Past Crimes (20 page)
Authors: Glen Erik Hamilton
“Hell if I know,” said Julian. “I don’t really give a damn. I never plan to see the sucker again. The other night was too close.”
Boom. The last of my doubts that Formes was talking to the right client vanished. I glanced at my watch. Twelve minutes since I’d texted Guerin. Come on, damn it.
“So how much hurt are we in, Julian?”
Formes snorted. “You-all? Nothing. I know my shit, okay? My stuff’s locked up tight. Anonymous voice accounts, and A-one encryption on the backups. But that doesn’t mean I’m happy having all of it in somebody else’s pocket. I’m out of town, as of now.”
“And you gave us everything?”
“Shit, Boone. You got everything I got. I delivered, right? It’s not my fault the mark wound up in a fucking coma.”
Boone. I had a name to match the voice.
“But you did go back to his house to get your little toys,” Boone said to Formes.
A cold wash went down my scalp that had nothing to do with the drizzle. I was up and moving across the park at a fast walk.
“Hey, I’m sorry about that,” said Formes. “I just didn’t want to leave any trail behind me. It’s done.”
“Pack what you need,” Boone said in his sandpaper rasp. “We’ll give you a car.”
“Okay,” said Julian. “I just want—”
Then there was a loud thump and a grunt of effort. My fast walk became a run, weaving through street traffic and pounding up and across the hood of a stopped car, hearing underneath the angry honks and shouts from the drivers a horrible coughing sound through the earpiece, over and over.
The sound of Julian Formes being strangled.
I
BARRELED THROUGH THE SIDEWALK
crowd like a running back. A mail carrier hesitated an instant too long in the open entryway, and I crashed into him, knocking him down and sending his packages flying. He hurled insults at my back as I took the marble stairs three at a time.
My heart was hammering too loud for me to hear anything through the bug. Was Formes still alive?
I came off the stairs at a crouching run, down the long hallway, boot soles as quiet as I could make them on the marble. Number 309 was at the far end. The door was closed.
I stood to one side and slowly tested the doorknob. Unlocked.
The rustle of soft movement inside, heard through the bug. The choking sounds had stopped. If Formes wasn’t dead already, he didn’t have long. Where the fuck was Guerin?
I eased the door open half an inch, on blessedly silent hinges. Maybe Boone was distracted enough with Julian that I could take him.
Another inch. Peering through the crack, I could see part of the living area and part of the kitchen. A fleeting shadow on the floor as someone moved.
The doorjamb by my shoulder exploded.
I flinched, stumbling back into the hallway. A second shot tore a fist-size chunk out of the door’s edge, just about where my head had been.
I had the little .32 out of my pocket and leveled at the door. Come on, you son of a bitch. Come after me.
Instead there was a bang and the sound of shattering glass from far inside. Boone was breaking a window. Trying to reach the fire escape.
I kicked the door wide. The crunching of glass continued down the hall in the bedroom. I went in low and fast, ducking behind the kitchen counters.
Julian Formes was lying on the floor beside his worktable, twisted in a final backbend of agony. His face was mottled crimson, the pale bruises of finger marks still on his throat.
I heard the clatter of feet on metal. I aimed the .32 at the open bedroom door and went up the hall. Boone was gone, banging down the steps on the fire escape below. A flash look out the window. He was already two floors down, the tall man in the black suit I’d seen entering the building. Between the metal slats, I glimpsed brown hair, clipped to a stubble.
I slid over the sill, feeling a hot jab of pain as the broken glass sliced my jeans and leg. The rusted steel of the fire escape shook threateningly under my weight. Its stairs were too tight and too steep, and my steps felt maddeningly slow.
Below me Boone jumped from the last level to the alley, black coat flapping behind him. I kept scrambling until I reached the second-floor platform. Boone was ten yards out and running hard, heading for daylight on Second Avenue, away from the square and its sudden crowd of onlookers.
I pocketed the .32, climbed over the railing, and dropped, fifteen feet to the asphalt. I didn’t roll with the impact so much as bounce, hitting feetfirst and hard onto my side. My newly repaired forearm twanged like a guitar string wound too tight. I forced myself up and after Boone.
