Blackbird (2 page)

Then, remembering that as usual lately I’d skipped breakfast this morning, and wondering about the relationship
between blood sugar levels and a runaway imagination, I found a couple of fairly crisp singles in my billfold and headed for the break room. Finding it deserted, I walked across and stood at the window for a minute watching the rain from a new angle. It seemed to be coming down harder now, and though I couldn’t hear anything through the thick double-paned glass I actually thought I could smell it, the two facts seeming, for no reason I could put my finger on, strange and wrong to me.

I pulled the knobs for a couple of candy bars, poured coffee into a Styrofoam cup and picked up a copy of the
Gazette
somebody had left on one of the small Formica-topped tables against the wall. No surprises here: everybody supporting the proposed new rehab facility and halfway house as long as it wasn’t in their neighbourhood, evangelical commandos in a sweat over sex education and
Huckleberry Finn
in the high schools, Louisiana Quarter politicians angling for a cut of the new highway bill. A tenth anniversary retrospective on the unsolved rape and murder of a local eleven-year-old named Joy Dawn Therone, the coverage then transitioning into a rundown of all the uncleared murders and disappearances of girls and young women in this part of the state over the last thirty years. I folded the paper and pushed it across to the other side of the table.

Then the vision of Bragg Field returned, this time superimposed only on the background of the break room and persisting as an accurate replay of something that had actually happened. Now the stands and the field were no longer dark but rocking with life and light and sound inside the cold grey roar of the rain soaking the county and threatening to drown out the marching bands and the screams,
cheers, whistles and air horns from the stands, never letting up from the kickoff to the last play. Our Homecoming game, the field now nothing but a hundred yards of churned mud and turf, the District championship and our shot at the State title on the line, and time running out on us. We stood in a ragged, dripping circle, eyes on number 16, quarterback Eldrew Cleveland Dasbro, brutally forcing himself to stand straight in defiance of the two cracked ribs that would show up on the x-rays after the game.

‘Red Hook Toss?’ he gritted through clenched teeth at Johnny Trammel, who’d just brought the play in from the sideline. ‘Are you shittin’ me?’

Johnny, my closest friend at Bragg, was a magician. He’d played Dr Prestidigito in the drama club’s fall presentation, and I’d seen him make all kinds of things appear and disappear – the coins from his collections, golf balls, even on one unforgettable occasion a gerbil that had first vanished, then somehow gotten out of Johnny’s coat pocket and down the neck of Janie Cochran’s sweater. But, as quick and elusive as he was, Johnny could never pull the Red Hook out of the hat, not in conditions like these, or against the kind of speed the Hawks’ defensive end had. We were down seven points with two and a half minutes left in the game; this was the only shot we were going to get. Johnny shook his head miserably.

But Daz was through with bullshit. ‘Okay, listen up, you lesbians,’ he said. ‘This here’s your higher power telling you Fake Twenty-two Boot Right is what Johnny-boy said, and that’s what we’re gonna run on these limp-dicks.’ Winking at me, he leaned aside to spit through his facemask, flinching and showing his teeth at the movement, then clapped his hands to break the huddle. Then as he stepped in behind centre I saw him do what he’d always done when
he had to – send his pain to some other dimension and become an uninjured version of himself, nothing now to show he was hurt but the blood on his hands.

At the snap I feinted left toward the line as Johnny blew by me to wrap his arms around Daz’s phoney handoff, Daz sideslipping back from the line with the ball still on his hip in a perfect bootleg fake, me kicking out and swinging downfield through the right flat and Daz floating the ball over my shoulder with flawless touch. I cradled it in twenty yards downfield, just out of the corner’s reach, and a few seconds later I was in the end zone, bringing us to within a point of the Hawks. We went for the two-point conversion and got it, me going off-tackle this time, nothing fancy, just hitting the hole as hard as I could. We were up by one.

Our kickoff carried to the back of their end zone in spite of the downpour, and four hopeless plays later the Hawks were done. Daz took a knee a couple of times and the District championship was ours.

The coaches all agreed that if he could stay healthy Daz was a sure thing for a major college scholarship, and would probably go no later than the middle rounds of the pro draft, but as it turned out he was a dead man walking. Halfway through a season when it looked like the Aggies’ were on their way to the Cotton Bowl, Daz on the roster as the freshman second-string quarterback, he would crash head-on into an eighteen-wheeler out of Beaumont while driving the brand new Audi an alumni dealer had let him ‘borrow’, his death instantaneous.

