Junkyard Dogs

by Craig Johnson

  I patted his hand and then immediately felt like a fool for doing it. “I’ll get it for you.”

  I filled the paper cup Janine gave me, and when I came out of the bathroom Isaac Bloomfield was waiting. “Changing of the guard?”

  “I understand you were Maced last night?”

  “Pepper spray.”

  He stood up on tiptoes to examine my face. “Your eye looks irritated.”

  “Pretty much all of me is irritated lately.”

  The Doc looked around the corner and down the hallway. “I’m assuming you want to know about the Lorme woman?”

  “I do.”

  “She was beaten up pretty badly, and she’s suffering from exposure. Where did you say she was?”

  “In the pump house of his cabin, farther up the canyon and down by the stream.”

  The Doc shook his head. “She’s going to be all right, but I was thinking of sedating her. I know you wanted to speak with her and thought this might be a good time.” He rubbed his long nose. “Then there’s the dead one.”

  “What about him?”

  “I’m doing the preparatory phase of the postmortem to save that young man from Billings a little time, and I think you might want to have a look at the late Mr. Polk.”

  “Oh, now, why don’t I like the sound of that?” How many times had I said that lately?

  “When you’re through with Ms. Lorme, I’m in room 31.”

  “The much vaunted room 31.”

  When I got back to the waiting room, Saizarbitoria was sleeping what looked like peacefully on the sofa. I put the water on a nearby table and fetched a pillow and blanket from the linen closet around the corner; I tried not to dwell on how intimate I was with the workings of Durant Memorial Hospital’s emergency wing.

  I didn’t want to disturb the Basquo so I put the pillow beside him and covered him up with the blanket. I stood and looked out the windows; the visibility had dropped to the point where I was starting to question whether my eye was getting worse or whether it was that I just didn’t want to see anymore.

  “So, you’d never seen him before last night?”

  “No.”

  “Never at the bar?”

  She was shaking her head before I’d finished the question. “No.”

  “Did he say anything while you were with him? Anything that might help us figure this out? Anything at all?”

  Carla bore more than a passing resemblance to her younger sister, and Claudia enhanced the kinship by sitting on the chair at her bedside. “He made a phone call while I was tied up in the car.”

  “With a cell phone?”

  “No, it was at a pay phone.”

  I moved a little closer and sat on the foot of her bed. There was a large bruise running the distance from her jaw line to her temple, a terrific split at her lower lip, and the marks on her wrists where he’d used zip cords. “Where?”

  She shook her head but stopped. It must have hurt. “I don’t have any idea. I mean I was tied up with a pillowcase over my head and was on the floor. I couldn’t see anything.”

  “How long did he drive after he put you in the car?”

  She thought about it. “I don’t know.”

  “Ten minutes?”

  “No. More.”

  “Twenty?”

  “Yeah, about twenty. Twenty minutes.”

  “He didn’t go anywhere else, just straight up the mountain?”

  She focused her eyes on me, sad that she couldn’t help. “I don’t know.”

  “It was a V6 Jeep. Was the motor straining to go up the mountain?” She nodded. “Then maybe it was the pay phone at the South Fork Lodge. Did you hear any other voices while he was stopped?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  It was only a little better than nothing.

  When I got back out to reception on my way to room 31, Saizarbitoria was still asleep, but Vic was waiting for me. She’d gotten the pillow under his head and held the Basquo’s duty belt and Beretta.

  I spoke in a whisper. “He wake up?”

  She whispered back. “Yeah, but then went right back out.”

  “Give you any fight about surrendering his sidearm?”

  “No.”

  It was state law that after a shooting, the officer had to hand in his/her weapon until a formal review had been completed. I sat beside her, and we both looked at him. “Just what he needs, to be on temporary leave right now.”

  She shrugged. “I figured I’d save you at least one shitty job.”

  “Thanks.”

  She unsnapped the safety strap on Sancho’s semiautomatic. “At the risk of cheering you up?” I looked at her. “He came through.”