Too slow. He had a big lead. I frantically scanned the street. Clumps of people going about their day, in and out of the stores and restaurants in the lunch rush. Nobody staring or pointing as if Boone had just run past them. The cars and trucks flowed sluggishly along.
Where would he go? The opposite side of the street and down another alley. I lurched through the traffic. A Subaru slammed on its brakes as the driver stress-tested his horn.
The first alley I checked was empty. So was the second. Doors off the alleys, some of them propped open. A seafood restaurant on this side of the road, with back entrances. Too many possible routes.
Boone was gone. Fuck. Double fuck.
That was two leads blown, him and Formes. And I hadn’t even gotten a look at the bastard’s face.
Sirens now, howling down James Street toward the front of the building that Boone and I had just fled.
As if on cue, my phone buzzed. A text from the detective:
WHERE ARE YOU?
A good goddamned question. I wasn’t about to limp back to Formes’s apartment and submit myself for another visit to a police interview room. Even if Guerin cleared me as a suspect in Formes’s death, Captain Unser would have a couple of warrant-officer MPs waiting in the precinct lobby, eager to provide me mandatory room and board at Lewis.
In a different alley two blocks down, I ditched my baseball cap. The .32 went under my flannel shirt, and I jammed Dono’s lockpick set into the pockets of my jeans. There were holes torn in the knee and shin of my jeans. My leg was oozing blood into my sock.
I checked my cell phone. Still on. Give the maker points for durability. I’d lost the earpiece in the chase. I put the phone to my ear.
“—not the neighbors on this floor. Downstairs.” A male voice. The bug in Formes’s apartment was still working.
“Bang on the doors, see if anyone else is home and awake.” It was Guerin. Even through the bug, he sounded pissed off and tamping it down. “How many cars did you reach?”
“Three.”
“Get two more. I want cruising in a ten-block radius. Start from the outer edge and work in. And find me a witness who can tell us what they were wearing.”
“I’ll wrap this place up for CSU after we go.” Kanellis’s voice, farther away and faint. “Eddie?”
“There’s blood here, on the windowsill,” said a third voice. “One of the perps cut himself.”
“Good. Maybe we pull a print, too,” Guerin said.
“Where’s your guy Shaw?” said Kanellis.
“Not answering his phone.”
“Think he got impatient?”
Guerin didn’t answer him. I’d heard enough anyway. I hung up on the bug and called Guerin directly.
“Where are you?” he said immediately.
“Forget me. The guy you want is named Boone. Six-two or -three. Lanky. Brown hair, cut so short he’s almost bald. I don’t know about facial hair, I didn’t get a look. Wearing a black suit, ten minutes ago.”
“Come in and we’ll do a full workup,” Guerin said.
“I feel like I’m telling you shit you already know.”
There was a pause. “Boone McGann is Burt McGann’s brother.”
That explained Boone’s Midwest accent. I thought of the robbery scene. The tactical choice I couldn’t figure out. Three men instead of four.
“Where was Boone on the day of the robbery?” I said.
“In jail. In California. A probation violation.”
“But he’s out now.”
“Yes.”
“And probably pissed off about his dead brother.”
“Come in and we’ll talk about it.”
“I can do better. I’ve got Formes’s computer and thumb drives. And what I think is the recording from the bugs he planted at Dono’s house.”
Another pause. “Including the shooting?”
“I sure as shit hope so. It’s encrypted.”
“You can’t stay out on the street, Van.” First name. Never a good sign. He’d probably have a lock on my cell signal within a few minutes if Kanellis was already talking to the phone company.
“I’ll drop Formes’s gear where you’ll find it.”
“Shaw.”
“And forget about the blood on the window. That’s mine.” I hung up and took the battery out of my phone.
Would Guerin put an all-points out on me? I had to assume he would. Dono’s house was blown. With half of the West Precinct combing the area, I couldn’t even risk returning to where I’d parked the truck, not yet.
And in all the action of the afternoon, I’d missed my daily deadline to report in to Captain Unser.
Fugitive from justice and AWOL, too. Lucky damn me.
I came up out of a sleep so solid and blank it was like a gray concrete wall. I was facedown on my bed. It was dark. My mouth tasted bad.
