Troubleshooter (20 page)

Tannino signaled Tim with a finger, and they stepped outside the circle of men. Tannino put his back to the others. "What's your read on Jim?"

The others watched Tim, gleaning the conversation's content. Anger lingered in Jim's light blue eyes, enough to embolden him to stare.

Tim said, "He seems a little wobbly."

"Think I should pull him?"

"I would."

"Would you pull you?"

"Probably."

Tannino let out a sigh meant to illustrate executive stress. "What about in there? Was it a good shooting?"

"Yeah. Guerrera saved my ass. Talk to Bear--he saw it."

"The kid can shoot. Who'da thunk it?"

"Not you?"

"I thought he might be all talk. You never know until you know."

Tim was distracted, scanning the empty parking lot.

"What?" Tannino said.

"We got two dead bikers and one bike."

"Maybe they rode in together?"

"Sure, right after their commitment ceremony."

Tannino whistled Freed over. "Give a drive around the surrounding blocks. We're missing a chopper. Check alleys, too."

"Diamond Dog's bike," Tim said. "Call someone at the post, get it tagged from our funeral surveillance shots. Goat's hog is inside."

Freed nodded and withdrew. Tannino spit on the asphalt as if clearing a hair from his mouth.

Tim said, "Don't release Diamond Dog's name to the press. Give up Goat, but I want until at least tomorrow on Diamond Dog."

"Fine. I'll give you till noon. Move your ass and make the play. We gotta build Rome in a day here, Rackley." Tannino shot his cuffs like an old-school gangster and squared his shoulders. He entered the warehouse. Emerged a minute later. "What the fuck is that?"

"That seems to be the prevailing question."

"Sinner business or entertainment?"

"Don't know."

"Was she pregnant?"

"Don't think so. Just a big girl."

Tannino took a deep breath and walked back to the cluster of deputies. He pointed at Jim. "You. Go home. You can do light duty at the command post, but you're done going out of pocket for this case."

Jim's glare went from the marshal to Tim. He spun and headed back to his wife's Saturn; he'd been roused from bed.

Tannino turned his attention to Guerrera. "To the hospital. That's not a suggestion." Another quarter rotation brought him face-to-face with Tim. "You and Bear handle the advise-next-of-kin. Take Guerrera's ride for a respectful showing. We don't need you rattling up to the curb in Bear's heap. What, Rackley? Why the face?"

"Guerrera handled her before, the grandmother, and her English isn't so hot. I thought maybe it might be easier for her to hear it from--"

"I'll tell you what," Tannino said, already heading back to his Bronco, "we'll do ethnic outreach on the next one."

Chapter
29

Guerrera's duty car was an Impala that Bear hated because of the creepy autonavigation voice--a spacewoman on ludes calling out each turn. "Left in two hundred yards."

Bear looked ridiculous stuffed in the driver's seat; he didn't do well in cars.

Tim hadn't done an advise-next-of-kin call since he'd received one himself from Bear the night of Ginny's death. He thought about asking Bear to handle tonight's, but he felt he owed Marisol's grandmother both their presences in the face of the news.

"The old man asked me if I thought he should yank Jim."

"I figured."

"Right turn in forty-five feet."

Tim looked at the camera mount on the center rearview mirror, the same model that had captured the assault on Dray. "Do I come off so coldhearted that my wife gets shot and the marshal asks me if another guy's taking the case too personal?"

"I think--"

"Oops. Make a U-turn."

"Shaddup, lady. Jesus Christ, I want to get nagged like that, I'll get hitched." Bear turned the car around and got them back on course. "I think since you fucked up on that front so profoundly, the marshal bets you won't go that route again. And more important..."

"What?"

