Gone, Baby, Gone (28 page)

As if on cue, a trooper crossed Pritchett Street with a paper bag and handed it to Angie. “Your stuff, ma’am. They sent it down with some pancake slugs.”

Angie kept her head down and thanked him, removed her Doc Martens from the bag, and put them on.

“The sweatshirt’s going to be a harder act to pull off,” Broussard said, with a small smile.

“Yeah?” Angie slid off the hood and turned her back to the reporters as one of them tried to vault the guardrail and a trooper pushed him back with an extended nightstick.

Angie dropped the blanket and raincoat off her shoulders, and several cameras swung our way at the news of her bare flesh and black bra straps.

She looked at me. “Should I do a slow strip, move my hips a bit?”

“It’s your show,” I said. “I think you have everybody’s attention.”

“Got mine,” Broussard said, staring openly at the press of Angie’s breasts against black lace.

“Oh, joy.” She grimaced and pulled the sweatshirt over her head, pulled it down her torso.

Someone on the expressway applauded, and someone else whistled. Angie kept her back to them as she pulled thick strands of her hair from the collar.

“My show?” she said to me, with a sad smile and small shake of her head. “It’s their show, man. All theirs.”

Poole’s status was changed from critical to guarded shortly after sunrise, and, with nothing to do but wait, we left Pritchett Street and followed Broussard’s Taurus over to Milton Hospital.

At the hospital, we argued with the admitting nurse over how many of us could go into ICU when none of us were Poole’s blood relatives. A doctor passed us and took one look at Angie and said, “Are you aware your skin is blue?”

After another small argument, Angie followed the doctor behind a curtain to be checked for hypothermia, and the admitting nurse grudgingly allowed us into ICU to see Poole.

“Myocardial infarction,” he said, as he propped himself up on the pillows. “Hell of a word, huh?”

“It’s two words,” Broussard said, and reached out awkwardly and gave Poole’s arm a small squeeze.

“Whatever. Friggin’ heart attack was what it was.” He hissed against a sudden pain as he shifted again.

“Relax,” Broussard said. “Christ’s sake.”

“The fuck happened up there?” Poole said.

We told him the little we knew.

“Two shooters in the woods and one on the ground?” he said when we finished.

“That’s the way it’s looking,” Broussard said. “Or one shooter with two rifles in the woods and one on the widow’s walk.”

Poole made a face like he bought that theory about as much as he believed JFK was killed by a lone gunman. He moved his head on the pillow, looked at me. “You definitely saw two rifles get dumped over the cliff?”

“I’m pretty sure,” I said. “It was nuts out there.” I shrugged, then nodded. “No, I’m sure. Two rifles.”

“And the shooter at the mill leaves his gun behind?”

“Yup.”

“But not the shell casings.”

“Right.”

“And the shooter or shooters in the woods get rid of the rifles but leave shell casings everywhere.”

“That is correct, sir,” Broussard said.

“Christ,” he said. “I don’t get this.”

Angie came into the ward then, dabbing at her arm with a cotton swab, flexing the forearm up against the biceps. She came over to Poole’s bed and smiled down at him.

“What’d the doctor say?” Broussard asked.

“Low-grade hypothermia.” She shrugged. “He shot me up with chicken soup or something, said I’d keep my fingers and toes.”

Color had returned to her flesh—not nearly as much as usual, but enough. She sat on the bed beside Poole and said, “The two of us, Poole—we look like a couple of ghosts.”

His lips cracked when he smiled. “I hear you emulated the famous cliff divers of the Galapagos Islands, my dear.”

“Acapulco,” Broussard said. “There are no cliff divers in the Galapagos.”

“Fiji, then,” Poole said, “and stop correcting me. Again, kids, what the hell is going on?”

Angie patted his cheek lightly. “You tell us. What happened to you?”

He pursed his lips for a moment. “I’m not real sure. For whatever reason, I found myself walking down the hill. Problem was, I left my walkie-talkie and my flashlight behind.” He raised his eyebrows. “Bright, wouldn’t you say? And when I heard all the gunfire, I tried to head back up to where I’d come from, but no matter what I did, it seemed like I kept moving away from the noise, instead of toward it. Woods,” he said with a shake of his head. “Next thing I know I’m at the corner of Quarry Street and the off-ramp from the expressway, and I see the Lexus shoot by. So I walk after it. Time I get there, our friends have received their head taps and I’m feeling kind of dizzy.”

