“Hold it right there! Now!” Streeter yelled. His voice was hoarse but deep.
Kevin frowned and looked back at the dogs. Both were jumping up and trying to bite his dangling leg.
“Drop the gun!” Streeter yelled and took a step forward.
Kevin’s face hardened and he raised the .38. Streeter saw the motion. Luckily, it was slow enough to allow him to squeeze off two rounds before Kevin’s gun was in position. One of the slugs hit the man on the fence in the right shoulder, causing him to spin in that direction. He lost his balance and fell back into the little alleyway. The gun bounced from his hand when he landed. Apparently, Streeter had hit an artery. Blood was pumping out of the shoulder in thick spurts.
The bounty hunter ran toward Kevin, his gun still raised. By now Terry was around the corner and he had his gun in firing position, too. When they got to Swallow, they lowered their pieces. Clearly, he wasn’t going to give them trouble. Streeter kicked the .38 away from him as a precaution. Kevin lay on his right side, his legs moving slowly up to his chest like he was curling into one final fetal position. By now the ground in front of him was covered with blood. He was looking straight ahead, at about ankle level, and it sounded like he was choking.
“Go call for an ambulance,” Streeter said, his eyes on Swallow. Terry nodded and left. Streeter knelt down over the man on the ground. “Don’t move. Just lie still.”
Swallow looked up. His eyes were unfocused and he was pale. He opened his mouth slowly, like it hurt him a lot to do so.
“Just lie still,” Streeter repeated, leaning farther forward. His face was now only a foot or so away from Kevin’s. Without sunglasses and up this close, Kevin looked much more like his mug shot.
The dying man opened his mouth. “We’ll get you. Gina…” His voice trailed off and his features froze. The sentence would never get finished.
The bounty hunter looked closely at Kevin. He knew he was dead but he moved his fingers around Swallow’s throat to see if he could find a pulse anyway. Then he studied this man who had killed at least three people. The man who’d terrorized Carol and threatened Streeter himself. Lying there with his prison-hippie beard and long hair, Kevin looked mad. Charlie Manson mad. He’d lived his whole life that way. Might as well go off to the next stop like that.
Terry returned about five minutes later. Streeter was sitting on the ground, leaning his back against the building. Swallow’s body was in front of him, a few feet away. Their guns were on the ground between them. The dead man looked so bright to Terry, lying there with all that thick red blood on his white T-shirt.
“An ambulance won’t help this man,” Terry said as he looked down.
Neither of them spoke. Finally, Terry asked, “He say anything at all?”
Streeter looked up. “Nothing that made sense, but he was a hard guy to the end. Even threatened me again. He mentioned Gina. Said she’ll get me. That lady won’t be getting anything but jail time. It’s finally over.”
TWENTY-TWO
Much of the rest of Monday was a noisy blur to Streeter. He and Terry were allowed to return to the church about an hour after the ambulance and cops arrived at the scene. But first they answered police questions as the attendants put the body on the gurney. Then they answered more questions at the church. Finally, they were driven to the downtown police headquarters to make formal statements and answer still more questions. Terry was finished by two, but Streeter wasn’t allowed to go home until well after five.
Earlier, when the bounty hunter and the PI first got back from the shooting scene, the front of the church was littered with television news trucks, police and fire vehicles, and other official cars. Sidewalks on both sides were lined with pushing spectators struggling with the orange crime-scene tape. A news helicopter even swirled overhead for part of the afternoon. It would take all day to clean up the mess. Frank was inside his office talking to a couple of the older officers.
“Too bad about Jeff getting banged up like that,” Frank told Streeter and Terry. He nodded goodbye to the officers who were leaving the room. Barrows had a concussion, along with assorted bruises, and he’d be in the hospital in a day or two. “Jeff’s a good kid and I hate to see him hurting. But, overall, I’d say we made out all right this morning. Swallow’s history, Carol’s alive, and there’s one less rice-burner cluttering the American highway,” he said, referring to the Honda. “End of story, and when you total it all up, I’d say the good guys won.”
