Iced (John Wads Crime Novellas Book 1)

by Jerry Peterson

  Larson cranked the wheel. She banged the car up onto the sidewalk and the snow-covered lawn beyond, the Suzuki’s wheels spinning, throwing up a mini-blizzard as the car hurtled toward the near corner of the Capitol. She glanced at her mirror.

  Wads saw her look. “He’s not after you. He’s after me.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means get outta here when I bail out.”

  He shoved the door open. Larson racked the Suzuki’s speed down, and Wads flung himself out. He rolled, scrambled to his feet, and hop-ran for the massive oak doors. Wads plunged inside and down a nearly dark hallway.

  His cell went off.

  Wads slid into a side hallway as he dug out his phone. He hit the incoming number.

  Larson’s voice came through, chocked with panic. “He’s in the building.”

  “Call the police.” Wads pocketed his phone. He drew his pistol and leaned around the corner.

  A dark figure came charging his way.

  Wads banged off a shot, and the figure spun into a doorway.

  “Who are you?” Wads called out.

  “Why should I tell you?”

  “I’d like to know who’s trying to kill me.”

  “That’s fair.”

  “So?”

  “They call me the vacuum cleaner.”

  “That’s a helluva name.”

  “People hire me to suck up their messes. Think about it.”

  “So I’m somebody’s mess?”

  “Quite right.”

  Who says quite right? Wads desperately wanted to grab a look around the corner–to see who the man was–but he also wanted to keep his head. “Whose mess am I?”

  “Sorry. Professional ethics.”

  Wads glanced down at his knee. For the first time he saw the rip in his pant leg and the red stain. “Let me guess. Ralph Barnard.”

  Something that sounded like plastic hit the marble floor. It made a rolling sound. Wads ventured a peek. He swore and ran for a near staircase up. Gotta get the high ground.

  Behind him the something popped, and the hallway filled with gas.

  FOURTEEN

  HIGH GROUND, gotta get the high ground.

  The thought hammered at Wads as he pounded past the second-floor landing for the third floor, and only at the top did he realize that the sound of his boots on the hard marble had given him away. He ripped his boots off and threw them aside.

  “Hey, don’t mess up my hallway.”

  Wads swivelled around, his pistol out, to face a janitor. She dropped her mop.

  “Look, lady, I’m not gonna hurt you. Just get outta here, someplace where you can lock yourself in and call the police.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Lady, someone’s trying to kill me, and I don’t need you in the way. Now go.” He waved his pistol toward a far hallway, and the janitor, her hair pulled back under a Brewers cap, sprinted off.

  Wads grabbed the woman’s cart. He pulled the two trash barrels from it, flopped them in front of the staircase a half step in. He latched onto the mop and swung it at an overhead light, smashing it. Wads then scattered the janitor’s squeegees and dusters and spilled her bucket of soapy wash water over the floor. He pitched the bucket down the stairs and ran for the rotunda balcony.

  Behind him someone fell across the barrels and swore. The someone scrambled up, slipped in the wash water, and fell a second time.

  Wads raced on in a limp-run around the balcony to the far side. Just as he plunged into a new hallway, he heard a sound–like a cheap firecracker–and felt a bee sting in his side. He whipped around.

  On the side of the balcony from which Wads had come, a man in a black ball cap laid across the broad banister, sighting along the barrel of his weapon.

  Wads dropped. The firecracker again, and a bullet gouged a chunk out of a bronze bust of ‘Fighting’ Bob La Follette, to Wads’s side and three feet up.

  A voice that had the sound of the Grim Reaper came across the way. “Gotcha with the first shot, didn’t I?”

  Wads fingered his side, and his hand showed blood. He gazed around the rotunda balcony, studying the walls. “Vacuum Cleaner, you any good at billiards?”

  “Why the question?”

  “Humor me. You any good at billiards?”

  “Chess. Chess is my game.”

  Wads turned. He aimed sixty degrees at the circular wall. “Three bank shot, eight ball in the side pocket.” He squeezed the trigger, heard the ricochets and an “uhnn.”

  “Even-up now?” Wads asked.

  “I’m dying.”

  “I’m good at a blind shot, but not that good.” He crawled away, to another staircase.

  Gotta get myself to the high ground.

  WADS PULLED HIMSELF onto a fourth-floor landing. He worked his way back into the rotunda. There he peered through the banister, down to the balcony below, and jerked back as three shots chipped away at the marble supports.

  “The shooting’s up there!”

  “Yeah, I see’ im. Police! Throw down your weapon.”

  Voices from below.

  Then a shot and a volley of gunfire.

  When it ceased, Wads again peered between the spindles. He aimed his pistol at the spot where the shooter should be.

  Jeez, where’d he go?

  Something pressed on Wads’s back, and a husky voice said, “Put yer gun on the floor. Push it away from you.”

  “Uncle Harley?”

  “Wads?”

