Wednesday, August 29
Noon
Denver, Colorado
Denver, Colorado, smelled pretty much the same as Chicago, Illinois, these days. It used to smell of mesquite and woodsmoke and cold winds down from the Rockies.
Now a superhighway ran right up the spine of the city on a long rise from south to north, splitting a tangled web of tract homes and restaurants, gas stations and shopping malls and warehouses. Denver was one of the reasons Sonny stayed in Santa Fe when he could. It was also a good reason for missing Charleston, but there was no sense in letting those feelings run. Charleston was closed to him, unless he wanted to serve twenty years upstate before he could have a drink in Old Town or go for a walk along Murray.
A chubby kid in a lime-green rodeo outfit was holding the door for him, waiting for a tip. Sonny pushed by him and went through a lobby packed with tourists in loud shirts and shorts, sitting around in padded plastic chairs sipping drinks that looked like salads.
Waiting for the elevator, he checked for coverage. There was nothing. If Lucas Poole had drawn surveillance here, they were better at it than they had been the last time he and Lucas had worked in Denver. They’d helped a couple of Israelis clean out a Palestinian banker who had a big house down on the South Platte. Lucas and Sonny got to keep most of the cash. The Israelis had taken the banker.
Sonny knocked on the door of 317, standing a little to the side. Lucas Poole hadn’t been the type to shoot a man through a door, but Lucas hadn’t been shot in the chest before. The latch was off. Sonny heard Lucas’s voice saying, “Its open.”
Lucas Poole was lying on the big double bed, propped up on a couple of pillows, holding a little Ingram auto on his belly. He looked like a skull on a stick, cheeks sunken in, his eyes yellow and red, his skin hanging on his ribs and slack in the hollows of his neck. Cords stood out as he smiled and raised his hand.
Sonny kept his mouth shut and his face blank.
Lucas set the Ingram down and levered himself up off the bed. Sonny took his hand and then he pulled Lucas into him, put his arms around him, feeling the body like a leather bag full of rods. Sonny slammed him a couple of times on the back and pushed him back to arm’s length, holding Poole by the upper arms.
“Lucas … how you doin’?”
“You can see for yourself. One thing I don’t recommend is Mexican medicine. Broca’s cousins almost killed me, they took care of me so good.”
“You took a hell of a round there.”
“Yeah. I’m still waiting for the lung to come back. Doc inflated it a couple of times, but I take a deep breath sometimes, feels like I swallowed a cactus. Anyway, I’ll be okay. You want a drink?”
Sonny watched Lucas carefully as he walked over to a dresser to pour them out a couple of fingers of Bushmill’s. His hands were steady enough, and he didn’t pour too much, and he waited until Sonny had his before tasting his own. Sonny nodded toward the puckered circular ridge just below Poole’s right collarbone.
“Well, here’s to you.”
They drank it down in silence.
“You talk to old Eufemio?” asked Sonny, still trying to get used to the way Poole looked.
“Broca’s dead. Texas Rangers boxed him up in a trailer park a couple of miles outside Del Rio. Come sunrise, they shot the place up. Killed Broca, Broca’s little sister—remember her? Delia? Killed his father and a couple of neighbor kids sleeping over. Supposed to be something like a thousand rounds put into the place.”
“Yeah? Sounds like somebody worked out an arrangement with the Rangers. Anyway … too bad about him. Eufemio was good.”
“Yeah,” said Lucas, smiling broadly, remembering the old drinking toast. “End of a long line. Here’s to him … So, you work something out with Jabba the Hurt?”
Sonny opened his shirt and tugged out a tan canvas money belt. He tossed it over to Poole, who caught it in one hand. He hefted it speculatively.
“There’s about a hundred thousand in there. One third. I put 50K aside for Myron’s son-in-law. Send that to him in about a month. Also another 50K for Myron’s wife. Put it in a trust for her. She’s dying, so Myron said.”
“It go hard for Myron?”
“No. I saw him. It was quick. He was dying anyway. Had cancer. In the end, I think he was just as happy to go out working. Save him some rat’s-ass finish, tubes up his pecker and down his throat. He did a good job his last time out.”
Lucas poured them another round. The liquor seemed to give him some blood and color.
“I read a little about it. What went wrong?”
Sonny shrugged. “We screwed up, is all.”
“Yeah?” said Lucas. “That happens.”
Lyle’s name drifted in the air between them for a couple of minutes, but neither man was ready to say it out loud. Finally, Lucas said, “Sorry about the kid.”
“Yeah. He always saw too many possibilities in things. It can hobble you, thinking that way. It was like he was always looking for just the right move to make—as if any one thing you did was going to change your life. Made it hard for him to pay attention to what he was doing. People would always take advantage.… You still pissed off with him, Lucas?”
“What? About me getting shot? Hell, Lyle had nothing to do with that. Sooner or later we’re all gonna get something we don’t want to get. No, I just … I always figured it’d be Lyle sitting here someday, and you who’d be dead, trying to save his sorry ass. No offense, Sonny?”
