Wright & Wrong

by W. Glenn Duncan Jr.

  Wright & Wrong

  A Rafferty P.I. Mystery

  W. Glenn Duncan Jr.

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  For Mum and Dad,

  * * *

  Your choices made me the man I am today.

  * * *

  Thanks.

  We shall be better, braver, and more active if we believe it right to look for what we don’t know.

  Socrates

  Don’t believe half of what you see

  and none of what you hear

  Lou Reed

  Chapter 1

  For a long time after I would wonder if I’d done the right thing.

  But I couldn’t worry about that now, because the kid was fast, and I needed every bit of energy I could muster just to keep him in sight.

  I’d first noticed him slouching in the doorway of a disused office building on South Harwood, as I was walking back to the office— figuring him for just another kid cutting class and hoping he realized how lucky he was.

  Me? Too focused on that bottle of scotch in my desk drawer. I made it a hundred yards farther before my brain kicked in and I realized where I’d seen the kid before.

  By the time I retraced my steps, he was on the move, turning the corner at Wood Street.

  Not wanting to spook him, I kept a loose tail as he headed out of the city towards Deep Ellum.

  Kept my eyes open for a working phone booth as we walked.

  Normally did my following in the Mustang, but that was a no-go today. I could have tried to get back to the lot near the office, get the car, and pick him up further down the road, but it’s hard to use a vehicle to tail a person on foot. They have too many options: heading into a store and out the back door, or worse, pausing for a minute just inside the front door and then heading back out while I’m wasting tire rubber trying to make it around the block.

  It’d also have been a lot easier if I could have called DPD and got a dispatcher to put me through to Ed so he could send a blue and white to pick up the kid, but we’d passed three non-operational payphones already.

  Bottom line, I had to tail this kid on my own two feet, no matter where he went or how far he decided to go, and I wasn’t looking forward to it. It’s hard for a guy my size to effectively follow someone on an open street.

  For a start, I’m bigger than your average Dallas city dweller, so I tend to get spotted too easily. For another thing, I’m not as fast as your typical high schooler, so if he decided to turn up the heat, I could be shit out of luck.

  As I found out.

  He had made me as he came back out of an alley off Elm Street. I’d picked up my speed and jogged towards the mouth of the alley as he turned off the sidewalk and disappeared from view. I got there, stuck my head around the corner, and hoped to catch a glimpse of which door he entered or get an idea on which way he went from the other end of the alley.

  What I hadn’t expected was to bump into him coming back out to the sidewalk and turning right into me.

  “Ohh … excuse me … sir,” he stammered.

  I tried to get my game face on, but I was too damn slow.

  He saw that I knew, and then he knew.

  He whirled and I grabbed for him. Missed the first two times—Christ he was slippery!—before I got my fist around his upper arm and wrestled him back into the alley. He thrashed and flailed, and I hung on.

  “Okay, kid. Settle down. Hey!”

  He pushed and wriggled and swung a skinny arm at me. I had a couple of inches and probably sixty pounds on him, so he wasn’t going to win if we started going head to head, but I didn’t want him to get lucky with a random fist.

  “I said, settle the fuck down!” Pushed him into a corner between a filthy dumpster and the even grimier brick wall of the alley. Pulled the .38 from my shoulder holster and started to feel better about the situation.

  He bounced off the dumpster, got his feet back underneath him, bent over and put his hands on his knees. His breathing was ragged, and I tried not to let him see that mine was the same.

  “I didn’t do it,” he panted.

  “Uh huh.”

  It looked like he realized that I wasn’t who he was expecting, and decided to try a different tack. “Who the fuck are you, anyway? Why’d you drag me in here? Fucking pervert.” Looked up at me through a shock of dirty-blond hair and gave me a sneer that only a teenager could pull off.

  “Saw what you did down at Columbus. Figured the cops might be interested, too.”

  The glare turned to a look of fear so strong that I thought maybe I’d collared the wrong kid.

  Nope.

  Same black leather jacket and denim jeans as I’d seen earlier that morning. Same white sneakers, too. I had misjudged his height—he was taller than I’d originally thought. But if there had been any remaining question, the T-shirt that I had thought was browny-red was actually a lighter shade of something now unrecognizable beneath a whole lotta drying blood.

  Gotcha.

  I stepped back a foot or two, gave myself a little extra space. Not that I wanted to use my gun against a kid, no matter what I’d seen him do less than two hours ago, but it was good to be prepared.

  The kid sniffed. “I didn’t do it,” he said again. Softer, and without the attitude this time.

  “Twenty-five to life says you did, pal.”

  Another sniff.

  “Okay kid. We’re gonna walk outta this alley, you and I, and we’re going to head down to DPD. I know a lieutenant who’s gonna be real interested in talking to you. So stand up. Nice and slow.”

  A car went past the mouth of the alley, someone yelled something, and I saw the glint of green in the kid’s hand too late.

