“My wife!” Pendegrass answered quickly. He ordered, “The tape, Boldt. Now! No more of this! I want that tape.”
“It’s in the car,” Boldt said.
“No fucking way,” Pendegrass barked.
“Search me. Ask him,” he said motioning to the porch. “He was here waiting for me. He saw me get out of the car.” He turned slightly. “Did I have a videotape on me?”
For a moment there was only the drone of an airplane far off, and the low constant hum of traffic.
“I didn’t see it on him,” Smythe confirmed. 492
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“Untuck your shirt,” Pendegrass ordered. Boldt did as he was told. No tape fell out. “I’m telling you, it’s in the car.” He added, “But then again, I wouldn’t shoot me just yet, if I were you. What if I dropped it off at a friend’s on the way over?”
From Boldt’s right, a third voice. “Then I’d have seen you,” Riorden said. Also wearing a balaclava, he stepped around the corner of the house, there to block any attempt at an exit to the street. To Pendegrass he said, “He didn’t stop anywhere.”
The third part of the puzzle. No more surprises.
“No one’s going to shoot you, Boldt,” Pendegrass stated. “All we want is that videotape.”
“We were going to trade,” Boldt reminded.
“Change of plans. You ever get any idea to breathe a word of any of this, and Matthews ends up like Sanchez or worse. That’s my leverage on you. That, and the tape. That’s my promise.”
Boldt felt another chill race down his spine. Pendegrass had made the wrong threat. He had also just made an admission of guilt by mentioning Sanchez. Boldt had much of what he wanted. “Front seat of the car,” Boldt said. “Take the tape and get out of here before I lose my temper.”
Pendegrass chuckled, amused. “I’m quaking all over.” He moved toward the Crown Vic, though never taking his eyes off Boldt. He tried the passenger door, but found it locked. “Keys,” he called out to Boldt. Boldt let the keys dangle from his right hand, thinking that if Pendegrass or the others had half a brain M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E
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they would wonder why he’d opted to have his keys out and ready in his right hand. Smythe might think he’d intended to open the back door of the house, but then why not switch hands with the gun when Pendegrass had walked out of the shrubs? But they weren’t thinking: That was just the point. They hadn’t been thinking when they’d stolen the guns off Krishevski’s tip about the strike; they hadn’t been thinking when they’d broken Sanchez’s neck in an attempt to rough her up and get her off the I.I. investigation; they hadn’t been thinking when they’d tried to cover it up by making it look like Flek. Guys like this didn’t think—they reacted. It was all they were capable of. “Thing’s got a remote,”
Boldt informed him, letting the keys hang from his hand. “I’ll do it for you.”
He lifted his right hand, pointing the small remote device toward the car the way people aim clickers at their televisions. Straight-armed and determined. Again that eerie silence, punctuated only by the keys ringing together like tiny bells. Boldt pushed the button. The doors to the car clicked open. Pendegrass pulled on the door handle and opened the passenger door. He leaned inside.
Boldt pushed the remote’s other button. As the car’s trunk popped open, Boldt shut his eyes, collapsed to the steps and rolled down them.
LaMoia came up out of the car’s trunk lobbing a phosphorus grenade, a police issue semi-automatic clutched tightly and ready to fire. Boldt heard one shot; he wasn’t sure from where. He caught hold of his fallen 494
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handgun on the roll, and opened his eyes to the devastating pure white glare of Pendegrass coming out the passenger door, burning brightly in that light like an angel. He had let go of the videotape, and it floated through the air in an eerie slow-motion arc. One hand shielding his eyes, casting a triangle of black across his brow, he raised the tip of that silencer toward Boldt, who saw no choice but to fire. He aimed low, tracking his shots as two holes appeared in the side of the Crown Vic, and a third found the man’s knee, bludgeoning it into a bloody pulp.
The force of a ton of bricks hit Boldt’s chest, knocking the wind out of him. He’d been shot.
“Drop the weapons!” he heard LaMoia order through his wired teeth. A siren cried in the distance.
