SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set (53 page)

“So! Feeling sickly, are we?”

Mac rolled her eyes at Mitchell. “You may not feel sick, but I feel like hell came to visit and decided to stay.” Saying this much threw her into a paroxysm of coughing. The doctor waited patiently for it to end before pressing his stethoscope to her scrawny chest.

“How long you had this cough?”

Mac shrugged her shoulders.

“Week? Two weeks?” He prodded her diaphragm, tapping at it with two fingers.

“Three, maybe four,” she said. “It's been getting worse.”

The doctor moved behind her and listened again with the stethoscope; lifting it, settling it in a new spot, lifting again, listening.

We need to do some blood work, but I think I can tell you right now this is a serious case of pneumonia. Double pneumonia, actually. Both your lungs are involved. Your temperature is elevated . . .”

“How high?” Mitchell interrupted, stepping forward, his heart a regular trip hammer. He knew she was sick, knew she was in really bad shape, but it was one thing to think it and another to hear a doctor say it.

“Hundred and three.”

Jesus, Mitchell thought. It goes much higher her brain will boil.

“We'll have to keep you . . .”

“I don't want to stay.” Mac looked made of sterner stuff than she had when they first entered the room. “I don't like hospitals.”

“Well, ma'am, if you don't stay, this thing might kill you. Just giving you a shot of antibiotics isn't going to make this go away, you know.”

“She's staying.” Mitchell took her elbow and looked into her old watercolor-washed eyes. “Aren't you?”

“Samson, I don't like . . .”

“I don't care if you don't like it here, you're staying. Aren't you?”

She tried, with her steady, fierce gaze, to fight him, but finally she glanced down at her hands lying in her lap on the hospital-issue gown and she said, “I guess I will.”

Mitchell hung around the hospital until they'd done the preliminary blood workup, taken a chest x-ray, and assigned Mac to a bed in a ward. He saw her tucked in, given a shot in the butt, an intravenous situated in her left arm, and then he knew he had to go.

“I have to leave for a little while, Mac, but I'll be back later tonight to check on you.”

“You don't gotta do that. I was just kidding about you staying with me. I ain't no kid.”

“I don't gotta do nothing, but I'll be here. I said I would and I will. Now you do what they tell you and when they're not around jabbing or poking, try to rest. Okay?”

“Mitchell?” She wrapped long bony fingers around his wrist. “I don't get well, you shouldn't worry about it.”

“What the hell you talking about, not getting well? Goddamnit, you're in a hospital getting shot full of miracle drugs, of course you'll get well.”

“If I don't,” she insisted. “If I don't, then you ought to know I've had a good run. Not a great one, but a good one. Even on the street, life ain't so bad sometimes. And . .” She paused, out of breath, swallowing hard and frowning as if it hurt to swallow, “. . . And at least I did a good thing telling you about those boys. I want you to do something about them, Samson. Make them hurt a little for that killing. It was a cold-blooded thing they done.”

“Don't worry on that score. They'll be put away.” He knew the chances of putting kids under eighteen years of age in jail for any length of time, any hard time, was a possible, but not a probable, outcome.

Yet he wouldn't tell Mac that.

Outside in the sunshine, Mitchell ground his teeth. Even the light summer breeze blowing gently across his face as he retraced his steps to where he'd parked his car didn't relieve the pent-up tension he had been holding in his gut ever since Mac had walked into the station that day.

He should have found a place for Mac to stay and she wouldn't have gotten pneumonia from living out in the elements. He should have forced a shelter or halfway house to take her in. He should have taken her in himself if he couldn't find a place.

He should have done something.

“Hell,” he mumbled, screeching tires leaving the parking lot. “Hell and damnation and cat shit on a stick.”

~*~

It was Mrs. Darnell who answered the door, inviting him into her spacious, country-decor den. Mr. Darnell wasn't home from work yet—one of the many ultra-chic laboratories huddled in the woods of the Woodlands. Ricky Darnell, a boy Mac had identified, was in his room “doing his homework,” Mrs. Darnell said. “What's this about, Officer Samson?”

“Could you have Ricky come in here?”