  “Yep.” I smiled as I watched him sleep. “He did.”

  “How close was it?”

  “Very close.” I croaked a nervous laugh. “How stands the kingdom?”

  “Amazingly quiet.” She glanced out the window and into the maelstrom—it looked like heaven’s comforter had ripped loose. “It’s Saturday and snowing like a bitch, so the citizenry has shown a noteworthy amount of common sense in staying home.”

  “I love Saturday blizzards.”

  “Me too.” She sighed. “We do have one visitor back at the office.”

  “Who?”

  “Gina Stewart. She says she wants to talk to Duane, and she wants you there.”

  “Great. I get to hold her hand while she tells her husband that she’s having somebody else’s baby.” I yawned. “I’m going to need you to call up South Fork Lodge and see if Wayne or Holli Jones spoke with Felix Polk or overheard the conversation he might have had there last night.”

  “Anything else?” She leaned toward me, bumping her shoulder against mine. “The ME is probably parked at the rest stop near Pryor Mountain, but his office says he’s on his way as of about an hour ago and just think, we get to reintroduce Felix Polk to his thumb.”

  “It’s the little things on the job that make it all worthwhile, isn’t it?”

  She smiled up at me with the wolflike tooth evident. “You know, I think I’m rubbing off on you.”

  About forty comments leapt to mind, but I let them all pass. “Could you call Ruby and ask her to make sure Gina stays in the reception area? After that, if you want to tag along, Isaac’s doing a pre-examination on Polk.”

  “Oh, joy.”

  I stood. “I need to talk to Duane before Gina does.”

  She increased the wicked smile she reserved for special occasions and stood beside me. “Well, he’s remarkably available.”

  One of the pre-mort procedures consisted of examining the body externally and getting the clothes cut off before rigor, if possible; consequently, Felix Polk now lay on the metal tray with no thumb and no clothes.

  “What do you make of that?” The Doc folded his arms and stood by the small parts dissection table.

  “He’s hung like a fucking cocktail sausage.”

  The Doc and I looked at her as she shrugged Sancho’s duty belt farther onto her shoulder. “Well, he is.”

  What Isaac Bloomfield was referring to was the amount of intricate tattooing that covered the majority of the man’s body. “Prison tats?”

  The Doc gripped his chin. “I’m no expert, but I would say yes.”

  I turned to Vic. “Go get the Basquo.” She departed without further comment, and I turned back to Isaac. “Anything else abnormal that you can see?”

  He shook his head. “Textbook center shot. I would imagine his death was relatively instantaneous. Why?”

  I studied the tattoos on Felix Polk. “We didn’t take photographs, and we transported the body. I just don’t want there to be any abnormalities that might lead anyone to be asking questions about the action Sancho took.”

  He nodded. “You’ll get a clean bill from me. You have the weapon Polk was holding when Saizarbitoria dispatched him?”

  “I do. An antique Luger, locked and cocked, and if he
hadn’t done what he did it would be me lying here on the table, unsuited and unbooted.”

  The door opened, and Saizarbitoria followed Vic in. He was yawning but stopped when he saw the body of the man he’d killed.

  “I wouldn’t bring you in here, but with your time at Rawlins you’re the closest thing to an expert that we’ve got.”

  He stood there for a moment more. It may very well be the case that confronting the body of someone you’ve killed is the hardest thing on earth to do. I watched him as he stood there, his foot on the gas but not moving. You convince yourself that what you did was the right thing, but there’s that hard, cold fact that of all the things you can do as a human being—this is one you cannot undo.

  He stepped closer, swallowed, and leaned over the corpse. “Definitely state, possibly federal.” He peered at the numerous shapes and designs. “Some of these are freehand, others are machine.”

  Isaac looked at him. “I didn’t know that they have tattoo parlors in prison.”

  The Basquo shook his head. “They don’t. The inmates make them out of a toy slot car motor, a hollowed- out ballpoint pen, a guitar string, and a nine-volt battery. It’s a crono, 115.” He looked up at us, aware that we had no idea what he was talking about.

