Ice Shear (16 page)

“Report,” Hale said.

I looked up. The kitchen had fallen from disrepair into destruction. All the cabinet doors hung open and the contents were strewn across the floor: tea bags soaking in tomato sauce, macaroni fanned out, and dishes smashed roughly, bowls broken in half and glasses splintered into tiny pieces.

An agent picking up broken glass nodded to the back porch. “Not us. Him. Slammed the cabinet open when we told him he couldn't leave for coffee, and a bunch of dishes came down. Accident, I think.” He dropped his voice. “The second cabinet he did intentionally.”

I stepped over a broken teapot, the rosebud pattern dotting pink across the floor. On the back porch I saw Marty tipped back in a lawn chair, gazing out at his backyard. A three-by-three-foot patch of snow had been roughly cleared to make space. The sound of the door opening didn't draw his eyes from the squirrels skittering across the surface of the snow. He wore a hat but no gloves, and I was alarmed to see his hands, red with cold, brush against the snow that walled in the chair. He was wearing his reclaimed leather vest over a quilted jacket. It looked painful, cutting tightly across his broad shoulders and puffy coat.

Marty still seemed unaware of me. I had experienced that kind of grief, where hours or even months passed without notice. I didn't want to alarm him, and I rested my hand on his shoulder to let him know I was there.

“I only wanted a coffee,” he said. He tipped forward. His chair skidded, and I held tighter to steady him. “They wouldn't let me leave. I couldn't get away.”

C
AN WE LOSE THIS
bitch?” Marty said.

He was getting friendly. It took us a while to get him talking—forty-five minutes, two ham sandwiches (the first of which he tossed to the squirrels), and some warmth. He was full of a rage that appeared to be righteous. He was currently sitting on the floor opposite me, leaning against his bed's box spring, which was flipped up against the only wall with a window, blocking out what little natural light there might be on this winter afternoon. The cheesecloth at the bottom of the mattress was torn, and a strip hung down, dusting Marty's elbow. I was propped against his upside-down dresser, its contents dumped onto the floor.

Marty hadn't said anything of value during this conversation, answering half my questions with a shrug and spending the rest of his time picking up random objects from the pile next to us: a pair of socks, a well-worn blowfish sushi T-shirt, four or five hair elastics. Periodically he shot sidelong glances at Hale, who loomed above us, leaning against a wall. When Hale told Marty to stop fiddling with the stuff on the floor and answer the questions, Marty called him a bitch.

I could understand the urge, as Hale annoyed me, too. Earlier, to coax him off the deck, I'd told Marty we could go to the station. It would be easier to talk, and he wouldn't have to witness the FBI tossing his house. He was unsure, not trusting the federal agents, but I got him to the point of agreeing when Hale piped up.

“Marty, we are going to need to go through everything here, in detail, even the yard. You are really getting in our way.”

“You tar snake. I'm staying.”

But Marty agreed to go inside. We wound through the house, stepping over the broken china, squeezing past the refrigerator that had been moved to the middle of the room, and dodging several
Fuck you
looks from agents. Most of them were directed at Marty, but a few were aimed at me. I did get a friendly nod from Jeff Scylla, out of Missouri, and from Sam Bailey. Sam was called “Silent Sam” because of the way he lived the phrase “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” A nod from Sam was a big wet kiss from anyone else. In a way, I had a harder time ignoring the friendly faces than the adversarial ones, and both Marty and I stared at the ceiling waiting for Hale to let us know the bedroom was clear.

“Don't want to contaminate evidence,” he said.

“I pretty well contaminated things when I took a shower,” Marty said.

I'd had enough of their bickering.

“Just give us a time line for last night,” I said, sketching out a table in my pad, writing “Time” and “Location” at the top of its two columns. “If you saw your brother and when. I can't promise to get the feds out of here any sooner—they're too busy rechecking my work to listen to me—but at least we can make progress on finding your wife's and brother's killer.”

Playing the “us against them” card seemed to be the best way to get Marty to cooperate. And I wasn't lying, not really. I wanted as little to do with the other agents as possible.

