Sunset Express

by Robert Crais

  Rossi went to Mrs. Earle and I went to Truly. Truly was trying to get up and not having a good time of it. The bullet had hit him maybe three inches to the right of his sternum, and a flower of red was blooming on his shirt. He said, “I think I’ve been shot.”

  Rossi was untying Mrs. Earle. I said, “Are you all right?”

  Mrs. Earle was still crying. “They shot Mr. Lawrence.”

  Rossi helped her up, telling her that she had to stand, that she had to move to the side, out of the way, telling her that everything was going to be okay. The lies you tell someone when you need them to cooperate because their life depends on it. Truly said, “Am I going to die?”

  I tore off my shirt and bundled it and pressed it to his chest. “I don’t know.”

  I pulled off his belt and wrapped it around his chest and the shirt and buckled it tight. He said, “Oh, God, that hurts.”

  There were more shots by the cars and running footsteps, and then Joe Pike slipped through the door. Maybe six shots slammed into the door and the walls and through the open doorway. Maybe seven. Pike said, “Those Glocks are something.”

  Rossi duck-walked over. “What’s the deal out front?”

  Joe said, “The black guy’s punched out. Kerris is behind the Jaguar. I don’t know about the crew cut.”

  Rossi nodded toward the rear. “Forget him.”

  I said, “Can we get to Kerris?”

  Pike made a little shrug. “He’s got a clean field of fire at us. We could go back the way we came, maybe, and work our way around.” He glanced at Truly. “Take about twenty minutes to work around behind the Jag.”

  I turned Truly’s face so that he looked at me. “You hear that, Elliot? You’re bleeding and we’re pinned down in here and Kerris is doing the pinning.”

  Truly opened his mouth, then closed it. He blinked at me, then shook his head. “Kerris kidnapped these people. He shot that old man. I didn’t know anything about it.”

  Rossi said, “Bullshit.”

  I shook Truly’s face. “Stop lying, you idiot. Stop worrying about incriminating yourself, and start worrying about dying.”

  He shook his head. His eyes filled with tears, and the tears tumbled out and ran down into his hair.

  I said, “It’s you and Kerris and the black guy and the guy with the crew cut. Is there anyone else up here?”

  He shook his head again. “No.” A whisper.

  “Is anyone else supposed to come up here?”

  The crying grew worse and became a cough. When he coughed, pink spittle blew out across his chin and the chest wound made a wheezing sound.

  I said, “Tell Kerris to give it up. If Kerris gives it up, we can get you to a hospital.”

  Truly’s face wrinkled from the pain and he yelled, “Kerris! Kerris, it’s over. I need a doctor!” It wasn’t much of a yell.

  Kerris didn’t answer.

  Elliot Truly yelled, “Goddammit, Kerris, enough of this, would you, please?! I’m dying! I’ve got to get to a doctor!” He coughed again, and this time a great red bubble floated up from his mouth.

  Rossi duck-walked over. She said, “You’re fucked, Elliot. Your man outside is in for murder and he’s looking to save himself. He’s got to kill us and this woman to do that, and he doesn’t give a damn if you live or die.”

  Truly moaned. “Oh, God.”

  Rossi leaned closer to him. “Maybe you’ll make it, but maybe you won’t. We still might get Kerris, though, and the sonofabitch who put you into this spot. Give him up, Elliot. Tell us what we want to hear.”

  Truly squeezed his eyes shut, but still the tears came out. “It was Jonathan.”

  Rossi smiled. It was small, and it was personal.

  I said, “Everything that’s happened, it’s so Jonathan can take over Teddy’s companies, isn’t it?”

  Truly tried to nod, but it didn’t look like much. “Not at first. At first, Jonathan was just going to defend him, like anyone else.”

  “But Teddy got scared.”

  Truly coughed, and more bubbles came up. “Oh, God, it hurts. God, it hurts so bad.”

  I said, “Did Teddy kill his wife?”

  Truly wet his lips to answer, and made his lips red. “Yes. He denied it at first, but Jonathan knew. You can always tell. You know when they did it.”

  Rossi frowned at me and nodded. You see?

