Wright & Wrong

by W. Glenn Duncan Jr.

  Three sets of DPD eyes saw the duffel bag and contents and started their responses at the same time.

  “Shit! Oh, sorry, sir …”

  “… we … we … already had that … identified … sir.”

  “Chrissake, Rafferty.”

  I looked at Ed with raised eyebrows. He shook his head and sighed. Hoisted his official face on.

  “I know you think this is exciting, Rafferty, playing with the professionals, but do you have any idea how big this thing is going to get? Do you?” I caught his look and declined to respond. “The last thing I need is you getting in the way with this one. The mayor is already all over my ass and I don’t have time to fix your usual fuck-ups at the same time.”

  “My fuck-ups?” I nodded at the shotgun and ammo.

  Ed looked at both the cops and back to me.

  “You heard me. Get the hell outta here. I’ve got work to do. Sergeant? Make sure he is no longer on the property.” He turned on his heel and walked back towards the rec-area.

  “With pleasure, Lieutenant.” Fat cop’s heart rate was obviously falling back towards normal and he relished the opportunity to take it into the red again. He turned to the young cop. “You stay right there. Make sure that no-one, and I mean no-fucking-one, goes near that bag, or it’s your ass.

  “Now you …” He reached for my arm and I shrugged away. Thought about punching him in the throat. He took a step back and lowered his hand to his holster. “Ohh, yeah, boy howdy. That’s it. Now, you can either get the hell out of here like the lieutenant said, or …” His eyes twinkled and he unsnapped his holster. “Or you can resist. Your choice.”

  The other cop twitched, looked around like he expected to have to defend the evidence from an invading force of paratroopers.

  Good grief. If they didn’t want my help, then I could deal with that just fine; I had plenty of other things to do. It’s not like they were doing me any favors. I turned to the sidewalk.

  Fat cop followed me out of the service area, stood about ten feet away, and smirked his way through watching me get my pipe started again. Mock saluted me as I walked away.

  Fuck ‘em.

  I shoved more smoke in the direction of my nerves and walked back to the office, now set on a date with a bottle of scotch. Didn’t care that it wasn’t yet noon. Any morning that involved watching the killing of innocent kids deserved an afternoon of hard drinking.

  Chapter 4

  But you already know how that turned out.

  Instead of sitting in my office with my feet on the windowsill and the second or third glass of scotch in my fist, there I was standing on the sidewalk watching more paramedics do their best to keep another kid alive.

  The bus had knocked him a good thirty feet down the street, whereupon his fall had been cushioned by the hood and windshield of a ’81 Mercury Lynx. Damn if the car didn’t look better afterwards.

  Couldn’t say the same thing for the kid, though. There was a lot of blood on the paint, and the glass, and the asphalt and—correspondingly—not a lot of movement from the teenager.

  The rest of the street heaved with people and I leaned against a wall and watched the good folk of Big D come together in the face of a horrific accident.

  The bus had slewed to a stop, already braking hard at the point of impact, and the driver was one of the first to the kid. A bike messenger slid sideways to a halt near the Mercury and checked on the driver and passenger. Shaken, but not injured, he called to a guy on the sidewalk with a house brick-sized cellphone pressed against his ear. Two construction workers had parked their pickup behind the bus and were now waving drivers around the accident scene.

  I heard someone shout, “I’m a doctor,” and then she was kneeling next to the kid, checking vitals and telling the bus driver to keep the growing crowd back. “Give me some room.” It seemed a fair enough request to me, given that most of the assembled multitude had come streaming out from the bus—an entire complement of Japanese tourists by the look of it, all snapping pictures, lighting cigarettes, and doing their best to get in the way.

  An ambulance rolled to a stop next to the bus two minutes later, the paramedics piled out and set up next to the kid. “Who is he? Anybody know his name?” Head shakes all around. The bus driver lifted his head and met my eye. The doctor gave the paramedics a brief run-down, then she moved to the side and let them do their thing.

