“He’s not thinking clearly. He’s just come out of a coma.”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so.” Charlene blew her nose.
“Does he understand that he’s been charged with murder?”
“We tried to explain that. Said he didn’t care, didn’t want to talk about any of it. Then stopped talking altogether and wouldn’t say anything else. Just lay there and stared at the wall.”
“He doesn’t care?! What the hell?” I needed to move so I got up, handed the shotgun to Cowboy, and went looking for a scotch bottle. He and Charlene watched me with fascination, like an exotic zoo exhibit. Found the scotch, poured a glass, and knocked it back. Blew out a breath and turned back to Charlene.
“Tell me this. If he doesn’t care about what happens to him, and you’re sure you were clear about the consequences …” She nodded, wiped her eyes. “Then why should I give a rat’s ass about what happens to him? This is bullshit and a waste of time.” I grabbed the bottle and glass and sat down again.
Charlene dabbed at her eyes and sniffed. Pulled her feet together, stood up straighter, pushed her shoulders back and looked me in the eye.
“Because he’s my boy,” she said. “I’m not giving up on him. And as long as you’re here, and I can find a way to pay you, you’re not going to either.”
“Uh huh.”
“Don’t give me that, Mr Rafferty. You work for me, remember? And you act all rough and tough and sassy. What is all that? Just a lie? A sham to get people to hire you, but you bail out when the going gets tough? Well, that’s not good enough for me. Or for Bradley. You claim that you’re the best there is. Here’s your chance.” She stepped forward, looked down at me and bored her eyes into mine. “Fucking prove it!”
Charlene gave me five more seconds of glare, then marched out of the room head held high. She padded up the stairs, the bedroom door closed softly, and footsteps creaked above our heads.
I poured and knocked back another scotch, tried to ignore Cowboy.
“Boy howdy, she’s as feisty as all get out.”
“Yep. She’s a pistol.”
“She just wants her son to be okay.” I hadn’t noticed Mimi standing in the doorway.
“I might go check on Ray,” Cowboy said and stepped out, pausing to cup Mimi’s chin in his weathered hand, then bent down to kiss her on the forehead. Mimi beamed, stepped into the kitchen, sat down beside me.
I brooded.
“C’mon Rafferty, where’s that grouchy old tomcat that I know and love?”
“Is she telling the truth about what went on at the hospital?”
“Yeah. It went just like she said it did.”
“Then I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t see what the point is. The kid doesn’t want to be helped. Practically begged me to shoot him the first time I met him. Maybe he did it, and the guilt is eating him up inside. That’s why he’s given up.”
“Look at me. Rafferty, I said, look at me.” I met her eyes. “You really believe that? Tell me right here and now that you believe that he shot those people and we’ll all pack up and go home.”
“I can’t prove that he didn’t.”
“I didn’t ask what you can prove. I asked you what you believed.”
She waited while I got there.
“No.” I heaved a sigh. “No, I don’t believe that he did it. But that’s not gonna be enoug—”
“That don’t matter. You gotta start with what you believe. The rest is just hard work. You think that it’s easy for Cowboy and me to be parents to Adam? With what we do? Hell’s bell’s Rafferty, I lie awake most nights wondering whether we’re doing the right thing or if he’d be better off with someone else.”
“You two are the best thing in the world for that boy,” I said. “Nothing surer.”
Mimi smiled, a big grin that lit the room.
“That’s what I keep coming back to. We sure ain’t perfect, but neither’s anyone else. I will love Adam, and protect him, with every breath and every bullet I have until I don’t have none left. And if it was him lying in that hospital bed instead of Bradley, no matter what he said and no matter what it looked like, I’d want good people fighting for him, right alongside me.”
Mimi dabbed at her eyes.
“That’s all Charlene wants. I’m gonna give it to her, and I know you’re gonna, too.”
I looked at her.
“Once you pull your head outta your ass and stop your bitchin’, that is.” She grinned, slapped me on the shoulder and headed out of the kitchen.
I sat for a few minutes longer then grabbed the phone off the wall and called Hilda. No answer at her place so I tried mine.
“Hey Ugly,” she said. “I was beginning to think you’d skipped town without saying good-bye.”
“Never happen, babe.”
“Uh huh.”
“I’d say good-bye,” I said. “From a long way away, but I would call. I’m no coward.”
Hilda laughed, and some of the tension seeped out of my upper body. “And me with a casserole cooking, and sitting here on your sofa—naked, I might add—waiting to show you how much I’ve missed you.” When I didn’t jump on that like I wanted to, she spoke softly. “You’re not coming home tonight, are you?”
“’Fraid not, babe. It’s starting to look like it might get ugly out here.”
“That’s okay. I can wait. I’ll just be here, eating casserole by myself and sobbing silently into my pillow. Still naked, of course.”
“Atta girl.” Damn!
“Before I forget though, that sergeant called looking for you.”
“Ricco?”
“That’s him.”
“Did he say what he wanted?”
“Nope. Just to call him back.”
“Thanks, hon.”
“My pleasure.”
We sat and listened to each other breathe for a little while.
“I’d rather be there with you. You know that, right?”
