Nothing to Hide (A Roland March Mystery Book #3)

by Bertrand, J. Mark

  The switch flips. I go cold.

  I poke my head into the hallway to be sure it’s clear. Then I race into the next office to the open gun safe. I torque the banana mag out of the Krinkov and grab a box of ammo. I start jamming rounds past the mag’s sharp metal lips. My hands are scraped, torn, but I keep loading. When the box is empty, I fit the mag into the little AK and pull the charging handle. The folding stock is already in place.

  Running now, confident, invincible, with the assault rifle’s butt in the pocket of my shoulder, I push through the office door, scanning left and right with the muzzle. They’re already downstairs, disappearing into the corridor at the end of the atrium.

  Adrenaline pumps through me, dispelling all pain. I glide ahead, descending the stairs in twos, sprinting past the fountain and into the corridor, with no thought but catching up to them, no thought but making them stop.

  I reach the entry. I can see the parking lot outside. The bright sun.

  Gunshots ring out.

  I throw myself into a crouch, slamming into a wall of mailboxes. But there’s no shattered glass. No one’s firing at me. I get up and take a few steps forward. Through the glass I see them outside. One of them, the muscled shotgunner, disappears behind an open car door on the far side of the lot. The one with the skull ring is just standing closer, between my own vehicle and the one next to it. His mask is hiked up over his eyebrows, his right arm extended toward the pavement.

  Outside, I advance in a crouch, my finger alongside the Krinkov’s trigger. His back is to me. Looking over the cars, I can only see his head and upper torso. As I hook around the back of my car, I see him clearly. My Kahr shines in his hand, the muzzle pointing downward. On the ground between his feet, lying in a tangle with his gun in one hand and a Five Guys bag in the other, Jerry Lorenz spits blood and glares upward at the coup de grace.

  “Police!” I scream.

  Skull Ring turns. We’re maybe four feet away from each other. I mash down on the Krinkov’s trigger.

  His gray T-shirt erupts in a pink haze, his body jerking wildly. He staggers backward, rolling, and I advance. The thump of the gunstock against my shoulder feels good and right. The man falls. The gun goes silent. It’s empty and smoking.

  A car screeches past us and I glance up in time to see the driver. Through the window I can see the outline of his unmasked face framed by a curly mane of hair.

  “March.”

  I throw the Krinkov down. Get on my knees beside Jerry.

  His chest.

  Two—no, three wounds. Thick, bright blood coming out in tidal surges, soaking his shirt. A line of blood down the side of his mouth.

  “Don’t talk,” I say.

  I put pressure on the wounds as best I can. I call for help. Traffic races past on Westheimer, oblivious to what’s happening.

  Underneath me, Jerry’s gone pale. His eyes have an unnatural brightness. He’s going. I scream for help again, afraid to take my hands off of him, afraid he’ll slip away if I do.

  “Come on, Jerry, don’t do this. Don’t leave me. You’re gonna be okay.”

  He tilts his head and spits, trying to clear his mouth.

  “Don’t talk. You don’t have to say anything.”

  He looks up at me. “My kid.”

  “I know, Jerry. It’s gonna be okay. Just stay with me.”

  His eyes bore into me. I keep talking, keep reassuring, and then my eyes cloud and my throat fills with phlegm.

  “Jerry, no.”

  Under my hands, his body is still.

  Behind me, I hear footsteps on the blacktop. A hand touches my shoulder.

  “We saw everything,” a man’s voice says. “We called the cops and an ambulance. They gonna be here soon. You better get out of here, man. The cops are on the way.”

  I shrug free of him. I slump against the car.

  “I am a cop.”

  He steps back, showing me his palms. “It’s cool, man.” Glancing down, his face goes blank and he starts retreating.

  I sit there, sticky with my partner’s blood, watching his wounds glisten in the harsh shine of the indifferent sun. My head tilts back. My eyes close.

  I long for the sound of sirens until they come.

  CHAPTER 9

  They find me in the long antiseptic breezeway, where the nurses left me half an hour earlier, working on my hands with a reddened towelette. I see them in my peripheral vision. Only one of them advances, his footsteps echoing on the glossy floor. The shoes come into view. Black wingtips with a military shine. He settles his weight next to me and sighs.

