In Harm's Way

by Ridley Pearson

  “That’s different. Two options.” Kevin replaced the Kira figure with another, taller figure from the toolbox. “Six foot. Six-foot-one. Wouldn’t matter if it was two-handed or one. The length of the guy’s arms more than compensates. Slightly choked-up on the bat…” He completed setting up the scene and put the new figure into motion. The bat was lifted high in the air and came down squarely with the end of the bat impacting the top of Gale’s skull-exactly as McClure had suggested. “That’s a frickin’ bull’s-eye.”

  “Six foot. Six-foot-one,” Walt said, his voice giving away his relief.

  Kevin looked over his shoulder and into Walt’s face. “What’s up with that?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I didn’t say it was the only option, did I?” When Kevin got behind a computer he became arrogant. Walt considered reprimanding him but didn’t want to get into it with him. “Here’s the thing I forgot: tiptoes. When you really whale on a bat-” He scooted out, stood up, and demonstrated, rising to his tiptoes as he swung high overhead. “Okay?” Slipping back into the chair, he manipulated the laptop to replace the taller assailant with a slightly smaller one. The figure rose up onto bent feet and the bat came down, the impact perfectly reflecting Mc-Clure’s notes. Kevin highlighted some areas and made the assailant stand once again.

  Walt returned to his earlier thought: there were only two people living on the Engleton property. A minute earlier Kevin had all but ruled out Kira. “How tall?” Walt choked out.

  Kevin moved the cursor arrow to the top of the head of the assailant figure, and steadied it there. A yellow box popped up alongside the arrow containing the measurement: 172.7 cm.

  “Inches?” Walt asked dryly. He already knew the answer-his height when wearing a pair of boots.

  Kevin asked the software for the conversion. A new number filled the box: 68 in.

  “Five-foot-eight,” Kevin said. “Or more precisely, five-foot-eight on tiptoe-six foot, six-foot-one.”

  Walt remembered kissing her. Coming slightly off his heels to reach her lips.

  He thanked Kevin and politely asked him to leave, telling him he thought he could get him some compensation as a consultant, and Kevin saying how he didn’t care about getting paid when they both knew otherwise. The kid was carting bags at the Sun Valley Lodge and delivering room service. How long was that going to last?

  Walt shut his office door and returned to his chair and stared at the e-mail there waiting to be sent, his request for the fingerprint work. It wasn’t a matter of thinking clearly. He couldn’t think at all. The number, five-foot-eight, stuck in his head like a wedge, like a baseball bat to the top of his skull. Back to Kevin’s perfect storm: a smaller person elevated on a step at just the right distance from Gale; a taller person killing the man easily. But it was the last option that wouldn’t leave his thoughts, the last option that had been building like a tsunami inside him.

  He hit Enter and the computer made a swishing sound indicating the e-mail had been sent.

  “Some cases don’t get solved,” she’d said to him. “Some cases go cold.”

  At the time, he’d thought she’d been protecting Kira.

  36

  Brandon, his stocking feet up on the trailer’s small coffee table, his hand in a bag of white corn chips, and his eye on the Mariners’ fourth inning at bat, spoke through a full mouth.

  “I think you two should talk.”

  Gail, paying bills at what passed for the kitchen table, didn’t look up. “We talk.”

  “I’m just saying-”

  “And I’m telling you we do.”

  “Maybe we need to think about getting a bigger place.”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s going to happen. I can barely pay the electric.”

  “Maybe you need to think about what we talked about.”

  Still not looking up, she continued writing out the check. “Maybe you need to get some overtime.”

  “There’s a freeze. You know that.”

  “Then some security work. You know how many people up here have bodyguards?”

  “You want me working eighteen hours a day? Seriously?”

  “There’s nothing out there for me. You think I’m going to wait tables or something?” She pushed the pile of checks to the edge of the table. “You need to sign these.”

  Brandon’s cell phone rang from the back bedroom. He struggled to standing, spilled the chips, and pushed past her to reach the phone before the call went to voice mail. It was the little nuisances that bothered Tommy Brandon-voice mail catching calls, lawn mowers that wouldn’t start, birth control interrupting the act, the bathroom counter being cluttered with beauty products. He could leave the wars and the economy and illegal immigration to others. Just give him a remote control with a button that worked.

  “Yeah?” he barked into a phone that looked toylike in his big hand. “Bonehead? Slow down! That’s better. Now? You’re sure? Yeah, it’s worth something. Don’t do anything. Don’t say anything. Go back to flipping burgers and leave this to me.”

