Mercy (60 page)

“Son of a bitch!” Haws squealed.

“Gordy! Gordy!” Marley sounded like he was going to cry.

“Christ!” Haws yelled. “My leg…just my leg! Lew! Don’t let the bastard get up…cuff him! Go cuff him!”

Marley jumped up and slogged across the yard and into the street and over to the curb where Barbish was trying to raise his head and which Marley kicked on the run like Tony Zendejas in a Monday night opener. It sounded like he had kicked a cantaloupe, but Barbish’s head did not burst open, only hammered down against the cement curb again, putting him out cold. Driven by adrenaline, Marley frantically ran around looking for Barbish’s .45, but couldn’t find it, gave it up and came back and cuffed the unconscious Barbish’s hands behind his back. He left him in the street and ran back over to Haws, who was moaning and holding his left thigh just above the knee and talking on the radio, which was caked with mud.

“Yeah, yeah. Listen two ambulances…I’m not ridin’ in the same…Lew. Lew, where’d I hit him?”

“Shit!” Marley said, stood again and clomped back across the yard, into the street, where he put a foot under the bleeding Barbish and heaved him over. Barbish’s face was all blood and blood was coming from the ear which had caught Marley’s flying kick. But his face was only skinned from the trip across the wet street on his nose, which was bleeding profusely. Only one of Marley’s four shots had caught him, square in the back of the knee. The lower leg was doubled around at an angle that it normally wouldn’t be able to achieve, which meant that Marley’s .45 slug had mushed his knee joint. The other inmates would be calling him Crip for the rest of his life.

Marley started to leave Barbish again, but caught the glint of the barrel of his Colt Commander protruding out from under Barbish’s hip. “Son of a bitch,” he swore. Again he put his foot under Barbish and rolled him up enough so that he could pick up the gun without grabbing the barrel. He put the Colt on safety, looked at Barbish a second, then brought his leg back and kicked Barbish’s disjointed lower limb, flipping it around so that the foot pointed in the wrong direction. Then he ran back to Haws.

“Where’d I hit him?” Haws groaned, gripping his leg above the wound and looking like a ghost.

“You didn’t fire, Gordy,” Marley said. “But I blew his knee away.”

Haws looked at Marley in astonishment. “What! I didn’t shoot?” He let go of his leg with his right hand and leaned over and got his gun off the muddy dead grass and stared at it. “Goddamn!” he yelled. “Son of a bitch! I didn’t even shoot?” He groaned and fell back on the grass, ignoring the tinny voice of the dispatcher yelling over the radio.

By this time neighbors were out into their yards and closing in quickly, as they judged the shooting to be over and saw that there were two bodies they could look at. Sirens seemed to be everywhere in the distance as Marley squatted down beside Haws.

“I’m gonna pass out,” Haws said, his eyes closed. He was bleeding profusely, turning the dun-colored grass and patches of mud black in the faint light from the streetlamp.

“No…” Marley laid his and Barbish’s guns on the grass and gripped Haws’s wound with both hands. Haws screamed and his eyes popped open.

“Stopping the bleeding,” Marley explained frantically. “Gordy!” he yelled, looking at his partner. “Raise your arm, Gordy. Point at the goddamn streetlight,” Marley yelled, trying to keep his partner out of shock. To his surprise Haws did it, but his Colt was still in his hand and he was aiming. “You talk to the dispatcher?” Marley asked.

“Yeah,” Haws croaked, and his hand started to sink.

“Gordy, you son of a bitch,” Marley yelled again. “Point at the streetlight!” Haws’s hand and nickel-plated Colt went back up in the air. And that was where they were when the swarm of radio units converged on Mirel Farr’s house not far from the Astrodome, and the ambulance jumped the curb and pulled up beside Haws and Marley on the dead grass.

Palma and Grant were at the intersection of San Felipe and Kirby Drive returning from Broussard’s when they heard Haws’s frantic call for an ambulance. Palma whipped the car right onto Kirby and headed south as fast as she could negotiate the traffic, passing under the Southwest Freeway and following Kirby all the way into Westwood Park.

The crowd was several people deep around the shooting scene and the collection of radio units, which were parked every which way on the curbs and blocking the street. An officer shooting always attracted a horde of radio units, and their cherry and sapphire flashers were bouncing off the crowd and neighborhood houses, giving the scene an unintended carnival atmosphere. Palma and Grant used their badges to push through the crowd and get past the vigilant uniformed officers. The crime scene unit hadn’t even arrived yet, and Palma was the first detective on the scene. She spotted Marley hanging around the back of the ambulance that Haws was going into. As the doors closed, Marley saw her coming over and went over to meet her.