  “Hey, kid. Can you hear me?”

  No response.

  “Kid. Hey kid. I’ve got nothing here. You?”

  “There’s a pulse. Weak. Rapid and thready.”

  “Okay. Let’s get a C collar on him. Check his pockets too … Gently! Gently.”

  “I found a wallet.”

  “Okay. Any details? Name? Blood type? Allergies?”

  “His name’s Bradley. Bradley Wright. Student card says he’s from Columbus High.”

  The paramedics glanced at each other and shook their heads.

  “This isn’t your lucky day now, is it Bradley? Come on, stay with us now.”

  “Gotta get him ready to transport, or we’re gonna lose him.”

  “No, we’re not. You stay here, Bradley. This is not your day. Don’t you give up on me, you hear!”

  Two cruisers pulled up, strangling their sirens as they parked, but leaving the flashers on. One cop took over from the construction workers and started traffic control, his partner checked on the paramedics while the other two cops flipped open notepads and started working the crowd.

  I’d already had enough speaking to cops, but I needed to know what was gonna happen to the kid. The paramedics might have thought he’d drawn a lucky hand earlier in the day, but I knew better.

  Knew he’d been the one dealing the cards and now it had come time to cash out.

  The house always wins.

  I wasn’t ready to walk away. No way this kid should get the easy way out like his buddies. Three asswipes who left a trail of pain and death and innocent schoolkids in their wake and they all get away with it? Life couldn’t be that unfair.

  Needed to stay around to make sure the paramedics did their duty and patched the kid up to live another day, so he could get what was coming to him.

  But me hovering on the street wasn’t going to change their result, so I decided to take up a more strategic position while I waited and watched.

  I crossed the street, pushed through the scratched door, and entered O’Rileys Irish Bar.

  The dark wood paneling, cracked leather stools, and Irish Rovers with their folky harmonies and down-home whimsy relaxed me in no time at all.

  I’m sure the glass of Jameson’s had nothing to do with it.

  Sat at the window and watched the scene continue to unfold outside. A tow truck had arrived, hooked up the Mercury, and dragged it off to the tow truck driver’s brother’s auto shop. Or a scrap yard.

  The paramedics worked on the kid for long enough that I started to get concerned he wasn’t going to make it. But they finally had him strapped to a gurney and packed up their bags. Almost ready to load him the back of the ambulance when one of them shouted, “He’s vomiting!” and they had to tip the gurney—with kid attached—sideways to let him vomit without drowning. So it took few more minutes until they had the ambulance buttoned up and were easing away down the street towards Parkland Memorial.

  The bus still hadn’t moved—the driver chasing down some of his passengers who had decided to wander I guessed—but the crowd was thinning. Saw one cop flip his notepad closed and get back into his cruiser.

  Heard the bell over the pub door tinkle and a voice say, “That’s him, officer. And I saw him with a gun, too.” And the day threatened to go downhill even further. I glared at the bus driver; he gave me a wink, then stepped back on to the sidewalk, no doubt pleased with having done his civic duty.

  Nodded at the bartender. Sure as shit I was going to need another drink to deal with this.

  “Excuse me, sir.” I watched the uniform approach and made sure t
hat he could see my hands the whole way in. I wasn’t up for going toe-to-toe with another cop, especially not with a couple of drinks already under my belt.

  “Top o’ the mornin’ to you,” I said. “Sure it be a bonny day to be alive, to be sure, to be sure.” Hilda says my Irish accent is one of my worst, and with good reason. Which made me think right then that the Rafferty forebears might be a little disappointed in the last of their line.

  No time to dwell on that. The cop stood with his head cocked and reached for his radio. So I tried another tack.

  “How can I help you, officer?” I hoisted a disarming smile to my face just to show I had no hard feelings about him interrupting my drinking time.

  “You can start by telling me who you are and why you happen to be in this bar today, sir.” He was more comfortable now that I wasn’t trying leprechaun impersonations, but not enough to step within reach. Or burden his hands with a notebook and pen.

