Hard as Nails

by Dan Simmons

  Yasein Goba was sprawled half across the grimy tub in the little bathroom at the head of the stairs. The blood trail led there and ended there. Goba had been hit high in the right ribcage—the wound looked consistent with the nine-millimeter slugs O'Toole had loaded in her Sig Pro that Kurtz had been firing—and the man had poured his life's blood half into the tub and half onto the bathroom floor. The bottom of the tub was solid brown with dried blood. There was blood all over the sink and blood on the mirrored door of the medicine chest. Bottles of pills, rubbing alcohol, and Mercurachrome were scattered on the floor and broken in the bloody sink. It looked as if Goba had tried to find something to stop the bleeding, or at least something to dull the pain, before he fainted onto the tub rim and bled out.

  O'Toole's file said that Yasein Goba was twenty-six years old and from Yemen. Making sure not to step in the dried pools and rivulets on the floor, Kurtz crouched next to the corpse. The young man may have been an Arab, but the loss of blood added a paleness under the brown skin and tiny black mustache. His lips were white, his mouth and eyes open. Kurtz was no medical examiner, but he'd seen enough corpses to know that rigor mortis had come and gone and that this guy had probably been dead about forty-eight hours—since a few hours after Kurtz and O'Toole had been shot.

  Lying in the tub was a Ruger Mark II Standard .22-caliber long-barreled target pistol. The checkered grip was mottled with blood. Kurtz lifted it carefully, letting his gloves touch only the end of the barrel where there was no blood. He held it up into the light, but the serial number had been burned off with acid. He knew it had a ten-shot magazine and he imagined that the mag would be empty, or near so. Kurtz set the gun back in the tub where the grip had been outlined in dried blood.

  He stood and walked into Yasein Goba's bedroom. On a high bureau was a sort of altar—black candles, worry beads, and a blown-up photograph of Parole Officer Margaret O'Toole with the words DIE, BITCH written across it in red Magic Marker.

  On a cheap desk by the front window was a spiral notebook. Kurtz flipped the pages, noted the dated entries and the Arabic writing, but some passages were in scrawled English—"…she contenus to prossecute me!!" and "purhsed fine pistol today" and "the Zionist bitch must die if I am to live!" The last page had been torn out of the notebook.

  Some sense made Kurtz look up, pull open the filthy curtain a bit with the barrel of his .38.

  Kemper's and King's unmarked car had stopped half a block away on the next street over. They were approaching Goba's house the same way Kurtz had, and if it hadn't been for the bare trees and the angle on the alley, Kurtz couldn't have seen them even from this high up. Stopping behind the unmarked detectives' car were two black Chevy Suburbans. Eight black-garbed and helmeted SWAT team members carrying automatic weapons boiled out of the Suburbans.

  Detectives Kemper and King deployed the SWAT teams, sending them toward the house through alleys, backyards, and along the salvage yard fence. King talked into a hand radio, and Kurtz assumed that there would be more SWAT squads coming from the next block over to the south.

  Kurtz folded up the spiral notebook and slipped it into the cargo pocket of his jacket. Then he left the bedroom, went down the stairs, through the kitchen, down more stairs, and out the back door. Because of the slight angle of the backyard and the heavy rain falling, the first of the SWAT guys weren't visible yet.

  There was a rusted and abandoned Mercury at the back of this weedy strip, abutting the salvage yard fence and Kurtz ran at it full tilt through the rain and mud. He leaped to the hood, jumped to the roof, heaved himself up and over the fence, and dropped into the salvage yard about five seconds before the first SWAT team loped into sight, the black-vested gunmen covering each other as they ran, automatic weapons trained on the windows of the late Yasein Goba's house.

  * * *

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  « ^ »

  Kurtz stopped by the Harbor Inn to change out of his muddy, wet clothes and to oil his .38, and then he drove back to the office. It was almost dark now, and colder, and the October rain was coming down hard. The clubs, restaurants, and wine bars along Chippewa Street were beginning to attract patrons and every color of neon reflected on the slick streets.