“On the ground! Now! No one gets hurt!” his sergeant shouted. They had two witnesses to Pendegrass’s mention of Sanchez: Boldt and LaMoia. Even if other charges failed, they had all three on assaulting police officers, attempted murder and deadly force. Boldt felt down and determined he’d been hit in the vest, not flesh. It didn’t feel that way. His breathing was labored, he couldn’t speak.
The phosphorus died down, hissing like a winded runner, and Boldt could see again.
Smythe was down, fatally wounded—Riorden’s doing, not LaMoia’s. In testimony it would come out from Riorden that he and Pendegrass had in fact intended to kill both Boldt and Smythe, just as Boldt had guessed. M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E
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Boldt for obvious reasons; Smythe for his stupidity and greed.
Pendegrass lay bleeding, passed out against the car, the fallen videotape just out of his reach, his fingers still stretching for it.
LaMoia, soaked through with sweat, kept his weapon aimed at Riorden’s back. The man was leaning spread out flat against the wall of the house, bleeding from his left arm. “You got him?” LaMoia inquired, indicating Pendegrass.
“I’ve got him.”
“It’s a mess.”
“Yes, it is,” Boldt agreed.
LaMoia hopped out of the trunk, walked over to Riorden and placed the barrel of the weapon against the base of the man’s skull. “The location of the Denver video,” he said ominously.
“John,” Boldt complained, “that’s not how to do it.”
“We did this your way, Sarge. We do this other thing my way.” He jabbed the gun. “You give up the video and your shooting of Smythe goes down as a stray bullet. With all this other shit, you’ll still get life, but you won’t get lethal injection.” He added, “You’ve got three seconds to decide. One . . . two . . .”
“Chuck has it!” the man spit out onto the wall.
“Locked up, I think. I don’t know.”
LaMoia backed off, pulled his cell phone from his pocket and hit a button. “You there?” he asked, when a voice answered. “It’s Pendegrass. And you’ve got all the probable cause you need.”
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Boldt stepped out of interrogation room A, “the box,” at 4 A.M., an empty mug that had held tea in his hand. LaMoia was still in the next room over, getting interviewed by his fellow Homicide officers just as Boldt had. Any officer-involved shooting required the surrender of one’s weapon, a half dozen interviews and a mile of paperwork. It wouldn’t all sort itself out for another week.
She sat in one of the gray office chairs, the kind with four spread feet on black rollers. Her left ankle, encased in a removable cast, looked more like a ski boot. Only Daphne Matthews could look so beautiful at four in the morning.
“Hey,” he said.
“Went a little differently than you thought,” she told him, barely able to conceal her anger. She didn’t like him taking chances like that.
“He took the bait,” Boldt said. “That’s what we needed.”
“At what cost?”
“I’m not saying it wasn’t messy. I’m not saying I might not do it differently, given hindsight. I considered involving the department for backup. But these M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E
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guys were too well connected. They would have heard we were out to sting them, and we would have either come up empty or dead. So John took the trunk, and we went for it.”
“You sent me to Pendegrass’s house without telling me. Why? Too big a risk?”
“No. B
ecause you might have talked me out of it.”
He paused. “You’re mad.”
“Damn right.”
“So are they,” he said, indicating the interrogation room.
“Every right to be.”
He sighed. “Yeah. Well I’m whipped. Give an ‘old man’ a ride home? They confiscated the Crown Vic. I’m without wheels.”
He won a partial smile from her. “Old man?” she quoted.
“Pendegrass called me that.”
“So blowing out his knee was generous of you.”
“Damn right.” He added, “More like lucky, I suppose. I’m not very good prone like that.”
“You’re pretty good prone,” she said, pursing her lips and letting him know that they could still tease. The kiss had been forgotten. Or at least wiped away. She tapped her purse.
Boldt missed the message. He said, “Are we going?”
