Joe Kurtz Omnibus

by Dan Simmons

  Kurtz waited. The cold air felt good after the stuffy interior of the limousine, filled with the bodyguards’ cologne.

  “There’s word that Angelina has hired a professional killer called the Dane,” said Gonzaga. “And paid him one million dollars in advance to settle old scores.”

  Cute, thought Kurtz. Angelina Farino Ferrara had warned him that Gonzaga was bringing in the Dane. Gonzaga warned him that she had. But why would either one of them warn me?

  He said, “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “You might want to work extra hard to earn the hundred thousand dollars I mentioned,” said Gonzaga. “Especially since all indications are that you’re one of the old scores she wants to settle.”

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  Empire State Security and Executive Protection had its offices on the twenty-first floor of one of the few high, modern buildings in downtown Buffalo. The receptionist was an attractive, bright Eurasian woman, impeccably dressed, who politely ignored Kurtz’s bandages and bruised eyes; she smiled and buzzed Mr. Kennedy as soon as Kurtz told her his name. She asked if he’d like any coffee, orange juice or bottled water. Kurtz said no, but a light-headedness on top of the pain in his skull reminded him that he hadn’t had anything to eat or drink for more than twenty-four hours.

  Kennedy came down a carpeted hallway, shook Kurtz’s hand as if he was a business client, and led him back through a short maze of corridors and glass-walled rooms in which men and women worked at computer terminals with large flat-display screens.

  “Security business seems to be booming,” said Kurtz.

  “It is,” said Brian Kennedy. “Despite the economic hard times. Or perhaps because of them. Those who don’t have, are thinking of illegal ways to get it Those that still have, are willing to pay more to keep what they have.”

  Kennedy’s corner office had solid partitions separating it from the rest of the communal maze, but the two outside walls looking down on Buffalo were floor-to-ceiling glass. His office had a modern but not silly desk, three computer terminals, a comfortable leather couch, and a small oval conference table near the juncture of the glass walls. A professional quality three-quarter-inch tape video machine and monitor were on a cart near the table. Rigby King was already seated across the table.

  “Joe.”

  “Detective King,” said Kurtz.

  Kennedy smoothly gestured Kurtz to a seat on Rigby’s right. He took the opposite end of the oval. “Detective King asked if she could sit in on our meeting, Mr. Kurtz. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  Kurtz shrugged and took a chair, setting Gonzaga’s leather portfolio on the floor next to his chair.

  “Can I get you something, Mr. Kurtz? Coffee, bottled water, a beer?” Kennedy looked at Kurtz’s eyes when he took off the Ray Charles glasses. “No, a beer probably wouldn’t be good now. You must be on a serious amount of pain medication.”

  “I’m good,” said Kurtz.

  “You left the hospital rather abruptly this morning, Joe,” said Rigby King. Her brown eyes were as attractive, deep, intelligent and guarded as he remembered. “You left your clothes behind.”

  “I found some others,” said Kurtz. “Am I under arrest?”

  Rigby shook her head. Her short, slightly spiked hair made her seem younger than she should look; she was, after all, three years older than Kurtz. “Let’s watch the tape,” she said.

  “Peg is still on life-support and unconscious,” said Kennedy, as if either one of them had asked. “But the doctors are hoping to upgrade from critical to guarded condition in a couple of days.”

  “Good,” said Rigby. “I called an hour ago to check on her condition.”

  Kurtz looked at the blank monitor.

  “This is the surveillance camera for the door you and Peg came out,” said Kennedy.

  The video was black and white, or color in such low lighting that there was no color, and it showed only the area of about twenty-five feet by twenty-five feet in front of the doors opening out into the Civic Center garage.

  “No cameras aimed at the parked cars area?” asked Kurtz as the tape began to roll, yesterday’s date, hour, minute and second in white in the lower right of the frame.

  “There is,” said Kennedy, “but the city chose the least expensive camera layout, so the next camera is looking the opposite direction, set about seventy-five feet from this coverage area. The shooter or shooters were in a dead area between camera views. No overlap.”

  On the screen, the door opened and Kurtz watched himself emerge nodding toward the shadow that was Peg O’Toole holding the door. Kurtz watched himself walk in front of the woman, who was staying back.