  Vic, of course, asked. “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “A written infraction to give or get tattoos inside.” His eyes returned to the body. “These things can tell you everything about the man if you read them correctly.”

  “Such as?”

  “Who he is, where he’s from, what he’s done . . . Everything. I’ve seen guys stupid enough to put their DOC numbers on themselves.”

  There was a particularly extravagant heart with flames and three-leaved shamrocks, unfortunately near the bullet hole in the man’s own heart. “Does the AB stand for what I think it does?”

  He nodded. “Aryan Brotherhood, the white supremacist gang.”

  “What about the spiderwebs with the FP?”

  “Those are his initials, and the webs represent doing time. The tombstones on his chest stand for the years he was inside.”

  I pointed at another one with a star and more tombstones. “That one?”

  “Huntsville, Texas, the numbers mean from ’78 to ’83.”

  “SWP ?”

  “Supreme white power.”

  “SB ?”

  The Basquo shook his head. “I don’t know, but we can cross-check the online systems.” He indicated another batch of symbols. “The stone wall with railroad tracks here means San Quentin. Again, the numbers mean he was in from ’85 to ’97.”

  Vic chimed in. “Thank you, Johnny Cash.”

  I studied the dead man. “That’s a long stretch.”

  The Basquo continued. “That’s where and when the Aryan Brotherhood began, so I guess we have a founding member here.” He shrugged. “They don’t take to wannabes. If you bullshit your tats, they skin them off you with a razor-blade and a pair of pliers.”

  Vic seemed only mildly impressed. “Wow, the George Washington of Nazi fuckheads.” She fingered the dead man’s arm, where a pistol pointed out. “That means he’s a shooter?”

  “Yeah. It’s odd that his tats end at his wrists and neck. This guy wears long-sleeved shirts, and you’d never see any of it.”

  I was getting an education. “That’s not the norm?”

  “No. They usually have stuff all over their hands, and sometimes on their faces.” He took a deep breath and touched Felix Polk for the first time, then looked up at Isaac. “May I?”

  “By all means.” Isaac stepped forward and assisted him in turning the body.

  The tattoos continued over both of the man’s shoulders and ended with a woman’s face. She was crying, and there were three teardrops. “Someone was waiting for him on the outside, and I’d say the drops are the number of kills.”

  “Three?”

  “Yeah, one for the stretch in Quentin and another in Huntsville.”

  “The third?”

  He shook his head. “Who knows? One where he didn’t get caught, maybe.”

  Sancho and the Doc turned the corpse back over as I came around the other side to face Saizarbitoria. “This is the kind of guy who would kill someone if a multimillion-dollar weed operation went bad?”

  The Basquo’s voice echoed off the stainless steel. “In a heartbeat, and I’m willing to bet that not only was Polk providing the knowledge for the venture, but he was also in charge of the buyers. Blood in, blood out. These guys are heavy into drug trafficking, extortion, and pressure rackets. I bet he was producing for the entire AB. Usually you have to do a hit just to get in and then members are actively expected to score for the others in custody.”

  I sighed. “Isn’t he a little old for this stuff ?”

  Santiago looked at him. “Not really. . . . ”

  I stuffed my hands into the pockets of my coat. “I’ve only got one question then.”

  The Basquo shrugged. “The partial thumbprint gave us nothing from the national records; Vic’s verbal request on a name search must’ve popped up in Travis County but nowhere else.”

  “That wasn’t my question.” They were all looking at me as I continued to study one of the few portions of Felix Polk that held no information—his face. “How did Ozzie Dobbs meet somebody like this? And more importantly, how did he think he’d survive being in business with him?”

  Nobody answered.

  Especially not Polk.

  The auxiliary baseboard heaters had kicked on in the jail to combat the extra-cold temperatures as Gina and I stood in the hallway.

  She said she’d gone over and talked to Mrs. Dobbs. “You’ve been busy.”

