Blackbird

by Tom Wright

  Mallory said, ‘So, Jim, ready to reach out to the masses?’

  I was about to answer when I saw Ridout making his way toward us from across the room, wearing a crooked little grin of defeat as he cocked and fired an imaginary six-shooter in the air. He tipped his head toward Chief Royal’s office as he joined us, Mallory smoothly transferring her attention to him, saying, ‘Well, looks like I get the bull rider instead.’ Her smile notched up a few watts as she inventoried Ridout’s muscles.

  ‘Steer wrestler,’ he corrected, his own expression brightening. ‘Bull riders are those crazy-eyed little dudes that walk crooked.’

  ‘Mallory, Danny,’ I said. ‘Danny, Mallory.’ I headed for OZ’s office.

  Nobody who’d worked out of Three for more than a day would have misunderstood Ridout’s six-gun gesture, which harked back to OZ’s thirty years with the Texas Rangers, an outfit founded by characters who hunted their man until they got him and didn’t talk much about it; silent, fearless, incorruptible men who never complained, never explained and never quit. Superstitious nineteenth-century border bandits and Comancheros, watching them ride alone through the true valley of the shadow of death, the only law in a quarter of a million square miles of the most dangerous ground on earth, called them demons.

  The hunt that had made OZ the Big Gun had ended on a hot, windy afternoon in Starr County, where he’d faced down four Mexican dope dealers in the middle of the street, he with the .45 Colt Single Action Army revolver he still carried as a duty weapon, they with their nine-millimetre automatics. They took their shots, he took his. One of their thirty-three cut a clean hole through the crown of his grey Resistol and another ended up in the heel of his left boot, but OZ, ignoring their fire and working left to right, took out all four of the shooters with consecutive heart shots. The people who’d known him longest said he could tell you the names of these guys and every other man he’d killed, except for the two he referred to as Mal Tiro Uno and Mal Tiro Dos, who’d floated away on the Rio Grande by the dark of the moon without having told anybody who they were.

  OZ operated without organisational charts or middle management. There were no file trays, staplers, pencil cups or tape dispensers on his desk, just his phone, a computer monitor, a picture of his late wife Martha, and the calendar blotter in front of him. He kept his files in his head, and to him ‘accessories’ meant his Colt, his saddle and his hat.

  I found him sipping coffee from a plain white mug as he watched me from across his desk – pink, clean-shaven jowls, what was left of his silver hair standing out in leprechaun tufts above his jughandle ears, sky-blue eyes as hard as tungsten. Behind him the walnut panelling was covered with photos of famous fellow Texas Rangers and other old-time lawmen, Hall of Fame Dallas Cowboys stars and big-game guides.

  I walked over to the nook where his coffee machine stood and sniffed what was in the carafe. It smelled better than dishwater, so I poured some into a plastic cup from the tray next to the machine, settled back in the black leather chair in front of OZ’s desk and took a sip.

  OZ said, ‘You done anything to get sideways with our city fathers that I don’t know about?’

  ‘Don’t think so, why?’

  ‘Got a call from Dwight Hazen this morning.’

  ‘The city manager? What did he want?’

  ‘Could be something, could be nothing,’ OZ said. ‘He’s jawin’ about a civilian review board, for one thing. Which is a piss-poor idea on a good day, and there ain’t no good days.’

  I shook my head, imagining a dozen petty bureaucrats micromanaging the department and fighting over the microphones at press conferences as they tried to position themselves in terms of sound bites, headlines and voting blocs. Calls to abolish the use of Tasers, demands for budget increases to buy more Tasers, new automatic weapons and sniper rifles to go with them, pleas for a return to God, detailed suggestions for rewriting the Constitution.

  ‘Then the cabrón got goin’ about you and that old graveyard collar,’ he said. ‘Wanted to know how I thought you were dealin’ with your “issues”, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean.’

  I heard three quick taps behind me, recognising them because they were the same three I routinely got at my own office door. Like OZ, I usually kept all of my phone’s mechanical and musical noises disabled, admittedly a hardship for Bertie, the head secretary, who was constantly having to huff her way back by shank’s mare to tell me to pick up.

  At OZ’s grunted invitation, Bertie stuck her head in the door. ‘Line four,’ she said testily. ‘For Lieutenant Bonham.’