For his part, Sergeant Haney was torn between anger and guilt—anger about making the wrong call on Swallow’s move, and grief over an injured officer. Streeter had a smooth path to do some serious “I told you so”–ing, but he didn’t take it. Besides, Haney was too busy giving orders and downplaying the damage to the press to allow much hassling.
After the immediate shock wore off, Terry slid back into his usual detached cool. His thoughts quickly returned to running the business with Brian in the hospital.
Carol had the most perplexing reaction. Streeter thought she’d be relieved and delighted. Finally safe, she could go home, which she did that afternoon. She should have been downright giddy, yet all she expressed was anger. “Damnit, Street,” she’d told him in the church garage just before he left to go downtown. “This isn’t right at all. I hate to see someone killed. You and your stupid guns. You didn’t have to shoot him.”
“What the hell does right have to do with anything?” he snapped back. “You’re alive and Kevin’s on ice. That works for me and you should be glad, too. Of course we all feel bad for Jeff. That wasn’t right. But why take it out on me?”
She shook her head. “It must look like I’m ungrateful. But after watching the explosion, watching it happen right out here—to see poor Jeff hurt like that.”
“He’s a cop and he knew he was getting in the line of fire every time he put on the uniform. Besides, you never showed concern for ‘poor Jeff’ when he was falling all over himself to be near you. And that piece of shit Swallow got what he deserved.”
She glared at him. “Calling a dead person names doesn’t make you noble. Maybe you could have taken Kevin alive, or just let him go for the police to arrest later. But no, you had to come on like Wyatt Fucking Earp. Always the big macho man.” She paused, shuddering in anger. “You know I’m opposed to capital punishment.”
“Give me a break, okay? If you hadn’t run back to get those files, they’d be scraping you off the back seat. Seems Kevin wasn’t opposed to capital punishment where you were concerned.” Streeter didn’t say anything for a moment. “We’re both really wound up. Let’s just drop it. The cops’ll take you home.”
She nodded. “Look, I know I shouldn’t have yelled at you for what happened.” It was as close as she came to a thank-you.
As he was being driven to headquarters, Streeter wondered if he’d done the right thing shooting Swallow. Killing a man didn’t sit well with him. Maybe he should have just tried to keep him contained in the alley until the police came. To hell with it, he finally decided. He did what he did on reflex and in self-defense. The result was that one very bad man was out of circulation forever. Frank was right: the good guys won. When Streeter finally got back to the church, he was exhausted but still wired. There was a message on his voice mail from Linda Parnell, so he called her.
“What a morning you had.” She sounded anxious. “Are you okay, Street?”
“I’ve had good days and I’ve had bad days, but this was both. Yeah, I’m okay.”
“Would you like some company?”
He could use the comfort and he wanted to see her, but he really needed sleep. “It’s tempting, but I just want a shower and then hit the sack. Maybe tomorrow.”
“Fine.”
“Haney told me that Gina Gallo, Swallow’s girlfriend, made a full confession,” Streeter said. “That should end this whole business.”
“Let’s hope so. I can’t stop thinking about Carol. Many psychotic illnesses share the same symptoms, and I
certainly don’t know enough about her to make a diagnosis. It could be any one of a number of problems. But I keep thinking of one in particular. It’s called ‘borderline personality disorder.’ Look at her mood shifts, how impulsive she is. All that misguided, deep anger. And don’t forget what she did to her hand with the disposal. Plus, borderline personality sufferers are extremists. Everything comes down to black or white. They’re oversensitive to what they perceive as abandonment or disloyalty. Does that sound like anyone you know, Street?”
“Sounds like most of the people I know.”
She ignored the crack. “Self-mutilation. Uncontrolled anger. Oversensitive to abandonment. Look what she tried to do to her ex-partner. And then her hand. She deserved to be mad at you, but she went beyond that. And remember her blaming you for her law practice going south. That was pretty extreme. People with this disorder can function normally and yet they’re incredibly manipulative.”