  Truly said, “Then he just admitted it. I’m not sure why, but he did, just out of the blue one night when we were going over his story. Jonathan and I were alone with him and he started to cry and he admitted that he killed her. That changed everything. Jonathan advised him to negotiate a plea, but Teddy wouldn’t do that. He was scared of going to prison, and he begged Jonathan not to quit the case. He said that he’d do anything rather to go to prison.”

  “Even give away everything he owned.”

  Another nod. “That was Jonathan’s price.”

  Rossi said, “All that stuff about Pritzik and Richards. That was bullshit?”

  “Jonathan and Kerris and I put it together. Jonathan had the idea of a straw man, and Kerris came up with Pritzik and Richards, and I knew Lester. We just put it together.” He started coughing again, and this time a great gout of blood bubbled up and he moaned. I put my hands on the compress and leaned on it. He said, “I don’t want to die. Oh, God, please Jesus, I don’t want to die. Please save me.”

  I wiped the blood off his face and forced open his eyes and said, “You’re a piece of shit, Truly, but I’m going to save you, do you hear? Just hang on, and I will get you to a hospital. Do you hear me?”

  He nodded. “Uh-hunh.”

  “Don’t die on me, you sonofabitch.”

  He moaned, and his eyes rolled back.

  I checked on Mrs. Earle, and made sure that she was behind as much metal as possible, and then Rossi and I went over to Pike. Pike was peering through a split in the door jamb. “He got a shotgun from the van. He’s talking on his cell phone.”

  “Great. Probably calling for reinforcements.”

  Pike glanced at Rossi. “Be real nice if Tomsic happened to find us about now.”

  Rossi shrugged. “Let’s all hold our breaths.”

  I edged past Pike and looked through the split. Kerris was behind the Jaguar with the shotgun. The black guy was lying on his side between the Jag and the van, and Mr. Lawrence was on his back a few yards behind him. The black guy was probably unconscious, but he might’ve been dead. I yelled, “Come on, Kerris. There’s three of us and one of you. Don’t be stupid.”

  The shotgun boomed twice, slamming buckshot into the corrugated metal about eighteen inches above my head. Mrs. Earle made a kind of moaning wail, and Rossi dived across the doorway, popping off caps to force Kerris down.

  Pike looked at me. “I don’t think he’s scared of the odds.”

  “Guess not.”

  Rossi edged toward the door and stopped just shy of the jamb, squinting out into the sun. She said, “Hey, the old man’s still alive.”

  Mrs. Earle stopped wailing. “Walter?”

  I went back to the split and saw Walter Lawrence slowly roll onto his belly, then push up to his knees before falling onto his face.

  Mrs. Earle started for the door, but Pike pulled her down. “Stay back, ma’am. Please.”

  “But Walter needs help.” She said it loudly, and Pike put his hand over her mouth.

  “Don’t draw attention to him. If Kerris sees him he’s a dead man.”

  Her eyes were wide, but she nodded.

  Walter Lawrence pushed up again, then looked around as if what he was seeing was new and strange. He saw the guy in the red knit shirt about ten feet in front of him and he saw the guy’s pistol, a nice blue metal automatic, lying in the dust. He looked past the guy in the knit shirt and almost certainly saw Kerris hiding behind the Jaguar, pointing the shotgun at us. Walter Lawrence was behind Kerris, and since Kerris was looking at us, he wasn’t looking at Walter Lawrence. Mr. Walter Lawrence began crawling for the
pistol. I said, “Rossi.”

  “I see him.”

  I watched through the split jamb, and could see the hills and the pumpers and the rough service roads below, and as I watched a dark sedan appeared on the road between the pumpers, heading our way, kicking up a great gray rooster tail of dust. Rossi saw it, too. I said, “Is that Tomsic?”

  She ejected her Browning’s clip, checked the number of bullets left, then put it back in her gun. “I can’t tell.”

  I glanced at Pike and Pike shrugged. Guess it didn’t matter to him. Guess he figured the more the merrier.

  Walter Lawrence crept toward the gun like a drunken infant, weaving on his hands and knees, bloody shirt hanging loose and sodden between his arms. He reached the pistol and sat heavily, but he did not touch the gun. As if simply reaching it had taken all of his energy. Rossi said, “In a couple of seconds we’re going to be able to hear the car. If Kerris looks that way, the old man’s dead.”