She clicked the purse open. Inside was a black plastic rectangle. A videotape. She explained, “I kicked the Pendegrass home, ahead of SID, as soon as I got John’s 498
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call. I looked everywhere. Turned the place upside down. Couldn’t find it.”
“Then what’s that?” he asked.
“Bernie Lofgrin says that you owe him your original Chet Baker, the one’s that’s autographed.” It was a 1957, original vinyl in perfect condition, one of the prizes of Boldt’s jazz collection. Small change, Boldt thought. “He says that he doesn’t want to know what’s on the tape, and that as far as he’s concerned there never was a tape.”
“His guys found it.”
“They make these books with fake leather bindings that aren’t books at all, but hold videotapes in your bookshelf. His guys found it in the bedroom while I was out searching the garage. Lofgrin brought it to me, as lead on the search and seizure, and I had to tell him . . . tell him what I thought it was . . . before he put it onto the inventory. Lou, I’ve never done anything like this.”
She passed it to Boldt.
He held the tape in his hand. His reputation. Possibly the end of his career on Homicide. He couldn’t be sure. And then he handed it back to her. “We return it to Bernie right now while there’s still time, and he puts it into the inventory,” he told her. “I’ll give him that album anyway . . . just because he was willing to go that far.”
Tears formed in her eyes as she looked up at him. She nodded. This was what she wanted to hear. He said, “It isn’t us . . . doing something like this. And besides, Pendegrass will mention the tape . . . it’s M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E
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going to come out. The best thing we can do is stand up to it. Sheila Hill is ultimately the one to decide if our relationship compromises her department, and she’s been in a few compromising positions herself. You don’t need to know about that. She’ll go light on us, believe me.”
The tears spilled down her cheek. Tears of joy, he hoped.
“Am I allowed to say I love you?” she whispered.
“Hell, no,” he said, offering her his hand and extricating her from the chair, “but that kind of thing goes both ways, so you be careful.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s better,” he said, touching her in the small of the back and aiming her toward the elevator. He couldn’t do the stairs in the cast. It would be a while until he could do the stairs again. “Look at us. A pair of gimps.”
“Yes,” she said, laughing through her tears, “a pair of gimps.”
Please visit Ridley at his website:
www.ridleypearson.com
If You Loved
Middle of Nowhere,
Be Sure to Catch
Ridley Pearson’s
Newest Thrilller,
Parallel Lies,
Coming in
July 2001
from Hyperion.
An excerpt, Chapters 1 and 2, follows.
C H A P T E R
1
The train charged forward in the shimmering afternoon sunlight, autumn’s vibrant colors forming a natural lane for the raised bed of chipped rock and the few hundred tons of steel and wood. The rails stretched out before the locomotive, light glinting off their polished surfaces, tricked by the eye into joining together a half mile in the distance, the illusion always moving forward at the speed of the train, as if those rails spread open just in time to carry her.
For the driver of that freight, it was another day in paradise. Alone with his thoughts, he and his brakeman, pulling lumber and fuel oil, cotton and cedar, sixteen shipping containers, and seven empty flatbeds. Paradise was that sound in your ears and that rumble up your legs. It was the blue sky meeting the silver swipe of tracks far off on the horizon. It was a peaceful job. The best work there was. It was lights and radios and doing something good for people—getting stuff from one place to another. The driver packed another pinch of chewing tobacco deep between his cheeks and gum, his mind partly distracted by a bum air conditioner in the bedroom of a mobile home still miles away, wondering where the hell he’d get the three hundred bucks 504
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needed to replace it. He could put it on the credit card, but that amounted to robbing Peter to pay Paul. Maybe some overtime. Maybe he’d put in for an extra run. The sudden vibration was subtle enough that a passenger would not have felt it. A grinding, like bone rubbing on bone. His first thought was that some brakes had failed, that a compressor had failed, that he had a lockup midtrain. His hand reached to slow the mighty beast. But before he initiated any braking—before he only compounded the problem—he checked a mirror and caught sight of the length of her as the train chugged through a long, graceful turn and down a grade that had her really clipping along. It was then his heart did its first little flutter, then he felt a heat in his lungs and a tension in his neck like someone had pulled on a cable. It wasn’t the brakes.
