Scars (Nevada James #2) (Nevada James Mysteries)

by Matthew Storm

  Dan called five minutes later. “Where the hell are you, Nevada?”

  “I was done,” I told him. “You think I need half the department following me home? The last time this happened you had me under surveillance for a month.”

  “That was to protect you, you dumb shit.”

  “Yeah, I know. It was pretty annoying, though.”

  “Where are you, Nevada?”

  “I’m not telling.”

  He swore for a while. When he was done I said, “Take Sarah to the hospital and make sure someone stays with her. She’s going to blame herself, but none of this is her fault. Make sure she understands that.”

  “It’s not her fault,” Dan said. “It’s my fault. The son of a bitch was right under my nose.”

  “Psychopaths are hard to spot, Dan. That’s why they’re called psychopaths.” I thought about that statement. “Well, no, that’s not really why they’re called psychopaths. The word origin is…not really relevant, I guess. The point is you couldn’t have seen this coming.”

  “I’m going to tear him apart if I ever get my hands on him. I’m serious, Nevada.”

  I sighed. Dan was the most upstanding, honest cop I’d ever met, but Ellis made the second person I had no doubt he’d execute without so much as an arrest or trial. The Laughing Man was the other one. Spending time around me really wasn’t a healthy thing. “Get some rest, Dan. And put a new team on it. No, screw that. Call in another department. SDPD Homicide is going to be pretty shaken up. I don’t think your people are going to be at their best.”

  “We’ll find him,” Dan said. “I promise you that, Nevada. We’ll find him.”

  “I know.”

  “Now where are you?”

  “In the wind,” I said.

  “What the hell does…” he started, but I hung up on him. When the phone started to ring again, I shut the power off. I wasn’t in the mood for conversation.

  I drove all the way to my motel in Miramar and sat in the Mustang for a good ten minutes, trying to decide what to do next. Drinking had never sounded as good as it did right now. I still had vodka in my room. I’d brought my security bottle with me when I’d hastily moved up here. But another part of me, a surprisingly strong part, didn’t want the drink. It wanted to go to the roof of a tall building to shout and scream at the sky. Ideally it would be raining when I did this; it would have been good for dramatic effect, but it had been a clear day and rain hadn’t been in the forecast.

  I powered my cell phone back on and looked through the voicemail, erasing the messages Dan had left without listening to them. There was very little doubt as to their content. It would be all swearing and demands that I go somewhere he could make sure I was safe.

  As strange as it might have sounded, the only person I really wanted to call right now was the one person I had no way of reaching. The Laughing Man. It was sick, but he was really the only other person on Earth capable of understanding any of this. In another very, very strange world, we might have been friends.

  Eventually I gave up and went into my room. The vodka I’d brought along was still in my suitcase. I took the bottle and turned the television on, then sat on the bed to watch it. The truth was I had no interest in the TV. I just wanted to hold the liquor. It was my old friend. It would keep me safe.

  Halfway through some late-night talk show I realized I was shaking. Was that adrenaline, or was it the vodka in my hand? I hadn’t opened the bottle yet. It was about three-quarters full. It would be enough to knock me out if I could get the whole thing down without vomiting. That itself would be a test. In the last of my drinking days my body hadn’t reacted well to alcohol at all. If I wasn’t already drunk I’d had to fight to keep the first few swallows from coming back up.

  I opened the bottle, sniffed the contents, and gagged almost immediately. With my eyes and mouth watering, I closed the bottle. Not yet. I wasn’t going to drink it yet.

  The phone rang and I ignored it, not even bothering to check the caller ID this time. The late-night show ended and an infomercial started up. The guy was hawking an amazing secret for cleaning dirty clothes. It seemed to involve some kind of spray. Also, if you ordered quickly enough, you could get three bottles for the price of one, and you could pay for them in small installments. I wondered if you could just pay them everything up front. Probably. It didn’t seem worth calling to check. When I did laundry, I just used the cheapest detergent from the store. It seemed to work just fine.