The woman, heavy from the hips down, but slim from the waist up, rather like a badly put together stuffed doll, stood her ground. “First,” she said, opening her eyes a little wider with the first tinges of alarm, “why don't you tell me what this is about, please?”

Mitchell sighed and took a breath. “Mrs. Darnell, I have a warrant for Ricky's arrest. He's a suspect for murder. We want to question him about the night of May 28th. Five boys were seen beating to death a man named George Calloway in an alley in Montrose, and your son was identified by our eye witness as one of those boys. If you'll call Ricky in here, I'll read him his rights.”

The woman simply stared at him, incredulous, her lips parting and letting out a sibilant hissing sound, “. . . Beating to death?”

“Yes. Calloway died of his injuries. He was beaten with baseball bats.” This wasn't the easiest way to tell a parent the news, but she had forced him.

“Ric-key!” She screeched his name and now she was fumbling behind her with one hand to feel for the edge of the sofa where she immediately sat, slumping forward. “Rick-ey!”

A tall gangly teen—blond hair cut short, piercing blue eyes, a boy who would°look at home on a surf board on a Venice, California beach—came striding into the room. He halted when he saw a stranger with his mother. “What is it, mom?” His mother did not answer. She pointed a shaky finger at their guest.

Mitchell turned to the boy. “Son, I'm Detective Mitch Samson, HPD homicide division. I have a warrant for your arrest for the murder of George Calloway.”

“Huh?” The youth stepped back, his face showing an identical look of alarm to the one on his mother's. “Whadda ya mean?”

Mitchell read him his rights, stepped forward, and took his arm. “Turn around and put your hands behind you.”

He had the cuffs out when he heard the first horrible high-pitched scream from Mrs. Darnell. He turned instantly, the hair rising on the back of his neck. She was coming for him, her eyes wild and crazy, both hands held up and made into claws. He ducked to the side, put out an arm to keep the woman from falling. “Wait a minute . . .”

“Nonononono,” the woman moaned. “He didn't do it!”

She made another pass and Mitchell knew she was out of her mind at this point, her little sterile world crumbling before her eyes, her son being taken from her for a heinous crime he was sure she knew about due to the coverage it had gotten on the television news.

“Look,” he said in a loud voice to get her attention, “the boy's under arrest and if you don't get a hold of yourself, you may occupy a cell next to him. Now calm down and think about it. You might want to call your lawyer. Ricky doesn't have to talk to us without representation. I suggest you stop wasting my time and do something that might actually help your boy.”

Ricky stood penitent, hands behind his back, waiting for the cuffs. He stared at the floor, saying nothing.

Mrs. Darnell paused and lowered her crabbed hands. The shock still commandeered her features, but a semblance of sanity had already come back into her eyes. “Lawyer,” she said, repeating after him.

Mitchell cuffed the boy and led him toward the door.

“Mom?”

Mrs. Darnell was crying silently, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Ricky. . .”

“Mom, call Dad!”

Mitchell had to get the boy to the car before the woman lost it again and caused some real trouble. He stopped in the entrance hall long enough to slip a card from his shirt pocket and drop it into a brass tray on the hall table. “Here's a number you can call. We'll need both you and your husband to come into the station to take care of the boy's things.”

Rickey Darnell was the one Mac had identified as leading the band of boys on their killing rampage. He was the one who took the first swing. Mitchell didn't even like touching the kid. It made him itch to hurt him, and he couldn't do that. He never did that. Hardly ever, he amended.

Hurting this kid would have felt good, but it could ruin the case against him too, if his attorney found any marks on him. That would never do. This one wasn't getting away so easily, not on stupid technicalities and fumbled procedure.

On the way to the station for booking, he talked to the kid in the back seat. “Big strong heterosexual boy like you, big smart rich boy got everything you ever need, and what do you do? Go on some flicking crazy joy ride with your friends and a trunkful of baseball bats. Man, that's about the stupidest flicking thing I ever heard of. You like cracking open that guy's head? You don't have nightmares about it, you stupid little bigoted asshole?”

The boy didn't protest. He didn't say anything, in fact, for the entire forty minutes it took Mitchell to drive him from the Woodlands area, north of the city, to the downtown station.

