by Harvey, JM
Jack started to reply, but Victoria beat him too it.
“Impartial, Laroy?” she asked, suddenly wondering if this interference might be something far more sinister than just another squabble over jurisdiction. “Isn’t your Special Tactics Unit under investigation by the US Attorney’s Office?” That rumor had been circulating around the Crowley building for weeks. She had no idea if it was true, no one from the Justice Department had approached her, but, judging by Laroy’s reaction, it must have had some grounding in fact.
Laroy’s eyes flashed. “There is no investigation,” he replied, grinding the words out like he was chewing broken glass. “The US Attorney’s Office has requested certain records for their review. We are—”
“Certain records pertaining to Willy Henderson?” she plowed right over him. “Are they reviewing why a suspect who was handcuffed in the back of a squad car had to be shot seven times?”
“That case is—”
“Abby Sutton was there the night Henderson was killed. She swore under oath that his hands were cuffed behind his back, that there was no way he could have made a grab for the deputy’s sidearm. How do we know that the STU didn’t kill Abby to keep her from talking to the feds?”
Erath laughed at that, but Laroy didn’t find it funny. His hands balled into fists as he opened his mouth to reply, but Victoria wasn’t done.
“Hell Laroy, how do we know it wasn’t you that killed her? You always were pretty quick with your fists when it came to the ladies.” As soon as she said it she knew that she had gone too far. She was making it personal, hitting below the belt, but it wasn’t in her nature to turn the other cheek and she had taken enough punches that morning.
Laroy didn’t reply to the accusation. He turned stiffly back to Jack. “Is this how you want to play it, Jack?”
Jack lifted his shoulders and let them fall. “You dealt the cards, Laroy.”
“Let’s go, Erath,” Laroy said as he turned hard on his heel. His eyes raked over Victoria one last time before he stalked back to the SUV, his apoplectic expression promising that this was not over. He climbed in behind the wheel.
“Tell your husband that we’ll be seeing him,” Erath said to Victoria as he trailed behind his boss, still smiling, still having a good time. “And he ain’t going to get a pat on the back and a pension this time. I’ll make sure he’s strapped to a gurney and given the hotshot in double-quick time. You have my word on that.” He gave her a wave then climbed in beside Laroy. The SUV lurched around in a circle and blasted away down the levee. The four deputies lingered a moment longer before they too turned back to their cars.
The tall, pale deputy paused in the open door of his cruiser to look back at Phil. “Best watch your ass when you cross the city limits,” he said, then dropped into his seat. The two cruisers backed around in a U-turn, and the drivers punched the gas, throwing up clouds of dust as they barreled back down the narrow road.
“Well, that could have gone better,” Jack said.
Bastrop shrugged defiantly. “To hell with them,” he said. “Those guys are so crooked they’ve got to screw their badges on.”
Jack let it go. He looked at Victoria. “I don’t think Laroy’s going to walk away from this,” he said. “Better be prepared. There are lots of folks that are going to take what Laroy said to heart. Valentine doesn’t have many friends downtown anymore.”
Victoria nodded as she brushed dust from her suit coat, but she didn’t reply to the comment, she just said, “I have to go,” then turned and headed to her Jeep. “I’ll be in my office all morning. Call me if you find anything useful.” She climbed in and cranked the engine, backed around and headed for the Crowley building, barely seeing the road ahead, she was so preoccupied with replaying what had just happened.
Deputy Erath and Laroy Hockley had seemed truly convinced that Valentine had murdered Abby Sutton. The accusation was ridiculous, but she had been a part of the legal system for far too long to take any comfort in that knowledge. Especially with Sheriff Swisher lurking in the background. He’d love to pin a murder on a DPD officer, even a retired one like Valentine.
At sixty-four, Sheriff Nolan Swisher was a hard, bitter old man with a gunfighter’s glare who didn’t let the petty niceties of legal procedure get in the way of his work. He was notorious for midnight bond hearings, back dated warrants and arrest reports slathered in Whiteout. In Dallas Texas, a city and state that sent more men to Death Row than most third world countries, that made him a very popular and powerful man.
More than powerful enough to put Valentine behind bars whether he was guilty or not.
