A Killer in the Wind (2 page)

“You sure we shouldn’t call the staties?”

“You’re gonna be fine, Dunn,” I said, pushing the door open. “Tonight, Sally’s gonna be having sex with a hero.”

“Can’t wait.”

“I wasn’t talking about you.”

Dunn and the LTR rolled out on the far side of the car, all saucer-sized eyes and adrenaline.

I shut the driver’s door and started across the dirt.

The house was a run-down two-story shingle with a porch out front. Lights on upstairs and in the back of the first floor, but I couldn’t see anyone moving. Dunn was ducking from car to car, checking the truck bed and the back of the Accord like I told him. He settled behind the Accord with the rifle braced on top and pointed at the house’s front door. I headed for the porch.

As I came close, the moon went behind the roof, casting the porch’s recesses into deep shadow. I could make out the shape of a swing just to one side of the front door and a rocker just to the other, but farther in than that everything was blackness.

I went up the stairs. I didn’t draw my 19. I still had an undercover’s instincts and figured I could talk my way out of pretty much anything. I stepped onto the porch. Deep darkness on either side of me. No noise but the frogs and crickets riddling and peeping in the swamp nearby. I reached out to pull open the screen.

The next second, the night was all roaring and snarling as a dog, a huge German shepherd, launched itself at me out of the blackness to my right. Lance, Harvey’s drug dog. I’d forgotten all about him. I saw his dripping fangs flash and his angry eyes burning even as I stumbled backward, arms wheeling, off the porch onto the top step. Lucky I hadn’t drawn my gun. If I had, I’d have shot the creature dead. Then I’d have had that on my conscience along with everything else because old Lance was chained up and couldn’t reach me. He snapped the chain tight and hung off the end of it, his front legs suspended in air as he snarled and yammered at me in a helpless rage.

Bess opened the front door, turning on the hall light inside as she did.

“Who’s there?”

“Dan Champion from the Sheriff’s Office.”

“Dan?”

“I’d like to talk to you, Bess, and I don’t want to have to shoot your dog to do it.”

“Quiet, Lance! Quiet! Go lie down!”

Lance gave a last disdainful woof and figured to hell with it. Receded into the porch shadows and lay down in the darkness. My heart was knocking at my ribs like a cop’s fist on a whorehouse door. Had to breathe my pulse back to normal as I stepped up onto the porch again.

“Sorry about that,” said Bess. “Harvey trained him. It’s all show. He doesn’t hurt anyone.”

She tried to smile but she was too worried to pull it off. That tenderness I sometimes noticed in her eyes was a hunted tenderness now. Plus she’d been crying and had black mascara rings highlighting her eye pouches. Reminded me of a cornered raccoon—just like a cornered raccoon, in fact: defiant and terrified.

I stepped up close to her, towered over her. The dog growled from the shadows. I spoke low.

“I’m here to take your brother, Bess. I don’t want the kids to get hurt.”

She looked up at me, right at me. Her lips trembled. “He’s not here,” she said, starting to cry.

“I don’t want the kids to get hurt,” I said again. “Where are they?”

She barely managed to get the words out: “Upstairs in their bedrooms.”

“And Frank?”

The mascara streaked her right cheek as the tears rolled down it. “Hiding on the cellar stairs,” she whispered. “Behind the door in the kitchen.”

I squeezed her shoulder. “Go up to your babies. It’ll be all right,” I said.

She nodded quickly. I held on to her arm, guiding her back into the house. I went in with her and let the door close hard so Frank could hear it, maybe think everything was back to normal. I nodded at the stairs and gave Bess a little shove that way. She glanced back at me once but then went, scurrying up to the second floor.

I moved on, past the staircase, toward the bright light of the kitchen in back. Down a narrow hall. I could see the cellar door just at the end of it, just where the kitchen began, on the wall to my right. The door was hinged to open toward me.

