Stegener snorted. “You guys just don’t care where you drive, do you.”
“Four-wheel drive is highly overrated.”
And then the four-by made a fatal mistake. Just as all three were disappearing beyond a low hill, the rifleman fired on the cop cars.
Stegener wagged his head. “Holy shit! That was so stupid!”
“From everything we’ve seen of your fake militia yoyos there, intelligence doesn’t seem to be the protectors’ strong suit.”
Stegener sat quiet. What was he thinking? “You know, Rodriguez, this doesn’t change anything. I’m still going to ruin you.”
Joe thought a minute. How should he frame this? He twisted around to face-to-face. “On the force or off it, being a cop is not what I do, Stegener. It’s what I am. You’re making the big mistake of thinking that I give a shit whether you exist. I don’t. You’re human life, and years ago I pledged to protect human life. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the president or a shoeshine boy. I learned that they planned to off you, so I did what I could to save you because that’s what I am, not who you are.” He shrugged. “As it turns out, you’re not a president or a shoeshine boy. You’re just an average, everyday schmuck.”
He started his poor, tired engine and got back on the highway home.
Tommy tapped two mugs of coffee from the urn in Jerry’s office, crossed to his chair, and handed one of them to Gretchen as he sat down.
“Thanks.” Gretchen sipped. “I hear Visneros got a job with Peoria.”
“Per’aps we might press the janitor into service as an investigator. Now’s y’r chance to become a murderer. We be down so short, y’ll be able to get away with it, no problem. If ye take the barest of precautions, the janitor will not find ye.”
“And I know exactly who I’ll murder first, closely followed by the chief. Any word on Stover?”
“Nae, he’s melted completely into the woodwork. The chief himself assigned officers to protect Bridgid.”
“Sure he’s going to protect her. There’s enough bad press already; he doesn’t want to add that to it. She’s a popular public figure for a few minutes yet, until the public forgets.”
“Aye, popular the world over. ‘Twould be an international incident.”
Joel Visneros threaded his way through the chairs and stood in front of Jerry’s desk. “Good morning.” The room quieted. “ You may have heard rumors that I’m leaving here and signing on with Peoria. That’s not true. The Ajo police chief is retiring. Their head of homicide is moving up into the chief position and I’ll come on there as Head of Homicide.”
Applause.
Joel continued, “It’s a lieutenancy, not a captaincy, but it sounds like fun. They wanted someone bilingual.”
“No,” Tommy corrected. “They wanted someone highly competent. Ye’ll do well, Joel.”
More applause.
Visneros looked around the room. “Thank you, all of you. You know, we’ve got a damn great division here, what’s left of it. Janet, tell us you cleared keystone.”
She executed a very messy Bronx cheer and Visneros went on to Meghan.
The morning briefing continued, pretty much routine, but Tommy’s thoughts wandered elsewhere. Where would Stover go? Back to Ireland? No. Not while Bridgid was still alive. He was most comfortable killing with a knife, but because she was under police protection, he might not be able to get close enough. Could he obtain a gun? Possibly. Did he have any experience with firearms? Probably not.
Visneros was asking, “Tommy? Any word on Stover?”
“Not so far. At six thirty this morning, I put Mr. Applegate on a plane for Pennsylvania. He will be selling the remainder of his ponies tomorrow. He wants to return here after the horse sale to help with the apprehension of Mr. Stover, if possible, so I purchased a round trip ticket for him. He will again be our house guest.
“Yesterday I took it upon meself to send out a bolo to all known gun dealers in the area; we’ve an updated list, ye know. But there be any number of other sources Stover could use to lay hands on a weapon.”
And the last thing on his list: “Officers detained a young man with a strong Irish accent yesterday afternoon, but it turns out he’s a groom taking his bride on honeymoon to the Canyon.”
Janet snorted. “With that accent of yours, Tommy, you’re subject to detention too, you know. Better keep your mouth shut.”
Gretchen twisted around in her chair. “It’s okay, Janet. I’ll do all the talking.”