  She glanced at my right hand, frowned at the square of grey sky showing through OZ’s window, then returned her gaze to me. I looked down at the hand myself as I stood to reach for the phone, made myself stop clenching and unclenching it, and raised the handset to my ear.

  It was Wayne Gaston with the Crime Scene unit. It sounded like he was out in the rain, meaning he must be at a scene somewhere. He said, ‘How about lookin’ at some evidence with me, Lou?’

  ‘What have you got?’ I asked.

  There was a silence, then, ‘Uh, that’s kinda what I’m askin’ myself right now – ’

  ‘Can’t you send me a shot with your phone?’

  ‘Sure would like to have you take a look in person.’

  ‘Not to jump to any conclusions here, Wayne,’ I said, biting back the unexpected impatience I felt edging into my voice, ‘but can I at least figure on somebody being dead?’

  ‘Eyes-on, boss,’ was all he’d say.

  TWO

  I loosened my tie and unbuttoned my collar, trying not to limp as I crossed the squad room to grab my gun and get a car. No new business on my desk, just the twenty-tens on a grill-fork stabbing at a family reunion out on the white end of Burnsville Road, and the potshot a one-legged combat vet on Maple Hill may or may not have taken at his neighbour’s cat last night with his AR-15.

  I checked the Glock’s chamber and magazine, slid the weapon onto my belt and went looking for Mouncey. I never drove when I went out on a call if I could help it because I wanted to see everything I’d otherwise miss by rolling up on the scene and parking the vehicle myself. There was general agreement at Three that Mouncey operating a motor vehicle was at least a metaphorical felony in itself, something along the lines of criminal assault against time and space, but she was always my first choice as a driver because she never had to ask where anything was, got us there fast, and up until now had always given the other traffic enough time to get out of her way. I found her at her desk picking through the old maids at the bottom of the bowl for the last few kernels of popcorn, and asked her to get us a car.

  She made the call, checked her own .40 and pulled on her tan leather jacket. ‘Where we goin’, Lou?’

  ‘Wayne’s at a scene.’

  ‘What he got?’

  ‘He wants to surprise us.’

  Ten minutes later we were out of the garage and headed north in the rain, which had lightened a little for the moment but was still falling steadily from a sky that now had taken on the look of heavy oilsmoke. Mouncey was decked out in tight pressed jeans and a lavender turtleneck under the leather jacket, with rings on every finger and what looked like a quarter of a pound of gold hanging from each earlobe. Her hair was piled up in ringlets that flashed with opal-coloured highlights. I knew that if we were out chasing leads or doing interviews there’d be nothing grabbable attached to her ears and nothing at all on the fingers of her gun hand, but on this call she was dressed for working inside the tape.

  The plastic ID she’d just used a corner of to winkle out a popcorn hull stuck between her incisors said Mouncey, Jacquanda S., Detective II-CID, but everybody called her M. She didn’t look much like police, but she had been a major-crimes detective for almost ten years and earned three commendations for things she’d done while being shot at, two of the shooters having had to settle for obituaries.

  Looking over her outfit, I said, ‘You put me in mind o
f a fleeing felon.’

  ‘The job just a day gig,’ she said. ‘Nights, I out perpetrating.’

  The passing landscape of miscellaneous storefront businesses started phasing into classier re-zoned conversions, upscale shops and finally older homes set back on spacious lots under mature oaks, sweetgums and longleaf pines, surrounded by acres of tailored, unseasonably green lawns with automatic sprinkler systems. Maybe money didn’t buy happiness, but it bought lots of grass.

  M said, ‘How the single life treating you, Lou?’

  Listening to the dull cardiac thumping of the wind-shield wipers for a minute, I took in a deep breath and blew it out along with the half-dozen bullshit answers that had occurred to me. I wasn’t much good at casual social lies and hardly ever wasted time or energy on them any more.

  ‘I don’t seem to be very good at solitude, M.’

  ‘Like to see the man that is,’ she said. ‘Y’all just be layin’ around suckin’ Bud Lite till you stufficate under all them dirty socks and pizza boxes.’ She looked at me with some expression or other for a couple of seconds before deciding to go directly for the throat. ‘Seen them two girls of yours waiting for they ride after school yesterday,’ she said. ‘Both of ’em lookin’ a little floopy, Lou.’

