On the Campaign Trail
Morrissey and Trask had done most of the drive in silence, Trask driving and Morrissey trying to ignore the pounding in his head. Other than thanking Morrissey for getting him back from the boonies, Trask had kept his mouth shut. It was a hard silence. Morrissey could see that Trask was brimming with apologies, explanations, and excuses. He didn’t want to hear them.
The black florist van borrowed from the detectives’ division was great cover but a miserable ride, drafty and badly sprung, with stiff vinyl seats that didn’t adjust and no leg room. By the time they got to Maine, Morrissey felt like he’d just done a coast-to-coast red eye in coach and was in a piss-poor mood.
He was too old for this. The days when the excitement of the chase outweighed the misery of hours with his knees in his ears were gone. He felt a depressing certainty things wouldn’t end well. In the battle of young Jenny Cates against the world, despite her successes to date, the bad guys had the edge. Ravaged by an aching head and a bleary brain, he felt old, jaded, angry. Still touched by a lingering shame at allowing himself to sleep with a woman so young and vulnerable. It was no state for a cop to be in when he needed to be on top of things.
More than anything, he would have liked a huge breakfast and a soft motel bed, but his cop’s intuition told him the situation required immediate attention. They gulped an indigestion-inducing McD’s breakfast heavy with grease, butter and cholesterol and joined the team watching the Mason and Cates houses. When Andy Mason came striding out and jumped in the red truck, he had signaled that they’d follow.
The place Mason had chosen to stop, a stark phone booth at a closed roadside restaurant, gave them nowhere to hide. They’d had to settle for driving down the road and doubling slowly back in time to see the truck, now with three passengers instead of one, heading in the opposite direction. They’d done their own about-face and followed the truck down the dirt road, stopping out of sight and going forward on foot. They had seen Mason taken at gun point into the derelict building by two men, a smaller one who appeared to be the leader, and a larger, a slope-shouldered Neanderthal.
Now, crouched behind the stripped carcass of a panel truck, they were discussing what to do. “Dollars to doughnuts those are the guys who shot you,” Trask said.
“Not a betting man,” Morrissey grunted, though he agreed.
He was more concerned with how they’d get inside and grab the guys before they wasted Mason. Even at a distance, he heard the sounds of violence. He knew from experience the kind of damage that slope-shouldered sadist could inflict and how little time it took. He gestured toward the building. “They’re gonna kill him. We’ve got to go in,” he said. “You take the back.”
“Let me take the front,” Trask protested. “You’re in no shape…”
“The back,” he said. “Go.”
Trask went.
Outside the door, he listened to the voices. First the one finishing an ugly and graphic description of what they would do to Jenny Cates if Andy Mason didn’t cooperate and they had to find her on their own. The voice so light and cheerful, the threat stomach-turning and utterly believable. Morrissey had seen plenty of things in his life most people couldn’t conceive of one human being doing to another. People so badly cut they looked like hash. A baby that had been boiled. An eighty-year old woman raped with a broom handle. And they’d been people he didn’t know. Jenny Cates he knew too well. There was a silence, the sound of a blow, and a thick, stumbling voice he assumed was Mason’s, strained with pain and tinged with helpless rage, telling them what they wanted to know.
Acting on the information overheard, he could have slipped away to find Jenny Cates, leaving Mason to his fate. But Morrissey’d been a cop twenty-five years. Leaving a civilian, particularly one whose only offense had been to try and protect someone, to a brutal death at the hands of two thugs wasn’t in his personal code.
He drew his gun, raised his foot, and kicked in the door.