And the light banter pleased Tommy immensely. The heart and soul of the division had not been slaughtered after all by the recent turn of events. Much now depended upon who would be brought in to fill the gaps.
The meeting finished and group disbanded. Some left, others returned to their desks.
Tommy would do both today; check his email and go out on the street. He found a yellow while-you-were-out slip on his blotter, a woman’s name and a number he did not know. He flopped into his chair and dialed.
Two rings. Three. “Hello?”
“Good morning. I be Police Detective Thomas Flaherty, and this number was on me desk when I came in.”
“The man had a strange accent. You sound just like him.” Slight Mexican accent.
“Talk to me, Madam.”
“Well, uh, on the TV news last night they interviewed a policeman, and he said that the man who kidnapped that girl got loose and they’re looking for him.”
“That be so.”
“That he’s a small fellow with a strong Irish accent.”
“Aye, indeed.” Tommy’s heart danced a brief jig.
“Do you know if he is looking for work? The Irishman, I mean, not the policeman.”
“Aye, he is.”
“Well, I think he found a job in the restaurant where I work. We need a dishwasher and someone to help clean up when we close. But the manager was off yesterday so I asked him to come back today. I think he will. I gave him a meal and a twenty to tide him over. He said he has nothing.”
“Where do ye work, Mum?”
“Chico’s Rincon. I do the condiments and sauces.”
“Ah. I know the place. I shall go there straightway and investigate. I thank ye immensely!” He jotted down her particulars and paused at Gretchen’s desk. “Janet, can ye spare Gretchen for a few hours?”
“Oh, gee, I don’t know. I’ll try.”
Gretchen stood up and shouldered her purse.
Janet warned, “Don’t you two do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Gretchen nodded. “That leaves it wide open. See you later.” And Tommy escorted her out the door.
Tommy was tempted to take a squad car and go to Chico’s lights and siren, but that would be silly for all sorts of reasons. He took his Kelly-green beetle, as usual.
As they pulled in to Chico’s parking, Gretchen exclaimed, “Wow! This is the first time I ever saw Chico’s lot empty!”
“A sight to behold, aye, but twill commence filling up any moment now; they open at eleven.” He parked out back and led her to the service entrance. That door wasn’t locked and they stepped inside. He called, “Lupe?”
A matronly little lady came hustling. “Tommy!” She hugged him. “And Gretchen!” She hugged her too.
“Ah, Lupe, tis me great pleasure to see ye.”
“I heard Joe is not a policeman. Is not true, is it?”
“Aye, tis true. Now he is a race car driver, and he won yesterday, too.”
“Oh! So that was the same Rodriguez. I heard on TV that a rookie won. I thought it would be a different Rodriguez, you know? Maybe a relative. Come in! Pase. Pase. What can I get for you?”
“I understand a fellow came around seeking work yesterday.”
“Marta told me. Yes. I need the help. Is okay to hire him?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll see.”
Here came the two officers in plainclothes and an unmarked car. With them, Tommy and Gretchen set up the cordon. To say Lupe was nervous was like saying t
he Oxford dictionary has a few words in it. And Tommy pondered the delicious irony that they just might capture Bridgid’s abductor in the restaurant of which her husband owned half.
The radio crackled. A low voice, almost a whisper: “Subject just entered the property.”
Across the kitchen, Gretchen stepped backwards into the pantry and set the door slightly ajar. Tommy shrank back behind the service door and flattened against the wall.
If Lupe bit her lower lip any tighter, she’d bleed.
A knock at the service door.
Lupe opened it. “Yes?” Her voice almost cracked, but she carried on bravely. “What can I do for you?”
“Be ye the manager?”
“Sí.”
“A woman yesterday said I mought find work here. Fine woman, black hair, so tall.”
“Come in. Yes, you can find work here. I pay twelve dollars an hour if you are a good worker.”
“Tis good.” And Jimmy Stover walked into the kitchen.