“How is he?” she asked.

“Lucky,” Marley said, looking drained. “It was Barbish,” he said, turning to look toward the street where the ambulance personnel were having a harder time with Barbish, trying to get him out of the gutter. Marley patiently told them what had happened, going through it chronologically and in some detail. “The slug missed the bone, but cut an artery, so he bled like hell. He’ll be okay,” Marley said, wiping a hand over his thin hair. “Jesus,” he said. “I’m a little shaky.”

Palma and Grant followed him over to the stoop of Farr’s house where he sat down. Under the sickly porch light Palma could see his clothes were smeared with mud, his shoes so clogged with it that they looked like brogans. He lifted his chin toward Barbish. “Asshole’s okay, too. I blew his knee off.” He looked at Palma. “I kinda kicked him in the head.” He glanced at Grant. “Just between us. I think that’s their problem over there. I may’ve vegetabilized him.”

“Farr didn’t give you much help about Reynolds?” Palma asked.

Marley shook his head. “Just that he’s a bad-ass who likes to beat up women. We didn’t get much past that before Barbish came in. We need to talk to her, though. I’d bet a paycheck she’s been letting him stay here. We ought to use that to get more out of her about Barbish’s relationship with Reynolds.

The way she was talking, I think they may have more to do with each other than we thought.”

Several more police cars arrived and pushed their way through the crowd to park next to the yellow crime scene ribbons. Frisch, Captain McComb, and two of the detectives assigned to the special squad set up to investigate officer-involved shootings got out of one of the cars and started making their way across the pitted and bogged yard, which got more difficult to negotiate with each passing minute as officers swarmed around the house.

Palma put her hand on Marley’s shoulder. “Hang in there, Lew,” she said, and she and Grant moved away as the officers approached, and Marley got ready to tell his story all over again. He would have to tell it more times than anybody would want to.

“Carmen,” Frisch said, veering away from the group and pulling an envelope out of his pocket. “Reynolds’s search warrant.” He handed it to her. “I talked to Art fifteen minutes ago, and he said he and Boucher have followed Reynolds all the way out to Galveston. He’s having dinner with a woman out there at Le Bateau on the waterfront. They’ve been drinking, just ordered their meal. As soon as they left the city, we had our people go in and wire the place. Before you go up, check with Leeland about the surveillance van so they’ll know what’s happening.” He handed her a key. “The wire people had it made. Turn it in to Leeland when you’re finished up there.”

“What about Reynolds’s car?”

Frisch shook his head. “They didn’t get to it in time. They’ll get something in it tonight. Look, you’ve got a couple of hours at least, if you go right now. That should give you enough time.” He looked at her, and then at Grant. “Do it right,” he said, then he turned and walked back toward Marley.

“Let’s go,” Grant said. “There’s no such thing as ‘enough time’ when you’re doing this.”

Palma backtracked to Bellaire Boulevard and turned toward the West Loop. She picked up the radio and called Leeland and told him to let the electronics surveillance people know that they were on their way. Leeland told her that they should identify themselves as soon as they entered the condo, and then do the same when they were leaving.

They parked among a cluster of other cars under the enormous spread of a live oak fifty yards from the phosphorus glow of a mercury vapor streetlamp in the parking lot of the St. Regis Tower condominiums. Though condominium owners were allowed a designated number of slots in the tower’s covered parking garage, weekends always found a spillover of cars in the landscaped parking lot in the front of the building. There were a number of large live oaks in the maze of medians and those parking places that fell within the circumference of their canopies were prized spots because they guaranteed shade the next day when the sun would send the temperature inside an exposed car shooting out the top of a thermometer.

Palma got out with the flash camera she had taken from the photo lab at the department that afternoon, and the two of them walked across the front drive of the fifty-six-story tower and into the marble and glass entrance. They took an elevator to the twenty-seventh floor and Palma let them into Reynolds’s place with the key that Frisch had given her.

As soon as they were inside, Palma spoke up and identified their entry, and before her eyes had adjusted to the dark foyer she realized that Grant had already left it. He was no longer with her. She started to ask him where he was, then caught herself, not wanting the guys in the surveillance van somewhere outside to know that she was already out of pocket.