  I turned the cap on the vodka again. Smelled it. My mouth started watering, but I didn’t gag this time. I screwed the bottle shut. My hands were shaking again. Now I knew it was the alcohol. The adrenaline had worn off a long time ago.

  I put the vodka down on the nightstand and took my Glock out of its holster. I’d been asked to surrender it as evidence, but I’d told Dan anyone who tried to take it from me was going to get a bullet in the neck. Brad Ellis still had my .45 and I wasn’t going anywhere unarmed. God only knew what Ellis had done with the other gun. Maybe he’d blown his dick off while he’d been running away with it in his pants. That would have been fitting.

  The Glock still had the powder smell on it from its recent firing. On another day I’d have taken it apart and cleaned it, but that would have meant leaving myself unarmed. There was no way in hell that was going to happen anytime in the near future. Maybe I’d ask Dan for another gun so I had a backup piece. Or maybe I’d just get my own. The more guns I had that he didn’t know about, the better. That would make it harder for him to take them away from me if he ever decided to try.

  I dropped the magazine on the Glock into my palm, looked it over, and slid it back into place. I could have popped another bullet into it, but that didn’t seem that important. I had plenty left. If Brad Ellis had any sense at all he wasn’t coming after me. He would be halfway to Los Angeles by now. Or he could have gone to Mexico. They didn’t even check IDs when you entered from the U.S. Nobody cared about who you were until you tried to come back. Did Ellis speak Spanish? That might be worth asking, but someone else could ask it. I was done with this.

  For a moment I had an urge to turn the gun on myself and pull the trigger. Everything would be over in a split second. I’d never have to worry about anything again. It probably wouldn’t even hurt.

  I sighed, put the Glock down, and picked the vodka up again. The bottle seemed heavier now. It couldn’t be, of course. My mind was playing tricks on me. The clear liquid inside looked appealing. It wasn’t expensive stuff and this brand tasted more like industrial chemicals than anything a person should actually drink, but it would get the job done. There was no doubt about that. If I managed to get it down I wouldn’t wake up until tomorrow afternoon. Sleep would be nice. And booze chased away the nightmares, if I drank enough of it. I knew that from experience.

  The cap was off the bottle almost before I noticed my hands were unscrewing it again. Once again the smell hit me hard, but I didn’t gag this time. That probably wasn’t a good thing. It was becoming familiar now. My body was getting used to it again.

  I glared at the bottle, then raised it and took a good-sized sip into my mouth. The liquid didn’t feel like anything more than water in my mouth, but it wouldn’t as long as I was holding my breath. So what if I swallowed it? What was it going to matter?

  Then I turned my head and spat it onto the motel carpet. My mouth and nasal passages started burning from the liquid almost immediately. I gagged once, then went to the sink and gagged again. I put the bottle down and rinsed my mouth out with tap water. If any of the vodka had made it down my throat, I couldn’t feel it. I’d probably be smelling it for a while, though.

  I picked up the bottle and took a long look at it, then turned it over and poured the contents into the sink, watching as the liquid swirled and disappeared down the drain. When it was gone I ran the sink for a few minutes to flush it away. Then I capped the bottle and tossed it into the trash can. I wasn’t going to be drinking tonight. Maybe someday I would, if
I got low enough. But it wouldn’t be tonight. And it wouldn’t be because I had a bad day. Or at least, it would have to be a worse day than this had been.

  I went back to the bed and looked for something else to watch on television. It was a reasonable bet that I wasn’t going to sleep tonight.

  Chapter 21

  “You look like shit,” Dan said the next morning as he sat down.

  I’d been toying with the second half of my Denver omelet, pushing bits of it around my plate like race cars around a track, when he arrived. I’d told him to meet me at a Denny’s when I finally returned one of his calls. I didn’t feel like going down to the station, which is where I knew he wanted me.