The memories popped like bubbles when Ridout stuck his head in the door, holding up his right hand splayed like a chicken’s foot. ‘Cueing Squarepants in five,’ he said.

‘I thought it was your turn?’

‘Nope. We traded back when you took the girls to Sea World.’ He disappeared, leaving behind a suggestion of Stetson aftershave on the air.

A former Texas-side chief had come up with an idea he called Conference Day, designating a media room where the departments announced toy drives, made excuses in high-profile murder cases, warned against drunk driving and issued tactical lies. My old partner Floyd Zito had called it the Officer Squarepants Show, and the name had turned out to have legs. This morning Channel Six wanted a two-minute spot on the dangers of burglar bars.

By now the Tri-State sky had darkened to the colour of wet slate, the rain still steady and hard, beating silently at the window and branching down the glass in miniature rivers. I looked at the candy bar I’d just taken a bite of. I couldn’t see anything wrong with it, but it had no taste. I tossed it in the trash, checked the time and headed for my rendezvous with the cameras.

When I stepped into the media room the reporter rose from the metal folding chair she’d been sitting on and walked over to meet me. I knew her from a couple of past interviews, a thin, tense woman named Mallory Peck with a big arrangement of black hair and a parsimonious smile. As Mallory stuck out an icy little hand to shake, a production assistant wearing tight, scruffy jeans out at the knees and a Soundgarden T-shirt appeared from somewhere with a makeup kit, tilting her head as she approached, assessing the angles and shadows of my face with an expert eye.

Mallory said, ‘So, Jim, ready to reach out to the masses?’

I was about to answer when I saw Ridout making his way toward us from across the room, wearing a crooked
little grin of defeat as he cocked and fired an imaginary six-shooter in the air. He tipped his head toward Chief Royal’s office as he joined us, Mallory smoothly transferring her attention to him, saying, ‘Well, looks like I get the bull rider instead.’ Her smile notched up a few watts as she inventoried Ridout’s muscles.

‘Steer wrestler,’ he corrected, his own expression brightening. ‘Bull riders are those crazy-eyed little dudes that walk crooked.’

‘Mallory, Danny,’ I said. ‘Danny, Mallory.’ I headed for OZ’s office.

Nobody who’d worked out of Three for more than a day would have misunderstood Ridout’s six-gun gesture, which harked back to OZ’s thirty years with the Texas Rangers, an outfit founded by characters who hunted their man until they got him and didn’t talk much about it; silent, fearless, incorruptible men who never complained, never explained and never quit. Superstitious nineteenth-century border bandits and Comancheros, watching them ride alone through the true valley of the shadow of death, the only law in a quarter of a million square miles of the most dangerous ground on earth, called them demons.

The hunt that had made OZ the Big Gun had ended on a hot, windy afternoon in Starr County, where he’d faced down four Mexican dope dealers in the middle of the street, he with the .45 Colt Single Action Army revolver he still carried as a duty weapon, they with their nine-millimetre automatics. They took their shots, he took his. One of their thirty-three cut a clean hole through the crown of his grey Resistol and another ended up in the heel of his left boot, but OZ, ignoring their fire and working left to right, took out all four of the shooters with consecutive heart shots.
The people who’d known him longest said he could tell you the names of these guys and every other man he’d killed, except for the two he referred to as
Mal Tiro Uno
and
Mal Tiro Dos
, who’d floated away on the Rio Grande by the dark of the moon without having told anybody who they were.

OZ operated without organisational charts or middle management. There were no file trays, staplers, pencil cups or tape dispensers on his desk, just his phone, a computer monitor, a picture of his late wife Martha, and the calendar blotter in front of him. He kept his files in his head, and to him ‘accessories’ meant his Colt, his saddle and his hat.

I found him sipping coffee from a plain white mug as he watched me from across his desk – pink, clean-shaven jowls, what was left of his silver hair standing out in leprechaun tufts above his jughandle ears, sky-blue eyes as hard as tungsten. Behind him the walnut panelling was covered with photos of famous fellow Texas Rangers and other old-time lawmen, Hall of Fame Dallas Cowboys stars and big-game guides.

