Strip Search (30 page)

“Sheldon?” His dry mouth didn’t work too well and he called again. “Sheldon?”

No answer.

Loosening the Star PD holstered in front of his left hip, Wager leaned cautiously around the frame. Above the glare of the hooded lamp the shrine to Annette flickered, shadowy and elongated in the yellow splash of a prayer candle cupped in a dark red bowl.

“Sheldon?”

Crouching, he stepped into the shop and glanced toward the dim end of the workbench, where the door led to the front. Empty. Wager squatted to peer at any mass of blackness hiding under the long shelf. Nothing. He snapped off the lamp and waited for his eyes to clear, ears sharp for any sound; now the dim shine of the alley came in the doorway and the yellow circle of the prayer candle danced softly against the ceiling. Slowly, Wager moved toward the far end of the room.

The door leading to the front of the shop stood open; beside it, another door, labeled Men, was tightly closed. He hesitated at the edge of darkness, feeling the crusty surface of a poorly varnished frame beneath his fingers. Then he bent low quickly and ducked forward, stepping to the side as he cleared the door and squinted among the scattered vending machines that made tall black rectangles against the windows.

A muffled
whump
and the red flash of a stifled muzzle. Wager sprawled and blinked and rolled, knowing that the shot came from somewhere to his left, somewhere among those tall, clustered shapes. He held his breath, pistol angled up, until the rattle of shoe leather moved toward him and he rolled again, hard, away from the doorway as a crouching figure moved across the light of a front window and was gone.

He fired once, the noise loud against the walls as the bright flash of his weapon lit up the darkened vending machines. Rolling again, he blinked away the glare of his pistol, only half-aware of a second shot flung his way between two oblong shadows. Crawling, his shoulder cracked into a metal corner and he heard the quick rip of his coat on something, then he was up and crouched in the blackest shadow, breathing lightly through his open mouth as his ears strained to hear through the tingle of that first shot.

Somewhere, somebody was whining.

That’s what it was: the high-pitched nasal whine of somebody trying to strangle his own terrified noise.

Blinking, shifting his gaze quickly from point to point in the way that had become habitual on those night patrols in Nam, Wager tried to use his lateral vision to thin the darkness. A scrape—a tiny crackle of grit—over there … just beyond his vision … A thin creak like a rusty nail slowly pried from a hole … Wager’s pistol, gripped in both hands, turned toward the slightly darker gloom that seemed to gather into stealthy movement.

He didn’t see it. He wasn’t sure what told him it was coming. A more solid blackness, maybe, or the air mashed in front of it, but a moment before it hit him he ducked his head, catching the plummeting, solid weight of the metal case across his shoulders and curling against the hard gouge of knobs and the sudden, lung-crushing weight. The machine rocked across his humped back and crashed in a splinter of glass and quivering steel, knocking Wager aside before it thudded flat on his leg and wrenched his knee sideways. Wincing against the searing pain of pulled ligaments, he saw a blurry shape lunge toward him. His pistol swung toward the rush of legs and then the man was gone, leaping through the tangle of fallen machines, and Wager, tugging himself from under the angled weight, stumbled after him.

He reached the workroom in time to see Max dart across the opening and hesitate, looking where he had heard the shot.

“I’m okay, Max! Which way?”

Max’s arm pointed across the alley and Wager saw a shape dark against the gray of a distant house’s wall. It stumbled into something and clattered it into fragments, fell, rolled, then staggered up again into a crippled lurch.

Vaulting the low mesh fence beyond the alley, Wager sprinted after the figure, the ache of his knee suddenly gone. Behind him, he heard Max’s large shoes thud into the lawn as the big man angled left to head off the man and Wager, pistol cocked, darted for the shape that started right, saw Max, then turned toward the other side of the house. A light winked on behind a drawn shade and a silhouette bent to peer out a crack. Somewhere in a neighboring yard a dog barked insanely and Wager, feeling a shattered birdbath grind beneath his shoes, swung right as the man hobbled toward the narrow lane that led between the house and the chain link fence.

