by Rex Burns
Wager spotted the large figure in his rearview mirror. Big Ron was wearing stained dungarees cut off roughly at mid-calf, bright red sneakers and matching baseball cap, a shirt of some kind of tan color that sagged loosely to hide his belt and pockets and any weapons or contraband he might tote. This time Wager got out of the car and rested his hand on his weapon. The waddling figure neither paused nor hurried but walked steadily toward Wager until he stopped a couple of arms’ lengths away. His shadow was a wide circle of black at his feet.
“Mama says you want to talk.”
“Tell me where you were last night Ron. At ten minutes after eleven. And don’t try to jerk me around.”
The eyes slowly blinked three or four times before he asked, “What for?”
“Because you need an alibi.”
“Alibi. What for I need a alibi?”
“Because I think you were shooting at me.” Wager added, “And it better be a goddamned good alibi.”
The wide face clouded and the eyes blinked again. “I wasn’t shooting at nobody, last night.”
He made it sound like an exception to his usual behavior. Wager opened the car’s rear door. “You want to volunteer to ride with me down to headquarters, or you want me to send a patrol car after you?”
“You arresting me? What for?”
“I’m inviting you to answer some questions. You threatened me a few weeks ago, remember? And last night I was shot at. Are you coming with me or do you want me to call a patrol car?” He tapped the radio riding on his hip. The gesture also revealed the pistol stuck in his belt. Wager hadn’t placed it there for intimidation; a strap on his shoulder holster rubbed across his wound. But the bulging, dark eyes rested on the pistol thoughtfully for a long moment before the pumpkin-sized head nodded.
It wasn’t technically an arrest yet or at least Wager could claim that the man cooperated with his request to come to the station for questioning. So no official paperwork was needed. Big Ron’s flesh spilled over the sides of the heavy chair in the interview room, and his torso dwarfed the metal table bolted to the floor. Wager, his back against the silver of the large two-way mirror that shielded the viewing room on the other side, watched Doty unpack items from his kit. The lab man had told Wager that the results would be chancy—you weren’t supposed to test flesh for gunshot residue more than six hours after a shooting. For one thing, the trace evidence could wear off in that time; for another, the suspect might have washed his hands. Wager said he didn’t think Big Ron ever washed anything, and that it was worth a chance.
Big Ron had denied that he was anywhere near the east side of the city last night and that at the time Wager was being shot at, he, Big Ron, had been over with some of his bros at an apartment on Welton Street having a party. He could prove it, too, if Wager would just call over there and ask anybody, and then he could cut out all this cheap shit of hassling somebody who hadn’t done nothing to nobody. Following people around. Come banging on peopleses’ doors all hours. Say people been shooting people they don’t even know. Making people afraid to even be seen talking to him.
“If you didn’t fire a weapon last night, then you won’t mind having your hands tested for residue, right?”
“My what for what?”
“Your hands. Run a test on them to find out if you’ve fired a weapon recently. You’ve got nothing to be afraid of, right, Ron?” He added, “It won’t hurt.”
He had sat, eyes blinking as thoughts worked their way across his mind and Wager waited. Finally, “You don’t find nothing, you quit fuckin’ around with me, right?”
“Sure,” Wager lied.
“Then let’s do it.”
Doty sprinkled a little talcum on his own hands and slipped into a pair of disposable rubber gloves. Then he unscrewed the cap of a brown bottle labeled Dilute Nitric Acid (5%) and stirred a couple of cotton swabs in the contents. He stroked the swabs along the back of Tipton’s broad hand, running out of moisture and having to wet a third swab. “Damn big hands.” Then placed the swabs in a plastic Baggie, and, with a marking pencil, labeled, initialed, and dated the bag. Then, following the same careful procedure of identification, he used new swabs to stroke the palm of that hand and the back and palm of the left hand. Next, he dipped another swab into the nitric acid solution and placed it in its own Baggie labeled Control Swab. In another Baggie, resting in the metal tool box that served as his portable office, was one of the shell casings that Landrum had picked up early this morning at the shooting scene. It, too, had a swab. “OK, Gabe. Be about a half hour.”
