Jack of Spades

by James Hankins

  “Nice to see you, Oscar,” Spader said. “You’re looking good.”

  “Need to have your eyesight checked, John. I look like shit.” He laughed, then barked out a harsh smoker’s cough. Spader had to admit, he was right. He looked like shit. Spader knew he and Wagner were about the same age, putting Wagner around forty-one or so, but he easily could have passed for fifty-five. His hair, which Spader remembered being brown with a dusting of silver, had given up the fight and gone all gray—not a distinguished gray, though, but a dirty gray, the color of fuzzy mold on a rotten peach. And, Spader now saw, Wagner’s cheeks were a little gray, too. He had the pallor of a man who spent far too much time indoors, the only light touching his face for an extended period being the glow of neon from behind a bar. And those were the rumors Spader had heard. Wagner had always been a drinker and it had gotten him into trouble, but the word was that he was knocking back far too much for his own good. He was thin now, a thinness bordering on an unhealthy gaunt. And then there were his eyes. Tired eyes the color of calf’s liver left in the sun.

  “You waiting for me out here?” Spader asked.

  “I was. Thought maybe I could buy you a cup of coffee.”

  Spader looked down at the cup in his hand.

  “Shit,” Wagner said. “Wanna buy me a cup then?”

  He licked his lips. He looked nervous. Like he didn’t want to be there. Spader realized they were standing in the parking lot where Wagner used to park his car, where he used to walk from that car with his back straight and head high, before he was bounced from the job. “You probably got someplace you gotta be, right? You’re on a big case now, I know. Hell, I shouldn’t have come. But you never returned my call and—”

  “Oh, shit,” Spader said. “I’m sorry, Oscar. I got the message you called but I just forgot all about it. I’m really sorry.” And he had. The message had come in the day after Peter Lisbon’s murder and the little pink slip of paper with Wagner’s message somehow disappeared from Spader’s desk and his mind.

  “Don’t worry about it. Like I said, you’re busy. Maybe some other time, though, huh? Sometime soon. I’d like to talk to you.”

  Spader looked at his watch, somehow managing not to dump coffee down his shirt as he did. “Hell, the coffee here never got any better after you left, Oscar. Let’s go find a decent cup.” Spader leaned over, poured his coffee onto the pavement, and carried the empty cup to his car, two parking spots down.

  “Wait,” Wagner said, looking down at the car he was leaning against. “Isn’t this your car?”

  “No.”

  “Man, and I thought I was a detective. Can’t even remember which car you drove. No wonder they forced me out.”

  Spader knew it actually had a hell of a lot to do with the Eddie Rivers case, but he said nothing.

  Wagner sat across a small table from Spader, a Starbucks paper coffee cup on the table in front of him. He was pushing it back and forth between his hands, turning it this way and that, staring at the Starbucks logo, avoiding Spader’s eyes. The nicotine-stained fingers of his right hand twitched now and then. He hadn’t taken a sip of coffee. Wagner wasn’t overly fidgety, wasn’t acting like an alcoholic jonesing for a drink, but Spader suspected that it wasn’t really coffee Wagner would have liked to have in front of him.

  Spader took another sip of his own coffee and said, “So what’s up, Oscar? We haven’t really stayed in touch, yet you called a couple of weeks ago—again, sorry about not calling you back—then you show up today? Is there something I can do for you?”

  Wagner stopped fiddling with his coffee cup and stared down into its dark contents for a moment. “This is hard for me, John.”

  For a moment, Spader wondered if Wagner wanted to apologize for what happened two years ago, for the fact that his sloppiness started a chain of events leading to Eddie Rivers escaping punishment for all but a relatively minor offense, and for all the grief his mistake had caused Spader since then. But somehow, Spader didn’t think so.

  “Come on, Oscar, we’ve known each other, what, twelve years? More? What’s on your mind?”

  Wagner shook his head. “You know how they shoved me out the door here, John. That piece of shit Rivers walked on a technicality—the kind that happens all the time in law enforcement, by the way—and they needed a scapegoat. They needed someone to take a fall for it. And they chose me.” He paused. “Even though it wasn’t me getting it wrong up on the stand.”

