Brass in Pocket

by Jeff Mariotte

  Spotting a lightweight hammer, she yanked it off the shelf and went to the end of the aisle. It was a good weight, and she wouldn’t have minded having something like it at home. For the moment, though, she had a different use in mind. She cocked her arm back and Frisbee’d it through the air. It spun and spun (the rubberized handle throwing its arc off, curling it left and down sooner than she had hoped). It crashed into a shelf somewhere amidst the kids’ clothing and hit the ground with a raucous clatter. Shots came from somewhere off to the right—but not as far back as before, Catherine believed—tearing toward the sound.

  So the bad guys were on the move. Good to know.

  She was too.

  Ducking back to the far aisle, she continued toward the rear of the store. In the furniture section, tall bookcases and heavy desks offered cover. She used it to move closer to the store’s center. Catherine was pretty sure Jim was somewhere in the men’s clothing, sheltered by shelving units thick with denim jeans and cotton T-shirts. In winter he would have had more protection, with the fleece and hoodies and heavy coats out. No one bought winter clothes in Las Vegas in the summer, not with temperatures hovering in the triple digits. Maybe the occasional adventure tourist preparing for an Antarctic jaunt did, but those people didn’t shop at Select Stop Mart.

  Lowering to her hands and knees, she sighted across the floor and saw a shoe that seemed out of place. When she found the sock and dress pants connected to it, she knew it was Brass. She crept forward, making sure there were plenty of racks or shelving structures between her and the far side of menswear. “Jim,” she whispered. “Behind you.”

  He twisted, looking back over his shoulder. He didn’t quite smile, but acknowledged her with the arch of an eyebrow and a finger raised to his lips. She went closer, stopping behind a circular rack of dress pants. “Where’s Antoinette?”

  “She was in custody,” he said at a low whisper. “But they got here before me. They were taking her out when I showed up. The store security guard tried to play hero and they shot him. Then that other cop barreled in and they got him, too. Antoinette broke free during the shooting and I haven’t seen her since.”

  Catherine scanned her memory, but she hadn’t seen Antoinette leaving the store after the first gunshots she’d heard. She had stared long and hard at the woman’s picture during the night, and she had known Antoinette might be in the store, so she had studied each face coming out.

  “I think she’s still in here,” said Catherine, “unless she went out the back.”

  “No. We all started out in back. She took off into the front. We followed, and here we are.”

  “Backup should be here any second,” Catherine said.

  “I don’t hear any yet.”

  “I don’t either,” she admitted.

  She was about to ask if he had a plan when a voice sounded. She recognized Wolfson’s high-pitched tone. “I see you, Mrs. Blago! Hold it right there!”

  “Damn it!” Brass said. He burst from his hiding place and ran toward the voice, toward the rear wall.

  Instead of following, Catherine stayed low and dashed toward the front, cutting across to the center at the same time. She stopped in the boys’ department, breathing hard, her back against a solid blond oak cube holding shirt-and-tie combinations wrapped in plastic.

  From there, peering under the miniature suits, she could see Antoinette O’Brady, frozen close to a swinging door that led into the back area. Wolfson was close to her and moving in, his gun pointed at her head. Brass closed in too, but Wolfson had the advantage. Wolfson stopped with the barrel of his weapon just inches from Antoinette’s head.

  “Just put that piece on the ground, Captain,” Wolfson said. “And maybe everybody’ll come out of this alive.”

  “Look,” Brass said. “You know how it works. This place will be surrounded inside of two minutes. Then things get complicated. Nobody’s going to let you walk away, but if you hurt me or Mrs. Blago, then things get that much worse.”

  “Don’t listen to him!” another voice called. It didn’t sound like Tuva, and Catherine didn’t recognize it. “There’s already a dead security guard and two shot cops. How much worse can it get?”

  “Yeah, well, if you had hit her in the first place we wouldn’t be here,” Wolfson said.

  “If you’re going to kill us anyway,” Jim said, “then I got nothing to lose, do I?”