It was. Wager picked up the telephone as he watched Big Ron. The man loomed at the side of Wager’s desk and gazed around the Homicide office with open curiosity, studying the Wanted and Alert posters, watching the other detectives busy at their telephones, listening to the traffic on Wager’s radio sitting in its charger on his desk.
“No traces, Wager. Twelve hours is a long time.”
“An MP-five kicks out a lot of powder.”
“Yeah, that’s true. And if he didn’t wash his hands there might have been some residue from all those rounds, even after twelve hours. In fact, if he hasn’t washed his hands I’d say the odds are against his having fired that weapon.”
And, as Wager had said, he didn’t think Big Ron washed very often at all.
“Too bad you don’t have his clothes. Residue stays in clothes a lot longer.”
“Yeah—thanks, Doty.” And to the hulking man, “Come on, I’ll give you a ride home.”
It wasn’t what he expected, but that didn’t mean Big Ron hadn’t asked someone else to do the dirty work for him. But on the ride back to the north side, the large man hadn’t acted smug, hadn’t given any impression of gloating. Instead he wanted to be reassured that Wager would take off the heat that had been making it hard to scrape up a living. “You gonna stop hassling with me now, right? You know now I didn’t shoot you or nobody else, right?”
“You still haven’t told me what I want to know about John Erle.”
Framed in the car window, the broad face clenched. “I ain’t got nothing to say about that.”
“Then I guess we’re right back where we were, Big Ron. You give my regards to your mother, will you?”
In the rearview mirror, the bulky, dark figure stared after Wager’s car, unmoving, until it swung out of sight.
13
TO WAGER’S WAY of thinking, September was the finest month in Colorado: The afternoon thunderstorms of summer gradually ceased as the air grew cooler and drier; the sunlight had a pleasant little sting to it, a half-heat, half-chill that hinted of the coming icy winds; even the sky turned a deep blue that no other month had. Those kinds of days often carried into early October, too, but as that month passed the weather changed: unsettled, spells of harsher cold, splatters of rain; and late October always seemed to bring sleet or snow. At least Wager’s memories of Halloween brought up pictures of jumping over slush puddles on the way to another doorbell, of being half blinded by an inky-smelling, rain-wet mask whose mouth hole was frayed from his damp breath, and of trying to guess if those bigger kids, sprinting noisily down the sidewalk and wearing smears of face paint or bandannas as token costumes, were friends who would join his group or enemies who would grab their sacks of candy and run off into the night of misrule and threat yelling, “Thanks for the treat, turkeys!”
But now, Wager’s ghosts and goblins didn’t wear masks and they didn’t come during just one season; sometimes they were unknown but constantly nagging, like the killers of John Erle and Julio. Other times, they wore a name like Neeley and his so-called witness, Nelda Stinney. Yet Wager would just have to try and keep that spook clear of his thoughts because he wasn’t being paid to worry about it. Wager’s lawyer was, and he had to keep reminding himself of that.
Still, last night he had dreamed, and in that dream he wandered among a crowd of well-clothed people, begging help from deaf ears and feeling a shocking anxiety as he suddenly realized that he was nake
d and in a moment the rest of the world would realize it too and cover him with laughter and derision. And that moment came closer and closer with increasing panic. He woke himself up with his own hoarse voice before the worst happened, but he didn’t need a shrink’s license to recognize the feeling of helplessness he would have if he lost his job as a cop. A cop was what he was—he was a uniform, even more than being Gabe Wager or his mother’s son. Dewing had warned him that his job was on the line, and he had heard those words, but it had taken a few weeks for the threat to really sink in. Because Neeley was a dirtball. He had gotten what was coming to him. Wager should not have to suffer any repercussions from doing his job. But he knew enough of the court system not to trust it. Juries and judges had done some strange things despite evidence or justice, and Wager did not at all enjoy the feeling of having his life and career in the hands of anyone other than himself. That included his lawyer or a possible jury, and it especially included Kolagny, who had been named the city’s attorney in the case.