“I got home around sevenish. After the wake I went to an AA meeting.” He watched me, expecting me to flinch at the mention of AA, but I kept my face bland. He continued. “I was really tired last night—I don't know why—and kind of crashed when I got home, calling my sponsor in L.A., watching TV, chilling. Ray got home around eight or so. Gotta say I was surprised. I mean, he never loses a chance to hang out with his one true love.”

“Jackie?” I asked.

“Craig,” Marty reached up, grabbed the hanging piece of cheesecloth from the mattress, and pulled down. Half the gauze came away and dust puffed out of the slash. Hale coughed. The fabric wrapped around Marty's wrist, and he shook it, but it tangled. From underneath the pile to the left, a phone started ringing. He grabbed a pair of scissors off the floor, cut the fabric away, and began to hunt through the pile. The ringing stopped just as he pulled the phone free.

He looked at the screen. “Jackie called.”

“For you?” I asked. My back was getting cramped leaning against the dresser and I sat forward, sliding the scissors behind me.

“This is Ray's phone.” Marty laughed bitterly. “The dumb shit forgot it again.”

As Marty flipped through the texts, I glanced at Hale, who raised an eyebrow at me. A second phone. That's how Ray got around Marty's phone monitoring.

“Marty, can I see that?” Marty ignored me. Hale looked ready to grab it out of his hands.

“Marty,” I repeated more loudly. “Marty, give me the phone.”

He flung the phone on the floor between us. Before I could reach it, Hale had knelt down and grabbed it.

“I want that back,” Marty said.

“Craig?” I said to Marty. He didn't answer, watching as Hale walked the phone to the door and handed it to an agent on the other side. I prompted him again. “Oh, yeah,
Craig.
Ray thought Craig was the shit with his plane and the man jewelry he wore.”

“At the funeral, I got the sense you're not impressed with Craig.”

“You got that right. He was always panting after Danielle like a puppy. And Craig's my age, but he hangs out with the teenagers 'cause they're impressed by his bullshit. Back in L.A., when Phil and I were tussling, Craig just stood there with his thumbs up his ass, watching the whole thing go down. Craig's all talk.”

“And your brother. All talk, too?” Hale asked.

Marty clenched his jaw once, twice, before he answered.

“Yeah. Yeah, he was,” daring Hale to make a comment.

Hale hadn't informed me he was going to be playing bad cop here. It wasn't needed. Marty thought all cops were bad cops. The locals were less bad than the feds—or maybe less competent and less of a threat—and he trusted me marginally more than he trusted Hale. I needed to keep him talking and asked him to tell us the rest of the details from the night before.

“Ray got home around eight. Settled down. Jason dropped off some submarine sandwiches. He didn't stay. So me and Ray, we ate those.”

Jason hadn't mentioned stopping at Marty's last night. I looked at Hale, but he was still in the staring contest with Marty.

“Around nine my brother announces that he needs to go to the grocery store before the storm. Should have known that little shithead was lying.”

“Why?”

I heard a crash from the direction of the living room. Marty cringed, and Hale didn't look happy, either. “He didn't know what groceries were. We had plenty of cheese curls. He was set.”

I thought of Ray calling out for grape soda in his too-big biker vest, the vest that now strained across Marty's shoulders.

Marty saw me smile. “What? You like one of those social workers?” His voice got high and shrill: “‘Just stopping to make sure the boys are eating right.' ” He rolled his eyes and his voice dropped back to its bass rumble. “Like you give a fuck.”

“No, it's like my daughter,” and I explained how I'd gotten soda for Ray a few days ago, and my seven-year-old would have chosen the same kind.

Marty sat forward. “What's her name?”

“Officer Lyons's personal life is off limits,” interjected Hale.

Marty rolled his eyes at me. “We really need this clyde here?”

I laughed, confusing Hale. I explained. “A clyde is someone who cuts you off in their cage.” My explanation needed an explanation. “Their car.”

I had Marty's attention. “You ride?”

I was ready to describe the interesting “neighbors” I had in California, leaving out the part where I was instrumental in arresting said neighbors, when Hale butted in again.