  “Feller can’t have a drink in the middle of the day?”

  “The bus driver says he saw you near the kid when he got hit.”

  “Hell, there were a lotta people on the street when—”

  “Says he also saw you with a gun. Would you care to explain that?”

  Thought about the options I had at this point of what had become one of the shittiest starts to a week that I could remember.

  Watching a bunch of kids get gunned down in cold blood and being unable to do anything about it.

  Helping the cops with working out what the hell had happened, or at least how it had happened, and being unceremoniously thrown off the crime scene by a cop who didn’t look smart enough to find the missing doughnut hiding in his own roll of neck fat.

  Having a good drinking session ruined by recognizing the third shooter from the scene and trying to apprehend him.

  Succeeding in chasing the only living perp from the shooting right in front of a speeding bus and watching him hover between life and death, the final outcome still undecided.

  I don’t like Mondays.

  I hesitated so long that the cop had stepped back and started his hands moving toward his utility belt.

  “I’m a P.I.,” I said.

  “Uh huh. So how about we start with some ID.”

  I shifted in the seat and reached for my pocket.

  “Slowly there, buddy,” said the cop, about the same time his hand reached the butt of his pistol. He glanced out the front window and nodded to his partner, who tinkled his way inside and took up a position near the bar. Nice triangulation.

  I shrugged, finger-and-thumbed my wallet out from my back pocket, and laid it down on the countertop. Flipped it open, and pushed it toward the cop.

  Like his overweight buddy from earlier in the day, he stabbed my license with a finger while he read all the details. Must have been a routine implemented after I left the force.

  “Uh huh,” he said. “And you’re carrying?”

  “Yep.” I wanted to take a slug of the Jameson’s but didn’t want to move my hands. This cop still wasn’t relaxed enough to make me feel relaxed enough. And the other guy near the bar looked a little too twitchy for comfort. So I just nodded.

  “Okay. Let’s see it. Again, nice and slow.”

  I opened the jacket with my left hand, let him see the holster and reached in—again with finger and thumb—extracted the .38 and laid it carefully on the countertop.

  The cop used a pen to pick it up by the trigger guard, sniffed the barrel.

  “It’s been fired recently.”

  I thought of a hundred smart-ass remarks I could have used at this point but decided against them. Maybe I was starting to grow up. Sounded like something Hilda might be happy to hear about.

  “Yeah. I was at the range earlier. Haven’t had a chance to clean it yet.”

  “Uh huh,” he said.

  That was all he had, no way for him to prove otherwise. He knew it and so followed up by pulling out his notebook and pen.

  “So why don’t you tell me all about what happened here today?”

  The bartender chose that moment to arrive with my fresh drink and I damn near could have kissed him.

  I leaned back in my chair, took a swallow of some more of Jameson’s finest work, and did one of the things I do best.

  I lied to a cop.

  Chapter 5

  “What an absolute bitch of a day,” Hilda said as she came through the door and slung her bag on the countertop. “If it wasn’t bad enough that I had to spend two whole hours with the Smithsons and they still couldn’t make a decision on the Edwardian dining suite, then Ramon dropped a cast iron shoemakers form. You know, I’m beginning to think you might be right about him, Rafferty. He dropped it right onto the edge of an eighteenth-century …”

  She seemed to notice for the first time that I was sitting, slouched actually, on the sofa. I hadn’t bothered to turn a light on after the sun went down, and the blue glow suffusing the house came from the TV, where I’d mercifully strangled the sound about an hour ago.

  “Rafferty? What’s wrong?”

  “I take it you haven’t heard the news?”

  “What news? After the day I’ve had, I just wanted some peace and quiet on the way home. What’s going on?”

  I turned the volume up, stood, and headed for the kitchen. Heard the breathless tones of the reporter of the moment fill the room behind me.