  I looked at Pike and Pike nodded. I took a breath and peered out the split again. Kerris had taken up a position behind the Jaguar’s front end. You could see about a quarter of his face behind the left front tire. The tire was probably a steel-belted Pirelli. Might be able to shoot through it, but it wasn’t much of a target. “Kerris? Truly’s dying. He needs a doctor.”

  “It’s the cost of doing business.” All heart.

  I stood. “Listen, Kerris! Maybe we can work something out.” I sprinted past the open door to the other side of the shed. When I flashed past the door, the shotgun boomed again, but the buckshot hit the wall behind me.

  Pike said, “Lucky.”

  I yelled, “I didn’t sign on to this job to get killed, and neither did Pike. You want the old lady, we just want to go home. You hear what I’m saying?” I hopped past the door in the opposite direction. Kerris fired twice more, once behind me through the doorway and once high through the wall. Maybe I could just keep running back and forth until he ran out of ammo.

  Kerris said, “Bullshit, Cole. I checked out you and your partner, remember? You aren’t built that way.”

  Another boom, and this time the number four slammed through the wall just over Joe’s back.

  I crawled across him to the split again and looked out. Walter Lawrence had once more focused on the gun. He leaned forward from the waist, picked it up, then held it as if he had never held a gun before in his life. Maybe he hadn’t. He cupped it in both hands and pointed it at Kerris, but the gun wavered wildly. He lowered the gun. I yelled, “I’m serious, Kerris. What’s all this to me?”

  “If you’re so goddamned serious, throw out your guns and come out.”

  “Forget that.”

  “Then let’s wait it out.”

  The car was close, now, and if I strained I thought that I might hear it. Walter Lawrence raised the gun again. Rossi said, “That’s Tomsic!”

  I yelled, “Okay, Kerris. Let’s talk.”

  I stepped into the door, and as I did Mr. Walter Lawrence pulled the trigger. There was a loud BANG and his shot slammed into the Jaguar’s rear fender and Kerris jumped back from the wheel, yelling, “Sonofabitch!”

  Walter Lawrence fired again, and again the shot went wide, and Kerris swung the shotgun toward him but as he did Angela Rossi shouted, “No!” and she and Joe Pike and I launched out the door, firing as fast as we could.

  Kerris brought the shotgun back, pulling the trigger BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM as our bullets caught him and lifted him, and then slammed him into the gray earth, and then the noise was gone and it was over and there was only the sound of Louise Earle crying.

  35

  Mr. Walter Lawrence fell onto his back and kept trying to right himself the way a turtle might, clawing at the air with his arms and legs. I took the gun from him and told him to lie still, but he wouldn’t until Louise Earle hurried out from the shed and made him.

  Linc Gibbs and Dan Tomsic pulled up in a cloud of dry gray dust, then ran over with their guns out. Tomsic said, “Who’s this?”

  “One of the good guys. Get an ambulance, for Christ’s sake. We’ve got another wounded in the shed.”

  Linc Gibbs made the call while Tomsic ran for the first aid kit that every cop keeps in his trunk. The crew cut had put one high into the left side of Mr. Lawrence’s chest. His shirt and jacket were soaked red, and he felt cold to the touch. The blood loss was extreme. When Tomsic came with the kit, we put a compress bandage over the wound and held it in place. Mrs. Earle held it. While Tomsic was working with the bandage he glanced at Angela Rossi. “You okay, Slick?”

  She made an uncertain smile. “Yeah.”

  When Mr. Lawrence was bandaged we ran into the shed, but Elliot Truly was dead. Tomsic looked close at Truly as if he wanted to be sure of what he was seeing. “Is this who I think it is?”

  “Unh-huh.”

  “Sonofabitch.”

  Gibbs had them send a medivac helicopter, and while we waited, we secured the scene. There wasn’t much to secure. Both the guy with the crew cut and the guy in the knit shirt were dead. Kerris was dead, too. Tomsic said, “Do all of these guys work for Green?”

  “Kerris was his chief investigator. I think these other two worked for Kerris. I saw the black guy at Green’s home.”

  Tomsic shook his head and stared at the bodies. “Man, you really wrack’m up.”

  I frowned at him. “Do you have a spare shirt in your car?” My shirt was still a bloody wad on Elliot Truly’s chest.