  They had separated ten feet or so and started to go opposite directions when something happened. Kurtz watched himself crouch, fling his arm out, point at the door, and shout something. O’Toole froze, looked at Kurtz as if he was mad, reached for the weapon in her purse, and then her head swung around and looked into the darkness behind the overhead camera. Everything was silent.

  He saw sparks as a bullet struck a concrete pillar eight feet behind them. O’Toole drew her 9-mm Sig Pro and swung it in the direction the shooting was coming from. Kurtz watched himself swing around as if he was going to run for the shelter of the pillar, but then O’Toole was struck. Her head snapped back.

  Kurtz remembered now. Remembered bits of it. The phut, phut, phut and muzzle flare coming from the sixth or seventh dark car down the ramp. Not a silenced weapon, Kurtz realized at the time and remembered now, but almost certainly a .22-caliber pistol, just one, sounding even softer than most .22s, as if the shooter had reduced the powder load.

  O’Toole dropped, a black corsage blooming on her pale white forehead in the video. The gun skidded across concrete.

  Kurtz dove for the Sig Sauer, came up with it, went to one knee in front of the parole officer, braced the pistol with both hands, and returned fire, the muzzle flare making the video bloom.

  There were two figures, remembered Kurtz. Shadows. The shooter near the trunk of the car, and another man, taller, behind the bulk of the vehicle, just glimpsed through the car’s glass. Only the shorter man was shooting.

  Kurtz was firing on the screen. Suddenly he stopped, dragged O’Toole by the arm across the floor, lifted her suddenly, and began carrying her back toward the doors.

  I Hit the shooter, remembered Kurtz. He spun and sagged against the car. That’s when I tried to get O’Toole out. Then the other man grabbed the gun and kept shooting at us.

  Officer O’Toole’s arm seemed to twitch—a slug going through her upper arm, Kurtz thought, remembering the doctor’s explanation—Kurtz’s upper body twisted and his head jerked around to the left as he brought the Sig Pro to bear again, and then he went down bard, dropping the woman. The two sprawled onto the concrete. Black-looking blood pooled on the floor.

  A full minute went by with just the two bodies lying entangled there.

  “There was no coverage of the exit ramp,” said Rigby. “We didn’t see the car leave…at least until it got to the ticket station.”

  “Why didn’t he come out to finish us?” said Kurtz. He was looking at his own body sprawled next to O’Toole’s and thinking about the second shooter.

  “We don’t know,” said Kennedy. “But a court stenographer comes out through those doors in a minute…ah, there she is…and she may have spooked the shooter.”

  Shooters, thought Kurtz. Remembering the adrenaline of those few minutes made his head hurt worse.

  On the screen, a woman steps out, claps her hands to her cheeks, screams silently, and runs back in through the doors.

  Kennedy stopped the tape. “Another three and a half minutes before she gets someone down there—a security guard. He didn’t see anyone else, just you and Peg on the ground. He radioed for the ambulance. Then another ten minutes of people milling until the paramedics arrive. It’s lucky Peg survived all that loss of blood.”

  Why didn’t the second sh
ooter finish us? wondered Kurtz. Whichever one of us he was trying to kill.

  Kennedy pulled the tape and popped another one in. Kurtz looked at Rigby King. “Why was I handcuffed?” His voice wasn’t pleasant.

  “We hadn’t seen this yet,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “The tapes weren’t marked,” said Brian Kennedy, answering for her. “There was some confusion. We didn’t have this to show Officers Kemper and King until after they visited you yesterday evening.”

  I was handcuffed the entire fucking night, thought Kurtz, glaring at Rigby King. You left me helpless and handcuffed in that fucking hospital all night. She was obviously receiving his unspoken message, but she just returned his stare.

  “This is the security camera at the Market Street exit,” said Kennedy, thumbing the remote control.

  A young black woman was reading the National Enquirer in her glass cashier’s cubicle. Suddenly an older-make car roared up the ramp and out of the parking garage, snapping the wooden gate off in pieces and skidding a right turn into the empty street before disappearing.

  “Freeze frame?” said Kurtz.