  He was right, Spader thought, he had been the one on the stand, not Wagner, lying on the stand to cover Wagner’s ass, to undo the damage Wagner did. But Wagner was wrong about one thing. He had never been the public scapegoat, as he claimed. That role fell to Spader. And Spader did, in fact, feel largely responsible for what had happened. He knew that if he had done things a little differently, made different choices, the reviewing judge might not have found the warrant lacking. And Rivers would have been two years into his fruitless appeals to overturn or at least reduce his life sentence. But he also knew that a thorough internal investigation of the matter revealed that Wagner had consumed two beers shortly before drafting the warrant application. Was that enough to impair his ability to draft it properly? Spader had no idea. Maybe not. But who could know for sure? And Spader remembered that Wagner had been disciplined for drinking on the job a few years before they started working together. And that it may have happened more than once. For his part, Spader had never seen Wagner’s drinking affect his job performance before that terrible night, but that mistake was enough for the powers that be, it seemed—that, along with the earlier on-the-job drinking incident. So despite the part Spader might have played in convincing the judge to rule the search unconstitutional, and the fact that in the mind of the general public, Spader was the one who botched things, it was Wagner who was given a choice by the force: retire or be fired in disgrace. He wasn’t forced out because they needed a someone to take the blame publicly; he was given the option to retire with some measure of dignity or be ignominiously fired, because he’d drafted a warrant application while possibly being under the influence of alcohol, and the warrant turned out to be no good and a serial killer went free.

  “You’ve had a tough time, I know,” Spader said, because even though he didn’t totally agree with Wagner’s assessment of the cause of his downfall, he had to say something. “You’re working private security now, aren’t you? Walmart, is it?”

  “Was, until a couple of months ago. And it was Target.”

  “What happened?”

  “Bastards fired me. Accused me of drinking on the job.”

  “And you didn’t.”

  “Hell, no. I’d had one or two that morning, but I can hold my alcohol and believe me, I was fine by the time I clocked in. And anyway, Jesus, what, a little beer in me’s gonna stop me from spotting a snot-nosed kid sticking a DVD down his pants? Shit, I was a detective for thirteen years. I think I can handle a security job at a department store, beer or no beer.”

  “Sorry things worked out for you the way they did, Oscar. What are you going to do next?”

  Wagner snorted. “Yeah, well, I don’t have a ton of options at the moment. Serving and protecting’s about all I know how to do, and they don’t want me back on the force, that’s for sure, and I think the word’s out on me in the private-security field too, now, because I can’t even get an interview for entry-level jobs. Good old state police force really did a job on me, John.”

  Spader was tiring of Wagner’s failure to accept a shred of responsibility for his situation, so he said, “It did?”

  “Sure as hell did. One single mistake on the job, a couple of beers during a stakeout, no big deal. And that was how many years ago? A dozen? And nothing even went wrong. It isn’t like the suspect slipped by me while I was passed-out drunk on the dashboard of my car. No, nothing like that. Just some by-the-book cop relieving me smelled beer on my breath, saw two lousy empties in the back of my car, and turned me in. Asshole. I heard he isn’t even a co
p anymore. Wish I knew where he was living about now. Anyway, nothing goes wrong but they still discipline me. Suspend me without pay for a week, put that damn little note in my file. They did the same thing a couple of other times, too. Put notes in my file. It’s the fucking notes that really did me in. Everybody had forgotten that stupid stakeout issue and those other petty little shit incidents until the goddamn Rivers thing happened to me and they go into my file and see those fucking notes about my drinking.”

  Spader couldn’t believe his ears. The Rivers “thing”—and by “thing,” of course, he was referring to a guilty-as-all-hell serial killer walking on the serious charges and killing two kids shortly after his brief jail stay—had happened to him. Not to the victims Rivers killed after his release. But to him. Spader was shocked how far Wagner had fallen.