“Of course I do, Ugly. It’s okay. You do what you need to do. Look after that woman and her son and come back to me safely.”
“Will do.”
“I love you, Rafferty.”
“You too, babe.”
“Man, you’re lucky you caught me. I was halfway down the steps outside when the desk sergeant yelled I had a phone call. Lucky that he didn’t tell me it was you, ’cause if I’d known that I might not have come back in.”
“You called me.”
“True enough. Well, you’re not gonna believe it, I mean I can hardly believe it, but we found that bullet.”
“The one from the forty-five?”
“Uh huh. Guess where it ended up?”
“Fucked if I know, Ricco. That’s why I asked you.”
He chuckled. “In an apartment across the street from the school. Second floor too, so it was like the kid was trying to shoot down a fucking pigeon or somethin’.”
“Really?”
“Check it out. The damn slug went across the street, missed the balcony and everything on it, went through an open window—an open fucking window, Rafferty—crossed the room, missed everything else and plugged a hole in a big fucking plastic tank of water. You believe that shit?”
“Not really. You’re sure that this is the same bullet? Sounds more like the result of a close shot to me.”
“Yep. ’Cause it hit the water it was still in almost perfect condition. Easy to match.”
“Okaaay.”
“But you ain’t heard the best part yet. Wasn’t even our guys that found it. Couple hours after the school shooting, the neighbor in the apartment below calls the super, ’cause there’s water running down her walls. From the tank, right?
“So the super goes up to the apartment above, knocks. No answer. Uses his key ’cause it’s an emergency, right. Walks through the door and sees that the tenant has turned the whole goddamn place into a reefer farm.”
“Bullshit.”
“I shit you not. The guy had pulled up all the carpets, ripped doors off the cupboards, and had trays of pot in every available space. The place was rigged up with lights and hoses and pipes and all sorts of valves to water all the plants. Obviously been doin’ it for a while, too. Some of the plants were nearly five feet high. Anyway, once they find the leaking tank, and the bullet, one of the bright sparks on the team thinks maybe it’d be worthwhile checking if it was anything to do with the Columbus shooting, asks ballistics to check for a match.”
“How come I never get that lucky?”
“Born under a bad sign, prob’ly.” Ricco didn’t break stride. “So the report only turned up on my desk yesterday and I hadn’t seen it yet. So I get to file that little bit of info—not that it makes any difference to your kid, we’ve still got him for the four vics in the hallway—Narcotics gets to take seventy, eighty kay of dope off the street, plus a good-sized stash of angel dust they found in one of the bedrooms, and this guy goes down for a long time. I swear, there are some days I fucking love this job.”
“Lemme ask you something else.”
“Hell, why not. I’m in a good mood.”
“You guys ever run those duffel bags?”
“Huh?”
“Where they came from. Who they belonged to.” It had already been a long day and I was getting tired of not making any progress.
“What the hell you want me to say? Three khaki duffels; surplus, by the looks. Coulda come from any Army Navy store in the country.”
“Detail on the owner, or owners?”
“The mom of one of the dead shooters said something about her son having ’too many book-bags’ laying around his room. We took that to mean the duffels. Book-bags! Since when does an Army duffel look like a fuckin’ book-bag. Some people.”
“That’s all you got?”
“And most likely they were all bought at the same time and place, based on the tags and the wear.”
“Most likely?”
“You heard me.”
“That ain’t much.”
“Fuck you. I’m not lettin’ you ruin my day. We made a major dope bust, all ’cause your kid couldn’t shoot straight.”
I left Ricco to his self-congratulations and hung up.
Poured another scotch and sat back in the chair. Listened to soft murmurs upstairs and the white noise of the crowd out front.
So Bradley didn’t hit anyone in the schoolyard with his shot. Why not? What would make him shoot four people in cold blood; six bullets, six hits, four kills, and then miss so badly with his seventh shot? Nerves? Adrenaline? I doubted it. They would come first, not once he’d started gunning down fellow students.
Maybe it wasn’t his seventh shot. What if it was the only shot he took on the day, with similar results to those ill-fated hunting trips Ray mentioned? If that was true, then there was the question of why he was shooting at all.
But looming larger in the background was, if not Bradley, then who?
The kitchen was growing darker as the tag end of the day arrived and it was time to do something about fortifying Casa de Wright before full dark arrived. I’d have rather sat there with a few more drinks, but I didn’t want to get into the wee hours and wish that we’d done something earlier.
So we got busy.
Organized for Charlene and Ray to hunker down in Bradley’s room. Humped the mattress from the master bed in, so they both had a place to sleep, at the back of the house and out of sight, in case things got ugly. Chocked the windows in the master bedroom and the sitting room up a couple inches for makeshift gunports and made sure all the drapes on the downstairs windows were closed. A laundry window overlooked the back yard which left us with first floor options in case the mob got brave enough to jump the side fence, but the back of the garage hid a blind spot on the other side of the yard and I didn’t like it.
“I could rig a coupla grenades and a tripwire ’tween the side fence and the house, boss-man.”
So that’s what was in the green bag.
“I don’t want to hurt any of these people if we can help it.”
“Pussy.”