I walked over to the nook where his coffee machine stood and sniffed what was in the carafe. It smelled better than dishwater, so I poured some into a plastic cup from the tray next to the machine, settled back in the black leather chair in front of OZ’s desk and took a sip.

OZ said, ‘You done anything to get sideways with our city fathers that I don’t know about?’

‘Don’t think so, why?’

‘Got a call from Dwight Hazen this morning.’

‘The city manager? What did he want?’

‘Could be something, could be nothing,’ OZ said. ‘He’s jawin’ about a civilian review board, for one thing. Which
is a piss-poor idea on a good day, and there ain’t no good days.’

I shook my head, imagining a dozen petty bureaucrats micromanaging the department and fighting over the microphones at press conferences as they tried to position themselves in terms of sound bites, headlines and voting blocs. Calls to abolish the use of Tasers, demands for budget increases to buy more Tasers, new automatic weapons and sniper rifles to go with them, pleas for a return to God, detailed suggestions for rewriting the Constitution.

‘Then the
cabrón
got goin’ about you and that old graveyard collar,’ he said. ‘Wanted to know how I thought you were dealin’ with your “issues”, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean.’

I heard three quick taps behind me, recognising them because they were the same three I routinely got at my own office door. Like OZ, I usually kept all of my phone’s mechanical and musical noises disabled, admittedly a hardship for Bertie, the head secretary, who was constantly having to huff her way back by shank’s mare to tell me to pick up.

At OZ’s grunted invitation, Bertie stuck her head in the door. ‘Line four,’ she said testily. ‘For Lieutenant Bonham.’

She glanced at my right hand, frowned at the square of grey sky showing through OZ’s window, then returned her gaze to me. I looked down at the hand myself as I stood to reach for the phone, made myself stop clenching and unclenching it, and raised the handset to my ear.

It was Wayne Gaston with the Crime Scene unit. It sounded like he was out in the rain, meaning he must be at a scene somewhere. He said, ‘How about lookin’ at some evidence with me, Lou?’

‘What have you got?’ I asked.

There was a silence, then, ‘Uh, that’s kinda what I’m askin’ myself right now – ’

‘Can’t you send me a shot with your phone?’

‘Sure would like to have you take a look in person.’

‘Not to jump to any conclusions here, Wayne,’ I said, biting back the unexpected impatience I felt edging into my voice, ‘but can I at least figure on somebody being dead?’

‘Eyes-on, boss,’ was all he’d say.

TWO

I loosened my tie and unbuttoned my collar, trying not to limp as I crossed the squad room to grab my gun and get a car. No new business on my desk, just the twenty-tens on a grill-fork stabbing at a family reunion out on the white end of Burnsville Road, and the potshot a one-legged combat vet on Maple Hill may or may not have taken at his neighbour’s cat last night with his AR-15.

I checked the Glock’s chamber and magazine, slid the weapon onto my belt and went looking for Mouncey. I never drove when I went out on a call if I could help it because I wanted to see everything I’d otherwise miss by rolling up on the scene and parking the vehicle myself. There was general agreement at Three that Mouncey operating a motor vehicle was at least a metaphorical felony in itself, something along the lines of criminal assault against time and space, but she was always my first choice as a driver because she never had to ask where anything was, got us there fast, and up until now had always given the other traffic enough time to get out of her way. I found her at her desk picking through the old maids at the bottom of the bowl for the last few kernels of popcorn, and asked her to get us a car.

She made the call, checked her own .40 and pulled on her tan leather jacket. ‘Where we goin’, Lou?’

‘Wayne’s at a scene.’

‘What he got?’

‘He wants to surprise us.’

Ten minutes later we were out of the garage and headed north in the rain, which had lightened a little for the moment but was still falling steadily from a sky that now had taken on the look of heavy oilsmoke. Mouncey was decked out in tight pressed jeans and a lavender turtleneck under the leather jacket, with rings on every finger and what looked like a quarter of a pound of gold hanging from each earlobe. Her hair was piled up in ringlets that flashed with opal-coloured highlights. I knew that if we were out chasing leads or doing interviews there’d be nothing grabbable attached to her ears and nothing at all on the fingers of her gun hand, but on this call she was dressed for working inside the tape.