  “… just tuning in, KTVT can confirm the following from today’s shooting at Columbus High School. Twenty dead, including eighteen students and two teachers. Sixteen others injured, with six of those listed as critical and two still in surgery …”

  I looked up from refilling my glass to see Hilda’s face illuminated by the TV. Her mouth was shaped like a big O and, if I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have thought it was possible for someone to cry that quickly. I picked a bottle of wine out of the fridge, grabbed a glass from the cupboard, and returned to the sofa as she kept watching.

  “… two other bodies in the schoolyard, also students, Kevin McKinley and Randy Wilson, believed at this time to be the perpetrators. We’ll be back with more of our rolling coverage of this tragic story after this short word from our sponsor.”

  Hilda hugged herself and backed into the sofa beside me about the same time that her legs gave out.

  “Oh my god,” she breathed.

  I poured wine and handed her a glass. Her hands shook.

  “Uh huh,” I said.

  “That’s near your office, isn’t it?”

  “Yep.”

  “Did you … could you hear it?”

  “Heard it,” I said. “Saw it.” A breath. “Couldn’t do a damn thing about it.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. Turns out that you can see from the office roof right into the schoolyard where it happened. And I did.”

  “Oh, Rafferty.” Hilda gave me a look I’d never seen before. The colors in her eyes flashed and I saw a thousand emotions in that look. Couldn’t even think about choosing one to respond to.

  But she didn’t need anything from me. She drained her wineglass, reached for the bottle, topped up, and fumbled a cigarette out of a packet.

  There wasn’t anything to say.

  The local Very Very Serious Talking Heads from KTVT came back after we had managed to resist the “latest door-busting deals on quality mattresses” and introduced a replay of an earlier interview with one of the survivors.

  Hilda leaned forward. I busied myself with my scotch. Good scotch. Was glad I’d made the switch to Glenfiddich.

  “Imani Laweles,” a bottle-blond reporter said at us from a tight close-up, “is one of the lucky students here at Columbus High School. She had no idea when she arrived for class this morning that she might never get to go home. But while her classmates lie fallen in the schoolyard, she lived to tell the tale. Describe for our viewers, in your own words, Imani, how you survived this horrific tragedy.”

  The camera pulled out to show a girl with corn-rowed hair, a chub
by face, and impossibly red eyes, wrapped in a blanket and barely keeping her feet next to the reporter. In the background, the techs were starting to work the scene, and I thought I could see the corner of a white sheet just creeping into shot. The cameraman must have noticed it too, and shifted a little further left. I automatically looked for Ricco amongst the crowd behind the reporter, but didn’t see him.

  “Umm. Well, we were all in class this morning, and … and …”

  Imani sniffed.

  “I saw her,” I said. “In the schoolyard.”

  “You were there? At the school?” Hilda asked. “No. Don’t tell me now. I want to hear this.”

  “Well … when we heard the … the first shot we wasn’t sure what it was. We … my girlfriends and I … one of us said maybe it was a … was a car backfiring or something …”

  “It’s okay, Imani,” the reporter said. “Take your time.”

  “There were some more … umm more bangs and we knew … we knew … it couldn’t be a car or nothing. It had to be someone … someone shooting … we didn’t want it to be, but it musta been.”

  “What did you do then?” the reporter said, obviously no longer willing to let Imani stick to her own timetable.

  “Someone, I don’t remember who, said … umm … that we should stay in the classroom and then … then someone else said … umm … no we needed to … umm … to get out of there because if someone … umm … someone with a gun came in they’d be able to shoot us easy and …“

  I drained my glass, reached for the bottle. Refilled, took a bite, and sank deeper into the sofa. That was my fifth. Or sixth. Or … what the hell, who gave a fuck.

  “… and then … I don’t know who it was … said that we …”

  I watched Hilda’s face, hanging on every traumatized word coming from Imani’s mouth and wished like hell for about the thousandth time that I’d been able to do something useful with my day.

  “… so we ran out into the hallway …”