“Police officer,” Wager shouted. He dropped to one knee, pistol balanced in both hands and rock-steady; the barrel traversed toward the shape that halted to jerk its arm up and aim at Wager. “Police officer,” he said again. “You’re covered—drop it!”

A shot answered him. A spurt of blue-yellow at the pistol end of the silencer frayed into the air as the red of the muzzle speared his way and a solid, quivering thud punched the fence behind him. Wager squeezed the trigger with the even, straight pull born of long target practice.

But before his weapon could buck, a shot blasted from beside him.

A splash of orange light showed the white-haired man peering at Wager down the long shaft of a silencer, then the grass blades flickered in another muffled round and a loud second shot, strobe like, showed him lift back and half-turn with orange eyes goggling toward Max, his revolver braced against the side of the house as a third round shattered the blackness. Then the clunk of a heavy weapon against the earth, and a long, groaning sigh, like no other sound, of life stunned into death.

The man’s ID said Eugene North, but Wager and everyone else in Homicide guessed that a check of fingerprints with the FBI records would turn up a different name. Through the sealed windows behind Sheldon, Wager could see the sprinkled gleams of distant office towers pale gradually as the sky lightened from a still-hidden sun beginning to rise somewhere over Missouri or eastern Kansas. This time, Wager asked the questions, and this time Sheldon did not get mad when he was advised of his rights. He just talked. “I want to get it over with,” he told Wager and the small cluster of Homicide detectives that brought a strangely crowded feeling to the early-morning emptiness of the offices. Ross and Devereaux on the duty shift were filling out their forms: the measurements from Max to the victim, the location of known bullet holes, the number of rounds fired by everyone. Max, pale and with dark circles under his eyes, sat with a cup of coffee and answered when he was supposed to answer and kept quiet when he was not. Pacing restlessly between the two groups of his people, Chief Doyle, unshaven and rumpled from the haste of yanking on his clothes, chewed an unlit cigar. He had a rule never to smoke before breakfast, but chewing wasn’t quite satisfactory and it irritated him.

“So North made you hide in the men’s room?” Wager asked.

“Yes,” said Sheldon. “He thought you’d try the door—hear me, maybe—and then he’d get you from the front room. I thought you were going to shoot through the door! When the shooting started, I thought …” He swallowed and wiped at the corners of his soft mustache and looked at Wager. “I didn’t want to phone you. Honest to God, I didn’t want to. But he made me. He … he killed Annette …”

“You witnessed that?”

“No—oh no! Afterward … before I came to see you people. He called me and told me she was dead and told me to say she was missing.”

The organization of the laundering scheme had been just about the way Max and Wager figured it. The business had half-a-dozen phony employees on its books, under contract rather than salary so the Social Security and withholding wouldn’t have to be accounted for—one of Annette’s touches. The clubs paid the vending repair service, the service paid its “employees’” salaries and expenses into Annette’s pocketbook. The Sheldons’ trips to Vegas had been courier service—they deposited North’s cut in a bank there as one more bit of distance between him and the operation. The Sheldons had been doing all right, but Annette thought they were taking more risk than North and figured they deserved more money for it. She threatened North with the police, and North wasn’t the kind to be threatened.

“Did Berg get a cut?”

“I think so. Or maybe he was paying off a loan. Annette told me once that North or somebody had loaned him money to keep the business going. The liquor and stereo equipment, the overhead, the license—all that stuff is really expensive. And then the profits weren’t as good as they expected.”

What Sheldon didn’t know, Wager could guess. Clinton and North helped Berg and the others over a rough spot or two—”Hey, think of it as a friendly loan; take what you need”—until they had Berg and the others owing their souls at five percent a day. Then they offered a way to work the debt off. “What about Angela Williams? Did he kill her, too?”

“Him or somebody working for him.” His eyes gazed at the gray rug between his feet. “It was cover, he said.”

“What?”

“Cover. I’d told him about you coming by the shop and asking about Annette’s money—how much she made and all. That worried him a lot. He wanted you to think that some crazy guy was killing dancers. He wanted cover for the operation.”