  She put the cigarette I’d forbidden her to smoke back in the pack and stuffed it into the pocket of the pink parka. “Yeah, well . . . I just wanted to get it off my chest.”

  “All of a sudden?”

  She shrugged. “Ozzie’s dead, and I’m scared.”

  “Of what?”

  Her brown eyes grew large in sarcasm. “Of being dead, too.”

  “Why would anyone want to kill you?”

  “Because I’m carrying Ozzie’s child?”

  I sighed. “I don’t think there’s very much of a chance of anyone coming after you for that.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re pretty sure that the individual who killed Ozzie did it because he was involved with Duane’s marijuana operation.” The next part was only slightly misinformative. “And we’ve taken a man into custody.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Fellow by the name of Felix Polk. Ever heard of him?” The response was predictable. “No.”

  “You never heard Duane or Ozzie mention that name?”

  “No.”

  “If I get you a picture of him, can you tell me if you’ve ever seen him?”

  She sighed in exasperation, kind of like Cady did, but without quite the intelligence. “Why don’t you just introduce him to me?”

  I paused, wondering if I really wanted to add to the death count in Gina’s head. “He’s indisposed.”

  “What’s that mean, he’s in the bathroom?”

  I figured the hell with it. “He’s dead.”

  “Oh.”

  From her response, he might as well have been in the bathroom. Other people’s deaths didn’t seem to make much of an impression on Gina.

  I needed to talk to Duane, but so did she. The problem is, she wanted me to be a part of her conversation, and I wasn’t too keen on the idea. On the flip side, I wanted her to be a party to my conversation, and she didn’t seem interested in that. We were at an impasse, and the only answer was a very emotionally messy round robin.

  “I am going to speak to Duane before you go in to talk to him.”

  “Why do you get to go first?”

  “Because what you’re going to say to him is going to be like an atomic bomb, and I’d just as soon get some answers before it goes off.”

  She folde
d her arms. “You think it’s that big of a deal?”

  I stared at her; I couldn’t help myself. “That you’re having another man’s baby? Yep, I think that’s going to put my questions on the back burner.”

  She shrugged again; the shrug really was Gina’s art form.

  “Duane, we know you had a partner in your little 4-H project and, since things have gotten more serious, I’m going to need you to tell me who that was.”

  He glanced at his young wife seated on a folding chair to my right and then back to me. “I didn’t have a partner.”

  I sighed. “Do you remember that talk we had about this conversation?”

  “Huh?”

  I nodded in an attempt to get him to remember. “The one about coming back here and having another conversation where you weren’t quite so guilty?” He was nodding along with me now. “That would be this conversation.”

  He stopped nodding. “Oh.” He paused and looked at his wife again, and it was almost as if he had to try to remember. “Ozzie, Mr. Dobbs, had the money.”

  I pushed my hat back and scratched my head. “I figured that one out, but I also need to know who had the know-how.”

  “Ozzie did. He had these equipment books and all this other stuff that told you how to do it.”

  “What kind of stuff ?”

  “Notebooks.”

  I rested my elbows on my knees and leaned in. “I don’t suppose you know where those notebooks are?”

  “Nunh-uh.”

  I threw a glance toward Gina; the response was predictable—she shrugged.

  I clasped my hands together and tried not to think about Sancho’s remark that the two in front of me weren’t likely to be clever enough, collectively, to overturn cows. “Did Ozzie ever mention a guy named Felix Polk?”

  “Nunh-uh.”

  He really seemed pretty much incapable of lying. “So you’ve never heard that name before?”

  “Nunh-uh.”

  Unfortunately, I believed him.

  I cleared my throat. “Duane, I think Gina has something she wants to tell you.”

  15

  “What do you mean it’s not the gun that killed him?”

  “It’s not a match. I’m sending it off to DCI, but I did the prelims on the lead after McDermott dug it out of him and the markings are nowhere near the same as the one I tested—besides, Polk’s gun was a 9- millimeter and the one that killed Ozzie was a .32.”