"Well, you do go stone cold, Rack. When you're mad. You don't get stupid, and you don't get sloppy. Stupid and sloppy are what Tannino--and the mayor, for that matter--is worried about. And frankly, if you handle business and the rest of the Sinners wind up ten toes up like Chief, I don't think anyone's gonna lose any sleep. But it's gotta be clean work." They drove a few minutes in silence, but eventually whatever thought Bear was working on got the better of him, and he said, "Jim's an easy call to pull off the case right now. He's not the one who the marshal--and you--should be worried about."

"What does that mean?"

"I dunno. Young deputy. A comer. Could go this way or that way or some other way. And--as everyone but you has noticed--idolizes you. For all the wrong reasons, I might add."

"Guerrera?"

"You think?" Bear shot Tim a you'd-better-think-about-it glare and feigned a sudden absorption in the cookie-cutter triplexes flying by on his left.

A few minutes later, they eased up to the house. Bear let the car idle, ignoring the solicitous autogal--"Next location, please."

Bear stared at the house, his face shifting. "Fuck. I hate this. I fucking hate this." He bounced his forehead off the top of the steering wheel a few times. "Okay, let's go."

At the door Bear's and Tim's painful Spanglish only made the encounter more demeaning to everyone and prolonged the agony of the revelation. Immediately the woman took in their dread by osmosis, but they had to run through "We're siento, Marisol is muerto" three or four times until the denial-fueled hopefulness dwindled from her eyes and her composure crumbled. One of her arms flared to help her keep her balance and Tim caught it and walked her to the couch, but she refused to sit. The footrest, now re-covered in plastic, bore a few stains from their last visit.

Tim focused hard on her hysterical Spanish and figured out she was asking variations on what he and Bear had termed the Impossible Rhetorical--"?Como pudo pasar?" How could this happen? He was having a difficult time keeping his emotions in check; they came at him from hidden angles, each trailing a memory: Bear's mud-caked boots the night he came to tell him and Dray that Ginny had been killed. The sheriff's dispatcher's static-laced voice announcing that a pregnant deputy had been shot point-blank. Tim's exhaustion caught up to him in a rush, and the room seemed to close in on him--the oppressive kitchen humidity, the sticky-sweet smell of the Advent candles, the woman's anguished sobbing.

Everyone murdered is a son or a daughter. Cops and deputies start burning out once they acknowledge this simple fact. The awareness--the true awareness--leads to a kind of insanity, a blurred vision. So they fight it tooth and nail. They fight it with the bottle. They fight it by pushing away what is theirs with what is not. The smart ones fight it with a cynical eye and gallows humor. And some of them--sometimes the toughest of them--just decide to give up one day and eat their guns or ride motorcycles into brick walls. To acknowledge the essential humanity of each bludgeoned face, each sprawled corpse, each Dumpster baby, is to run the gauntlet with every nerve exposed. But not to acknowledge it is a kind of denial, a kind of death in itself.

The shotgun blast that had entered Dray had also knocked Tim's careful system of balance and countermeasure out of whack. His compartments bled into one another; his boundaries slid; his lines blurred. In the haze he sensed a barely conscious choice at hand: He could take either nothing personally or everything. He could either connect the dots between his comatose wife and the other victims or deny them all a place in his heart.

Somewhere the woman's halting English returned. "She will be home. She have to come home to me."

And Bear's soothing murmur: "I'm so sorry, ma'am. We're so sorry."

She looked impossibly frail in Bear's embrace. Tim cleared his throat and blinked away the wetness in his eyes.

"I just make her bed again. Her bed is ready for her." The woman tore at her shirt, her knuckles knobby from years of hard work. She collapsed on the couch, face pressed to the cushion.

Bear did a double take at Tim. "You all right?" he mouthed.

Tim wiped his nose, nodded.

"Why don't you go to the car?"

"I'm fine."

"You'll be finer in the car."

The woman's hoarse sobbing was audible all the way down the walk.

Bear climbed into the car twenty minutes later. Tim's eyes and nose were rimmed red, the contrast severe against the pallid skin of his face. His breathing had settled, the calm after the storm. Bear looked more than a touch unsettled. Tim wouldn't turn to meet his gaze, so Bear faced forward, hands on the wheel, elbows dangling. His head was ducked; he was at a loss.

