“Stop for gas?” I said.
John Alderdyce was leaning against his Taurus, hands in pockets, dressed casually for him in a maroon cashmere sweater, gray slacks, and black suede pumps with flaps over the laces.
“It’s Kopernick’s show,” he said. “I gave him a head start. Didn’t count on shooting.”
“Who does?”
We watched a male-female EMS team slide Noble Kady’s cot into the back of the ambulance. He was strapped in tight, and still making noise, a couple of octaves lower than before thanks to the shot they’d given him. His leg was in splints. The morgue wagon was still on its way for his partner. That particular crew is almost never in a hurry.
A Bloomfield Hills prowl car, first responder, contributed to the clutter of vehicles in front of the house. One, a deep blue steel-reinforced Mercury, I recognized from Kopernick’s visit to my house. He’d run it onto the lawn when Goss’s reinforcements showed up inside.
The neighbors had come out, some in robes and pajamas, to watch the show in the light from streetlamps and the thousand-candlepower spot mounted on the police cruiser. In that quarter of town they were polite enough to confine themselves to the opposite sidewalk.
I touched my cheek. The bleeding had stopped, but the throbbing went on; and I’d only just recovered from the blow to my neck. Alderdyce watched me.
“You need to have that stitched up. Al Capone could carry off the look. You can’t.”
“I’ll take it under advisement.” It came out slurred, like I was waiting for the novocaine to wear off.
“You want to tell it all here or wrap it up for later?” he said.
“Kopernick can fill you in. He’s even got audio.” I showed him my cell. “I ran a bluff. Now that Goss’s owned up to being in the apartment, that part’s sewed up tight. He said he was rattled then, but he forgot he told me about it when he wasn’t.”
“Hearsay; but I think we can sell it. The chief was worried about that towel. Seems probable cause and stolen evidence aren’t compatible.” He made a nasty chuckle. “Look at him, the big ham. Thinks he’s Boston Blackie.”
Kopernick, in his gray fedora and the pinstripe suit he’d ordered for his first press conference, was coming down the steps from the front door, one hand clamped on his prisoner’s shoulder like an iron claw. Chester Goss, hands cuffed behind him, looked dead white in the glare of the spot. He’d left his makeup artist at the studio.
I said, “Let’s hope when he makes sergeant they put him behind a desk.”
“He’ll find a way to fuck up even there. It’s in his genetic code.”
“Cut it out, John. When this is finished I mean to travel. Go someplace where the locals don’t know how to spell DNA.”
The detective first-grade folded Goss into the Mercury’s back seat, slid under the wheel, and maneuvered the boat into the street. Alderdyce, looking after him, straightened, took his hands from his pockets, and scowled at his wrist. “Well, shit,” he said. “What’ll I watch now, The Golden Girls?”
Michael Mihalich might not have been cut out for the courtroom, but he knew how to ram through the paperwork on Dan Corbeil’s release from prison. It was typed, signed, notarized, and filed before my stitches came out. The Wayne County prosecutor greased things the rest of the way. She was only too happy to clear a cell for Chester Goss.
Some penitentiaries, somewhere, probably still follow the rule of Hollywood: the big steel gate rumbles open on rollers, the freed prisoner shakes hands with a guard, and walks out into klieg-enhanced sunshine and the arms of someone waiting.
But it wouldn’t be like that at Huron Valley. Corbeil would come out a plain steel door carrying his personal effects in a fat mailer. It’d be as institutional as the system itself, brief, cool, and unapologetic. I got that from Barry Stackpole when I gave him the details of Goss’s arrest for his podcast. He had sources on both sides of the bars.
The embrace, if there was one, would be stiff and awkward, like the conversation during the ride home. Brother and sister were strangers after all.
That’s the way it would go, more or less; I wasn’t there. Chrys had invited me to the reunion, but I said it was their moment, not mine. So I stayed home to heal, catch up on my sleep, and bank my fee. I didn’t shoot anyone this time.