  “Getting yourself cleaned up,” he says. “Good.”

  He rests his hand on my shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “You don’t have anything to apologize for.”

  “Just when you were saying all your goodbyes—”

  “Shut up,” he says gently.

  “You didn’t get to talk to him.”

  “March, shut up.” The hand on my back feels so heavy. “He was a good man. A good detective. We all had our doubts in the beginning, but he worked out all right.”

  I can’t answer him. All I can do is nod. The silence between us is full of understanding. After a while he squeezes my shoulder and begins to rise.

  “There’s some people who need to talk to you. Some questions that need answering.”

  “I have a question,” I say. “What did Lorenz have to engage them for? Did the people on the scene say anything about that?”

  An air of hopelessness comes over him. “I don’t think anyone saw what led up to the initial shooting. We just don’t know . . .”

  More footsteps. I look up to find Bascombe there along with an assistant DA and a couple of plainclothes men I assume are from Internal Affairs. Behind them, several detectives from a different homicide shift. They’ll carry the ball on this, our own people being too close.

  As we walk down to the elevators, I’m wrapped in an inviolate bubble, nobody alongside or too close, like they see me as a piece of evidence at a crime scene, something not to touch unless you’re properly gloved. I don’t care.

  I don’t want them getting close.

  ———

  “This is not good,” the ADA says. “Not. Good.”

  Bascombe bristles. “Of course it’s not. It never is when we lose a man.”

  “I’m not talking about that, Lieutenant. One of your detectives walked up to a suspect and unloaded on him with a full-automatic weapon. They won’t even know how many holes are in him until they can search him during the autopsy. And there are witnesses who saw it all. There might even be footage from the pawnshop surveillance cameras.”

  “This isn’t an interrogation. Detective March is answering questions to help with the hunt for the suspect who got away. Anyway, the guy whose ticket he punched was about to shoot Lorenz in the head.” Bascombe looks my way for confirmation. I give him a mute nod. “Under the circumstances, what was he supposed to do?”

  For the interview, they’ve commandeered the ground floor all-faith chapel, positioning me on the front bench and taking up a semicircle of positions between me and the door. The other homicide detectives—the ones who actually need this information—stand in back, staring down at their notebooks, fully aware of the awkwardness of the situation.

  One of the Internal Affairs investigators breaks in. He’s in his mid-fifties and sports a healthy golf-course tan with light circles under his eyes and light stripes on his temples where his sunglasses rest.

  “My understanding,” he says, “is that your partner was actually killed with your side arm, Detective March. Is that correct?”

  “It was my backup. They took my weapons. That’s why I went after them.”

  “With an automatic weapon.”

  “I didn’t know it was full-auto. I’d seen it earlier in the gun safe, so that’s where I went. I had to load it first or I would have been quicker.” I glance at the cuts on my finger from pushing the rounds
into the magazine.

  “You didn’t call for assistance.”

  “It all happened so fast.”

  The ADA interrupts. “This is not good. Did you have to shoot him so many times?”

  “I pulled the trigger once. I wasn’t expecting to empty the clip. Like I said, it happened real fast. If it’s any consolation, he was on his feet with a gun in his hand. The ballistics will confirm that, too. I didn’t shoot him once he was on the ground.” Which is more than he had in mind for Jerry—

  “That’s it,” Bascombe says. “I think we’re done for now, unless you guys need anything more.” He glances back to the homicide detectives, who shake their heads. “Fine. We’ll do this for real once everybody’s had a chance to process.”

  But the IAD investigator isn’t finished. “One more thing, Detective. I know a lot of people are going to applaud your actions here. I’m sure you’ll get a few pats on the back for this. Whatever you were feeling at the moment, though, seeing your partner there on the ground, there’s such a thing as overkill. If you’re expecting us to rubber-stamp this, you’ve got another thing coming. That was your weapon used to kill Detective Lorenz. And if what you did to that shooter isn’t excessive force, then I don’t know what is.”