Something had woken me. A noise. I shifted a little, and the muscles in my neck creaked painfully. I was lying in the same position since I’d collapsed on the bed … when? After the party. The latest party.
The digital numbers of my alarm clock glowed blurry red in the black room. Four in the morning, almost. I was gingerly turning my head to rest on the other side, even out the twist in my neck, when the noise happened again. My new cell phone ringing. My graduation present to myself. The ringtone still sounded weird.
The phone was somewhere in the pile of clothes on my floor. I used my arms to pull my body off the bed—getting vertical was way too much effort—and fumbled around for the little hard rectangle in the pile. The ringing had stopped and started again by the time I found the phone.
I didn’t know the number. I hit the green
ANSWER
button and grunted into the phone.
“Van? Fuck, man. Oh, fuck. Is that you?” Davey. His voice was hushed and even more hyper than usual.
“Yeah,” I said. My tongue was thick. The days since graduation had been one long rolling kegger. Davey and I and a handful of other Emmett Watson High grads crashed one party after another for different cliques and different schools. There’d been a couple of girls and at least one fight. Last I remembered, Davey was going home to sleep off some of the fun.
“Van. Oh Jesus. I need you to come here, Van. Please.”
“Davey, what the fuck?”
“Right, right. Okay. I’m … I’m near Broadway. In a store. Oh, Jesus.”
“Slow down. Are you busted? Is this your phone call?”
“No, no. God, I wish. It’s Bobby, Van. Bobby Sessions. He’s dead.”
Bobby Sessions. Davey’s connection for selling weed—and maybe more crap besides. Dead.
“Van?” Davey’s voice cracked. “Please, man. They’re coming.”
“
Who
is?” I was pulling on clothes with one hand. My hangover was gone, a miracle cure.
Davey exhaled a slow, shuddering breath. “I don’t know. We went to meet some guys Bobby said he knew. At the reservoir. Bobby had some shit to sell, he had it in the trunk of his car, and we went to meet them. He said he’d give me a discount if I’d help load the stuff, but I think maybe he just didn’t want to go alone.” Davey laughed, a brittle cough.
The reservoir was only a couple of miles away. I pulled my boots on over bare feet. “What happened?”
“Fuck, Van. They didn’t even
talk
to us. They were older guys. Badass. One of them, he just looked at the second one and said ‘Okay,’ and the other guy shot Bobby. Then they shot at me, but fuck, I wasn’t waiting around. I’ve never run so hard. I’m still shaking. Oh, fuck, Van.”
Told you. You colossal retard, I
so
fucking told you.
I found the keys to Dono’s Chevy Cavalier on the floor in the hallway, where I’d dropped them the night before. “I’m coming to get you. Tell me what store.”
“That place for Christmas, with the fake plastic trees and dolls and shit. They chased me across Broadway, and I cut through a yard, and I was in an alley—”
“Slow down. I know the store. Did you break in?” Maybe an alarm would bring cops. Not great for Davey, but better
than getting dead. The Cavalier started up with an outraged roar, and I eased off the gas.
“Yeah. I was going to go right out the front, but I think they’re already there. On the street outside.
I don’t know what to do, Van.”
“Stay tight.”
Maybe I should just call 911 myself. No, that was the fear talking.
Don’t ever involve the cops, not ever
—I could almost hear Dono growling in my head. No good ever came from those assholes.
Dono was out of town. He’d put up with sitting in the crowd for Watson High’s graduation ceremony in the Seattle Central Community College gymnasium. After we’d finally thrown our caps in the air, he clapped me on the back and told me he’d be on the road until Monday and not to burn the house down.
I turned onto 14th Avenue almost on two tires, overcorrecting with my free hand and nearly sideswiping a parked station wagon. Two minutes away, if I caught some air going over the hills.
I could hear Davey hyperventilating through the phone, even above the grind of the transmission. “Jesus, Van. I can’t be part of Bobby and all this shit. I can’t.” He was crying, I was pretty sure.
“I’ll be there.” I dropped the phone just in time to yank the wheel with both hands and sail through the red light on Thomas Street. The phone clattered to the floor, out of reach.