  Arlene was at work, arranging weddings, receptions, wedding dress fittings, and wedding cake designs with happy brides all over the eastern and central United States, but she wiped all that from the screen, lit another Marlboro, and looked at Kurtz when he came in, hung up his leather jacket, and leaned back in his swivel chair. He pulled the pistol out of his belt in the back to keep it from digging into him, and set it in the lower right drawer next to the bottle of Sheep Dip scotch.

  "Well?" said Arlene.

  Kurtz hesitated. Usually he told Arlene almost nothing of his activities outside the office—much of it was illegal, just as this afternoon's breaking and entering of the dead Arab's house had been, and as far as he knew Arlene had never had so much as a traffic ticket—but she'd already broken the law last night for him, passing herself off as a County D.A.'s assistant, not to mention breaking and entering O'Toole's office and stealing her riles. So what the hell, thought Kurtz.

  He told her about finding Yasein Goba and the Yemeni's little revenge altar, about taking his diary, and about the pistol.

  "Jesus, Joe," whispered Arlene. "So do you mink it was one of your shots in the parking garage that got him?"

  Kurtz nodded. "We won't know for sure until the coroner digs the slug out and they run a ballistics test, but I know that I hit the first shooter."

  "So that's the motive," said Arlene. "He was mad at O'Toole for some reason."

  "I read just enough of his diary—the parts in bad English—to see that he blamed her for ruining his life, something about not being able to marry his childhood sweetheart because he was treated as a felon by the 'Zionist bitch.'"

  "'Zionist bitch?'" said Arlene. "Didn't this idiot know that O'Toole was Irish?"

  Kurtz shrugged.

  "Well, that ties it all up in a knot, doesn't it, Joe?"

  Kurtz rubbed his cheeks and then his temples. The headache felt like someone tapping, not very gently, on the back of his head with a two-pound hammer wrapped in a thin sock.

  "They weren't after you," continued Arlene. "You were just unlucky to get in the way when one of Peg O'Toole's crazy clients came after her."

  "Yeah."

  "There was nothing in O'Toole's file on Goba that suggests that he was hostile or angry at her—the last several meetings she had with him sound easy, even upbeat. But if he was crazy, I guess it makes sense. Maybe it even ties in to that old Lackawanna Six terrorist thing. There are some crazy people down there in Lackawanna."

  "Yeah."

  "Now you're free to investigate this other thing." Arlene waved her cigarette toward the map on the north wall with its twenty-two pins, seventeen red, five blue.

  "Yeah."

  "But you don't buy the Goba thing for a minute, do you, Joe?"

  Kurtz closed his eyes. He tried to remember if he'd eaten anything since the half donut with Rigby King at Broadway Market that morning. Evidently not. "No," he said at last. "I don't buy it."

  "Because you remember two shooters," said Arlene.

  "Yeah. I told Rigby King about the second guy when I saw her this morning."

  "If someone other than Goba was driving the car when it busted out of the parking garage, they'll probably find the bloodstains in the backseat," said Arlene.

  "The car wasn't there at Goba's," said Kurtz.

  "You said it was a rough neighborhood. And Goba had been dead two days. Car thieves were probably just waiting to pounce on a vehicle left unattended for two days."

  "Yeah."

  "You don't buy that either?"

  "I don't know," said Kurtz. "But I know there was a second man in the parking garage Wednesday. And odds are that the second man was driving the car when it crashed out Goba didn't get home by himself. I don't think he could even have got into the house
and up the stairs by himself."

  "You said you saw bloodstains and trails everywhere. His handprint on the kitchen door."

  "Yeah."

  "And you said it looked like he'd rummaged through his medicine chest hunting for bandages or painkillers?" Arlene exhaled smoke and tapped at one fingernail with another.

  "Yeah," said Kurtz.

  "Any strange footprints in the blood or extra handprints anywhere?"

  "No," said Kurtz. "Not that I could see. Whoever dragged him in the house made it look like Goba crawled in under his own power."

  "A friend maybe?"

  "Maybe," said Kurtz. "But why wouldn't a friend haul Goba to the hospital? He was hurt bad."

  "GSW report?" said Arlene.

  Kurtz knew that she was right Doctors and hospitals had to report gunshot wounds to the authorities.

  "I bet there are Yemeni doctors in Lackawanna who might've kept it quiet," said Kurtz. "I know for a fact there are medics down there that'll patch you up without reporting it. For a price."