  Catherine didn’t like the way the conversation was headed. She decided to bring an end to it while she could.

  Brass had not shot at Wolfson while he was standing behind tall, voluptuous Antoinette. Catherine didn’t have much of a shot either—she would have to thread it under the boys’ suits and between a couple of CD racks. But Antoinette wasn’t directly in her line of fire. And Brass was right—these guys were in too deep to let anybody out alive. They had to close it down before backup came, which meant life spans were measured in seconds.

  She planted her bottom on the floor, feet spread for balance, and braced her right hand with her left. Took a deep breath and let it out again. Squeezed the trigger.

  Her weapon thundered and spat smoke and flame, and Wolfson’s leg exploded just above the knee. Blood splashed onto the floor. Wolfson swore, fired a wild round that spanged off a steel support post, and buckled, clutching at the wound. Gunsmoke stung Catherine’s nose and eyes.

  She rolled away from her position even as Wolfson fell. Someone unloaded two shots where she had just been, and a third chewed into the wood of the shirt-and-tie cube. She risked another glance and saw Tuva standing near Wolfson, staring her way. He saw Catherine and raised his gun. She ducked back just before he fired, and she felt the cube shudder under the impact of his shot.

  “Get me out of here, you no-neck bastard!” Wolfson said.

  “I gotta find them first,” Tuva said. “I know where that CSI is, but I lost the captain and Mrs. Blago.”

  Wolfson swore. Catherine moved away from the cube, ducking around a tall unit that held boys’ jeans on one side and little girls’ T-shirts and casual tops on the other. Movie, TV, and cartoon characters smiled down at her.

  From there, she caught a glimpse of Brass and Antoinette. He had her arm clutched in his left hand, his weapon in his right, and he was backing her toward the front of the store. Brass knew where Wolfson and Tuva were. But he had said there were three of them, and so far she had only seen the two dirty cops. Which meant there was another player somewhere—the one whose voice she didn’t know.

  Tuva made his move. He charged out of cover with a gun in each hand—probably he had taken Wolfson’s—firing wildly. Brass squeezed off a couple of shots and the big man cried out and went down hard, upending a rack of underwear and socks.

  “Come on, Antoinette,” Brass said, pulling her along faster. He made it sound more like a growl than an invitation. Catherine dashed to their side. “There’s another one somewhere, right?”

  “Somewhere,” Brass said.

  “Vic’s still in here, I think,” Antoinette said.

  “Vic Whendt?”

  Brass cocked his head toward Catherine and flashed her a quick grin. “I always knew you were good.”

  “Hey, it’s what I do.”

  “That was some nice shooting, too, Catherine. It’s almost like you do this for a living.”

  “This is a little outside my usual ballpark. But I’m always up for a change of pace.” In truth, she was shaken, her stomach like bunched fists. She knew this morning would take some time to get over. And they were far from done.

  Catherine recognized the danger they were still in. They had to make it out the front door, which meant crossing the open space between the merchandise and the cashier stands, and then past those to the doorway. She slanted her head toward the door, and Brass nodded his assent.

  He put one arm over Antoinette’s shoulders. Antoinette’s head was tilted forward, gaze on the floor, like she was afraid to meet Catherine’s eyes. Her body language was submissive, beaten. She wore a
low-cut white knit top and tight dark pants more appropriate for a woman half her age, and the coloring that Catherine had taken for a pattern at first glance, she now realized, was Deke Freeson’s dried blood. “I want to get her out of here,” said Brass.

  “It’d be easier if we knew where Whendt was.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Victor Whendt!” she shouted. “Your friends are done. It’s time to give it up!”

  He didn’t respond. As far as she could tell, he had left the store.

  But she didn’t honestly believe he had. If they got away, then he would be hunted down. If he could finish the three of them, he would have earned Blago’s gratitude and he would be rewarded. He could count on a secure retirement, out of the state or out of the country.

  There was little downside for Whendt in staying inside the store long enough to kill the three of them.