They were pointed east, and morning leaked at the horizon, a slow, orange bleed.

Tim's voice was cracked and quiet. "Take me to Dray."

Chapter
30

The waiting-room TV, suspended from a bracket in the corner, offered a virtual face blast of information. Shots within shots, subheadlines with bullet points, an Energizer Bunny crawl across the bottom: Laughing Sinner killed in Fillmore shoot-out....Pregnant deputy shot by fugitive Den Laurey still in critical condition.... Another Cholo found dead. Authorities believe killing related to biker gang war.... AP: Mutilated female corpse discovered in former IronClad Parts warehouse....

Tim caught a few stares from the waiting wounded, who--as a corralled TV viewership on a bureaucratic timetable--had no doubt watched grainy, zoom-lensed Deputy Rackley poking through one of the three high-profile crime scenes that had emerged last night and this morning.

Dray was alone in her room, arrayed peacefully under the covers, her head tilted just so on the pillow. He spoke her name, half expecting her to rise and greet him. Her skin felt hard and waxy and gave off the scent of antiseptic. He missed the smell of her, and it struck him that there was no way to recapture it unless Dray reentered her life, unless she showered, sweated, ate her vast yet specific array of foods, rubbed jasmine lotion into her hands in her elaborate manner that made her look like a cartoon villain scheming. Her smell captured the combination of countless variables that were her life, that were her alive.

A middle-aged woman--a physical therapist by her ID card--entered and introduced herself. She was heavyset and to the point. "The nurses in the CWA told me you're the guy. In charge of catching those bikers? I have a daughter who lives out in Simi...." Her thought trailed off into a dark corner. "You catch those guys."

She pulled the sheets off Dray and rearranged her body with practiced, no-nonsense movements. Dray's arms looked thin, dwarfed by her belly.

"How's she doing?" Tim asked.

"Still not arousable to stimuli. No purposeful movements. The doc says the baby's going strong, so that's good."

She grasped Dray's calf and foot and rocked the leg, as if shaking off dust, then bent it back. She repeated the motion a few times before switching legs. He watched her work. Seeing Dray animated, even falsely, gave him a stab of irrational hopefulness.

Tim cleared his throat. "What can I expect here?"

"There are significant variations based on the nature of the injury--"

"No bullshit," he said softly. "Please."

She paused and regarded him, Dray's foot in hand, before returning to her task. For a moment Tim thought she wasn't going to answer. Then, without looking up, she said, "I can't speak to brain damage. My area of expertise is muscle atrophy. She has a week or two before there's appreciable deterioration. Rehabilitation gets harder after that. And, you know, the likelihood that..."

"That she won't be able to."

The physical therapist contemplated Dray's leg bends with renewed focus. Tim watched the knee rise, fall, rise.

Think this is the best use of your time?

"Shut up, Dray."

The therapist caught his murmur, raised an eyebrow in his direction.

I miss you, too, babe, but you have more important things to do than watch me play cadaver Twister.

Tim watched the physical therapist rotate Dray's foot in precise circles.

So you won't leave?

Not right now.

Make yourself useful, then.

The therapist placed Dray's heel on her own shoulder and elevated the leg to stretch the hamstring, her fingers laced to brace the knee straight. She finished and jotted a few notes on her clipboard.

"Can I?"

She looked up at Tim, surprised. Her eyes twinkled with a sad grin that never made it to the rest of her face. "Of course, hon."

Tim set his holstered gun on the neighboring chair and rose. The therapist paused at the door, monitoring him before withdrawing.

Tim started at the beginning of the routine. Dray's bare sole fit perfectly, as always, in the curve of his hand. He'd stretched her enough, before their early-morning runs, to note that her muscles were now tight and cranky. He rotated her arms, compressed her shoulders, kneaded her neck.