“Officer Lyons here is one of us,” Hale said. “FBI, in California. Probably saw your jacket. And your mom's got a sheet, right?”

Marty shook his head. “Fuckin' fibbies. Entrapment—”

“I
was,
” I said, as furious as Marty was. “I
was
in the FBI. I'm out.”

Marty paused. “They kick you out?”

“I left.” I spun it in my favor. “Couldn't take these assholes anymore.”

“Yeah.” He rolled one shoulder in a friendly shrug. He pushed the second shoulder back and looked pinned to the wooden slats of the box spring. He rolled his head back and squinted at me. “But once an asshole, always an asshole, right?”

I protested, but he cut me off.

“Thought maybe you wanted to hear the real story. I know why you're here. You don't give a fuck.”

“I do.”

“You don't. You don't care who killed my brother. You probably think he deserved it. Because me and Ray are the sons . . . no,
I'm
the son”—a fierce pride seemed to ride through him—“the heir apparent, to the Abominations' chief enforcer.”

Hale rolled his eyes. “Well, that and your little California meth lab.”

I couldn't hide my anger. “Shut it, Hale.”

“Spare me, sister,” Marty said. “Sitting here, pretending like you don't know, with these shitheads”—and he nodded at Hale—“sorry, these
gentlemen
crawling all over everything.”

“Marty,” I said, “as far as I'm concerned you are innocent until proven guilty.”

“Don't you mean guilty until proven dead?” Marty said.

“Or guilty until proven guiltier,” Hale said. “It's not like you were much of a clean liver before.”

“Fuck you very much, fed. All the charges, even the RICO stuff, were dropped. My record is clean.”

I was completely lost. There was no point in my being there—Hale made sure of that. I would have left, except I might need to break up a fight.

Hale rolled his eyes. “Only because our lead witness—”

“Your rat.”

“—was murdered,” finished Hale.

Marty smiled. “Never did find his body. Rumor has it he traveled to Costa Rica to open a banana farm.”

“And if I were as dumb as you, I'd believe that. What you need to know, Officer Lyons, is that Marty here, from when he was seventeen until we arrested him at the ripe old age of twenty-two, showed a real aptitude for producing and distributing meth. In one of those superlabs. And our friend Marty here got off after he killed our lead witness.”

Marty chuckled meanly. “And you can't touch me. Double jeopardy,
friend
. Guess you fucked that up. But the thing that kills me is that you dipshits won't be able to find who killed Danielle”—he swallowed, choking back rage—“because you're so busy pinning this on me. You'll drag crap out of any old evidence locker and splay it out on a table for the press. All the while knowing I. Didn't. Do. It.”

“You're a bad guy,” Hale said. “Your people are the ones doing drug production and dealing.”

“And you need me, my family, my club”—and this was the first time I heard Marty identify himself as a member of the Abominations—“you need us to be major league bad guys so you'll get more taxpayer money for overtime and shiny new equipment. You're prosecuting the old case you lost, who
cares
who killed Danielle and Ray.”

I couldn't make out which case they were arguing over—here or in California.

“You guys are all the same,” Hale said.

“You mean us Abominations? The best part of this”—and Marty threw his arm wide to take in his tossed room—“I'm not even one of them anymore. I got them to jump me out, and I got the broken ribs to prove it. Broken fingers, broken hand, crushed sinus cavity, fractured clavicle, and a bridge in my mouth to replace the teeth that Zeke personally kicked out. They wouldn't have me. But here's some fun news for you all: Some real Abominations are showing up today. My parents are coming. They'll take Ray out of the morgue. They'll break me out of here. They'll haul ass back to California, and throw a huge fucking funeral.” Marty heaved himself up, deftly stepping sideways over the glass lampshade now on the floor. I scrambled up. “My parents arrange a lot of memorials. They're good at it.”

Hale rolled his eyes. “You may be putting on a show of being clean and sober, out of the Abominations, but we both know this poison is in your blood. We'll see if you're cracking jokes when we arrest you.”

“You aren't going to arrest me, because I didn't do it.” Marty dusted himself off. “Now I'm leaving. I'm going to go to the wake.”