“No offense, Lucas.”
“So … what you have in mind now?”
“You get that bulletin from your cousin?”
“Yeah. She’s gonna be a real cop soon. Can you see it? My cousin, a girl cop in a uniform and everything?”
“No. I can’t. She give you a hard time about this?”
“No. She’s a good kid. I wouldn’t ask her for anything that would … that she wouldn’t want to do. But this is different We find a bad cop for the Feds, that’s okay with her.”
“They even send these bulletins to places like St. cloud?”
Lucas dug the sheet out from under a stack of magazines and papers and handed it across to Sonny.
“Nationwide, this one went. They haven’t got him yet, though. I checked with her this morning.”
Sonny flattened the sheet out on his knee. It was a standard Federal notice, a picture of Frank Keogh in his police blues, head-and-shoulder shot. Age, weight, any identifying marks. Wanted in connection with the murder of NYPD Sergeant Arthur Randall Pike at Lincoln Hospital, 08/22/90. Ligature homicide. Notice listed by a Detective Sergeant Ezekiel Parrot of the Bronx Detective Area Task Force. So on and so forth. Sonny read it twice.
“So you figure this guy’s going to go straight to this place … Upper Matecumbe Key?”
“Yeah. Story is, the guy’s father is a retired cop. Now get this: It seems the way this Pike guy was killed, it’s exactly the same way a bunch of kids were killed maybe twenty years ago. Guess who was the cop on that case? The guy’s father. Marlee says the FBI has the father’s marina under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Man owns a boat down there called The Madelaine. Runs fishing charters out of the Bahia Mar Azul Marina. Drinks all the time at a place called Rotten Ralph’s or something.”
“So let me get this straight. This Frank Keogh, his father did the original investigation?”
“That’s what she says. Caught some teenage psycho. The kid walked on an insanity plea. They slammed him into an asylum upstate. He’s been there ever since.”
Weird, thought Sonny. It bothered him that there were factors here he had no control over. What the hell was going on with this guy?
“Sonny … I have to tell you, I think you’re out of your fucking mind, chasing this cop around the country.”
“It’s a personal thing, Lucas.”
“Suppose I said it was a personal thing, Lyle fucking us up back there in Lawton?”
Sonny felt a thin red streak of anger, but he fought it down.
“I don’t know, Lucas. Is that how you feel?”
“Hell, no. The point is, it makes no sense, you chasing a cop. The cop didn’t know your brother. The cop was just doing what he was told to do. It was his job to shoot Lyle. If Lyle hadn’t wanted to be shot, he shouldn’t have been keeping bad company.”
Levine’s line. Bad company. Maybe they were. It had been a long time since Sonny looked hard at what he was doing for a living. Somehow he always thought of himself as one of the good guys, a man capable of keeping his promises and being faithful to his friends and family. It seemed to him that being loyal to a partner, caring about the death of a brother, those were the things that made up in a way for the stealing he was doing. He had no illusions about who he was. He was a thief, a professional thief. But he was also a man who had some good qualities. Going after Lyle’s murderer was a way for Sonny to go on seeing himself as one of the good guys.
“Maybe that’s true, Lucas. But I’m doing it anyway. Are you in or out?”
“No hard feelings if I’m out, Sonny?”
“No. I could use you, but no hard feelings.”
“What is it you want me to do, anyway?”
That was a tricky question. Sonny knew that Lucas wasn’t going to approve of what he had to say.
“Lucas … how healthy are you?”
Poole’s thin face darkened. His throat flexed and he looked at Sonny in a flat way.
“I’m fine, considering I have half a lung gone. I’ll be fine. If you don’t think so, then say goodbye now and stop sitting around in my room depressing me.”
“Well, there’s no other way to say this. I need you to come along with me, help me figure out where this cop has gone. When we find him, I want you to help me take him out.”
Poole said nothing but his eyes were changing, as if he was seeing Sonny in a way that hadn’t been clear before, and he didn’t like it.
“I don’t do contracts, Sonny. Neither do you.”
“This isn’t a contract. This is for me.”
Poole didn’t like that either.
“Sonny, this is me. We never lied to each other in all the years we been through. Lyle’s dying was business—that’s all. For you to take it any other way is … mean. A man goes mean and there’s no end to that. He just gets meaner and meaner until somebody stops him.”
“That may be, Lucas. But Lyle wasn’t out there on business. He was just standing around on that balcony with his hands up, waving a goddammed painting around. I don’t think that Keogh bastard even had permission to take him out. That Irish prick did it because he likes it. You follow?”
“Yeah. Maybe he was mean. So you get mean too? You stop being what you are and start being something else, maybe even you don’t know what that will be. It could be something you don’t like. You got it in you, Sonny. It’s never come out, but it’s in there.”
“You killed that kid in Lawton, Lucas.”
“That was business. A man signs on to be a cop, he gets that snazzy uniform and the boots and the big black Ford, gets to carry a piece and a sidearm and wear that shit-kicking grin for all the citizens to see, part of the package is, now and then they get into something and they get killed. If it weren’t for the fact that now and then one of them gets himself killed, they wouldn’t like the job near as much. It adds spice, like Tabasco sauce. It’s business. What you’re talking about is ugly, mean-minded, and just plain stupid.”