“You remember calling it in?” Broussard asked.

“I did?”

Broussard nodded. “On the car phone.”

“Wow,” Poole said. “I’m pretty smart, huh?”

Angie smiled and took a handkerchief from the cart by Poole’s bed, wiped his forehead with it.

“Christ,” Poole said, his tongue thick.

“What?”

His eyes rolled away from us for a moment, then snapped back. “Huh? Nothing, just these drugs they got in me. Hard to concentrate.”

The admitting nurse parted the curtain by Broussard. “You have to go. Please.”

“What happened up there?” Poole slurred.

“Now,” the nurse said, as Poole’s eyes rolled to the left and he smacked his dry lips, batted his eyelashes. “Mr. Raftopoulos is not up to this.”

“No,” Poole said. “Wait.”

Broussard patted his arm. “We’ll be back, buddy. Don’t you worry.”

“What happened?” Poole asked again, his voice fading into sleep as we stepped back from the bed.

Good question, I thought, as we walked out of ICU.

As soon as we got back to the apartment, Angie hopped in a warm shower and I called Bubba.

“What?” he answered.

“Tell me you have her.”

“What? Patrick?”

“Tell me you have Amanda McCready.”

“No. What? Why would I have her?”

“You took out Gutierrez and—”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Bubba,” I said, “you did. You had to.”

“Gutierrez and Mullen? No way, dude. I spent two hours with my face in the dirt at Cunningham Park.”

“You weren’t even there?”

“I got hit. Someone was waiting, Patrick. I took a fucking sledgehammer or something in the back of my head, knocked me cold. I never even made it out of the park.”

“All right,” I said, and felt clouds of oil swimming through my head, “tell me again. Slow. You got to Cunningham Park—”

“At about six-thirty. I take my gear, I cut through the park toward the trees. I’m just about to go into the trees and make my way to the hills when I hear something. I start to turn my head and fucking—
crack
—someone hits me in the back of the head. Which, you know, just annoys me at first, but fucks up my vision too, and I’m starting to duck and turn, and
crack
again. I go to one knee, and I take a third hit. I think there might have been a fourth, but next thing I know I’m waking up in a pile of blood and it’s like eight-thirty. Time I get into the trees again, the woods are crawling with Staties. I go back, go to Giggle Doc’s.”

Giggle Doc was the ether-snorting doctor Bubba and half the mob guys in the city used to repair injuries they couldn’t report.

“You okay?” I said.

“Got some serious ringing in my head and things are still going black and then clearing, but I’ll be all right. I want this motherfucker, Patrick. No one knocks me down, you know?”

I knew. Of all the things I’d heard in the last ten hours, this was by far the most depressing. Anyone fast enough and smart enough to take Bubba out of the equation was very, very good at his job.

Another thing: If you were to deal with Bubba in that way, why leave him alive? The kidnappers had killed Mullen and Gutierrez and tried to kill Broussard, Angie, and me. Why hadn’t they just shot Bubba from a distance and been done with him?

“Giggle Doc said one more swing probably would have severed the tendons in back of my skull. Man,” he said, “I am fucking pissed.”

“As soon as I know who it was,” I said, “I’ll pass it along.”

“I’ve been sending out my own questions, you know? I heard about the Pharaoh and Mullen from Giggle Doc, so I’ve got Nelson making some phone calls. Heard the cops lost the money, too.”

“Yup.”

“And no girl.”

“No girl.”

“You picked a fight with some serious motherfuckers this time, dude.”

“I know.”

“Hey, Patrick?”

“Yeah.”

“Cheese would never be stupid enough to send someone to take a pipe to my head.”

“Not knowingly. Maybe he didn’t expect you to be there.”

“Cheese knows how tight me and you are. He’s got to half figure you’d bring me in for backup on something like this.”

He was right. Cheese was too smart at covering his bases not to expect Bubba might be involved. And Cheese also had to know that Bubba was capable of rolling a grenade into a group of Cheese’s men just on the off chance he’d kill the guy who’d piped him. So, if Cheese had given the order…again, why hadn’t he made it a termination contract? With Bubba dead, Cheese wouldn’t have to sweat reprisal. But by leaving him alive, Cheese’s only alternative, if he wanted to have any organization left by the time he got out of stir, was to hand over at least one of the players in the woods that night to Bubba. Unless he had other options I couldn’t envision.