  He waits for an answer but nothing comes. I don’t have it in me to fight. All I can give him is a shrug and a shake of the head. It was my weapon. It was excessive force, at least in the sense that seeing your partner shot up in front of you is excessive. Seeing one of the assailants drive away without injury is excessive, too.

  Bascombe chases the others out of the chapel, turning at the door to face me. He claps his hands on my arms a couple of times, like he’s trying to impart his own strength to my sagging frame.

  “Stay strong,” he says. “We’ll get through this.”

  “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  “It can wait.”

  “I didn’t say anything to the first responders. And I wasn’t going to bring it up in front of those jackals just now.”

  His eyes narrow. “All right. What is it?”

  “I did get a look at the second suspect, the one who got away. He took his mask off in the car. As he drove past, ours eyes locked.”

  “And?”

  “I can’t swear to this,” I say. “He was behind a tinted window. But remember the photo we got from Bea Kuykendahl? In that file on Brandon Ford?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Well, that’s who it looked like to me.”

  ———

  When you’re put on administrative leave, they tell you it’s for your own good. You’ve been through something traumatic. It takes time to recover.

  Don’t worry about the job. Just focus on you.

  But none of this is true.

  The last thing I need is this. Time to reflect. Time to replay what happened over and over in my head. Time to dream it’s still in progress. Time to wake up in a cold sweat, my hands tensing as if I’m still firing the gun.

  It’s not for you. It’s for them. So they don’t have to see you. So they don’t have to think of something comforting to say. In grief you’re like the sun to them. In disgrace they cannot bear to look at you full on. So they tuck you away somewhere out of sight, telling themselves that one problem at least can be solved, if only for now.

  At home I lock all the doors and switch off the ringers on all the phones.

  I go to the stereo with a stack of CDs and a half-formed intention of choosing something appropriate to the moment, music to feed the rage in me, or alternately to quench it. The discs end up strewn in a half circle, their liners unfolded. Portishead first, quite depressing, but it’s too sterile and electronic. Too artificial. So I play Tom Waits full blast for two minutes until the gates of hell open up under me. Then I switch it off and pull the plug from the wall.

  Upstairs, I run the shower on cold until my whole body shivers and convulses. I stick my face under the spigot and imagine the water blasting it away like porous stone.

  I can’t do nothing.

  I won’t do nothing.

  Dressing in jeans and a black pullover and a pair of steel-toed Red Wings, I grab the gym bag from the closet safe and dump its contents on the bed. Two high-caps loaded with Speer Gold Dot hollow points slip into the spare mag holder, which clips to my belt. The holstered Browning, loaded with another high-cap, tucks inside the waistband behind my right hip, my shirt hanging over the butt. In front of the mirror I check to make sure the rig doesn’t print, then I draw the gun, punching my arm forward, making sure my hand doesn’t shake.

  Outside, it’s dark already, the night thick with cicadas and the smell of citronella and steaks grilling on the other side of the neighbor’s fence. In the back of my head, a thumping, cauterizing wail. Maybe from the album or from my roughed-up soul.

  I don’t know where to find Bea Kuykendahl now. She won’t be at her office, and I doubt she’ll be at her suburban country biker bar, either. If she’s heard about Lorenz, maybe she’ll be expecting me. Maybe she’ll make herself scarce. I will find her no matter what and I will make her reveal the truth.

  A man’s life is at stake, she said.

  She’ll eat those words.

  I wrench open the car door and drop behind the wheel. The sharp edge of the Browning’s cocked-and-locked hammer digs at my side. The spare mags on my left do likewise, and when I try to adjust them—there it is. The pain I’ve been fighting since the fall. The blade goes in deep and starts twisting. It saws back and forth in my vertebrae, slices down the back of my left thigh. Whatever I do to ease the pain only makes it sharper. I try climbing out of the car only to end up frozen in a crouch, the small of my back hollowed out.

  Whimpering, I stagger inside, making it up the stairs on fingers and toes. I unsnap the holster and pull the Browning out of my belt. I strip off the spare mags and leave them on the floor. On the bed, I inch my way up, straining my arm toward Charlotte’s nightstand where her old prescription sleeping pills are kept. I swallow two of them dry, feeling the capsules scrape down my throat.