“That’s harassment, you know. There was a seminar about it at the Annual Private Dick’s Symposium. Trying to Stay Sane in a World that Isn’t.”
“Sounds like fun, boss-man. Shame I missed it. Yore still a pussy, tho.”
“Whatever. See if you can find a hammer and nails. Bang a few through the top of that fence and gate. That ought to slow down anyone trying to crawl over. While you’re at it, that pissy little lock can be snapped easy enough, make sure that gate is nailed shut good and tight. Same on the other side, too.”
“Ah yuh.”
I could hear more traffic and voices out on the street and saw more than one face peering at me from behind windows in neighboring houses. There was a buzz in the air that felt like that around a smoldering pile of logs in the split second before you see the first lick of flame and the whole stack erupts.
I hoped we could snuff it out before it got to that point.
Cracked open the garden shed and moved all the tools inside the garage. Last thing we needed to do was give these clowns more things to hit us with if they did make it over the fences.
I was finishing the final load from the shed when Cowboy walked around corner of the house. “All done. Anyone tryin’ to get over those fences now, gonna be able to strain tea through their palms.” He grinned. “I bashed a few in down lower too. Jes’ in case.”
“All right.” I did another visual around the back yard. Couldn’t see anything in the gathering gloom that would come back to bite us in the ass. “That’ll do,” I said. “I still don’t think they look smart enough to try anything stupid, but I’ve been wrong before.”
Chapter 27
Cowboy shook me awake.
“Unnnhhhh,” I mumbled. “My turn already?”
“Nope. Thought you’d wanna see what’s goin’ on.”
I wriggled out of the sleeping bag and sat up, blinking in the gloom. “What time is it?”
“Little after four.”
“Uh huh.” I rubbed my eyes and cracked my shoulders. Stood. Followed Cowboy to the sitting room. “What’s happening?”
“Take a peek for y’self.”
I squatted near the left-hand corner of the window and eased the curtain back a couple of inches to look out over the front yard.
“Yore little Gettysburg address got to some of them, I reckon,” Cowboy said.
He was right; the crowd on the front lawn had dwindled during the night, with maybe a third or less of the protestors remaining. Dropped signs and garbage wafted around in the pre-dawn zephyrs. The last of the news vans had disappeared and I guessed the neighbors would be happy about being able to park in front of their houses again.
“You woke me up to look at fewer people?”
“Shore. Thought you should see the results of a job well-done.”
“Really?” I started to stand, deciding whether to clock Cowboy on the way up.
“A’course not. Look further ’round to the left, boss-man.”
I wriggled around on the floor, opened the curtain wider and twisted my head to look toward the front left corner of the Wright’s little piece of suburban paradise.
A flickering glow bent out from behind a large elm and illuminated a group of men standing there. I blinked again, trying to get the focus working, trying to work out whether the guy in the center of the group was Dark Hair or not.
“That the guy was in the front with the fat chick?”
“Got it in one,” Cowboy said.
“Uh huh.”
Couldn’t hear what they were saying, and I wasn’t yet ready to open the window further, but the body language was clear enough. Six guys, four with flaming torches, two others with long weapons, all facing Dark Hair. He was doing the majority of the talking, based on his arm waving and pointing at the house. The others shuffled a little, changing weight on their feet, and
looked like they were unconvinced about whatever he happened to be saying.
“How long they been at it?” I asked.
“Ten, mebbe fifteen minutes.”
“What’s your read?”
“I think they might be plannin’ to see whether yore a man of yore word, boss-man.”
“Poor fools them.”
“Ah yuh. How you wanna play it?”
“Much as I don’t want to, I’ll get outside and stop them before they get those torches too close to the house. This place is all wood and it wouldn’t take much for the whole shebang to go up.”
“Better you than me, boss-man.”
“Where’s Mimi?”
“She’s watching from the other end of the house. Mom’s room.”
“You two stay inside. I don’t want to provoke them if we don’t have to, but keep ’em honest, okay?”
“Got it.”
I made sure the door to Bradley’s room was closed, heard soft snoring behind it. No point in waking Charlene and Ray if we didn’t have to. They’d be awake soon enough if the night turned to crap.
Step-hopped into a pair of jeans, shrugged a T-shirt and windbreaker on, thought about the shoulder holster, and settled for tucking the .38 into the back of my waistband. Grabbed the Ithaca, confirmed that I had swapped out the buckshot rounds for birdshot before I went to sleep, and headed downstairs.
By the time I’d flicked on the porch light and made it outside to the top of the steps, the would-be posse was starting up the lawn.
“Cowboy?” I called into the night.
His reply floated back from the dark sky. “Right here, boss-man.”
“Mimi?”
No spoken response, but the night air rattled with what sounded like the metallic clack of an Uzi being primed for action. Good enough.
I stepped off the porch and met the gang across a thirty-yard wide DMZ midway between the curb and the house. Far enough, I hoped.
Dark Hair was four steps behind the torch-carrying, rifle-toting group, like a Field-Marshal surveying his troops from a safe vantage point.
I worked the Ithaca. The sound mixed with the crackle of the torches and floated away in the night air.
Wright & Wrong Page 21