I raced past the black void of the reservoir, a half-acre expanse of water with no lights inside the high fences and very few outside. Good place for a murder. None of the homeless camped around the grassy edges of the facility would bother much about gunshots in the dark, so long as the danger didn’t come their way.
Davey had said the men had killed Bobby immediately.
What the fuck had Bobby been selling? It must be coke or hash, something worth more than a trunkful of bad weed. Fucking Bobby Sessions. Dumb on so many levels, he needed a map to find his way to stupid.
The only thing Bobby’s killers hadn’t counted on was how fast Davey Tolan could run. Like a cat with battery acid sprinkled on its tail.
The Christmas store was near Harvard Avenue, not far from Broadway, Capitol Hill’s main artery. I saw only a couple of cars moving on Broadway. There was no movement at all two blocks west, where the business district started giving way to cheap studio apartments.
The sun hadn’t touched the sky in the east yet. It was starting to rain. I flipped the wipers on and forced myself to slow the car. To think. I wished Dono were in the passenger seat next to me. I tried to picture him there. What he might say.
Two men, Davey had told me. Would they both have chased him on foot? One might have gone back to their car, trying to get out in front of Davey and cut him off. They’d probably have cell phones, staying in touch with each other. Checking every doorway and trash bin until they flushed Davey out.
They sure as shit wouldn’t give up. Davey had seen them shoot Bobby. They’d risk a lot to make sure he didn’t get away.
So what, then? They probably knew that Davey was still in the area, but no more than that. If they’d been close enough on his heels to know he was hiding inside the Christmas store, he’d never have had a chance to call me.
I slowed as I neared the next block and took a right off of Harvard. Letting the Cavalier glide, like I was looking for an open space. The Hill never has street parking, but everybody tries.
The car caught up to a lean guy with a black cap walking parallel. He turned and stepped closer, bending to try to peer in my window. A sharp, goateed face. Wet and angry. He wore a stiff-looking leather coat. I kept pretending to search for parking as I cruised past.
Three doors farther down was the Christmas store. Holiday Haus, it was called. Not that anyone was calling it much in early summer. The place was shuttered. Dead season.
I drove around the corner. A service alley ran the length of the long block, between the row of shops and the looming apartment buildings behind it. The alley was wide enough for trash trucks to drive through and empty the bins.
When the Cavalier was level with the alley, I stopped and turned off the headlights. The alley was well lit. I could see all the way down, maybe seventy-five yards to the other end. Nothing moved. The rain was a little harder now. Another minute passed.
Then someone leaned out of one of the doorways, three steps up from the pavement of the alley. Just a dark torso and head, like a silhouette target. The figure stayed there for a few seconds, looking at my idling Cavalier. Then it faded back into the doorway.
It could be somebody waiting to catch his ride to the early shift. Or grabbing a smoke in the alley because his girlfriend won’t let him light up in the apartment.
But I caught the same vibe from him as I had from the rat-faced guy out front.
Way
too edgy to be a citizen. Bad-asses, Davey had called them. Stone killers, for a few kilos of junk.
Fuck, this was not how I was supposed to be spending my graduation week.
It wasn’t too late to get the cops here. The precinct was barely ten blocks away.
But if the cops grilled Davey—and me—they might want
to talk to Dono, too. Maybe even start wondering why he was out of town. Would the attention be a problem for him right now? What was he into?
I could handle it myself. Had to.
Okay. So look at it the way he would.
The first need, always, is an exit route. At least one open path that will stay clear. The Holiday Haus was only a third of the way down this side of the alley. It wasn’t too far to make a run for the car, if I could get Davey out of there.
Too many moving parts,
Dono would say. One man whose location you know, another on the move. And maybe they had even called for help. Too many gears that might grind me up.
So improve the odds, boy. If you can’t simplify the situation for you, make it more complicated for them.
I put the Cavalier next to a fire hydrant and left the doors unlocked.
There was a small pile of broken cinder blocks against the apartment building wall by the alley. I leaned down and picked out a piece about half the size of a thick paperback. It had a good heft.
In the alley I jingled my keys and put the chunk of cinder block up to my ear, like it was my phone.