  "Goba was poor."

  "Yeah," said Kurtz.

  "Joe," said Arlene, looking at the map with all the pins, "there's something you're not telling me about this heroin-addict killer situation. About why you agreed to work for Gonzaga and that woman, but why you don't want to do it."

  "What do you mean?"

  "There's something."

  Kurtz shook his head. The action made him dizzy. "Arlene, you want to order from that Chinese place down the street? Get takeout?"

  She stubbed out her cigarette. "Have you eaten anything today?"

  "Sort of."

  She made her snorting noise again. "You stay here, Joe. Catch a couple of minutes rest. I'll go down and order in person, bring something back."

  Arlene patted him on the shoulder as she left. The contact made Kurtz jump.

  He was half-dozing when the phone rang.

  "Joe Kurtz? This is Detective Kemper. I just wanted to let you know that it looks like we've found the man who shot you and Officer O'Toole on Wednesday."

  "Who is it?" asked Kurtz.

  "You can read about it in the papers tomorrow," said the black cop. "But it looks like the guy was just after Officer O'Toole. If we find any connection between the shooter and you, I'll be the first to let you know."

  "I bet you will," said Kurtz.

  Kemper disconnected.

  Kurtz took Goba's diary out of his jacket pocket and flipped through the pages. The scrawled entries were all dated, although Goba put the day first, then the month, and then the year, in the European manner. Much of it was in Arabic, but the English entries screamed out Goba's hatred of Parole Office "Zionist Bitch" O'Toole, how she was stealing Goba's future, keeping him from getting married, forcing him to return to a life of crime, discriminating against Arabs, part of the Zionist conspiracy, blah, blah.

  The entries were made in a hard-tipped ballpoint pen, which was good. Kurtz flipped to the missing page. Only a ragged fringe remained. He found a pencil in his desk and began gently shading the next, empty page. The impressions from the heavily pressed ballpoint came up immediately.

  Kurtz was asleep sitting at his desk when Arlene returned with the food, but she woke him gently and made him eat something. She'd brought two cold bottles of iced tea with the Chinese food.

  They used chopsticks, sat at Arlene's desk, and ate in silence for a minute. Kurtz slid Goba's spiral notebook across to her. It was opened to the pencil-shaded page. "How does that read to you?" he asked.

  Still holding her chopsticks, Arlene putted the notebook under her desk lamp and squinted for a minute, moving her glasses forward and back. "Letters missing," she said at last. "Lots of misspellings. But it looks like the final sentence reads—'I can't… live with…' something, maybe 'the guilt,' although he spelled it without a 'u,' and then, I must also die." Arlene looked at Kurtz. "Goba wrote a suicide note."

  "Yeah. Convenient isn't it?"

  "It doesn't make sense…" began Arlene. "Wait a minute. These numbers above the scrawl."

  "Yeah."

  "It's dated Thursday," said Arlene.

  "Uh-huh."

  "Didn't you say that there was no sign that he'd crawled into the bedroom, Joe? No blood trail there?"

  "That's what I said."

  "So his diary ends with the announcement that he can't live with the guilt of shooting O'Toole, and presumably you, too, and that he's going to kill himself. On the day after he bled to death."

  "A little peculiar, isn't it?" said Kurtz.

  "But that page was missing," said Arlene. She pushed the notebook aside and began spearing at her beef and broccoli. "Maybe you shouldn't have taken this notebook, Joe. The cops might have noticed the missing page and shaded in this last entry's imprint just the way you did."

  "Maybe," said Kurtz.

  "And they'd know that Goba's confession was a fake." She looked at him over the desk lamp and adjusted her glasses. "But you don't want them to know."

  "Not yet," said Kurtz. "So far, it's the only advantage I have in this whole mess."

  They ate the rest of the meal in silence.

  When he was finished and the white cartons were wrapped in plastic and tossed away, Kurtz stood, walked to his own desk, swayed slightly, shook his head, took the .38 out of the Sheep Dip drawer, and lifted his leather jacket off the back of the chair.

  "Uh-uh," said Arlene, coming around her desk and taking the pistol out of his hands. "You're not going anywhere tonight, Joe."