Dewing had said, “Kolagny doesn’t seem to like you, Detective Wager.”
“Kolagny doesn’t know his butt from his elbow, either.”
“Well, it would be better if he and I could put up a unified front against Heisterman. But it doesn’t look like it’s going to work out that way. In fact, Kolagny seems almost happy about you being sued. If you don’t mind my asking, what’d you do to piss him off?”
“Told him I was tired of handing him four-square cases and then watching him throw away my work on bullshit plea bargains because he was too afraid to go into court and do his job.”
“I guess that would do it, all right. OK—not to worry—we at least know what we can and can’t count on from that direction.”
Sighing, Wager turned from the gray light of the window. Its little rivulets of rain made tiny jumps down the glass and distorted the wet glare of taillights and the haze of spray in the streets below. The homicide office was busier than usual for this time of the morning: noisy with the steady rustle of papers and keyboards as well as the murmur of voices aimed into telephones, warm with the activities of people who found things to catch up on that would not take them away from the hot coffee and into the cold and wet of the streets. And maybe that was what Wager felt right now: an odd sense of depression at the vision of a wet, gray Denver outside, contrasting with the almost homelike familiarity and warmth of this ugly office. But the best cure for that kind of feeling was work, so he turned to the small stack of memos, court notices, transcripts, letters, forensic reports, requests, telephone messages, and even newsletters and advertisements that made up this way of life whose value had sharply increased.
The cold, damp weather had another effect: It had cooled off street activity and tempers, and the rumors and fears of gang wars had gone down with the temperature. Governor Harmon had shifted directions with practiced ease and now was reminding voters of the jobs he had created and the potholes he had filled. Even Gargan had stopped calling Wager, though now and then one of his news stories made sly reference to certain officers who were uncooperative with the fourth estate or who were being sued by people they had arrested. A third effect of the cold was that it made his trapezius sensitive to movement. The doctor said that wasn’t supposed to happen, that there was no reason for it and that he must be imagining it; so Wager didn’t bother going back for his final checkup. It reminded him of the Marine Corps and the medical treatment he received for a sprung knee: two a.p.c.’s and a fifteen-mile hike. What the hell. It wasn’t the doctor’s shoulder. But it still twinged when his arm jumped out to catch the sudden tinny warble of his telephone.
“Wager, you know me.”
He recognized the wheezing lurch of breathy words. “What do you have for me, Willy?”
“Gimme—gimme—gimme. You ain’t even going ask how’s my health. How’s my day going.”
“All right: How’s your health and how’s your day going? Now what do you have for me?”
“That’s what I like about doing business with you, Wager. No time wasted on small talk, you know?”
“I wish I could say the same, Willy.”
“Ha! Awright—I can take a hint. That boy you was asking about, he was working for Big Ron, all right. Lookout holding the stash, deliveries, that kind of thing. I reckon ol’ Ron he was planning to build up his business some more. Expand out a little, you know? But he back working by hisself, now, though.”
“How long ago did Hocks start working for him?”
“Couple months, maybe. But nobody saying if he got shot by him. Nobody knows.” He grunted. “Or at least that’s what they say.”
“Any rumors of Big Ron and anybody else pushing each other for territory?”
“Naw. But that shit go on all the time. You know, sometime worser’n others. Ain’t heard about no gang war neither. Nothing more than the usual, leastwise.” Another lurch of breath. “Oh, yeah—that boy, he had a street name: Doodle Bug.”
“John Erle? Doodle Bug?” Street names, nicknames, and gang names often indicated something about the bearer—a personality trait, a habit, even an historical event, like the one nicknamed “Rolaids” because, once in a shootout, he reached in his pocket for a shotgun shell and yanked out a package of antacids to jam into his weapon. “How’d he get that?”