“Hey,” I said into the chunk, “it’s me. Just getting home.”
The silhouette was still standing in the apartment building’s doorway. I went up the stairs, sluggishly, fumbling at the keys.
“Fuck no,” I said, chuckling, “I’m not that drunk. Not yet.”
Up close the silhouette became a man, a jowly white guy around thirty with a blue parka and hair cut so short that most of his head was scalp. He leaned against a wall covered with a hundred flyers for bands and shows and furniture for sale. I nodded to him as I approached.
“Hang on,” I said into the chunk. I looked up at the guy. “Locked out?” I said.
He shook his head once, cheeks wagging, and turned his attention back up the alley.
I nodded understanding and went past him, still jingling the keys, and as I came to his blind spot, I spun and smacked him hard on the back of his bristly skull with the flat of the cinder-block chunk. He fell forward onto his knees. I hit him again, in the same spot, and he collapsed completely, face-first onto the landing. Blood spattered off the chunk onto his parka.
Oh, shit. I’d panicked and hit him way too hard. The hood of the parka had fallen over the side of his face like a shroud. I tugged it back to look at him.
Breathing. Maybe. I felt the side of his neck. Yeah. Definitely a pulse there, or maybe that hammering was all me. Then he exhaled, and his warm breath made a wisp of vapor in the night air.
My fingers on his neck were an inch above a thick line of ink. I pulled the parka back farther. The tattoo went down past his collar, some messed-up design of arrows and swastikas and the top half a couple of letters in Gothic script—
NF
.
I’d seen the art before. Nation’s Fist. A white-power bunch, mostly rural and definitely small-time, compared to the bigger supremacist gangs that made their trailer payments running drugs or guns in the Northwest. None of the Hitler lovers could push any real weight, not compared to the Mexicans or the newer Russian families.
But they were sure a shitload tougher than just Davey and me.
It wouldn’t be long before Rat-Face finished checking the front of the block. Would he stay out there? Or come back here to meet his buddy?
I quickly rummaged through the skinhead’s pockets.
Not easily. He was two hundred pounds of deadweight lying facedown and wearing a thick parka. He had a cell phone, more like a walkie-talkie, and a bunch of random crap like candy and half-chewed toothpicks.
Stuffed into his waistband was a target pistol, a Ruger Standard. I could smell burned powder under the bite of the cold air. Probably the same gun that had shot Bobby Sessions. I’d never liked Bobby, but the sight of that gun made me feel a little better about hitting the skinhead with a brick.
I stuffed his walkie-talkie in my pocket. The gun was a tougher choice. I didn’t want to carry around a murder weapon. But I really didn’t want this asshole to wake up and come after Davey and me with it. I tore one of the flyers from the wall and wrapped the pistol’s grip to take it with me.
I glanced around. No movement up or down the alley. I took a deep breath and flew off the landing steps, running all the way to what I prayed was the right door for the Holiday Haus. It had no window and no knob on this side, just a spring lock. I had to peer closely to see that the door had been jimmied. I stuck my fingernails in the gap and pulled it open a few inches.
“Davey?” I said into the darkness inside.
A sudden rustle of movement. “Van?” His voice was so soft that I hardly heard it.
“Let’s go, damn it. Come on.”
“I
can’t.
” A whispered wail.
I swore to myself and slipped through the door, into the void. With the front windows shuttered, the shop had the devouring blackness of an underground cave. I didn’t dare move, in case I knocked over something large and noisy.
“What the fuck, man?” I said.
“Wait.” More rustling, and I realized that Davey was crawling closer to me. I knelt to meet him. The Ruger in its
paper wrapping banged on the floor tiles, and I put it down. Fucking thing was cursed.
“We have to go, Davey. Now, while he’s still on the street.”
“
Wait
, goddamn it.” I could hear his palms slapping the floor as he crawled, but I still couldn’t see a thing.
I smelled something sharp. Piss. Davey had hosed down his pants.
“We have to run for it, D. Right
now
.”
“I
can’t
—” he said, and I reached out blindly and grabbed him. One of my hands caught him by his long hair. I clamped my other hand over his moaning mouth and shook him like a dog on a rat.