  “I didn’t get much sleep,” I said.

  “That’s not really a surprise.” He asked for a cup of coffee as the waitress passed by. “You don’t smell like booze, though. I was wondering if I was going to have to drag your ass to detox.”

  “To be honest, so was I. How’s Sarah?”

  Dan shrugged. “Shaken up but she’s taking it better than I would have expected. I think I underestimated her. She’s more angry at herself than anything else. Thinks she should have acted faster when she started to suspect Ellis.”

  “Nobody wants to point the finger at another cop,” I said. “Her career would have been over if she’d been wrong. Hell, it might have been over even if she was right.” I speared a piece of ham, but wasn’t hungry enough to put it in my mouth. “She reached out to me but I ignored her because I didn’t want to deal with it. That’s on me.”

  “Yeah. That is on you.”

  I blinked. That hadn’t exactly been what I’d expected to hear. “You do remember I’m not a cop anymore, right?”

  “I seem to remember telling you a while back you’re always going to be a cop,” he said. “That doesn’t change because you’re not wearing the badge.” He pointed at me. “You have responsibilities. To me. To Sarah. To the department.”

  I looked at him. “You know what? You’re right about you and Sarah. I haven’t done some of the things I should have.”

  “No, you certainly…” he started.

  I cut him off. “But fuck the department. I don’t care about the department anymore. Did you bring my badge along with you?” He nodded. “Throw it in the trash. I’m never putting it back on.”

  Dan pursed his lips and watched as I took a drink of my Diet Coke. “Your poker face needs work,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You’re not upset at the department. It’s something else. Is it that you think you should have spotted Ellis, too? Are you mad at yourself?”

  “I’m just mad,” I said.

  “What’s going on, Nevada?”

  I sighed. Meeting him in person had been a mistake. “I’ve been working on something else,” I admitted. “Privately.”

  His eyes widened. “You have another case? Tell me it’s not organized crime again.”

  “No. Odds are you’ll hear the details soon enough. It’s just…I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was going to help an old lady find some closure for something she went through a long time ago. And I’ve realized that if what I think happened is what happened, then no good is going to come out of it whatsoever. If I do everything by the book, a guy who made a terrible mistake twenty years ago is going to prison for the rest of his life. I should drop the whole thing and move to Tahiti.”

  “If I thought you’d stay there, I’d buy you the ticket myself.” He sighed. “But you’d get bored, Nevada. You always get bored.”

  “Yeah.” I pushed my plate aside. I wasn’t going to be eating any more. “I just wonder what the point of all this is.”

  The waitress came to refill Dan’s coffee and this time left the pot. He took a sip and grimaced. “You know this isn’t the first time we’ve had this conversation.”

  “Oh?”

  “Maybe you don’t remember. Marjorie Hamlin. This was…seven years ago? I was still a sergeant.”

  I let the name bounce around my head. “Older woman. Shoved her husband during an argument?”

  Dan nodded. “He fell down and hit his head wrong. Got a bleed on the brain and died three days later. We had no history of abuse on either side, no previous incidents. By all accounts it was just a terrible accident.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She was looking at a homicide charge. Got scared. You brought her in when she ran and then you started yelling at me.”

  “That sounds like something I’d do.”

  “You asked what the point was. She was an old lady, she hadn’t meant to kill anyone, she was no danger to anyone else. She had to live with what she’d done. What was the point of putting her in prison? Wasn’t the pain of living with what she’d done bad enough?”

  “And what did you say, o wise one?”

  “You know exactly what I said.”

  “Tell me anyway. I think I need to hear it.”

  He nodded. “I said we weren’t putting her in prison. We were bringing her in so justice could be served. What form that took was for the court to decide. She had to stand in front of a jury and put the decision to them. Twelve people would hear what happened, look at the evidence, and then decide what needed to be done.” He reached across the table and took one of my hands. “Because there has to be an accounting, Nevada. People need to be accountable for what they’ve done. And as I remember it, Marjorie Hamlin got probation.”