  The bottle came flying at me, and by the time I’d ducked, felt the thump as it hit my shoulder and the relief that it hadn’t been my head, and looked back, the kid was hoofing it to the other end of the alley.

  Damn it, he was fast.

  He beat me to the back end of the alley by twenty feet and, by the time I’d made it around the corner, he’d increased that to twenty-five.

  We ran down a narrow laneway squeezed between the back of old brick buildings and a disused industrial lot.

  I ran hard, tried to ignore the pain in my ankle, and did my best to not trip over the piles of garbage and detritus, or get tangled in the overgrowth doing its best to pull down the ten-foot-high chain-link fence on our left.

  Looked like this laneway continued for a hundred yards or so before it ended against another brick wall with a steel roof rusting into oblivion above. Couldn’t tell if there was another alley at that point so I wasn’t sure whether I had the kid boxed in or not.

  Kept pushing, just in case.

  Vines and leaves slapped at my face and something harder—loose wire maybe—scratched my left arm. I pounded through a puddle and my feet threatened to get out from under me, but I held it together and kept running.

  About fifty yards short of the end of the laneway the kid disappeared, and I had to grab at the wall to help angle myself into the shoulder-width alley he’d found. He hurdled a pile of pallets and sprinted toward the light at the street end.

  I slipped as I climbed over the pallets, barked my shin, and was thirty feet behind as I hit the slimy pavement again.

  But he was slipping and sliding too, and I wasn’t losing any ground. I was breathing hard, though, so unless I ended this thing soon, the kid was
too likely to outrun me.

  “Stop!” I yelled.

  The kid snapped a look over his shoulder as he bolted for the mouth of the alley.

  “Don’t make me shoot.”

  I wasn’t going to shoot a kid, but he didn’t need to know that particular detail.

  I found a little patch of dry ground and skidded to a halt just as the kid stepped onto the sidewalk, bathed in sunlight.

  “Stop right there. I shit you not. I will shoot you.”

  He stopped. Turned to face me.

  “So what? So fucking what? How much more can that hurt?” he said. I could see the tears and sweat dripping down his cheeks. He spread his arms wide. “Do it then. If you’re gonna. Fucking DO IT!” he screamed.

  I pulled the trigger, loosed a round over his head, and he flinched. Looked down at his chest. Back at me.

  “I thought so.”

  He stepped off the curb.

  I heard the horn and squealing tires a split second before the front end of a Greyhound bus sent the kid flying out of view.

  Chapter 2

  Before all that excitement had erupted, it had been just another typical Monday.

  In the office, feet on the desk, and into my second cup of hot black heart-starter. Spring was starting to show signs of being ready to arrive, and I was enjoying the warm breeze from the street on the back of my neck. Loafing with the newspaper and eyeballing the hell out of a pre-lunch nap.

  Not everyone was sharing my sunny disposition and positive outlook.

  A tanker, the Exxon Valdez, had run aground a couple days earlier in Alaska, someplace called Prince William Sound, and the aerial photos of the resultant oil spill looked like a depraved Christo installation.

  Behold, Ladeez and Gentlemen, I give you ‘Ze Earth … in Blackface.’ Thunderous applause and don’t forget to visit the gift shop on the way out.

  Hundreds of oil-skinned volunteers were already at the scene, doing their best to contain the threatening slick and limit damage to the surrounding wilderness. Only time would tell how successful those efforts would be.

  I was trying to visualize the reports of how much oil had made it outside the boat, when I heard the first shot.

  My brain tried to downshift straight from barrels of crude to threat assessment, got caught somewhere in the middle, and lurched into a call and response routine—

  That was a gunshot.

  Don’t be stupid, it was a car backfire.

  No, I’m certain it was a gunshot.

  —before I told the cerebral combatants to shut the hell up and got myself to the open window.

  Looked up and down Jackson street.

  Usual morning traffic. People running late for work jockeying with those go-getters headed to the second or third meeting for the day. Lots of cars. No obvious clunkers.

  Strike the car backfire.

  Another shot

  Two.

  Three.

  The city tableau laid out before me gave no clues to who was firing, where they were, or what I could do about it.

  I turned and bulled my way through the office door, thundered down the hallway and heaved myself up the fire escape to the roof. Just as I got to the low brick parapet at the edge, a three-shot burst rang out.

  Now with a clear line of hearing, and maybe a bit of oxygen debt, my brain gave up arguing with itself and started triangulating.

  Slantwise, through a gap between brick buildings and over past The Scottish Rite Cathedral on the other side of Young Street, I could see figures running around the school rec-area there, wheeling in unison, like a flock of birds startled into flight.

  Screams, shouts, and a chorus of “Oh my God”s pleaded their way to me before a volley of shots cut them off.

  Two teenagers at the rear edge of the flock—a boy and girl—fell like puppets with slashed strings. The rest of the bodies surged to the left and out of my sight.

  It was all happening in front of me.