  “So much for that,” Brass said. “He didn’t bite.”

  Before stepping out into the open space, Catherine tried to scope out Whendt’s best shot at them. If he was in one of the aisles, he could swing out at any moment and open fire. But there were three of them, and he would be vulnerable in those first instants before he got his weapon into position, then again after his first shot gave away his location. She thought Whendt would have himself situated someplace from which he could fire as soon as they were in range. At the far end of the store were glass-fronted coolers full of beer, soda, and dairy products. She didn’t think he would be hiding in one of those—not for long, anyway—but if he was, she would never spot him from here. Light from the hanging overhead fixtures glinted off the glass doors, making them opaque from this distance.

  Her job was to see things others couldn’t. Usually those things were tiny, even microscopic. It was the seeing that was important, though, and the recognition, upon seeing, of what was out of place. A speck of blood, a sliver of skin, the faint parallel tracks of a fingerprint, a hint of soil on the edge of a shard of broken glass. She was good at it, because she had an organized mind that could comprehend patterns. When the pattern was disrupted, she had her target.

  Catherine tried to apply the same skills to this situation. She was looking at the macro picture rather than the micro, but the principle was the same. If Whendt was out there, watching for them to step from shelter, possibly already drawing a bead on her head as she hunted for him, his presence would break the pattern of orderly shelves and neat rows.

  When the first shots had been fired, people had dropped merchandise in their haste to flee. There hadn’t been many people in the store, but Catherine had already seen towels on the floor, a shattered bottle of juice, a spray of colorful greeting cards.

  Now she spotted an end cap display of dog food, big fifty-pound bags of it on the bottom shelf, smaller ones above. A couple of the big bags had slid partially onto the floor, and some of the small ones had been piled on top of the large ones remaining in place.

  That didn’t make sense. If someone had been starting to lift a big bag into a shopping cart when the shooting started, where was the cart? And if they dropped that big bag so that it, and maybe another one, had slid partway off the shelf, they wouldn’t have taken the time to stack small bags on the displaced ones.

  And they wouldn’t have arranged those small bags in such a way that there was a small gap between them and the back of the shelf.

  Catherine ducked back behind the rack that shielded them. “Pet food,” she said quietly. “He’s hiding behind some bags of dog food, maybe eighteen inches off the floor. He’s got a weapon aimed this way. If we step out, he’ll open fire.”

  “You got that CSI X-ray vision,” Brass said.

  “I try.”

  “Stay here,” he told Antoinette. He moved to the edge of the shelf, peered around the edge, and showed just enough of his weapon to get off a shot. He fired. Dog food sprayed onto the floor with a sound like a swift, sudden cloudburst.

  “Okay, Whendt!” he called. “Hide-and-seek’s over, and you lose. Now throw your weapon out here and show your hands. Do it now!”

  In the long silence that followed, Catherine heard sirens approaching. At last. Then a .45 automatic skidded out from behind the dog food, spinning across the slick floor. Vic Whendt came out next, hands in the air.

  “Put ‘em behind your head,” Brass ordered. “Get on your knees.”

  Whendt obeyed. Brass took handcuffs from his pocket and clipped them over Whendt’s wrists, holding his weapon on the big man the whole time.

  Antoinette waited with Catherine, finally meeting her gaze. There was moisture in her brown eyes and her lower lip quivered a little, but she squared her shoulders and held her chin up. Not proud, but trying for it. She knew the worst was over, for the moment. She also knew people had died because of her. No matter what had happened between her and Blago, that wouldn’t be easy to deal with.

  “You okay?” Catherine asked.

  “No. Not for a long time,” she said. “But I will be, I think. You know Jim, I take it.”

  “Yeah, for years.”

  “He’s one of the good ones, isn’t he?”

  “One of the best,” Catherine said. “They don’t come much better.”