I knew Frank would come out of there gun first and he did. Meaning to curl around the door, take a shot at me, and run for it. I was there too fast. As the door swung open, I kicked it back on him. It smacked him in the shoulder. The pistol fired, a deafening blast. A china serving tray on a kitchen shelf exploded into fragments and white powder. A black hole opened in the flowery wallpaper. Then I was on him. I grabbed his wrist. I snatched the gun out of his hand and dragged him into the kitchen by his shirtfront and smashed the gun butt into his face, breaking his nose. I hate a scumbag with a gun, hate it. I twisted his shirtfront in my free hand and slammed his back full force into the wall. Held him there with a forearm and stuck the barrel of his own weapon into his eye socket.

“You pull a gun on me?” I said. I slapped him in the face with the barrel. “You hit women. That’s what you’re good for. You don’t pull a gun on me. Not on me.”

I slapped him again just to see his eyes spin around. Then I hustled him and his bloody face back down the wall, past the stairs, to the front door. I heard the German shepherd going nuts on his chain again and when I pulled the door open I saw Deputy Dunn and his rifle trying to edge around the creature’s teeth to reach the door.

I pushed Frank out onto the porch.

“Shut up, Lance!” I shouted, but the dog kept barking.

I went past him—and past Dunn—and threw Frank down the stairs. He landed face-first in the dirt below and lay there, dazed and groaning.

“Kill him,” I told Dunn.

“What?”

“Oh, all right, cuff him then, and get him in the car. Shut up, Lance!”

The dog howled and squealed and barked some more.

While Deputy Dunn kneeled on Frank Bagot’s back and wrestled his arms behind him for the cuffs, I stepped into the house again. Went to the bottom of the stairs. Looked up to where Bess now stood on the landing, a frightened child huddled one under each of her arms.

“It’s all right,” I told her. “Someone’ll come by tomorrow, pick up his things and take a statement from you. Tell them how he held you hostage, threatened your kids.”

“He did, you know,” she said, sniffling.

“Well, you tell them. And you ought to get rid of that dog too, before he hurts one of you,” I said.

“I will,” she said.

But she wouldn’t. Or if she did, she’d get herself a man just as bad and he’d do the damage instead of the dog. That’s how it was with her, with everyone more or less. By my reckoning, maybe 15 percent of the suffering of life is unbidden sickness and disaster, the rest we bring on ourselves.

I hesitated a moment at the base of the stairs. Beautiful kids too. A porcelain girl with silk blonde hair. A dark solemn boy with farseeing eyes. It was a shame what was going to happen to them in this house. But there was nothing I could do about it. Nothing anyone could do.

I gave them a nod. “You have a good night,” I said.

The dog was still straining and barking as I stepped out onto the porch again, but I think it was beginning to get tired of the sound of its own voice. When I glared at it now, it whimpered and shut up and circled the floorboards, its chain scraping. Finally, it lay down again. I went down the stairs to the dirt drive.

Dunn was just working Frank Bagot into the backseat of the Beamer. I stood where I was a while and composed myself, considering the night sky: the gibbous moon rising and the Big Dipper bright and the bright stars and planets flickering out from behind the trees, making the woods seem mysterious and deep. With the dog quiet, I could hear the swamp creatures again. Whistling, chattering, humming, groaning like bulls. There was a peacefulness about it after the sudden violence, an atmosphere of rightness and content as if things were working in the dark of the forest the way they were intended to.

That’s when the ghosts returned to me—the memory of the ghosts, I mean. The memory of the city with all a city’s suddenness and jarring noise. I was thinking about Frank Bagot and the way he came back to his past and the way the past comes back. I had lived three years in exurban Tyler County, but New York was always with me. I was always half-afraid that I would turn this way or that and see the little boy who wasn’t there, see him staring at me with his phantom eyes. Or the woman. Samantha . . . The past shapes your desires and your desires lead you back into the past.

I took a deep breath of the cool spring air, rich and moist and somehow green, full of the swamp and the forest.
You’re fine,
I told myself.
Fine
. But I guess the thing is: Once you’ve been crazy, once you’ve seen ghosts and lived with delusions, you can never be quite sure of yourself anymore. Reality seems fragile to you. You’re always worried it’ll crack and you’ll step through it into the bad time again.