He thought of Carol’s weird pass at him in the loft Saturday. “So?”
“So, Swallow’s dead. I’d put some real distance between myself and Carol if I was you. She’s seriously disturbed, probably suicidal. And if she is borderline, there’s not much chance of her being helped, even in therapy.”
“You’re right, and that’s just what I’m going to do. Carol already moved out and I don’t plan to see her anymore, even as a friend. Sometime I’ll tell you what she tried to pull on me here Saturday night.”
When he hung up, he was too jazzed to go right to sleep. He changed into his workout clothes and went to the basement gym. As he walked down the stairs from his loft, he half expected to see Barrows at his usual station. For an unfocused half-hour, he lifted. Then he went up to read in bed. But he couldn’t concentrate on that, either. He kept thinking of Carol’s curious reaction earlier that day and how she’d acted the past couple of weeks. What she’d told him about Kevin. The symptoms Linda mentioned stuck with him, too. As he tossed around in bed, a sickening thought kept whipping through his mind. He didn’t want to believe it even though he’d flashed on the idea over the past week. But he couldn’t chase it away. Finally, he slipped into a jangled sleep at about three.
He awoke at seven, and the thought was harder to ignore. It festered, pushing on the wall of denial he tried to maintain. Then, shortly after ten o’clock, he found solid proof to back up his suspicion. As he went through a makeup bag that Carol had forgotten, he found the link that confirmed his worst fear. He made one phone call and got a recorded message. It stated that the person wasn’t home. However, she would be “ever so happy” to return the call “if you’d just be so kind as to leave your name and number. Really.” Streeter stared at the phone after he’d hung up from listening for the third time. Then he called Nathan at his office.
“Terry, can you come over here right now? Yeah, the church. We have to talk. You, me, and Frank. It’s really important.”
“I’ll be over as soon as I can.”
Streeter went to Frank’s office. He was disappointed to see the room empty, but then he remembered that Frank would be gone until late morning. He sat in the big desk chair for over an hour, thinking about Carol. Shortly before eleven, he heard the front door open. The bondsman’s voice, along with Terry’s, echoed in the hall.
“Look what I found hanging around outside,” Frank said as they walked in. He studied his partner. “Jeez, it looks like someone smacked you with a three-wood, Big Guy.”
“What’s up?” Terry asked.
Streeter nodded to the chairs across the desk from him. “You might want to be sitting down when you hear what I have to say.”
Both men sat. “About what?” Frank asked.
“About everything that’s happened and about the lovely Carol Irwin.” He looked at Frank. “You mentioned to me more than once over the last few days that you thought there was something off target about her.”
“Yeah, I did. ’Course, I never thought much of that lady. But now she seems more in control and loose in the head, all at the same time.”
“That thought hit me, too,” Streeter said. “She’s got an underlying edge that she never had before. Then, yesterday, I noticed how really weird it was. Here she’s finally out of the woods and she acts like she just got a speeding ticket. Mad as hell. She even implied that I didn’t have to drop Swallow. It actually upset her that he was dead, almost like there was an emotional connection between them.” He paused and looked closely at the two men. “I believe that she and Kevin were working together all along on this hit-list bullshit. Carol’s a killer or, at the very least, an accomplice. I had questions about her almost from the start, but I should have figured this out sooner. It was just hard for me to believe she was that far over the top. As I told you way back, Frank, I had a blind spot for her.”
Terry and Frank looked at each other.
“Hey, come on,” Frank said as he stared back across the desk. “Just because she needs a little Prozac now and then, don’t put her in with the killer.”
“I know.” Streeter stood up and leaned in to the desk, his palms pressed on the top. “That’s what I was telling myself last night while the rest of the country slept. But I put it all together this morning and there’s not much doubt about it anymore.”
“What’s your proof, Street?” Terry asked.