So Wager had stirred things up all right. Do something, lieutenant, even if it’s wrong. And one of those things was another death. “He killed her for that?” And Angela Williams’s death was what had stirred Wager’s suspicions about Annette Sheldon. So tangled a web of causes that things seemed almost fated, almost as though things really had worked out for the best—except for the dead. But what was Wager supposed to do—nothing at all?

Again the tuft of straight, uncombed hair sprouting from Sheldon’s crown nodded. He took off his thick glasses and wiped them on his cuff and Wager was surprised at the amount of baggy flesh beneath his wet eyes. It made him look even older and weaker. It made him look like someone who could be manipulated by a strong woman. Even one who maybe loved him. “He killed Annette for the same thing. Money. She was a good dancer … she could have made it all the way to the top. …”

And Angela had been a good mother and a good daughter. And Doc a good snitch. Everybody was good at something. Wager would give Detective Lee a call in an hour or so and tell him the Angela Williams case could be closed and Lee would know that Wager was good at solving homicides. And Clinton would still be on the street because he was good at covering himself. Everybody was good at something.

Wager sipped at his coffee and glanced at Max. His partner had been good at shooting. Max had fired three rounds and then called to Wager, and they had stood there as the yard light winked on, showing the broken birdbath and uprooted and scattered petunias, their fragrance thick in the cool air, the scared face at the back door, and the sprawled figure, whose pumping blood slowed to an erratic pulse, then a weary flow, then ceased, even as they watched.

“I thought he hit you,” said Max. “When you didn’t fire back, I thought he hit you.”

They heard the querulous voice from behind the dark screen door, but it didn’t register with either man. “Thanks, Max.”

“Why’d you yell at him? Why’d you give him a shot at you?”

Because it was procedure. And because he wanted to know if he had the guts to hold his fire. But all he told Max was, “It seemed like the thing to do.”

“I thought he hit you,” Max said again.

“He tried.” Wager remembered the ease and sureness with which he had leveled his pistol and aimed, unafraid. The steadiness of his trigger pull. “You got him before I could, that’s all.” And it was true.

Max sucked in a long, slow breath that stifled his feelings; they would come later. Alone. Maybe with Polly. Probably not. Those kinds of feelings weren’t something you loaded onto your wife. Max would give himself the familiar arguments and he would go about his life because there was no bringing anyone back. He would joke about all the paperwork. He would nod and smile when someone said he had saved the taxpayers’ money. He would say “Thanks” when someone told him “Good shooting.”

And late at night, in the silence of his apartment, Wager would wake up sweaty and staring and be glad that Whitey was dead and not him. But he would be glad, too, that this time his flesh had stood its ground and done its duty.

Wager turned his attention back to Sheldon, who had not moved. Behind him, he heard Bulldog Doyle’s heavy tread as he made another round between the two groups. The odor of the unlit cigar wafted around Wager’s shoulder as Doyle leaned toward him.

“Good job, Wager,” muttered Doyle. “You and Axton did damn fine work.”

Wager looked up at the Bulldog’s pale gray eyes over that underslung jaw that had given him his nickname. “Thanks.” Then he smiled. “It was teamwork all the way.”

Doyle’s eyes hardened and he bit into the soggy tip of the cigar. It made a sound like chewed cabbage.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Gabe Wager Novels

“I
GUESS
… I guess what I’m asking, Gabe—dammit all—is if you’ll help me out.”

The plea came hard through Tommy Sanchez’s wrinkled mouth, and Gabe Wager, sharing Tommy’s embarrassment, stared at the rows of brightly lit whiskey bottles behind the bar. He could tell Tommy no, and Sanchez would understand. There would be neither begging nor blame; they’d finish their beers and argue a little over who got to pick up the tab, and then the cowboy would mash out his cigarette and shake hands and say, “Thanks, anyway, Gabe,” and stump out of Wager’s life forever. Or he could say yes and it would be pretty much the same except Wager wouldn’t lose a friend. But he might get kicked out of the homicide unit of the Denver Police Department for sticking his nose in places it didn’t belong.