  "Need to talk to a man in Lackawanna," mumbled Kurtz. "Baby Doc. Have to find…"

  "Not tonight Your scalp is bleeding again—sutures are all screwed up. I'm changing the bandages and you can sleep on the couch. You've done it enough times before."

  Kurtz shook his head but allowed himself to be led into the little bathroom.

  The bandages were blood-encrusted and they pulled scab and scalp when Arlene jerked them off, but Kurtz was too exhausted to react. If the headache was a noise, it was reaching jackhammer and jet-engine levels now. He sat dully on the edge of the sink while she brought out the serious first-aid kit cleaned and daubed the scalp wound, and set clean bandages in place.

  "I have to see a guy," said Kurtz, still sitting, trying to visualize standing and retrieving his .38 and jacket. "Baby Doc will probably be at Curly's. It's Friday night."

  "He'll be there tomorrow," said Arlene, leading him into the office and pressing against his shoulders until he sat down and then flopped back on the old couch. "Baby Doc always holds court at Curry's on Saturday mornings."

  She turned to grab the old blanket they kept on the arm of the couch. When she turned back, Kurtz was asleep.

  * * *

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  « ^ »

  The Dodger liked Saturday mornings. Always had. As a kid, he'd hated school, loved weekends, loved playing hooky. Saturdays were the best, even though none of the other kids in the area would play with him. Still, he'd had his Saturday-morning cartoons and then he'd go out alone into the woods adjoining the town. Sometimes he'd take a pet with him into the woods—a neighbor's cat, say, or Tom Herenson's old Labrador that time, or even that pale girl's, Shelley's, green and yellow parakeet. He'd always enjoyed taking the animals into the woods. Although the parakeet hadn't been that much fun.

  Now the Dodger was driving slowly through rural residential roads in Orchard Park, the upscale suburb where the Buffalo Bills played their games out at that huge stadium. The Dodger didn't give the slightest damn about football, but sometimes he pretended he did when befriending some guy in a sports bar. Even the women in Buffalo were gaga over football and hockey and assumed everyone else was, too. It was a place to start with people when you were pretending that you were one of them.

  Orchard Park was mostly like this street—rural roads masquerading as streets, homes both large and small set back on an acre or less of woods. The house he was looking for was… right here. Just as described in the Boss's briefing
to him. This rural street ran along a wooded ridgeline and this house, strangely octagonal, was set thirty or forty yards from the road, all but obscured by the trees.

  The Dodger drove his van right up the driveway, not hesitating. There was no car parked outside, but the house had a garage so the car might be in there and she might be home. On the lawn, just as described in the briefing, was a stone Buddha.

  He parked the van in the driveway turnaround just outside the garage and jumped out, whistling, carrying a clipboard. The van was painted with a common pest control logo and graphic, and the Dodger was wearing coveralls and an orange vest, had a white hard hat over his Dodger cap, and he was carrying a clipboard. The old joke that you could go almost anywhere unchallenged with work coveralls, a hard hat, and a clipboard wasn't really a joke; those cheap props could get you past most people's radar. The Dodger's 9mm Beretta was on his belt, under the orange highway vest, holstered next to a folding seven-inch combat knife.

  Still whistling, the Dodger knocked on the front door, taking a half-step back on the stoop as he'd been taught. He'd take another half step back when the door opened, showing how polite he was, how non-aggressive. It was an old door-to-door salesman's trick.

  The woman didn't come to the door. The briefing suggested that she'd be home alone on Saturday, unless her boyfriend had slept over. The Dodger was ready for either contingency. He knocked again, pausing in the whistling to look around at the wooded lot and the view from the ridge as if appreciating both even on such a cold and cloudy October day. The air smelted of wet leaves.

  When she didn't answer a third knock, he strolled around the house, pretending to inspect the foundation. In the back, there was a cheap deck and sliding glass doors. He knocked loudly on the glass, taking a step back again and arranging a sincere smile on his face, but again there was no answer. The house had that empty feel that he knew well from experience.

  The Dodger pulled a multiple-use tool from his coverall pocket and jimmied the door's lock in ten seconds. He let himself in, called "Hello?" a couple of times into the silence, and then strolled through the octagonally shaped ranch house.