“Say he was always doodling in this little notebook of his. Was really bugs about it. So that’s what they called him.”
“Who told you that, Willy?”
“One of my people he talked to this spic kid over on the west side. Arellano. Don’t know his first name. Don’t know him, neither. Just one of my people talked to him and that’s what he say.”
“Is Arellano in a gang?”
“He spic ain’t he?”
“I could say the same thing about you, Willy.”
“You couldn’t say I was a spic—ha! Besides, I’m a one-man gang, Wager. I’m big enough to be my own gang. In so many ways! I just ain’t wasting my time with all that Crips and Bloods shit.” He paused to hock something untasty out of his throat. “My man say this Arellano belong to the L-one-oh-twos. That’s all he know.”
“OK. Now, one more thing.”
“More! Man, you got to be the—”
“It’s important, Willy.”
“Yeah! Well, what’s important to you might not mean shit to me.”
“You shouldn’t have any trouble with this one, unless you’re losing touch with your own neighborhood.”
“I ain’t losing touch. Touch is what I got plenty of.”
“Reach out and touch LaBelle Rhone for me. I tried her last address, but she’d already stiffed the landlord and moved on.” He told Willy the old address. “Or didn’t you know that she was back on the street?”
“She been back six months or more! Everybody knows that. Except maybe you—you just finding it out?”
“See if you can find out her new address, Willy.”
“Shouldn’t take me more’n ten minutes.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t want no thanks. Just remember I done you some favors.”
It would be hard for Wager to forget if he wanted to: Willy would see to that the next time he or one of his had a problem with the law. And there was bound to be a next time, but that future issue went into the gray area where legality and justice didn’t always coincide. Wager took a deep breath, gave Fullerton a call, and a half hour later had the information he needed: Arellano’s first name was Guillermo, his street name Halconito, and the principal hangout for the L-102s was West 44th Avenue in the Chaffee Park neighborhood, the Estrellita Billiards Room. Wager also learned that the gang was one of the new ones, apparently unaffiliated so far with such larger organizations as the Westsiders or the Inca Boys, that the “L” in its name came from the street where most of the members grew up and still lived—Lipan—and that the 102 was the paragraph in the state criminal code that defined first-degree murder; he could not help learning that Denver, like the rest of the
country, was following California’s lead, that the latest LA census of gang membership estimated around 900 separate gangs or identifiable collectivities comprising an estimated 100,000 members, all or most of whom were armed. Fullerton was sending Wager some up-to-the-minute data about that despite the fact that Wager wasn’t interested in LA.
“You never know when this kind of information might come in handy, Gabe.”
Wager agreed and thanked the man; you had to take the bad with the good. He also took the elevator to the basement garage and headed out into the gray and cold streets of downtown.
As a kid, Wager had not been allowed to go into billiard parlors; unlike cantinas they had been for men only, and the ladies of the barrio’s families weren’t welcome. And what was unsuitable for una dama wasn’t suitable for their kids. This did not mean that Wager, as he moved into his early teen years, did not manage to spend some time at the local salon watching the billar players. He had even stroked a few cue balls himself, but—because the owner didn’t trust kids jabbing cues across his expensive felt—had mostly dropped nickels into the pinball machines. What surprised him was how familiar the Estrellita felt with its welcome warmth and the odors of stale beer and strong tobacco, with its four green tables glowing under hooded lights and cigarette smoke, and crowded so close that people at neighboring tables had to take turns shooting. There was even a small bar advertising Cerveza Tecate and Dos Equis, among a variety of other brands including Coors on tap. The ranchera music, too, was familiar—this time some nasal voice wailing about how homesick he was for his house and family and sweetheart in beautiful Sinaloa. What was new were signs declaring No Colores and that everyone under thirty would have to show an ID to buy alcoholic beverages. Also new was the row of electronic games across the back wall: The pinball machines had been replaced by four video machines that beeped and roared and chattered electronic gunfire and explosions.