Tommy didn’t waste time in conversation. He fully intended to take the fellow down from behind in a choke hold. Suddenly he was slamming sideways against a dishwasher with stainless steel corners. Gretchen shouted from somewhere and one of the cover officers yelled from somewhere else. Tommy writhed and flailed on the floor, useless. His whole right side howled, nearly paralyzing him.
More shouting.
He wrenched himself to his feet and, dizzied, hung onto a prep counter for a moment.
He heard shouts from out front in the restaurant proper, which told him which direction the action was going.
Gunfire
He stumbled to the swinging doors, his gun in hand and pointed at the ceiling, but Gretchen was just disappearing out the front entry. Tires screeched out on the street. Helluva lot of yelling out there. He flopped to sitting in the nearest chair and holstered his gun. He wasn’t up to being able to help out.
The next thing he knew, they were loading him in an aid van.
Chapter 15 Hugh Bartoli
“Joe? We’re meeting at Hugh’s tonight around six. Can you make it?”
What with all the noise around the raceway here, Joe had trouble hearing him. “Sure, Jerry. Anything I should bring or do?” He paused from adjusting the inflation of a wheel on his speedy little orange car.
“I don’t think so.” Jerry closed the line, so Joe thumbed his phone down and holstered it. He went back to his mundane task.
In front of the car, Johnny stood erect with the dipstick in his hand. “Jerry was your boss, right?”
“Right.”
Johnny’s eyes narrowed. “He’s not planning to hire you back, is he?”
“He’s retired now, so he’s not in the hiring business any longer.” Joe realized what Johnny was really asking, so he stood erect and addressed the actual topic. “You’re worried I’ll go back into police work.”
“Yeah.” Johnny rammed the dipstick back down its pipe and dropped the hood.
“So am I.” Joe leaned on the car roof. “I’m really torn.”
Johnny leaned on the other side of the roof. “I can see why you would be. You gave a lot of good years to police work. And your friends are there. Is there anything Bubba and I can do to help?”
“I don’t know, Johnny. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I have two things I’m good at and I love doing, but I can only do one of them.” How to say this? It was so complex an issue. “It’s very doubtful I’ll ever have a chance to go back into law enforcement. I was suspended. Without due process, true, but I was suspended. Right or wrong, it’s in my jacket, on my permanent record now. And I quit. That’s on my record forever, too. Two black marks. And if I managed to get on another force, I’d have to start over at the bottom. I’m a little long in the tooth to begin all over again.”
“So we’re safe?”
“For the moment. But there’s Bridgid. So far, she’s dealing with the climate all right. But this marriage business is all new and wonderful and she’s in full honeymoon mode. When the new wears off and the temperature goes back up to triple digits and stays there, will she be able to handle it? If not, we emigrate to Ireland. I’m not going to let her be constantly miserable on my account.”
“And the kids would be okay with that?”
“Their grandparents are there. They’d love it.” Was Joe painting too rosy a picture here? No, he didn’t think so as he mulled it. So he explained, for Johnny had not yet heard this story. “Rico was being harassed in his public school by the principal, no less, because she assumed that with his last name, he must be the son of some gang-banger. A Mexican troublemaker. A third of his instruction time was in-school suspension for stuff that wasn’t a problem if white kids did it. Like talking loud in the hall, for instance. His teachers helped as much as they could, but their hands were pretty much tied. The district wouldn’t transfer him. So I gave him the choice and he left his friends behind to enroll in a private academy. Later he told me he realized sometimes you have to make painful decisions. His group of friends had been very close. So I think he and Glo will take a move okay.”
Johnny grimaced. “That’s the thing about you, Joe. Every effin decision you make is based on evidence, like with Rico here. Don’t fool yourself, and you don’t fool me. You’re never not going to be a policeman.”
“Gretchen, thank you. You and Janet both. This Mrs. Marsh is a goldmine. We’re going to verify her information and file charges next week. Big charges.” Meg Cozynsky put her notes together and closed her attaché case.