  “That sounds about right,” I said.

  “So whatever this thing is that you’re not telling me about, keep in mind that you aren’t judge, jury and executioner. That’s not your role. You don’t decide right and wrong. You’re just an agent that gives justice the opportunity to be served.”

  I leaned back. “Look at you dropping philosophy,” I said. “When did you get so eloquent?”

  He shrugged. “Sometimes I want to grab you and shake you, Nevada, but that wouldn’t get me far. I do this instead.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I actually feel a little better.”

  “Good.”

  “I’m still putting a bullet in the Laughing Man when I catch up with him, though.”

  “Not if I beat you to it.” He smiled faintly. “I’m going to wait a couple days, and then we’re going to have another conversation about your badge.”

  “My answer isn’t going to be different. Maybe don’t throw it in the trash, though. I worked hard to get it.”

  “It suits you. Also, I like it when you have to follow my orders.”

  “I never followed your orders.”

  He shrugged. “Fair enough. I like it when I can keep an eye on you, then. You want to tell me where you’ve been staying?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ll be moving back to my old motel soon. You should come over. We’ll get a pizza and watch awful television.”

  He nodded. “Deal. Anyway, I’ve got to go. My guys are having a pretty bad day and I should be there, but I needed to see you first. Good luck with this thing you’re doing. Let me know how it works out.”

  On impulse, I stuck my hand out and he shook it. That wasn’t something we did very often. Later, I’d wonder what had been going on in my head to make me want to do that. Maybe it was the thought that everything was going to be okay.

  Chapter 22

  Del Mar was just up the coast. I could have called ahead but I didn’t think this was going to be a long conversation, and even though I doubted Conrad Meyers was going to run, I’d have looked like an idiot if he did.

  His house was easy to find. It was in a modest suburb in the hills overlooking the ocean. I couldn’t think of the last time I’d been up here. I doubted I’d been looking for a murder suspect at the time. Del Mar wasn’t exactly a hotbed of violent crime. It was more a hotbed of BMWs and overpriced restaurants.

  I parked on the street and sat in the car watching the house for a while. My Glock was tucked away in its shoulder holster. I doubted I was going to need it here.

  Af
ter a few minutes of thinking it over, I got out and went up to the front door to ring the bell. A man in his late forties opened it. He had graying hair and wore a green cardigan. My first thought was that I should tell him to lose the cardigan. He looked like he was about to audition for a new version of the Mister Rogers show.

  He smiled at me. “I’d be happy to take a brochure, miss.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “Oh,” he said. “I thought you must be a Jehovah’s Witness. They come by sometimes to hand out their literature.”

  “No,” I shook my head. “My name is Nevada James. I used to be with the San Diego Police Department. Are you Conrad Meyers?”

  “I am,” he said. He squinted his eyes slightly. “I think I’ve seen you on television. You were at a crime scene.”

  And they said people didn’t watch local news anymore. “That was me,” I admitted.

  “You can’t think I know something about that? I don’t. Did you want to come inside?” He moved aside so I could have entered. I didn’t really want to.

  “No,” I said. “I’m here about something else.” I stuck my hands in my pockets. “I’m here to ask you about the Adam Collins bombing from 1993. I was wondering if…”

  There was no need to finish the sentence. Conrad’s face had gone white. And then the bastard started to cry.

  ***

  I called Anita Collins two hours later as I was driving back to San Diego. “It’s over,” I said. “I found the bomber.”

  In the background I could hear voices in conversation and clinking sounds that must have been glasses knocking together. I hadn’t bothered to ask where she was. It seemed early for a cocktail party. Maybe she was at a brunch.

  For a long time she didn’t say anything. “Anita?” I asked.

  “I’m here,” she said. “Sorry. That really wasn’t what I was expecting to hear this morning.”

  “Are you busy? You sound like you’re at a party. I could call back, I guess.”