  Kennedy nodded and backed the video up until the car was frozen in the act of hitting the gate. Only the driver was visible, a man, long hair wild, but his face turned away and his body only a silhouette. The camera was angled to see license tags, but this car’s rear tag looked like it had been daubed with mud. Most of the numerals and letters were unreadable.

  “Attendant get a good look?” asked Kurtz.

  “No,” said Kennedy. “She was too startled. Male. Maybe Caucasian. Maybe Hispanic or even black. Very long, dark hair. Light shirt.”

  “Uh huh,” said Kurtz. “There could have been another man on the floor in the backseat.”

  “Do you remember a second man?” asked Rigby.

  Kurtz looked at her. “I don’t know,” he said. “I was just saying there could have been a second man in the back.”

  “Yeah,” said Rigby. “And the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in the trunk.”

  “Detective Kemper thinks it’s a Pontiac, dark color, maybe late eighties, rust patches in the right rear fender and trunk,” said Brian Kennedy.

  “That narrows it down,” said Kurtz. “Only about thirty thousand of those in Buffalo.”

  Kennedy gestured toward the frozen image and the license plate. “We’ve augmented this frame and think that there may be a two there on that tag, perhaps a seven as the last digit.”

  Kurtz shrugged. “You check Officer O’Toole’s computer files? See if she has any pissed-off parolees?”

  “Yes, the detectives copied the computer files and went through her filing cabinets, but…” began Kennedy.

  “We’re pursuing the investigation with all diligence,” said Rigby, cutting off Kennedy’s info-dump.

  Kennedy looked at Kurtz and smiled as if to say, man to man, Women and cops, whattayagonna do?

  “I’m going home,” said Kurtz. Everyone stood. Kennedy offered his hand again and said, “Thanks for coming, Mr. Kurtz. I thank you for trying to protect Peg the way you did. As soon as I saw the video, I knew you weren’t involved in her shooting. You were a hero.”

  “Uh huh,” said Kurtz, looking at Rigby King. You left me there handcuffed all night so that an old man in a wheelchair could slap me around. Anybody could’ve killed me.

  “You want a ride home?” asked Rigby.

  “I want my Pinto back.”

  “We’re finished with it. It’s still in the Civic Center garage. And I have your clothes and billfold down in my car. Come on, I’ll give you a ride to the garage.”

  Kurtz walked to the elevators with Rigby King, but before the elevator car arrived, Kennedy hustled out. “You forgot your portfolio, Mr. Kurtz.”

  Kurtz nodded and took the leather folder holding Gonzaga’s paperwork listing seventeen murders unknown to the police or media.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  It wasn’t a long ride. Kurtz pulled the little brown-paper package of his clothes and shoes out of the backseat, checked his wallet—everything was there—and settled back, feeling the reloaded .38 against the small of his back.

  “You know, Joe,” said Rigby King, “if I searched you right now and found a weapon, you’d go in for parole violation.”

  Kurtz had nothing to say about that. The unmarked detective’s car was like every other unmarked police car in the world—ugly paint, rumbling cop engine, radio half hidden below the dashboard, a portable bubble light on the floor ready to be clamped onto the roof, and city-bought blackwall tires that no civilian anywhere would put on his vehicle. Any inner-city kid over the age of three could spot this as a cop car five blocks away on a rainy night.

  “But I’m not going to search you,” said Rigby. “You wouldn’t last a week back in Attica.”

  “I lasted more than eleven years there.”

  “I’ll never understand how,” she said. “Between the Aryan Nation and the black power types, loners aren’t supposed to be able to make it a month inside. You never were a joiner, Joe.”

  Kurtz watched the pedestrians cross in front of them as they stopped at a red light They were only a few blocks from the civic center. He could have walked it if he wasn’t feeling so damned dizzy. Leaving the portfolio on the floor back at Kennedy’s office showed Kurtz how much he needed some sleep. And maybe some pain medication. The pedestrians and the street beyond them seemed to shimmer from heat waves, even though it was only about sixty degrees outside today.

  “When my husband left me,” said Rigby, “I moved back to Buffalo and joined the force. That was about four years ago.”

  “I heard you had a little boy,” said Kurtz.