  And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

  An overcoated and backwards-baseball-cap-wearing figure strode into my view slot. He stood next to the two bodies, cradled his AR-15, and cocked his head. He brought the gun up to his shoulder and fired at the sprawled carcasses. They twitched and sprouted crimson haloes.

  Blood angels on the pavement.

  The figure toed both bodies with a booted foot, then turned towards me and lifted his arm. For a second I thought he was going to wave, then another member of the Overcoat Club stepped into view, and they high-fived before the new arrival checked the magazine on a gun that looked like a black capital letter T. I couldn’t tell from that distance, but probably a TEC-9 or MAC-10.

  Not that the exact designation of weapon would make the slightest bit of difference to the kids being murdered in their schoolyard.

  I noticed for the first time that my hands were clenched, nails digging into my palms. I wanted—needed—to do something, but the best I could do right now was stop edging forward and accidentally pitch myself headfirst off the roof.

  Thought about the weapons I had in the office a floor below. Nothing that could throw a slug far enough to make a difference. Considered for a split second taking a leaf from Mimi’s book and adding a sniper rifle to my arsenal, then snapped myself back into observation mode.

  It wasn’t much, but it was all I had, and it might help later on.

  Uh huh.

  Overcoat One smiled, reached into the khaki duffel bag hanging from his shoulder, pulled out a flat black magazine. He ejected the one from the gun like he was in the middle of his third tour, and slammed the new one home.

  Overcoat Two swung his duffel bag around to his back, raised his gun, braced his feet, and squeezed off a series of shots. The reverberations reached me a split second later.

  More screams and shouts.

  The two Overcoats moved left out of my sight line. Rattling gunfire, and strangled shrieks bent around the buildings and stung my ears.

  Another movement.

  Over the top of the shorter building in front of me, and at the far edge of the school rec-area, a figure crept around the bottom of a short flight of brick stairs.

  Boy. Skinny. Black leather jacket and denim jeans. Brown, or browny-red T-Shirt. White sneakers. Medium height, probably five-nine though it was hard to tell while he was crouched. Dirty-blond hair. Handgun in one fist.

  His hair whipped around his face as he looked side to side.

  He lifted the gun in front of his face, looked at it a few seconds. Wrapped his hand around it more tightly and crouch-walked out of my view.

  A knot of kids ran back through the nearer view slot. One of them actually tripped over the bodies of the two blood angels and couldn’t get her feet back under her before she sprawled out of sight. I willed her to get up and the hell out of there.

  The Overcoat Club were there again. Looked like they were laughing as they walked back out of view, both firing short bursts from the hip.

  Good fire control.

  I mentally pistol-whipped my brain for such a thought.

  Before I could continue my internal flagellation, Skinny Boy walked into view, pistol outstretched, lined up a shot, didn’t take it, then followed his buddies out of sight.

  And there I was, standing ineffectually on a roof watching the whole thing play out before me. I was only a hundred twenty, hundred thirty yards away, but I might as well have been in Alaska for all the good I could do at that moment.

  Felt vaguely schizophrenic knowing that the best thing I could do was keep watching in case I could help the cops once they got hold of the situation, but also not wanting to look at it anymore.

  I’d seen a lot in my forty-plus years on this rock, but violence against kids still hit me the hardest. Not that I thought adults were more deserving of pain just for being older, but I was able to set that aside more easily. I’m sure Hilda would be able to tell me exactly what it was.

  Maybe I’d just seen too many kids get hurt.
Vivian, Kimberly, Edie …

  A bunch of kids—fewer in number this time—ran screaming through my view slot again, closely followed by the Overcoats, in a weird parody of a sideshow alley shooting game. This time though, there wouldn’t be any kewpie dolls for a knocking down all the targets.

  Overcoat Two changed magazines, dropping the empty right next to the lifeless bodies at his feet. Craned his head back and let out a war-whoop that I heard over the traffic noise, grabbed his buddy around the shoulders and gave him a healthy shake. Cycled the action on his weapon and nodded to Overcoat One.

  They brought their weapons up to hip height and blazed fire—no short bursts now—and moved after the running students.

  About ten seconds after they were out of sight, Skinny Boy crept back into view. He stopped, half-kneeled, hesitated, looked like he sucked in half a dozen breaths and then squeezed off a shot. It was a big gun, more than he was used to, judging by how he had to bring the recoil down from over his head.

  More screaming collided with rattling gunfire and covered the echoes of the handgun’s report.

  In the background, I could dimly hear sirens cutting through the traffic.

  Not quickly enough.

  Skinny Boy cocked his head, looked around, and ran out of sight.

  Long seconds passed as I waited for something else to happen.

  Shorter bursts of gunfire now.

  Louder sirens.

  Fewer screams.

  As a cop car careered down the wrong side of Jackson below me, another blue and white slid through my view slot, all four wheels locked. I guessed that was the Young Street school frontage and that someone in blue serge was about to have his chance to be a hero.

  A long burst of fire counterpointed the squealing tires, and I hoped it was towards the cruiser and not directed at any of the kids who might still be alive.