“Well, first, there’s Kevin himself. Carol always talked about how sharp he is. His long reach for killing. It was an oversell from the word go, but when he did things like getting to the other PIs, I started believing it myself. Then there was that break-in here at the church. That was too far over the top to be just Kevin. He had to have help from the inside. True, he had Gina. But from what the cops told me, she was the type that gets in over her head reading the funny pages. Plus, Gina didn’t have the access Carol did. Didn’t we say it seemed like Swallow could read our minds? Maybe he didn’t have to.” Streeter thought for a moment. “Then there was Saturday night at the hospital. Carol said something that bugged me but I couldn’t figure out why. Not until last night. Right when she first got to St. Joe’s, she mentioned the bomb in the deodorant can. That caught my attention.”
“Big surprise. That’s how Swallow operated,” Frank said.
“True, but how did she know specifically about the deodorant can? I didn’t tell her and you didn’t give her any details. You just told her Cullen was hurt and at St. Joe’s. And she told me later that she didn’t hear anything from the media until she read about it in the Rocky Mountain News the next day. The only way she would have known about the deodorant can was if someone actually told her. That would have to be either Kevin or Gina.
“And I’ve got one more little item here that takes it from speculation to fact. This morning I was getting her things together. She went home in a hurry yesterday and left some personal stuff. Her makeup bag. She’s only got maybe eight or ten of them, so she probably didn’t even notice it. Anyhow, I’m in a suspicious mood, so I go through it. Inside, I found a small notebook with telephone numbers arranged in alphabetical order. One of the entries really grabbed me. It was ‘G.G.’ The number had an Evergreen exchange.”
He reached into his front shirt pocket, pulled out a piece of paper, and unfolded it. Then he tossed it on the desk. “Terry, call ‘G.G.’ and tell me what you think.”
Terry nodded. He grabbed the paper and picked up the phone. “Hi, hi,” the recorded voice of a woman came bubbling through. “This is Gina. I’m not home right now, or maybe I’m busy. Like in the can.” A forced childish tee-hee came on next. “But I’d be ever so happy to get back to you if you’d be just so kind as to leave your name and number. Really. So long from Casa de Gallo.” It was followed by a starting beep.
Nathan put the phone down and looked at Streeter. “Gina Gallo? The hell’s Carol doing with her number?”
“Good question,” Streeter responded. “What’s she doing even knowing about Gina before yesterday? We didn’t have the number and I never told her Gina’s name. I just gave he
r the broad strokes about our trip up to Evergreen. When she didn’t recognize Kevin from the picture I dropped it.”
“That would explain why she didn’t make him from that picture,” Frank said.
“Right. Of course she wouldn’t make him. It was the perfect way to throw us off the track. There’s no good explanation for her having that number. And there’s only one reason she’d want it: to keep in touch with Swallow. Gina didn’t even know about the two of them, or she would have told the cops by now. One other thing. Remember yesterday morning, right after you came back from calling for the ambulance?”
Nathan nodded. “What about it?”
“You asked if Kevin said anything before he died. I told you he threatened me again and he even mentioned Gina. In bed last night I kept thinking about it. What he said exactly—or as best as I can remember—was ‘Well get you.’ Then he mentioned Gina. I just assumed he meant she would get me. He had to be talking about Gina, I thought.”
“Instead he was talking about Carol getting you,” Frank shot in.
“Exactly. She’ll still get me. Like she’s been after me for a while and she’s not giving up. Let’s assume I’m right about Carol working with Kevin. Everything made sense right up until yesterday morning. All the other attacks, the way they went down. But that mess yesterday was nonsense. If she’s working with Kevin, why would he bomb the car she was in? Gina was expendable, or else Kevin wouldn’t have rigged the bomb to go off with her that close. But that doesn’t answer why Carol wanted him to attack Barrows’ car. Now, conveniently forgetting those files got her out and made her safe, but that still leaves me looking for a motive for the attack. If they’re in it together, why attack yourself?”
“Maybe she wanted to nail Barrows,” Frank offered.
Streeter shook his head. “What for? Besides, she didn’t even know he’d be in the car until that morning. But she made sure I was in the car. She absolutely insisted on it. My bet is she and Kevin were after me.”
Streeter Box Set Page 36