  He slapped the phone shut and right back open. Hit a speed dial key. “It’s me, Tommy. Bonehead says our guy is at the Casino right now. A pal of his bartends there, called him. Suspect’s got a burger and beer in front of him-Yeah, five, seven minutes, max…” He moved quickly down the trailer’s narrow aisle and found the black windbreaker hanging on a peg by the door-SHERIFF, it read on the back in bold yellow letters. He returned to the small bedroom, his ear pinched to the phone, and wrapped his gun belt around his waist, buckling it. “Okay, I’ll call it in… I’ll wait. I promise.”

  The phone went into his pocket. He kissed her on the top of her head as he swept past her. His hand was on the door.

  “Later.”

  “Your vest!” she said.

  He kept it behind the front seat of the pickup. He paused there at the front door for a second, thinking that only the ex-wife of a cop would have been able to decipher what was going on based on one end of a phone call.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Be safe. Nothing stupid.”

  As he ran to the truck, he was wondering if this was how she’d sent Walt out the door all those years, if she hadn’t simply traded him in for a newer model. It made him feel cheap. It made him relive a dozen conversations that the sheriff had started, some completed, some not. A Twilight Zone moment as he stepped into another life, a life different from the one he thought he’d been living.

  “Jesus,” he muttered to himself as he yanked open the driver’s door and climbed behind the wheel. He pulled the door shut as he backed out. The tires yelped as he throttled down. He fished the Bluetooth device into his ear and got the phone dialing.

  “Officer in need of assistance…” he said, running a stop sign and fishtailing out onto the two-lane highway.

  He forgot all about the vest behind the seat.

  “Just one?” Brandon mumbled to himself as a Ketchum Police Department cruiser pulled to the curb and parked across Main Street. Ketchum’s nightlife scene was confined to this two-block stretch of bars and restaurants bookended by traffic lights. Tourists milled outside the establishments and jaywalked to join friends on either side. The Casino’s A-frame, appropriately pushed a few yards back from the other buildings on Main Street, as if shunned by the mainstream population, was not for the faint of heart. Nor was it for the tourists. If Ketchum had bikers, this was where they’d go. It served as home for the hardcore drinkers, the barflies, and the locals who preferred tattoo-revealing T-shirts. The women wore their shirts tight and their lipstick red. Some nights you could bowl a frame down the center of the place, and then there were nights like this when it looked like a convention was under way. The Allman Brothers shook the exterior wall as Brandon approached the establishment’s doorway, which was open to the night air.

  His backup was positioned at the Casino’s rear door in case the mountain man made a break, but he had no description to give the cop, no way for this guy to discern one person from the next. An
d when a cop-or in his case, a deputy sheriff-entered a place like the Casino, it would be like shining a flashlight under the fridge-the roaches were sure to scatter.

  Brandon stepped through the door and pressed his back against a bulletin board covered in flyers for secondhand fishing boats and twelve-step groups. He kept the yellow lettering to the wall. Kept the windbreaker zipped to his navel, just high enough to hide the gun belt. At six-four, he had a clear view over the heads of the customers, five deep and crowding the bar, of the pool table in the back and the line of deuces to the right. Two guys sitting at separate tables had empty red plastic baskets in front of them, the deli paper stained with oil and catsup. Either could be the mountain man. Practically everyone in the place could qualify given the beards, the sweat stains, and the unkempt hair.

  Brandon searched the three behind the bar-two guys and a girl-all moving calmly but at light speed, to address the needs of the customers. The beer taps remained on, a plastic cup or mug replacing the last and catching the next. Horse piss, Brandon thought.

  He’d hoped for eye contact with one of the male bartenders, was surprised when the hard-faced woman connected with him and cocked her head just faintly to her left indicating the second of the two at the tables. Brandon didn’t acknowledge, knew better than to connect her with himself.

  Just for an instant, he remembered his vest behind the seat in the truck. Heard her voice reminding him. Just for an instant he considered going back to get it.

  “Howdy, Deputy!” a male voice called out loudly from Brandon’s left, offered as a warning to the clientele. It came from one of the bartenders, a guy named Stone whom Brandon had once arrested for breaking the windshield of his girlfriend’s car with her mailbox, uprooted with a forty-pound ball of concrete on the business end. While Stone’s warning didn’t cause a mass exodus, some of those in the room froze, and a few slinked away. Both the men sitting in front of the red food baskets stayed rooted in their seats. Neither so much as looked up.