6
Kyle kept repeating “Horse-shit, douchebag!” all the way to Target where he mercifully stopped cursing and started singing the Sponge Bob song at top volume. That was twice as annoying to Val, but not nearly as embarrassing.
The store was crowded, and they didn’t have any toddler-sized baseball gloves. Val wove through the aisles, circling and backtracking, remembering things then forgetting them. It took over an hour to pick up everything they needed. By then he had stacked the double-stroller’s bin to overflowing and had even piled a few items in the seats with the boys.
On the sporting goods aisle he debated the too-large baseball gloves for five minutes. They were expensive and he was already cringing at the imminent grocery bill, but finally he tossed the two smallest ones into the boys’ laps. Max immediately tried to eat his glove while Kyle threw his back at his father. Val ended up balancing both gloves on top of the stroller. He pulled into a checkout line then remembered detergent and had to veer back into the aisles, admonishing the boys for forgetting the one thing on their list.
It was after 11:00 before he finally headed out to the parking lot, the stroller’s bin overloaded with groceries, plastic bags strapped haphazardly to the frame. They looked like a trio of Okies fleeing the dustbowl.
After an hour and a half in the sun, the car’s vinyl seats cooked Val’s back and butt straight through his shirt and jeans. He flipped the air conditioner lever over to HIGH and aimed the vents back at the boys. The compressor rattled and groaned its way through a grand mal seizure, almost stalling the engine, before it finally settled into a gasping wheeze that produced a trickle of cool air, barely enough to knock the temperature down to a low simmer. He had to get the compressor overhauled. Or make a down payment on a minivan.
No, he’d rather walk.
Hell, he’d rather crawl.
As Val drove toward the parking lot’s exit, he spotted the same black Range Rover that had stopped briefly in front of his home less than two hours before. Small world. It was parked near the exit, facing out. It really was a sharp looking ride. Idiotic, but…
Max and Kyle dozed off almost immediately, heads lolling, drool spilling down their chins. Val headed for the highway then west on IH 30 toward home.
As Val exited at Sylvan Avenue, singing along like an idiot with Ray Wiley Hubbard’s ‘Redneck Mother,’ he spotted the Range Rover again, three cars back.
That made three times in one morning.
Valentine’s rusty internal cop alarm started jangling. Three times stretched coincidence almost to the breaking point.
Val clicked the radio off and kept his eyes on the Rover. He was probably just being paranoid, but he couldn’t take that chance. He’d made a lot of enemies while he was on the police force; sent dozens of people to Huntsville State Prison and eleven men and one woman to the red brick lethal injection room at the Walls Unit. And there was always Abby Sutton and her biker crew, the Confederate Syndicate. Abby had made a lot of threats at the civil trial, surrounded by her pack of hairy rednecks. All in all, there were probably a few hundred people in Dallas who would be happy to see Valentine eating grass by the roots. And most of them wouldn’t care if a couple of toddlers got in the way of a bullet.
The Rover followed the Mustang down the exit ramp, still three cars back. Val slowed to a crawl as he approached the light and the three inter
vening cars whipped around him, but the Rover hung back, matching the Mustang’s speed.
Val turned left at the intersection, flicking his eyes between the road ahead and the rearview. The Rover turned with him. He made a quick decision; he couldn’t take the boys home, the driveway was too exposed to the street and there was no back way in. Instead, he took a left at Colorado and headed for BoDean Gannon’s.
He just hoped he wasn’t bringing a hit man right to Bo’s door.
Bo was Val’s most unlikely friend. Val had been part of the SWAT team that had arrested Bo almost twenty years before. At the time, Val had just four years on the force and less than three months on SWAT Team One. BoDean was way more experienced. He and his crew had racked up eighteen successful bank robberies. But it all went wrong when they hit the Chase Bank in downtown Dallas.
Val had been perched three hundred feet above the street, atop the Hotel Adolphous’ green-copper roof with a scoped .223 Remington when BoDean’s crew hustled out of the bank, shotguns at port arms. Val hadn’t hesitated, and he hadn’t fired any warning shots. He had put two rounds through Bo’s right thigh, dropping the big man in his tracks. The rest of the crew took the hint and hit the street face-first, their hands locked behind their heads, old pros.