  I roll over onto my back, wincing with every minute adjustment. The overhead fan is still. The room feels close and warm. Somewhere nearby I hear a faint sniffling, a soft wet gasping sound like a kicked and broken dog might make. Somewhere nearby, maybe even in this room. Maybe even on this bed.

  ———

  The IAD man was right about one thing. People I don’t know, mainly in dress uniforms, go out of their way to clasp my elbow, to pat my back, to whisper encouragement. They do it on the sly, and not just because of the funeral. We live in different times, when even if you reach the end zone, spiking the ball is no longer done. But the consensus is unmistakable. The man with the skull ring got what was coming to him.

  “I wish they would stop,” Charlotte whispers.

  She’s a vision in black, clinging to my right arm like at any moment she might have to hold me up single-handed. I stare at her until she frowns. She’s only a few hours off the plane and already back on duty. A cop’s wife. Bridger called her in England and she cut her trip short. I never would have asked her to, but I’m not complaining. I’ve been floating, all my ballast poured out on the ground. Now there’s someone here to grab my ankle and pull me back.

  I have no role to fulfill here, no casket to carry and no eulogy to give. I prefer it that way, though I was not consulted on the matter. From experience I know that tragedy has a way of marking a person, setting him apart, making others as reluctant to approach him as they would be to enter some awe-filled holy place. I should be invisible in this crowd, unnoticed, and if it weren’t for the fact that I’d riddled Lorenz’s killer with bullets, I would be.

  We file down one of the aisles—the anticipated crowd is so vast, the event was moved to the auditorium of one of Houston’s smaller megachurches—and disappear down a long, padded pew. As I stare down at the folded program, Charlotte spots people she knows in the crowd, wondering aloud if we s
hould go and join them.

  “There’s Theresa,” she says. “She looks pretty torn up.”

  I glance up briefly. Cavallo is half hidden under her husband’s arm, her eyes damp and sparkling, her mouth hidden under her hand. Maybe Lorenz had been right and she did think highly of him. She’d told me once they went to the same Bible study, though he’d never given any evidence of piety in my presence. While I’m watching her, José Aguilar catches my eye. He raises an eyebrow in acknowledgment, then nods. Hang in there. I nod back.

  It takes a long time for the mourners to enter, there are so many. All the brass is up front, and so is the new mayor and most of the city council. The shocking death of an HPD detective will not go unheralded, not on their watch. I realize for the first time that there will be speeches. I shift in my seat.

  “Are you still in pain?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “If you can’t sit through it all, we can always slip out.”

  “I said I’m fine.”

  I’m not going anywhere. I owe him that much at least.

  Near the front, weaving between the public officials, I see my old boss, Lt. Wanda Mosser, her white hair radiant. She shakes a few hands, managing to smile and look appropriately sober all at once. Two years ago she presided over the media fiasco that was the Hannah Mayhew task force, and even though it failed to find the girl alive, Wanda managed to use the opportunity to burnish her own reputation. Back in the day, when she’d come through the ranks, a woman couldn’t hold her own and be successful in this man’s world unless she was even tougher than the boys. Wanda had no trouble delivering. When she was angry, she had a way of looking at you like she might just slit your throat. I’ve been on the receiving end of that look, so I should know.

  Today, though, she’s just one of the brass. Nothing to prove except that she knows how to lend decorum to a solemn occasion. Which is not such a bad skill to have.

  The funeral lasts more than an hour, but it’s a good one. The politicians keep their remarks brief, relinquishing the spotlight to Lorenz’s family. His widow does not speak. Instead, his younger brother reads from a prepared script, mostly recounting how proud Jerry was to be a homicide detective and the only thing he loved more was his wife and their two-year-old son. I manage to get through this stony-faced, though Charlotte doesn’t. Then there’s music, an aria of some kind from a famous requiem I’ve never heard of, performed by a woman from the Houston Masterworks Chorus without even a hint of accompaniment or artifice. Her voice rings through the church, austere and beautiful, the words incomprehensible to me, most likely Latin. When she finishes, I realize for the first time that I’ve been holding my breath.