  “Think I might have something.” Most cops keep a spare shirt for just such occasions.

  He had a plain blue cotton dress shirt still in its original plastic bag stowed in his trunk. It had probably been there for years. “Thanks, Tomsic.” When I put it on, it was like wearing a tent. Two sizes too big.

  The medivac chopper came in from the north and settled to a rest well away from the radio towers. Two paramedics hustled out with a stretcher and loaded Mr. Lawrence into the helicopter’s bay. They told us that they were going to lift him to Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital, which would be a five-minute flight, and Mrs. Earle wanted to go. They refused to take her until Angela Rossi volunteered to go with her. Lincoln Gibbs told Rossi that we would pick her up at the hospital.

  When the helicopter had lifted away and disappeared over the hills, Gibbs looked at me and Pike, and said, “Well?” The first of the black-and-whites was just now kicking up dust on the roads below.

  “Green’s people got to LeCedrick Earle. They offered him money and an early out from prison if he could get his mother to change her story. He hadn’t spoken to her in six years, but he called and told her that the guards and the other prisoners were beating him because she was defending the police. Green’s people went to her also, and helped convince her that it was real, and that the only way they could save LeCedrick was if she changed her story so that they could get him away from the guards.”

  Gibbs nodded. “Figured it had to be something like that. Figured she wouldn’t do it for money.”

  Tomsic said, “Will she say that on the record?”

  “Yes. And we’ve got something else, too.”

  They looked at me.

  “Truly made a dying declaration that Teddy Martin admitted murdering his wife, and that Jonathan Green conspired with Truly and Kerris to fabricate false evidence against Pritzik and Richards.”

  Tomsic smiled, and Lincoln Gibbs made a little whistle. Gibbs said, “Truly said that to you?”

  “Pike and Rossi heard it, too. Mrs. Earle might’ve heard it, but I’m not certain that she did.”

  Gibbs went back to his car and spoke on his cell phone for a time. As the black-and-whites rolled up, Tomsic met them and told them to hang around. There wasn’t anything for them to do until the detectives who would handle the scene arrived. Gibbs came back in a few minutes and said, “Is that your Jeep on the other side of the hills?”

  Pike said, “Mine.”

  “Okay. We’ll pick up Rossi and Mrs. Earle at MLK and go see Sherman.”
>
  I spread my arms. “Like this?”

  Tomsic was already walking to his car. “The shirt looks great on you. What’s your beef?”

  “It looks like I’m wearing a tent.”

  Pike’s mouth twitched.

  I said, “Hey, Gibbs.”

  He looked back.

  “How about I pick up Mrs. Earle? It might be easier for her.”

  He stared at me for a short moment, and then he nodded. “We’ll meet you at Sherman’s.”

  A black-and-white brought us to Pike’s Jeep, and we drove directly to the MLK emergency trauma center. Mr. Lawrence was in surgery, and Rossi and Mrs. Earle were in the waiting room. I sat next to Mrs. Earle and took her hands. “We need to go see the district attorney. We need to tell her what we know about all of this. Do you see?”

  She looked at me with clear eyes that were free of doubt or equivocation. “Of course. I knew that we would.”

  The four of us drove to Anna Sherman’s office in Pike’s Jeep. Mrs. Earle rode with her hands in her lap and her head up. I guess she was thinking about LeCedrick. We did not listen to the radio during this time, and perhaps we should have. Things might’ve worked out differently if we had.

  It was just after three that afternoon when Louise Earle, Angela Rossi, and I were shown into Anna Sherman’s office. The bald prosecutor, Warren Bidwell, was there, along with another man I hadn’t seen before, and Gibbs and Tomsic.

  Sherman greeted us, smiling politely at Louise Earle and giving me a kind of curious neutrality, as if the meeting in Greenblatt’s parking lot had never happened. I guess that they had told her what to expect.

  Sherman offered coffee, which everyone declined, and as we took our seats she passed close to me and whispered, “Great shirt.”

  I guess that they’d told her about the shirt, too.

  Anna Sherman asked Mrs. Earle if she would mind being recorded, and if she would like to have an attorney present.

  Mrs. Earle said, “Am I going to be arrested?”

  Anna Sherman smiled and shook her head. “No, ma’am, but it’s your right, and some people feel more comfortable.”