With his good looks, his bandito mustache and his redneck-dancehall charm, Bo had been irresistible to the media and the jury. The judge had even seemed a little saddened by the twenty years he had handed down. But not Bo. He had thanked the judge, grinned at the gallery then waved Val over to the railing.
“Nice shooting,” he said.
“I was aiming for your head,” Val had replied then laughed. Bo had echoed that laughter a little uncertainly. An uneasy friendship had been struck up that day, one that had resumed when BoDean was released eight years later, broke and looking for a job.
BoDean didn’t stay out of work long. He managed to turn his experience at bank robbing into a very lucrative security business. He made more money protecting banks than he ever had robbing them.
The Rover stayed a hundred yards back for the three-mile trip to BoDean’s. Val made the corner on Bo’s block and hit the gas. He turned in hard at Bo’s driveway, stopped short, hopped out of the Mustang and trotted back to the street just in time to see the Rover crawling around the corner. The driver spotted Val at the same moment and hit the gas. He must have been doing close to sixty when he passed the driveway, but Val still got a good look at the driver’s face. A face that stopped him cold.
Jesus, it was Zeke Sutton, Lamar and Lemuel Sutton’s baby brother. Zeke was a junkie lowlife, a stereo thief and a shoplifter, about as dangerous as a bad cough, but he must have grown a pair and now he was looking for payback.
And Val had the twins in the car.
As the Rover disappeared around the next bend, Val sprinted back to the Mustang, slid in and goosed it down the driveway, kicking up a rooster tail of gravel as he followed the driveway around the house. At the end of the turn, hidden by a band of pine trees, was a three-bay steel shop building. Val skidded to a stop out front, right beside a spotless black BMW E-class. As he exited the Mustang and headed for the shade of the shop, leaving the engine and the air conditioner running, he grimly looked over the BMW. He knew the car’s owner. It didn’t improve his mood.
Two of the garage’s bay doors were open to catch the stifling breeze. One bay was filled by a monstrous Ford F-450 dually King Cab with a towing rig on the back and a push bar welded to the front end; the other bay held a primer-gray Chevy Malibu with the number 54 painted on the roof. BoDean was bent under the hood of the Malibu, a torque wrench in his hand, sweat dripping off his handlebar mustache. He looked up as Val approached.
As Valentine’s eyes adjusted to the gloom of the shop, he nodded in Bo’s direction then let his eyes slide to the silhouette of a tall Hispanic male who was leaning against a cluttered workbench that sat flush against the rear wall. The guy looked to be about twenty-five, but Valentine knew he was closer to forty. Slick Hernandez.
Slick was a legend in the Dallas barrio. A La Eme assassin by the age of sixteen, Hernandez had landed on Death Row at twenty-two. He had been exonerated on that charge nine years later, just three weeks before he was scheduled to be strapped and zapped, when DNA became available to defendants at State expense. By all accounts, Hernandez had wasted little time in returning to business, executing three Guatemalans who had dared to cut out their Mexican Mafia handlers.
“Como estas, Five-O?” Slick asked, laying the Mexican accent on thick as refried beans, though he had been born and raised in South Oak Cliff.
“Bien,” Valentine replied, “convict.”
Slick chuckled and turned to Bo. “Gonna slide, BoDean. Stay hard.”
“Places to go, people to kill,” Valentine said, his eyes never leaving the Mexican gangster.
Slick chuckled again. “Don’t like the competition, detective?”
Valentine started to reply but bit it off. He had the boys in the car and Zeke Sutton cruising the street out front. He couldn’t afford to pick a fight with a La Eme hit man. Still, the temptation was there. A dark and brooding thing.
“Watch your back, Slick,” Bo said as he wiped his hands with a greasy shop rag.
Valentine watched Hernandez walk to the BMW, catching the bulge of a pistol jammed into the waistband of Slick’s tailored slacks. Slick moved like oiled ball bearings, eyes never still, gaze predatory. He looked exactly like what he was: a hired killer.
Val turned to Bo. “You know you’re not supposed to associate with convicted felons,” he said as the BMW purred to life and glided backward down the driveway. “You’re still on parole for another three years.”