  “I guess you heard wrong,” said Rigby, her voice fierce.

  Kurtz held up both hands. “Sorry. I heard wrong.”

  “I never knew my father, did you?” said Rigby.

  “You know I didn’t,” said Kurtz.

  “But you told me once that your mother told you that your father was a professional thief or something.”

  Kurtz shrugged. “My mother was a whore. I didn’t see much of her even before the orphanage. Once when she was drunk, she told me that she thought my old man was a thief, some guy with just one name and that not even his own. Not a second-story guy, but a real hardcase who would set up serious jobs with a bunch of other pros and then blow town forever. She said he and she were together for just a week in the late sixties.”

  “Must have been preparing for some heist,” said Rigby.

  Kurtz smiled. “She said that he never wanted sex except right after a successful job.”

  “Your old man may have been a professional thief but you never steal anything, Joe,” said Rigby King. “At least you never used to. Every other kid at Father Baker’s, including me, would lift whatever we could, but you never stole a damned thing.”

  Kurtz said nothing to that. When he’d first known Rigby—when they’d had sex in the choir loft of the Basilica of Our Lady of Victory—he was fourteen, she was seventeen, and they were both part of the Father Baker Orphanage system. They didn’t know their fathers, and Kurtz didn’t think either one of them gave a shit.

  “You never met your old man either, did you?” he asked now.

  “I didn’t then,” said Rigby, pulling up to the curb by the Civic Center parking lot entrance. “I tracked him down after Thailand. He was already dead. Coronary. But I think he might have been an all right guy. I don’t think he ever knew I existed. My mother was a heroin addict.”

  Kurtz, never the best at social niceties, guessed that there was probably a sensitive and proper response to this bit of news as well, but he had no interest in spending the effort to find it. “Thanks for the ride,” he said. “You have my Pinto keys?”

  Rigby nodded and took them out of her jeans pocket. But she held onto them. “Do you ever think about those days, Joe?”

  “Which days?”

  “Father Baker days. The cata
combs? That first night in the choir loft? Blues Franklin? Or even the ten months in Thailand?”

  “Not much,” said Kurtz.

  She handed him the keys. “When I came back to Buffalo, I tried to look you up. Found out my second day on the job that you were in Attica.”

  “Modern place,” said Kurtz. “They have visiting hours, mail, everything.”

  “That same day,” continued Rigby, “I found out that you murdered that guy—tossed him onto the roof of a black and white from the sixth floor—the guy who killed your agency partner and girlfriend, Samantha something.”

  “Fielding,” said Kurtz, stepping out of the vehicle.

  The passenger window was down halfway, and Rigby leaned over and said, “We’ll have to talk again about this shooting. Kemper wanted to brace you today, but I said let the poor bastard get some sleep.”

  “Kemper has a hard-on for me,” said Kurtz. “You could have come and uncuffed me last night You both knew I didn’t shoot O’Toole.”

  “Kemper’s a good cop,” said Rigby.

  Kurtz let that go. He felt stupid standing there holding his little brown-wrapped bundle of clothes like a con getting sent back out into the world.

  But Rigby wasn’t done. “He’s a good cop and he feels—he knows—that you’re on the wrong side of the law these days, Joe.”

  Kurtz should have just walked away—he even turned to do so—but then he turned back. “Do you know that, Rigby?”

  “I don’t know anything, Joe.” She set the unmarked car in gear and drove off, leaving him standing there holding is brown-wrapped bundle.

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  Arlene arrived right at nine-thirty. Kurtz was waiting outside the Harbor Inn. The wind blowing in from the lake to the west was cold and smelted like October. Weeds, newspapers, and small debris blew across the empty industrial fields and skittered by Kurtz’s feet.

  When he got in the blue Buick, Arlene said, “I see you got the Pinto back.” It was parked behind the triangular building in its usual spot.

  “Yeah,” said Kurtz. He’d had some problems with the local project youth the first weeks he’d lived here, until he’d beaten up the biggest of the car-stripper gang and offered to pay the smartest one a hundred bucks a week to protect the vehicle. Since then, there’d been no problem, except that he’d already paid several times what the Pinto was worth.