She stood in the dark foyer with the uncanny feeling of being in over her head. At first she heard nothing, saw no light, and had the sudden, irrational feeling that Grant wasn’t there, that something had gone wrong, and she was walking into a situation that was completely different from what she had left a few minutes before. She shook off the temptation to let her mind run with that fiction. It was too easy to allow that kind of fantasy to dictate to you, make you do something rash. But now she didn’t know what to do. Did she wait for him in the foyer? Did she go look for him? Without turning on the lights? Obviously he wasn’t using the lights. Maybe if she let her eyes adjust. A few minutes’ wait did help, enough to enable her to negotiate the furniture, but certainly not well enough for her to see anything in detail. Then what the hell was he doing?

She moved to the other side of the foyer and started through what must have been the living room. She could make out sofas and armchairs, a potted palm silhouetted against the Post Oak district skyline sparkling through floor-to-ceiling windows with their drapes drawn back. There was a grand piano, an item of furniture that immediately struck her as incongruous, a bar with a collection of bottles. When she got to the far side of the room near the windows, she turned and looked back, hoping to see the doors to other rooms. To her right was a dining room, and perhaps the kitchen, and to her left she saw an arched doorway and a faint wash of light falling across the marble floors.

Palma moved across the living room toward the light, made the corner, and saw what was probably a bedroom door closed with a bright seam of light issuing from the bottom. She made her way to it, being careful to keep the camera from knocking over a lamp or vase, sliding her feet slowly across the floor like a woman wading in the surf. When she made the hall, she headed for the seam of light, feeling still that she was about to open the door on something completely outside her experience, about to do something that could not be compared with anything she had ever seen or done before.

Almost compelled to knock first, she resisted the impulse and pressed down the door handle and pushed it open. Sander Grant was on his knees beside a king-size bed. She knew he must have heard the door open, though he didn’t turn around or speak or acknowledge it in any way, but continued doing something with his hands on the bed in front of him. Palma approached the bed, and even when she knew she was in his peripheral vision he did not indicate that he saw her or knew she was there.

In front of him on the bed were two boxes of bleached white wood about a foot square and four or five inches high. Both boxes were elaborately carved with Oriental motifs, and as Palma looked closer, she could see that in places the wood was mottled as if stained from frequent handling. Grant had gotten one of the boxes open, and one of each of its four drawers swung out of a different side of the box and at a different level, forming a spiral stair, each tray pivoting on a single pin hinge located in one of the four corners. There were no handles to the drawers, no latches, no indication of how the drawers were to be sprung and opened. It was this intricate, but clever, locking system that Grant was still trying to discover on the second box.

Palma knelt down beside him and looked at the contents of the four opened drawers of the first box. The bottom of each bleached wooden tray was covered with a piece of bright yellow silk, and mounted on the silk with thin wire clips were rifle shells, two columns of five each. On each shell was engraved a date and a location: Tien Phuoc, 16 May 1968; Thuan Minh, 4 June 1968; Dak Ket, 15 June 1968; Ta Gam, 17 June 1968; Son Ha, 21 June 1968. She went to the next drawer: Rach Goi, 9 July 1968; Vi Thanh, 23 July 1968; Rang Rang, 3 August 1968; Don Sai, 10 August 1968.

Palma heard a click and Grant opened out each tray in the second box. Four more drawers of yellow silk, ten shells to the drawer: Chalang Plantation, 12 June 1969; Chalang Plantation, 13 June 1969; Chalang Plantation, 14 June 1969; Bo Tuc, 20 June 1969; Tong Not, 25 December 1969; Dak Mot Lop, 19 March 1970; Ban Het, 22 March 1970; Ban Phya Ha, 9 May 1970; Polei Lang Lo Kram, 23 June 1970. There were eighty shells in all, each of the same caliber, but differing in subtlety of metal color and place and date.

Grant stared at the trays and their contents. He said nothing, did nothing, and his face gave no indication of what he might be thinking. Then, very carefully, he closed each of the eight drawers. He stood, still not acknowledging Palma’s presence, and picked up the first of the two boxes and carried it across the room where he set it on the floor of the opened closet, careful to place the shallow, flat legs of the boxes into the same indentions they had made in the thick carpet. He did the same with the second box, then came over to the bed and smoothed it out, adjusting the hang of the bedspread to make sure the seam was even.