“Christ!” I said.

“Got another mind-fuck for you,” Bubba said.

I wasn’t sure I could handle one more twist in my already knotted brain, but I said, “Shoot.”

“There’s a rumor going around about Pharaoh Gutierrez.”

“I know. He was teaming up with Mullen to take over Cheese’s action.”

“No, not that one. Everyone knows that one. Thing I’m hearing is that Pharaoh wasn’t one of us.”

“Then what was he?”

“A cop, Patrick,” Bubba said, and I felt everything in my brain slide to the left. “Word is he was DEA.”

21

“DEA?” Angie said. “You’re kidding.”

I shrugged. “Just what Bubba heard. You know street info: could be total bullshit, could be total truth. Too soon to tell.”

“So, what? Gutierrez was undercover for six years, working Cheese Olamon’s operation, and then he gets involved in the kidnapping of a four-year-old and he doesn’t pass that info on to his superiors?”

“Doesn’t add up, does it?”

“No. But what else is new?”

I leaned back in the kitchen chair, resisted an urge to punch the wall. This was one of the most infuriating cases I’d ever worked. Absolutely nothing made sense. A four-year-old girl disappears. Investigation leads us to believe the child was kidnapped by drug dealers who’d been ripped off by the mother. A ransom demand for the stolen money arrives from a woman who seems to work for the drug dealers. The ransom drop is an ambush. The drug dealers are killed. One of the drug dealers may or may not be an undercover operative for the federal government. The missing girl remains missing or at the bottom of a quarry.

Angie reached across the table and put her warm hand on my wrist. “We have to at least try to get a few hours’ sleep.”

I turned my wrist, took her hand in mine. “Is there one single thing about this case that makes sense to you?”

“Now that Gutierrez and Mullen have been whacked? No. There’s no one else in Cheese’s organization who could pick up the slack. Hell, there’s no one in his organization who’s smart enough to have pulled this off.”

“Wait a minute….”

“What?”

“You just said it yourself. There’s a power vacuum in Olamon’s organization now. What if that was the point?”

“Huh?”

“What if Cheese knew Mullen and Gutierrez were planning a coup? Or maybe he knew Mullen was, at least, and he’d heard whispers that Gutierrez wasn’t who he claimed to be?”

“So Cheese set all this up—the kidnapping, the ransom demands, et cetera—just so he could take out Mullen and Gutierrez?” She dropped my hand. “You’re serious?”

“It’s a theory.”

“An idiotic one,” she said.

“Hey.”

“No, think about it. Why go to all this trouble when he could have hired a couple of jack boys to pop Mullen and Gutierrez while they slept?”

“But he’s also pissed at Helene, wants his two hundred grand back.”

“So he tells Mullen to kidnap the kid, set up this elaborate child-for-money ruse, and then he has someone whack Mullen while it’s going down?”

“Why not?”

“Because then where’s Amanda? Where’s the money? Who was firing from those trees last night? Who knocked Bubba out? How did Mullen not know he was being set up? Do you realize how many people in Cheese’s organization would have had to be in on this huge, complicated conspiracy to pull it off? And Mullen wasn’t stupid. He was the smartest guy in Cheese’s crew. You don’t think he would have sniffed out a plan from the inside to kill him?”

I rubbed my eyes. “Christ. My head hurts.”

“Mine, too. And you’re not helping.”

I scowled at her and she smiled.

“Okay,” she said, “back to square one. Amanda is abducted. Why?”

“Two hundred grand her mother stole from Cheese.”

“Why didn’t Cheese just send someone around to threaten her? I’m pretty sure she would have buckled. They’d know that, too.”

“It could have taken them three months just to figure out the money wasn’t impounded by the police in the raid on the bikers.”

“Okay. But then they’d have moved fast. Ray Likanski had black eyes the day we met him.”

“You think he got them from Mullen?”

“Mullen would have given him a lot worse than black eyes if he thought he’d ripped him off. See, that’s what I’m saying. If Mullen thought Likanski and Helene had ripped the organization off, he wouldn’t kidnap Helene’s kid. He’d just kill Helene.”

“So maybe it wasn’t Cheese who had Amanda abducted?”

“Maybe not.”

“And the two hundred grand was a coincidence?” I tilted my head, cocked an eyebrow at her.

“You’re saying that’s a big coincidence.”