Shot through the heart, and who’s to blame, right?” Sammy’s head rocked back in a silent laugh. “We found a cell phone on him, but it’s a pre-paid. I’ll have the boys start running the call history, but don’t get your hopes up.”
Pookie knew that Sammy was right; the phone would probably reveal nothing. Perps were smart enough to buy pre-paids with cash, meaning there was no personal information associated with them. A pre-paid phone calling only other pre-paid phones left almost no trail. The only thing they were likely to get were GPS locations of calls made and received. That might reveal a pattern, or possibly produce a specific place to investigate.
“Get us call locations as soon as you can,” Pookie said. “What else you get off him?”
“Nothing yet,” Sammy said. “We’re done with him. Hudson the Hotness has him now.”
Bryan’s head snapped up. “Robin’s down there?”
Sammy nodded. “That’s the fact, Jack.”
Bryan started walking out. Pookie followed him.
“By the way,” Sammy said just before they exited the broken door. “Whichever of you two comedians called in a BOLO on a guy in a fucking cloak should watch out. Robertson just canceled it. He said someone was in deep shit for playing games at a murder scene. FYI, eh?”
Bryan snarled, then turned and walked out.
The assistant chief of police had just canceled a BOLO on a murderer. Pookie wanted to be shocked and outraged, but he wasn’t that surprised; he was just too damn tired to get fired up about it.
Pookie took one last look at Susie Panos. She’d tried to save her son, and in doing so proved an old adage — no good deed goes unpunished.