  Wagner was staring down into the black depths of his untouched coffee again, so he didn’t see the look in Spader’s eyes, a look of equal parts disgust and pity. “They could have treated me better, John. They could have chosen to go lighter on me. They could have ignored that first incident, seeing as nothing went wrong. They could have pulled me aside, given me a private warning, a little talking-to, like a schoolkid in the principal’s office, and let it go at that. Nothing official. But they chose to document it. Each time.” Spader noted that Wagner had now admitted, whether he realized it or not, to several on-the-job drinking incidents. “They chose to suspend me, to make their little notes a permanent part of my file. So when that Rivers thing happened and they were looking for a scapegoat, looking for an excuse to give me the ax, they jumped all over me with my ‘history’ of drinking affecting my job performance.” He caught Spader’s eyes and held them with his own. Spader thought they were asking again why it wasn’t Spader in his situation, instead of him. “Tell me the truth, John, you ever see alcohol affect my job performance?”

  Spader gave it a brief moment’s thought and answered honestly. “No, Oscar, I can’t say I ever did. But you—”

  “Exactly. But when I get caught with a little beer on my breath at Target, my ‘history’ of drinking on the job pops up again—a history I’m sure the state police personnel made Target well aware of when they called for a reference—and I get canned. You see what I’m saying, John?”

  “I’m not completely sure I do,” Spader said.

  “I don’t know either, I guess. It’s just that some bureaucrat sitting in an office, some desk jockey who never got his hands dirty, never had to wade through the human filth on the street like I did, gets to make decisions about my life, and the choices he makes about how to deal with me affect the rest of my life, even after I leave the job. I’m sure it was a different dickhead each time, but each time the son of a bitch chose to make it official instead of giving me a chance to straighten up without a fucking note in my file. Then one of them decides to suspend me without pay, and adds another goddamn note. Then the final asshole chose to make me the fall guy for the Rivers thing and I lose my job. Oh, yeah, then someone, probably the same prick who decides to can me, tells Target just why they bounced me from the force, so when there’s the faintest whiff of Bud on my breath at Target, I get fired from there, too.”

  “You know that for a fact?” Spader asked. “That someone with the state police told Target about your…your past?”

  “Not for a fact, no, but it’s obvious, don’t you think?”

  Spader didn’t see it as obvious at all. Frankly, showing up for a security job with beer on your breath should be enough to get you fired, with or without a history of drinking on the job.

  “Look, John, all I’m saying is, I’m tired of other people’s actions determining the course of my life. It ain’t fair. I put in too many good years serving the people of Massachusetts for the state to have cut me loose like it did. And now I can’t even get a fucking interview?”

  Spader wasn’t comfortable with this conversation. He didn’t like hearing Wagner talk like this, didn’t like seeing a good though flawed man reduced to the bitter creature before him, an ex-cop who had indeed provided years of good service to the commonwealth, but whose final mistake was a whopping one that contributed to the murders of at least two innocent people, perhaps more. Spader was saddened by what he was hearing when Wagner spoke, what he was seeing when he looked at the broken man.

  “Like I said before,” Spader said, “it sounds like you’ve had it rough. You called me a while ago and I neglected to call you back. What was it you wanted, Oscar?”

  Wagner hesitated. He cleared his throat. “Well, you know, I figured maybe you figured you owed me a little, for taking the fall for you like I did.” Jesus, Wagner was playing fast and loose with his facts today. “Not that I’m saying you owe me, but I thought maybe you felt that way.” Spader didn’t. “I also figured maybe you’d wanna do something about it.”

  “Such as?”

  “Tell you the truth, I didn’t even think of you until I saw you on TV at some crime scene. The one where that guy got his feet chopped off. That looks like a bad one, by the way.” Spader nodded. “Anyway,” Wagner continued, “I remembered when we were still working together, you were off-duty one night and you busted up a robbery at the mall.”

  Spader remembered. He had walked into a RadioShack shortly before closing and grew suspicious when ten minutes passed without him seeing a single employee. Sure, it was possible the guy was in the back room shutting things down for the night, but ten minutes seemed like a long time. Spader peeked into the back room and saw the legs of a man seated on the ground stretching out from behind a set of shelves. Spader drew his Glock, slipped into the storage room, and pointed his gun at a surprised punk who, without a word of prompting, dropped his .38 and raised his hands.