  The only replies that came to mind were defensively self-serving and useless, and I didn’t respond. Knowing Mouncey would have used one of the tac frequencies to talk to somebody on Wayne’s crew as she was bringing the car around, I said, ‘Get anything at all from out there?’

  ‘Uniform name Hardy catch it and buzz Wayne,’ she said. ‘Call from a pre-pay, sound like a white lady, most likely local, but wouldn’t give ’em no name. Crime Scene up there a half-hour now. It that field across the interstate, west side the tracks.’

  I visualised the area, which I remembered as being mostly deserted, and started pawing around in my pockets in search of camphor.

  Noticing this, Mouncey said, ‘Told me this a fresh one, Lou.’

  I stopped pawing and said, ‘Any civilians at the scene when Wayne got there?’

  ‘’Bout a bo-zillion of ’em, way he carryin’ on. Man just cain’t handle people jackin’ with his clues. I told ’em leave ev’thing like it is till we get there and e’body stay sharp cause the Man on his way.’

  ‘Why the hell’d you do that?’

  ‘Keep they sphincters tight,’ she said. ‘Discipline crucial, got a outfit like this one.’

  Humming a tune from ‘More Than A Woman’, she swung left through the red light at Hancock, setting off a massive chorus of horns and squealing brakes, made a hard right under the trestle and took Springer north between the lake and the wooded railroad right-of-way to the zigzag below the double bridges of the expressway.

  Coming out from under the vaulted concrete, we rounded the curve under a high billboard and saw what looked like every patrol car, fire truck and EMT unit in town parked at random angles along a quarter of a mile of the access road shoulder and out across the field wherever the ground was solid enough, their red and blue roof lights twinkling.

  ‘Be a good time to stick up the town,’ Mouncey observed. ‘Protectors and servers all out here gawkin’.’

  We rolled to a stop next to an Arkansas-side pumper and Wayne’s Crime Scene bus, and I climbed out. A hundred yards away at the edge of the pines and assorted oaks on the low bluff above the tracks several dozen uniforms along with city councilmen, courthouse civilians, off-duty fire-fighters and EMTs – basically everybody in town who had a scanner – were milling around and trying to look involved. Seeing Dwight Hazen among them surprised me a little, but I didn’t take time to analyse the feeling. Outside the yellow tape the media people, bristling with cameras, microphone booms and lights, stood around in knots and cliques looking restless and surly.

  They swarmed me as I bent to duck under the tape, video cams, flashing still cameras and microphones converging a few inches in front of my nose, all of them demanding information and comment. Sticking with the rule that when you know nothing, that’s what you should say, I tried to look reasonable and trustworthy but kept my mouth shut.

  The temperature felt like forty or so by now, with no wind to speak of, the rain still fairly light but coming steadily. Low streamers of mist drifted over the uneven yellow and brown weed-fields surrounding the site, almost obscuring an abandoned-looking storage warehouse a quarter of a mile to the west, leaching the colour and depth from the mixed hardwood and pine woodlands to the north and giving them the look of an old oil painting. If you didn’t know about the country club and the upscale suburbs beyond the trees you might think the scene was completely rural, but we were actually almost half a mile inside the city limits.

  As we worked our way up the slope toward the gathering under the trees, Mouncey picking her way along behind me like a deer, trying to keep the mud off her lime-green platforms, I caught sight of Wayne, suited out in white Tyvek, nitrile gloves and a surgical cap. He saw my wave, broke away from the group and came over to meet us. He was a tall, slightly awkward, middle-aged, east Texas country boy with a strawberry-blond moustache, wire-rimmed glasses and a flash-mounted Nikon hanging from a strap around his neck, like everybody else on his crew. To him the proposition that you could overspend on photography gear, or that there was any such thing as too many pictures, would have been nothing but crazy talk.

  ‘Howdy, M. Howdy, Lou,’ he said, a drop of rain hanging from the tip of his nose. Stripping off one surgical glove, he stuck out his big hand and we all shook. ‘Y’all ready to join the workin’ stiffs?’ He tried with no success to kick some of the clingy red clay off the surgical booties covering his size-thirteen Noconas.