Mitchell gave him an earful and he liked doing it. And if the kid had said anything back to him, he would have been hard pressed not to turn in his seat and swat him in the mouth, attorney or no attorney, just for the general principle of the thing.

After booking, Mitchell volunteered two more detectives from Homicide and the three of them, in separate cars, went out to the Woodlands again, this time to round up the other four suspects. None of their parents gave them grief, not physical grief anyway. All of them were like Mrs. Darnell in that they were stupefied with shock and disbelief. Their little boys? Murderers?

No one made a move because it was a lot harder to come on tough against three cops than it was against one. And Mitchell, a man without a suicidal bone in his body, didn't want to chance a replay of Mrs. Darnell, her of the clawed hands.

It wouldn't be nice to have to shoot down some rich housewife-mommy or respectable scientist-daddy on a Monday afternoon.

Twenty

Big Mac lay on her side, making it easier for her to breathe. Mitchell sat in a vinyl chair pulled up close to the bedside. He watched Mac sleep.

Her face was pasty white and he could hear her rattling breath from where he sat, hands in his lap. She did not wake while he was there, and at ten p.m. a nurse came by to whisper that visiting hours were over, he'd have to leave.

Outside the hospital, he looked at the night sky peppered with stars. His stomach felt queasy and he realized he had not eaten any dinner. Too busy booking the kids from the Woodlands. Too busy worrying about Mac.

He drove down Elgin toward the Montrose section of the city. Knowing it was not just to find something to eat. He needed a few hours drinking Irish coffees and watching the girls dance. Would Shadow be on stage?

He ate two bean-and-red-chilli burritos at a Mexican street cart, washed them down with a Corona beer with a slice of lime floating in it. Probably give him indigestion on an empty stomach, but the spicy food followed by the tart cooling quench of the Corona made him feel better all the same.

He sat alone in the club where Shadow danced, waiting for her to perform. Finally, when it was after midnight, he asked the waitress, “Shadow on tonight?”

“She quit.”

“What?

“I hear she's dancing at one of the places down the street, if you want to find her.”

Mitchell immediately stood up, depositing a larger tip than he usually left on the table, and walked out into the cool night. Where could she have gone?

He had to find her.

~*~

He couldn't find Shadow. He discovered what club she was dancing in, the Blue Boa, by asking club managers all up and down the street. But the cadaverous man with the pockmarked face running the Boa said she wasn't scheduled tonight.

Mitchell thought it just as well. He had had one or two too many whiskies-and-coffee. His stomach boiled like a pot of water left on the burner too long.

At home, Pavlov jumped him from behind the door when he got it opened, covering him with slobbery kisses and planting huge front paws on his chest. “Down, boy. Whoa, slow down.”

The house smelled closed-up. Doggy. And something else, like the inside of an empty can of liver dog food. What the hell. It was home. It wasn't much, but it was home.

He dropped his keys on the end table and locked the front door. He hadn't yet turned on a lamp and thought he wouldn't bother. It would hurt his tired eyes. They felt like sandpaper.

Pavlov couldn't be quieted. He kept butting his master with his back-end, swinging around in that silly semicircle dance.

Mitchell let his right hand drift down and trail along the dog's broad head as he made his way through the dark to the bedroom. When he had his clothes off and stripped to his shorts, he climbed wearily into the unmade bed. Pavlov bounded onto the mattress, circled once, and lay down next to him. Mitchell was too tired to give a damn, though he never let the dog sleep with him. The old saying came to mind, just as he was reaching out for sleep. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.

But then that was fine with him—fleas being better than some things a body could take on after a night in bed with certain kinds of beasts.

~*~

Shadow killed the third man at about the time Mitchell fell into a deep sleep next to his dog.

His name was Wilson. Chap Wilson, he said, moved recently to Houston from Peoria. Shadow picked him up at the back entrance of the Blue Boa. It was her night off at the new club and she never met the men far from where she worked.

“Is this a man-hating thing?” he had asked in the moments before his death.

By the time she had pondered out a reply, it was too late. “It might be,” she admitted to the open glazed eyes. Certainly it was hating this man that had proved his death. He might be the most perverse man in America, though how she could know for sure was something else that would take some steady, uninterrupted thinking.