  “And?” Spader said to Wagner.

  “And I figured maybe they’d remember you.”

  “Who?”

  “The mall,” Wagner said. “Or the store manager. Where was it? Circuit City?”

  “RadioShack.”

  “Right, RadioShack. So I thought maybe they’d remember you and you could call them up, the mall security director or the RadioShack manager, and put in a good word for me. At least get me an interview. Anyway, I was thinking maybe you’d want to do that, if maybe you thought you owed me one. And I’m not saying you do, John. But maybe you think you do.”

  Spader didn’t think that at all, and he couldn’t in good conscience recommend Wagner for a security job. But maybe he could get him an interview. The drinking was a concern, though.

  “Oscar, if you’re still drinking, maybe you should think about a different line of work. I could talk to some people about a desk job maybe, or—”

  “Christ, not you too, John. I’m a cop. It’s what I do. And if being a rent-a-cop is as close as I can get to the real thing because some assholes who don’t even know me decide to fuck with my life, then I guess I’ll have to take it.”

  Spader didn’t like the look in Wagner’s eyes. They were angry, resentful, and Spader wasn’t sure all that emotion was directed at the “bureaucrats” whose decisions Wagner claimed had ruined his life. He also didn’t care for the way the man shot the blame around like a kid with a squirt gun, aiming it everywhere but at himself. But they’d worked together for years, been friends for years, and he couldn’t leave him without trying to give him some hope.

  “I’ve gotta run, Oscar,” he said, standing, “but I’ll make a few calls. See what I can do.”

  “Thanks, John,” he said, but what Spader heard in his head was, It’s the least you can do.

  SIX

  Two days went by without any progress on the Galaxo case. No efforts that were under way bore fruit. No new leads developed. On the plus side, no one else had reported having a body part hacked off by a cartoon alien. The Galaxo task force continued to make calls, pound the pavement, and get nowhere.

  Though the case was going nowhere, Spader tried to get his personal life in some semblance of order. Earlier in the evening, he’d called
Hannah, apologized for leaving her the way he did the other night, then ended their relationship, telling her that she was terrific, it was nothing personal, but he still loved his wife. She said she understood and told him that if things changed for him one day, if he ever felt differently, he should call. If she was still available, they could make another run at it. It was the most amicable breakup he’d ever experienced and he was tempted to call her back and ask her out again for that reason alone. If she’s so great to break up with, imagine how great she could be to get serious with. But he didn’t call her back. No matter how mature she’d proven herself to be, no matter how pretty and intelligent and sexually exciting she was, she still wouldn’t have Olivia’s eyes. Or her hair, her laugh, her beautiful-though-ever-so-slightly-lopsided grin, or her appealingly odd sense of humor.

  After hanging up with Hannah, he called his ex-wife. Something had come up the other day for Olivia, so she’d had to cancel their breakfast with David. They’d played a little phone tag during which each suggested new times and days to meet, and the best they could come up with was breakfast a few days later. So Spader was calling Olivia to tell her breakfast that morning would be fine, and that he hadn’t gotten a chance to go through his things but he’d look for her photo albums soon. She hadn’t been home, though, and in his attempt to keep any unwanted emotion from leaking into his voice, the message he ended up leaving sounded stilted and impersonal and he wished he could sneak into her house, erase it, and leave another. He might have done that if he wasn’t afraid of being caught in the middle of the night by Olivia and her new boyfriend, his arm around her waist, the two of them wearing nothing but goofy smiles and each other’s underwear.

  And now Spader lay in bed, the TV on his dresser broadcasting a message that read, “Our programming day has ended.” A miasma of thoughts and emotions swirled inside him, along with a bottle of Budweiser and two-thirds of another. He thought about Olivia and the good times. He knew there’d been some less-good times, but he was having trouble remembering them. He thought of Hannah, though fairly briefly, and certainly not as long as she probably deserved. Then he thought of Olivia again for a while longer. When the second beer turned into a third, his thoughts drifted on powerful currents, pulled almost against his will to a dark place—the place in his mind where Eddie Rivers lived.