A car—number seven or eight—was dancing back there like she’d had too much to drink. Shaking her hips and wiggling her shoulders all at once, kind of swimming right there in the middle of all the others. Not the brakes, but an axle. Not something that could be resolved.
He knew the fate of that train before he touched a single control, before his physical motions caught up to the knowledge that fourteen years on the line brought to such a situation.
In stunned amazement, he watched that car do her dance. What had looked graceful at first, appeared suddenly violent, no longer a dance but now a seizure as the front and the back of that car alternately jumped P A R A L L E L L I E S
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left to right and right to left, and its boxlike shape disintegrated to something awkwardly bent and awful. It leaned too far, and as it did, the next car began that same cruel jig.
He pulled back the throttle and applied the brakes but knew it was an exercise in futility. The locomotive now roiled with a tremor that shook dials to where he couldn’t read them. His teeth rattled in his head as he reached for the radio. “Mayday!” he shouted, having no idea why. There were codes to use, procedure to follow, but only that one word exploded from his mouth. The cars rolled now, one after another, first toward the back then forward toward the locomotive, the whole thing dragging and screaming, the beauty of its frictionless motion destroyed. The cars tilted right and fell, swiping the trees like the tail of a dragon, splintering and knocking them down like toothpicks, the sky littered with autumn colors. And then a ripple began as that tail lifted briefly toward the sky. The cars, one coupled to the next, floated above the tracks and then fell, like someone shaking a kink out of a lawn hose. Going for the door handle, he let go of the throttle, the “dead man’s switch” taking over and cutting engine power. He lost his footing and fell to the floor of the cab, his brain numb and in shock. He didn’t know whether to jump or ride it out.
He would later tell investigators that the noise was like nothing he’d ever heard, like nothing that could be described. Part scream. Part explosion. A deafenin
g, immobilizing dissonance, while the smell of steel spark-506
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ing on steel rose in his nostrils and sickened his stomach to where he sat puking on the oily cab floor, crying out as loudly as he could in an effort to blot out that sound.
He felt all ten tons of the engine car tip heavily right, waver there, precariously balanced up on the one rail, and then plunge to the earth, the whole string of freights buckling and bending and dying behind him in a massive pileup.
He saw a flatbed fly overhead, only the blue sky behind it. This, his last conscious vision, incongruous and unfathomable. For forty long seconds the cars collided, tumbled, shrieked, and flew as they ripped their way through soil and forest, carried by momentum until an ungainly silence settled over the desecrated track, and the orange, red, and silver leaves fell out of a disturbed sky as if laying a blanket over the face of a corpse.
C H A P T E R
2
Six Weeks Later
Darkness descends quickly in December. In the flaming blue light of a camp stove, a man’s breath fogged the chattering boxcar as he struggled to warm a can of Hormel chili, the aroma mixing with the smell of oil and rust. The faint vapor of his breath sank toward the planking and then dissipated.
Umberto Alvarez thumped his fist onto the floorboards, the feeling in his fingers lost to the cold, and then cupped both hands around the small stove, wishing for more heat. The train rumbled. The can danced atop the stove. Alvarez reached out and steadied it, burning himself. Be careful what you wish for, he thought. The train’s whistle blew and he checked his watch. Nearly ten o’clock. The last significant slowing of the freight train had occurred ten minutes earlier, in Terre Haute. Alvarez had taken careful note of this, for at that speed, a person could get on or off the moving train—
important to know for any rider. His reconnaissance almost completed, this trip, Indianapolis to St. Louis, would be his last ride for a while. Thank God. Behind him in the boxcar, Whirlpool dishwashers 508
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were stacked three high, their cardboard boxes proclaiming Whisper Quiet as the rattle of steel-on-steel shook his teeth.
Middle of Nowhere Page 37