  Wads turned his head as best he could. From the corner of his eye, he saw standing over him a man with a face chiselled from granite and a bush of white hair, the man in a blue shirt, sleeves pushed above the elbows, necktie pulled loose. He held a shotgun, its single barrel jammed against Wads’s spine.

  Wads gave a jerk of his jaw. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Trying to keep myself alive. There’s a guy out to kill me before I can get to the A.G.’s office. What’re you doing here, anyway?”

  Harley Wadkowski took a step back. He swung his twelve-gauge to the side. “My office’s just down the hall. Workin’ late for my Sauk County constituents when I hear all this blastin’ goin’ on.”

  Wads pressed a hand against his side as he got to his knees. With his free hand he recovered his pistol.

  “You hurt, son?” Wadkowski asked.

  “Just a nick. Thank God the cavalry’s come.”

  “City police, yeah, I called ’em. And the state police, too.”

  “Unc, standing up like that, you could get your head blown off.”

  “Oh for cripes sake.” The legislator hunkered down next to Wads. “What do we do now?”

  “Either wait for the cops to catch him or go hunting.”

  “Personally, I’m for huntin’. I’m a damn good bird man.”

  “Any chance he could take an elevator to the basement and get out of here?”

  “We lock the elevators at six.”

  A door across the way inched open. The shooter crouched in the doorway.

  Like duck hunters from a blind, both Wadkowskis popped up. They let loose with a hail of bullets and buckshot.

  The shooter fell.

  Wads and his uncle raced around the balcony. As they did, the man crawled to a side door. He pushed it open, hauled himself over the sill, and kicked the door shut.

  The Wadkowskis slid on
blood on the marble floor, the senior Wadkowski slamming down hard. But he held onto his shotgun.

  “You all right?” Wads asked.

  “Gonna have to see my chiropractor. Waddy, we got him if he’s leakin’ like this.”

  “Gimme your shotgun.”

  “Why?”

  “My gun’s empty.”

  Wads pulled his uncle up and relieved him of his twelve gauge. He pumped a new shell into the firing chamber.

  “I’m comin’ with you, boy.”

  “Hell you are. Where’s this door go?”

  “Up to the inside observation decks. He’s not gonna trap himself. My bet is he’ll go up to one of the three doors that go outside.”

  Wads eased the door open. He leaned through, saw a blood trail in the dim light from a wall sconce, the trail going toward the stairs. Wads glanced up.

  Nothing.

  Only silence.

  He limped up the first set of steps–marble–to the fifth-floor landing. The blood trail did not go toward the exterior door, but toward the next staircase. The up arrow said Museum and Trumpeter’s Ring.

  Fourteen steps and the sixth-floor landing. A circular staircase ahead. To the side, an exterior door and blood droplets going that way.

  Wads eased the door open. He stepped out into the snow and pressed his back against the wall. “Cleaner man,” he called out.

  “Come after me and you die.”

  The voice had a distant sound and seemed to come from above.

  Wads peered up. “I could leave you out here, bolt the door. You’ll freeze by morning if you don’t bleed out before that.”

  “I know you, John Wads. You can’t wait that long.”

  “You got that right.”

  Wads inched to the side, to a ladder, his foot brushing against a container. He picked it up. A milk chug. Only no milk, just a splash of something red.

  He pitched the chug over the side and snaked his way up the rungs of the ladder. At the top, Wads poked his head up just enough that he could see statuary high and to his right, and the columned walkway around the Trumpeter’s Ring–the columns supporting the Capitol’s exterior dome–the walkway where someone could make his way to the far side, but why?

  “Fake blood,” Wads called out.

  “You found my bottle.” The voice, though faint, sliced through the wind.

  “Body armor?” Wads asked.

  “Where it counts. Gives me the edge, don’t you think?”

  Wads clung to the ladder. The rungs cut into the soles of his stockinged feet as he peered in the direction from which he’d heard the shooter. “Coming after you?” Wads called out. “I’m reconsidering.”

  “Reconsider too long and I’m gone.”

  Shoot. The observation deck on the roof of the north wing. A two-story drop, but a man could make it, even wounded.

  Wads hauled himself up onto the Trumpeter’s Ring.

  Go left?

  Would he be there, waiting to kill me?

  Wads glanced that way, then set out in the other direction, the wind whipping his hair as he shuffled along, shotgun at the ready. His socks, wet from the snow, so frozen that Wads could no longer feel his feet.

  Yet he went on, a cluster of statues ahead.

  The high ground.

  Yes, that was the high ground.

  Wads pulled himself up and in among the statues, short of the north wing. The edge of the blast of light from the observation deck’s floods illuminated his position, the blast that bathed the dome and Lady Wisconsin–the Golden Lady–at the pinnacle of the structure that topped the dome. The light seared Wads’s eyes, and he squinted, squinted through the dazzle of snow crystals driven sideways by the wind, squinted until he made out the shooter in half-silhouette, crouched on the banister below, the shooter peering down at the observation deck.