  31

  CATHERINE AND BRASS held their badges high and walked through the phalanx of cops approaching the store. Brass turned Victor Whendt over to some of the uniformed officers, then put Antoinette into his unmarked car. Catherine explained that there were still two wounded cops inside, as well as a security guard who was either badly wounded or dead, along with two wounded suspects who were also cops. The police charged into the place, clearing each section, then allowed the paramedics in.

  While she waited for Brass, Catherine turned her radio and cell back on. Messages had piled up. Greg Sanders was being checked out by paramedics, having suffered light burns and some bruising and lacerations, but he would be fine. Jesse Dunwood’s killer, on the other hand, had not pulled through. Benny Kracsinski’s end had come about in the same place as Dunwood’s: in an airplane at the Desert View Airport.

  Dunwood’s death had been more peaceful. Small comfort, but some comfort just the same.

  Elsewhere, Nick and Riley were chasing a lead on Dawson Upson. Sam Vega and the LVPD backed them up. Catherine had been informed, but there was little she could do to help at the moment. Anyway, she still needed to talk to Brass.

  When Antoinette was in his sedan with the doors closed, Brass sauntered over to where Catherine waited, wearing a hangdog expression. “I guess I owe you an explanation.”

  “I guess you do,” she agreed. “And it better be good. I don’t mind saying you had me pretty worried.”

  He took her elbow and steered her away from where any of the police swarming the area now would be likely to overhear. “I don’t know how good it is, but it’s the best I’ve got.”

  “Is it the truth?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Catherine folded her arms over her chest and gave him the same face she showed Lindsey when she came home three hours late. He noted it and turned away. “I had to do one of those press conferences a few weeks ago, with the mayor. You know, when that toddler was found in a packing crate and we were trying to get an ID on her.”

  “I remember,” Catherine said. “Inez Balboa.” It had been the worst kind of case.

  “Right. Awful thing. Anyway, a couple nights later, I was leaving work, and this woman walked up to me. Blond, nice body, you know. My age. Dressed to show off. She looked vaguely familiar and I wondered if I’d arrested her once. But as soon as she spoke, I remembered who she was.”

  “Antoinette Blago.”

  “Except that I knew her as Antoinette O’Brady, most of a lifetime ago.”

  “You went to high school together.”

  He gave Catherine an appreciative glance. “I should have known you’d figure that out.”

  “You should have. Like you said, Jim, we’re good at what we do. We know you were in the motel room where Deke Fr
eeson was killed.”

  “I’m not surprised. Anyway, she had seen me on TV, at that press conference, and recognized me right off. We dated, back in the day. Pretty hot and heavy for a while there, during my senior year. It turned out that she had a taste for bad boys, and I mean real bad. I wasn’t enough trouble for her and she dumped me hard. When she came up to me that night, I thought she was coming on to me too, if you get my drift.”

  “I get it.”

  They started walking across the parking lot, toward Catherine’s SUV, still parked down by the gas station near Deke’s car and Liz Tavrin’s squad car. Brass’s shoulders were hunched, his hands buried deep in his pants pockets. His shirt and suit were wrinkled, but he had no doubt worn them all day and all night, so she wasn’t surprised. “I figured maybe she wanted to make it up to me, but it didn’t take long to realize that a roll in the hay for old time’s sake wasn’t what she had in mind.”

  “That surprises me. Sometimes for old time’s sake is the best reason there is.”

  He shrugged. “Guess I’m still not bad enough for her. Her latest bad boy, as it turns out, is Emil Blago. You know who he is, right?”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “He’s just about as bad a boy as they get.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “She’s been married to him for twenty-four years now. That’s about twenty-three and a half years too long, to hear Antoinette tell it.”

  “Why did she stay, then?”

  Brass moved his shoulders. “Why does any woman stay in a bad situation? Who knows? She had all the material things she could want. Blago was too fond of booze and dope and he screwed around on her, but he told her he loved her, gave her expensive gifts, nice trips, big parties, lavish presents. But she was always surrounded by crime, fear, and violence… some of it directed at her. She was afraid to stay and even more afraid to go.