“I’ll tell Janet. She worked harder on this than I did. She even gave up a raft trip down the Colorado River because we were so close to tying the case together.”
“Hell being a cop, ain’t it?”
Gretchen borrowed one of Tommy’s favourite lines: “You nailed that head on the hit.”
Meg went off to her desk in Fraud, deep in the bowels of the department, and Gretchen slogged upstairs to the Vulture’s Roost. Why was she feeling so melancholy? She was a bride, and Tommy was an even better man now that they were united in matrimony than when it was “Your place or mine?”
And she thought again of Joe and the raw deal he’d been handed. This wasn’t melancholy, it was a fury that she could do nothing about. It was the part about being helpless that felt like melancholy.
Tommy said he stayed on only so that those who had quit would still know what was going on in the department.
She stopped. They didn’t need her eyes and ears. Sure, she had a cushy job, and she had already earned a couple special commendations. But some things are more important than that.
She turned and headed for the stairs.
She had never been in the chief’s office before, and her opinion had never been invited, of course. That was about to change.
The chief’s receptionist was your standard forty-year-old secretary with a pleasant smile and an iron-hard voice. “May I help you?”
“Gretchen Weimer, Homicide.” She flapped her badge case open. “I’m here to speak briefly to the chief.”
“I’m sorry, you’ll have to make an appointment.”
“I won’t be that long.” Gretchen blazed past her desk and marched right into the room with the name printed in gold on the door. It was a good thing they hadn’t painted Jerry’s name on his door; they’d just have to scrape it back off. The lady hurried in behind her, but then she didn’t seem to know what to do next.
The chief was sitting at his desk laboring over his keyboard. The grumpy look on his face suggested he didn’t like creating paperwork any more than Joe did.
Gretchen laid her badge case on his blotter facing him. “This won’t take long. Either keep it and I’m gone, or give it back to me.” She stood up straighter. “I started out in the lab, and for years I was Maynard Rust’s bitch. I put up with it because I loved the work and I loved the people I worked with. Then I was able to transfer over to Homicide; same people, and I love the work even better. Until now. You threw Joe Rodriguez
under the bus, and nobody deserved less what you did to him. Nobody in the division deserves that insurance debacle. We give you our best every day; Janet James gave up a rafting trip through the Grand Canyon to find a missing person who may have been murdered. FYI we found the lady alive and well and put her in protective custody. We want basic support not because we earned it and deserve it, although we do, but because it’s essential to our job of serving the public. We’ve just been screwed over royally, all of us, and with your” (pause) “tacit” (pause) “permission. End of diatribe.” She stepped back.
He studied her for long, long moments, like an eagle watches a rabbit. He reached out and shoved her badge case across his desk to her. “Get outta here.”
“Yes, sir.” She turned, brushed past the secretary, and walked out the door. On her way out she heard the chief bark, “Get me Gretchen Weimer’s jacket.”
She took the stairs to the Roost, mostly to unwind a little. Did she hurt matters or help them? She no longer cared; there was not much worse you could do to the division.
That had already been done.
Joe parked in the employee lot behind the Twenty-third Street fire station and went inside. The bays that held the aid van and pumper were both empty, so Bridgid the paramedic was out on a call. He turned aside, knocked at the captain’s door, and entered.
Big, burly, potbellied John Szchypanski looked up and grinned. “Chessie radioed in that they dropped their patient at Mays. So she should be here in about ten. They responded to a multi-vehicle on Fortieth.”
Joe scowled. “Clear out there? Doesn’t the department have anyone closer?”
“All busy. We’re in a budget crunch.”
“Welcome to my world.”
Szchypanski sat back. “Yeah, but think of all the money the taxpayers are saving. Have a seat.”
“Right. Pennies and pennies.” Joe sat.
“Don’t know if you know. Your wife is filling the shoes of two paramedics. We had to RIF one and the other left. So the brass froze the riffed position until such time as the budget permits hiring a replacement. It’s getting damn frustrating.”
Pony Up Page 17