  Wads leaned across the lap of a seated Greek scholar studying a scroll. He brought up his shotgun and sighted along the barrel. “You can’t jump fast enough.”

  The shooter, his pistol out, twisted towards Wads.

  Wads squeezed the trigger.

  The shotgun’s firing pin hammered the center of the brass end of the shell in the chamber. The shell’s powder exploded and rocketed out a tight fist of steel pellets.

  FIFTEEN

  WADS, STRIPPED TO THE WAIST, sat amidst a litter of law journals on a coffee table in the state attorney general’s office, a parka-clad EMT taping a patch over his wound.

  The EMT smoothed the tape. “You’re darn lucky. Tore through muscle, not the abdominal cavity.”

  The A.G., Constance Herr, as attractive as when she represented the state in the Miss Universe contest fifteen years earlier–attractive even in a gray business suit–glanced away from her computer’s screen. “So my old boyfriend’s going to survive?”

  “I don’t see why not?”

  “Don’t make any record of this and don’t tell anybody you’ve been here.”

  “But there’s paperwork–”

  “Paperwork, hell, young man. I’ve already issued an order holding the Nine-One-One call tapes for a grand jury. You do as I say or I’ll have you jailed for interfering.”

  He shrugged and packed his kit and left.

  Herr, who knew when to charm and when to be the tough law enforcer, turned to Wads. “You know I’m stepping in deep manure here.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Ralph Barnard has raised a lot of money for my campaigns, and the governor’s, too. We’re going to get splashed. But by what I read here, Ralph is some bastard.”

  Wads reached for his shirt. “So what do you intend to do?”

  “I’ve got a federal attorney who owes me a favor and a friend at the SEC I’ll call.”

  “So you’re going to arrest him?”

  “Not until we get an indictment. The feds for fraud–guaranteed–and I’ll go after him for murder for hire.”

  “How long’ll this take?”

  “A couple days.”

  “Connie, the TV people had to be listening to their police scanners. This is gonna get out, and Ralph’s gonna get gone.”

  The A.G. shook her head. “No. The state police commandant’ll put a lid on everything, and I’ve got a safe house where I can hide you.”

  Harley Wadkowski stepped away from a detail of troopers. “He’s my nephew. How about I put him up?”

  “Assemblyman, that’s good with me. And, Harley–”

  “Yes?”

  “Take your shotgun home. If I ever hear it’s in your office again, I’ll confiscate it.” She again turned to Wads. “I don’t want you calling anybody, understand? You’ve disappeared.”

  Wads waggled a hand, as if to say ehh, then went back to buttoning his shirt.

  “Tomorrow,” Herr went on, “I’ll have the state police put out a release stating you were killed in a shooting on the Capitol grounds. Let Mister Barnard think you’re dead.”

  “But what about Barb Larson?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A friend. She drove me here.”

  “Let her think you’re dead, too.”

  WADS AND HIS UNCLE left the attorney general’s office, Wads padding along in blue footies. A trooper, coming their way, held up a pair of boots. “Found these down the hall. Figured you might want them.”

  Wads took the boots. He leaned against the wall and pulled them on, knelt and, glancing up at the trooper, laced them. “You look like you played football. Colleg
e?”

  “The U-dub.”

  “Tackle?”

  “Guard.” The trooper reached out his paw. He helped Wads up. “I’m Dan Blanowitz. I get to look after you for a while.”

  “The A.G.?”

  “Yup.”

  A medical examiner’s crew came off through the double doors from the observation deck. They pushed a gurney, a body in a black body bag strapped to it.

  Wads stopped them. “Mind if I look?”

  Blanowitz intervened before they could object. “We’re attached to the A.G.’s office. It’s okay.”

  One of the crew unzipped the bag enough that Wads could see the face of the man who had intended to kill him. Wads leaned in, as did his uncle.

  “Gawd, looks like hamburger,” the senior Wadkowski said.

  “I hit him with the full load. I intended to.” Wads touched the arm of the nearest examiner. “Any identification?”

  “Nothing in his pockets but a tin of Carmax. His face won’t help us, but we did take his fingerprints and a DNA sample.”

  “Any wounds other than the face?”

  “A couple pellets to the hands, and a lot of damage to his clothes. The guy was wearing Kevlar, the lightest I’ve ever seen. Front, but not the back.”

  Wads touched the body bag. “That would be important.”

  The examiner crewman’s eyebrow rose, puzzlement apparent. “Do you know something?”

  Wads shook his head.

  “Well, when we rolled him, we found he’d been shot in the fanny. Odd, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Definitely.” Wads winked at his uncle.

  The crewman reached for the zipper pull. “You done?”

  “Yeah. Thanks for letting me take a look.”

  He zipped up the bag, and he and his partners went on, pushing the gurney ahead of them.

  The senior Wadkowski nudged his nephew. “The butt shot, that yours?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You gonna tell ’em?”

  “They wouldn’t believe me, not how I did it. And I’m not sure I believe it either, except I was there. I heard the strike.”