  I took the gloves he handed me, pulled them on and looked around at all the people who thought Do Not Cross applied to everybody but them. Hazen and a younger man who looked like a staff gofer or maybe an intern of some kind were working their way toward us, Hazen locked in on me with a grim, concerned expression, the rain plastering a couple of spitcurls of dark hair to his temple. I had once heard somebody called ‘Joe College at forty’, and it wasn’t a bad description of Hazen except for being maybe five years low. The assistant, a sort of scared-looking, unfinished version of the city manager in a dark suit that I thought would have looked silly out here even if it wasn’t plastered to him like wet tissue paper, glanced uneasily back and forth between Hazen and me, trying to decide which flag to salute.

  ‘Uh, Lieutenant, I thought I’d get your take on this – ’ Hazen began.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said, wondering what it was about him that irritated me so much. ‘I’ll be happy to give you that as soon as I know something. Right now I’d appreciate it if both of you would wait behind the tape.’

  Hazen looked at me with a questioning expression, like a man who’s not quite sure he heard right, took in the kind of breath you do when you’re about to give somebody an attitude adjustment, but then apparently had second thoughts. He glanced back at the reporters, made a show of shrugging and flashing his let-the-man-do-it-his-way smile, then retreated, the gofer hopping from one weed clump to the next behind him until they reached the tape and stooped inexpertly under it.

  Turning back to Wayne, I said, ‘So what have we got?’

  ‘I’ll show you,’ he said, leading the way toward the medium-sized possum oak at the centre of what was left of the gathering, which now consisted mostly of Wayne’s crew, a dozen or so uniforms and a few EMTs waiting for their cue.

  ‘Don’t worry where you step along here,’ Wayne said. ‘We did all we could with the ground, but you know what that’s worth when it’s already trompled to pieces before you get to it.’

  I’m not sure what I’d expected, but this definitely wasn’t it. The oak’s lower branches had been hacked away with a heavy-bladed tool, probably a machete or axe, and what looked like a six-foot length of four-by-four had been lashed to the trunk with coarse-fibred rope to form a cross-beam. Pinned by two thick bridge spikes driven through the wr
ists, with several loops of rope binding the arms to the beam, was the corpse of a woman, head fallen forward as if she were looking down at us with dull eyes as we stood before her slack body. All my life I’d heard of corpses having expressions of horror or pain on their faces, reflecting the manner of death, but the job had taught me better. The only expression death leaves the dead is indifference, and that was all I saw in the woman’s features now.

  Stepping in for a closer look, I could pick out individual drops of rain refracting the light like jewels in her dark hair. A strip of silver duct tape that had apparently been placed across her lower face had been pulled back to expose the bloody mouth and chin. A torn and bloodstained ecru cashmere pullover sweater still covered most of her torso but she was naked from the waist down. The insides of her thighs were black with congealed blood. Her feet had been turned to the side and a third spike had been driven through the heels and deep into the wood of the tree trunk. More blood had run down from the arms and feet to form a black puddle in the wet grass.

  Wayne said, ‘Them spikes up there at the top went through between the radius and ulna just proximal to the carpals on both sides and didn’t cut either one of the radial arteries, even with all the struggling she did.’

  Looking up through the rain at the dead, grey face, I said, ‘I know her.’

  All eyes came to me.

  ‘It’s Deborah Gold.’

  ‘The psych doc?’ said Wayne.

  I nodded absent-mindedly, thinking about Jerusalem thieves, Texas psychologists, and dying hard. Dr Gold had been a department consultant at one time, mostly doing the pre-hire psych screening of new applicants, and she and I had a history.

  Mouncey squinted as she took another look at the face. ‘Believe you right, Lou,’ she said. ‘Look like some hard miles on her since then.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Especially the last few.’

  ‘Be damned,’ Wayne said, squinting up at the empty eyes.

  Lying in the weeds not far from the base of the tree I saw a pair of expensive-looking alligator shoes which, by reason of living mostly with women all my life, I knew were the kind called pumps. Bloody earlobes and grooves around three of the curled fingers meant the victim must have been wearing jewellery, which the killer had apparently taken while she was still alive. The hands themselves were fairly slender and long-fingered with what looked like a clear lacquer covering the well-manicured nails.