I heard Deputy Dunn shut the Beamer’s rear door. I walked over to the driver’s side.

“Nice work,” I said.

He nodded, big-eyed, big Adam’s apple going up and down. He was still all fired up and confused. But I could see by the look of him that he was beginning to realize he had come through it, and he’d have a good story to tell his Sal tonight.

We both got into the car, me behind the wheel.

“You bastard, you hit me,” said Frank Bagot out of the back.

“You’re lucky I didn’t shove that gun up your ass and blow your brains out,” I told him. I started the car.

I paused for a moment there, my hand on the gearshift. Looking out the windshield at the lighted house with the moon above it. Finally, with some small trepidation, I scanned the edges of the surrounding forest. Fearing I would see those old ghosts standing there, watching me, from just within the trees.

But there was nothing. Of course not. I felt fine. Good. I had for years. Not likely ever to see what I once saw, what I saw back then, down in the city. The boy. The woman. Not likely.

But once you’ve been crazy, you can never be quite sure.

2

Flashback: The Emory Case

T
HIS WAS A
little over three years ago. I was NYPD back then. An undercover vice detective in Manhattan North—what in cop-speak we called an
uncle
. I had the whole uncle routine going too: the longish hair, the motorcycle, the cigarettes—and the ganja, when off-duty—not to mention the complete disdain for rules and procedures that goes along with the undercover trade.

I had been a while finding my calling. Raised in orphanages and foster homes, I’d bummed around for a few years after high school. Did construction work here and there. Drank hard. Broke hearts. Punched people. Then, on the advice of a deputy sheriff who’d just finished kicking me in the stomach, I joined the Army. Traveled to the Hindu Kush, met exotic,
Pakol
-wearing evildoers, and killed them. Came back, got my degree in law enforcement at Syracuse, then applied to the NYPD.

I became a white shield uncle in PMD—the Public Morals Division—right out of the academy. You can do that in Vice. It’s not like Narcotics. You don’t have to serve three years on patrol. So I scored my gold shield after eighteen months. And now I was a detective—thirty-three because of my late start, but still plenty young enough to be on fire with ambition.

And I was more than on fire. I had nothing else in my life to distract me. No wife, no family. Nothing but the job. I worked it hard. I developed a hunger inside me. I hammered through my two-week eighty-hour pay periods and then past the twenty-five overtime cap whether the department approved the money or not. Then I worked on into secret, sleepless, unknown nights, and screw the union rules. I combed through hot cases and cold cases. I pawed through buried files in basement boxes that had never even been scanned into the system. I busted my way up from prosses to pimps to mobster traffickers in women and children—all manner of modern slave-traders who preyed on foreigners and the poor. I even did my part to bring down a state senator once, a man of the people trading his vote for high-priced call girls on the side.

Over the course of a couple of years, I developed . . . I’m not sure what to call it—a preoccupation, say, with a perp known to me only as the Fat Woman. She was a specialty broker. A seller of human beings without flaw or blemish, supplying the finest in flesh and souls—in women, girls, and boys—to the very highest class of clients. That’s what my sources told me at least. There was no record of her anywhere—no pictures, no prints. She was just a word on the street, a passed remark, a knowing mutter over the body of a dead child. An elite and legendary monster, like the devil himself. In fact, it’s a good comparison because, as with the devil himself, you only saw the effects of her while she remained invisible. As with the devil himself, some people, even some police, didn’t believe she existed.

But I did. I believed. And I wanted her. I had an eye out, always, for any sign she had passed by.

Then came the day—it was deep winter—I got a call from a friend in the one-seven. Their module was working a luxury pross ring run out of a building on Sutton Place. My friend, one of the investigators, a detective named Monahan, had been camped on the street outside for a week. He’d snapped a stakeout photo of a john who frequented the place.