“Slick ain’t never caused me any problems. You, on the other hand, shot me. You also got me involved in three fistfights in one bachelor party weekend. So, you gotta figure he’s a little more welcome than you are.” BoDean ducked back under the Malibu’s hood, settled the torque wrench on a bolt and turned it a quarter inch. “Besides, Slick was exonerated. Pardoned.”
“For one murder. Out of how many?”
BoDean didn’t look up. “Slick had my back in Huntsville, Val. You know that.”
“True,” Val said. “Means a lot.” They didn’t call Huntsville Gladiator School for nothing. Murder was a hobby for many of the inmates.
“Speaking of friendship and favors,” Val continued as he glanced over his shoulder, through the Mustang’s windshield at the twins still strapped in their car seats, still asleep. His eyes shifted to the driveway beyond the car. No Rover in sight. He turned back to Bo. “I need a couple. First, I need to borrow the tow truck.”
“Keys are on the counter,” Bo nodded at the workbench.
“And I need some babysitting,” Val added as he crossed to the bench and picked up the keys. A twelve-inch length of rebar was lying in the midst of a jumble of small parts and tools. Val hefted the rebar. It had a good feel to it. Not as good as a gun, but… He turned with it in his hand to find BoDean staring at him.
“What the hell’s going on, Valentine?”
Val shrugged. “Got a little issue.”
“A little issue?” Bo said, his eyes dropping to the rebar. “The last time I heard those words was right before you picked a fight with five Gypsy Jokers down in Juarez.”
“I didn’t pick that fight, I just met them halfway.”
“Halfway? That’s what you call a beer bottle to the skull?”
Val let it go with a shrug. “Sharon around? Think she’d watch the boys?”
Bo nodded, still frowning. Valentine had that jazzed up, ready to fight look that BoDean knew all too well. A sure sign that someone was going to get hurt, maybe Valentine himself.
Bo sighed and shook his head. “Take the damn truck and get the hell out of here,” he said as he dug his phone out of his pocket. “And, for Christ’s sake, don’t bring that rebar back here covered in blood.”
“I’ve got groceries in the trunk. Mind if I to
ss them in the fridge?”
“Just don’t jostle the Lone Stars,” BoDean said without looking up from the phone.
Val grabbed the milk and the eggs out of the trunk and carried them to the fridge as BoDean spoke to his wife. By the time Val had rearranged the beer to make room, Sharon was crossing the lawn toward the shop.
“Hi Valentine,” she called as she ducked down beside the Mustang and peered into the backseat. Sharon woke the boys, who, despite their post-nap moodiness, were thrilled to see her. She spoiled them as shamelessly as any grandmother. Val helped her load the boys into the stroller, pausing to smooth their hair flat and brush the sleep out of their eyes.
“Daddy’s got to take care of something, but I’ll be right back,” he promised them then stood there staring after them as Sharon trundled them across the lawn and through the kitchen doorway, wondering if he had just lied to them?
Jesus, what the hell was he doing? He should call the cops, let them deal with Zeke.
Right, he could imagine the reception that call would get. DPD and the rest of Dallas County had washed their hands of the Suttons and Valentine four years ago. Even if the dispatcher did send a squad car, what would Val tell the uniforms? That Zeke had driven by Val’s house then went to the same grocery store? What laws were there against that? No, there would be no help from the cops.
Val turned and climbed into the tow truck, cranked it up and rolled down the driveway.
BoDean watched silently from the shade of the garage as the dust stirred up by the tow truck’s departure settled back to the gravel. He shook his head as he turned back to the Malibu and muttered, “I thought you had retired from killing people, Valentine.”
7
The Frank Crowley Court Complex is located on the shabby side of downtown Dallas, across the highway from the skyscrapers and the sports arena where the Dallas Stars play, on Riverfront Boulevard, though you’d need a rocket strapped to your back to see the Trinity River from there. Surrounded by hourly-rate parking lots and clapboard bail bondsmen’s offices, the courthouse and the adjoining Lew Sterret Justice Center are the nicest buildings on the strip, but that isn’t saying much. With their fortress-like facades of brown brick and tinted glass they look exactly like what they are: machinery to process and incarcerate criminals on an industrial scale.