“Yeah,” said Sonny, smiling at Lucas. “You gonna help me?”
Lucas said nothing. After a while, he smiled.
“Yeah. What the hell. Somebody got to be there to tell your relatives what happened.”
They smiled at each other then. After a while they got into the Bushmill’s and the talk rolled around to who they had worked with over the years, what had happened on this job and that. How Ronnie del Monica got himself shot by a security guard in Modesto while he was trying to get a scorpion out of his pants. And Hubie Ferris, who once lifted a rolled car off Sonny with his bare hands, by the side of the highway, the troopers no more than six minutes back.
And the time they took the bank in San Miguel down in Quintana Roo just because it was there, Lucas just deciding to do it and Sonny still at the teller’s cage next door, Lucas pulling out his Colt and sticking it in the man’s nose, saying later, Well, shit, he was a rude little fucker, you know? And the ride to Reno under a sickle moon, playing zydeco, the names and faces all running together, the kids who came to play, the hard guys who had gotten theirs in the big yard one way or another … Charleston and the family, playing football on the turf … Well, it had been sweet. It had been a good time.
Sonny woke up the next morning in the bathtub with cold water running on his crotch. There was a note taped to the mirror.
Dear Sonny
You look so pretty there I had to leave you sleeping. I am downstairs having some coffee. You have a couple of aspirins and climb up on the sink there and reach up into the tiles. You’ll see an old friend there I brought up to give you back. Take care you don’t slip on the sink or you will give yourself a fearsome crack on the nuptials. This happened to me.
I forgot to tell you last night but before you got here I made a bunch of calls and if this cop you are looking for has one green eye and one blue and looks Irish as hell then it might be that he bought a 1975 Cadillac Coupe de Ville from Bobby Durkel’s lot in Richmond on Tuesday. I told all of the guys who knew Lyle back when he had the car lot that there’d be money in it for anybody who could get some word about this guy. If it is the guy we send five c’s to Chico del Monica in Atlanta.
The guy is using the name Barnaby Galston. New York ID. Plates were Virginia ZRG 334. Midnight blue sparkle.
Soon as you get yourself together, let’s get the hell out of here. They’re looking for us too.
Lucas
Sonny read the note three times. Damn, Lucas was good.
There was more to him than you could see in a year.
He got up onto the sink and moved the sound tile. The package was short and bulky, wrapped in a Mexican blanket.
It was the Heckler, broken down and cleaned.
Sonny dressed and thought about Frank Keogh.
Richmond?
The guy was going to go down like a paralyzed falcon, dropping down the map all the way to Florida. I-95.
Dammit, they’d pick him off at a tollbooth if he kept that up. They’d have cameras all over that route. It was a big mule road—Sonny knew that from his brief run at the drug trade. I-95 from Florida to the northeastern seaboard and Montreal. The DEA and the FBI had funded surveillance cameras on some of the busier stretches. Keogh would be very hot. Somebody who was awake at the wheel would see the man, see that huge goddam car.
Sonny could see the panic in that kind of a flight and it made him smile. Different now, isn’t it, Frank?
Not as much fun, being chased, is it? Gets on your nerves and you do stupid things.
The thing to do was somehow to get in front of Keogh before the federates got there. Once he was taken in, it’d be a lot harder to get to him. He’d have to subcontract the killing to somebody in the yard. That was expensive and risky because it linked him to the murder. Not a lot of men would pass up the chance to buy some reduced time if they had Sonny Beauchamp to sell.
Sonny thought about it all through a room-service breakfast. He had to get some very good information as fast as possible. His only advantage over the federates was that he knew what name the guy was running under, and the make of the car. It would take a lot of calling and he didn’t want to hang around in this hotel room any longer. The Denver FBI would be checking the hotels regularly. Sonny was still hot from the Lawton robbery. Lucas was even hotter. Although Lucas didn’t look like Lucas anymore. He’d dropped twenty pounds and aged ten years. He looked … old.
For a while, Sonny felt something like guilt at dragging Lucas into this. He put it to one side—something he’d think about later.
Lucas was down in the coffee shop, looking like a piece of chewed beef. They paid the bill and walked out of the lobby and into the hard clear light of Denver. Off in the west, over the ragtag sprawl of the city, a ragged blue ribbon marked the foothills of the Rockies. Three of the peaks had snow but it was ninety degrees and brutally sunny down here in the valley of the South Platte.
They found a little motel out on Arapaho Road. The room was cold and dim and mud-brown. Lucas had nothing to say and Sonny left him alone.
At the Safeway across the road Sonny picked up a couple of sixes of Lone Star and some sugar donuts. He worked out in the room for an hour, doing pushups off the bureau and crunches on the dirty shag rug. When he was sick and sore and shaking, he ate the sugar donuts and drank three Lone Star beers and started making phone calls.