  Brandon didn’t move. He wasn’t going to have a bartender dictating how this went down. He checked his watch: the sheriff could arrive anytime in the next few minutes. Maybe another backup or two. He liked those odds much better than two-to-one. He adjusted the Bluetooth in his ear, hoping it might ring, hoping the sheriff was close.

  Despite Stone’s broadcast, despite the wandering eyes, not many had landed upon him. Maybe no one cared; maybe those that did were now gone. What he didn’t like was the collective cool of his two suspects against the far wall. Not so much as a twitch from either.

  His Bluetooth purred. He touched the device and connected the call. “Yeah?”

  “I have a runner in custody,” the KPD cop announced.

  “Lose him,” Brandon said softly.

  “Say what? He’s cuffed and on the way to the cruiser.”

  “No, no, no. Lose him. Return to post.” Brandon ended the call. Moron. The sin was not arresting the wrong guy, but leaving his post. He’d lost his backup.

  He pulled the phone from his pocket and speed-dialed.

  “Fleming,” came the sheriff’s voice in his ear.

  “Your twenty?”

  “Just passing the hospital. Five minutes.”

  “I make my move and the front door goes unguarded.”

  “Got it.”

  “My backup vacated the back. I’m wide open here.”

  “Do you see our boy?”

  “Yeah. Could be one of two I’m looking at.”

  “Does he see you?”

  “It’s a work in progress, Sheriff.”

  “Hold tight, Tommy. You hear me? For once, hold tight.”

  “It’s about to go down. I’d love to be wrong about that.”

  “Me, too. Two minutes away. I’ll take the front.”

  “Out.”

  He slipped the phone back into his pocket. Felt the bulge of his handgun in the holster. Remembered the vest behind the seat in the truck. Was that what was stopping him? he wondered. Had he allowed Gail’s warning to wedge into the cracks that held duty in place over the mortal fear that always existed? The noise of the place was getting to him. He found a mirror behind the bar that allowed him to monitor both men without facing them.

  The man at the second table, the one farthest away, reached beneath the table, and Brandon’s right hand sought out his own gun up under the windbreaker. The guy held a wad of bills, not a weapon, and Brandon saw what appeared to be a neat stack of hundreds with smaller bills in the fold. The man peeled off a ten and a five and left them on the table, returning the money to his pocket.

  The man stood, and Brandon saw it too late. The guy fired a single shot into the ceiling. Everyone in the room ducked at the same instant. All but Brandon, all but the one man trained not to duck. He was reaching for his own sidearm as the second bullet was fired.

  Brandon was jerked to his left. It was a hot, searing pain, but not overwhelming, the way he’d imagined it might feel. He felt his breath catch, instantly light-headed. Heard a car door out there somewhere and knew it was the sheriff. Wondered if the sheriff had heard the shots.

  The man who’d shot him-their mountain man-swung a chair through the window alongside his table, raked a leg of the chair along the lower edge clearing the shards of broken glass, and jumped through and out onto the sidewalk.

  The sheriff came through the door, taking one step past him, and rose onto his toes, immediately seeing the broken window.

  “Here,” Brandon coughed out, slouching toward the floor.

  The sheriff spun around. “Damn it!” he said, holstering his weapon and reaching out to catch his deputy. “Some help here!” He reached for his radio clipped to his uniform. Brandon heard, “Officer down. Request ambulance…” He fought against the purple ooze at the edges of his vision, fought against the image of the muzzle flash from the handgun. That burst of light occupied his thought, had overtaken him.

  “Stay with me!” he heard.

  The sheriff? He wasn’t sure where that had come from. His brother? A priest? No white light. No journey through his lifetime memories. Only that dark purple rim flooding in from the edges like a spreading pool of blood. That, and a penetrating cold. A cold like no other. The cold of fear. The cold of the unknown. Of outright terror. There was no warm wash of love. No angels. Just that cold dragging him down and unrelentingly pulling him out of sight.

  Walt was heading to the Jeep to follow the ambulance to the hospital, when he glanced back at the Casino and the swarm of deputies now involved in the crime scene. He thought it ironic and unacceptable that when a deputy needed backup, one local cop showed up on the scene; but when a deputy was shot and wounded, the place was lousy with law enforcement. He had to turn that around.

  Climbing into the Jeep’s front seat, pushing Bea’s wet nose out of his way, he caught sight of the chair in the sea of broken glass out on the sidewalk. One of the bar staff, broom in hand, was just approaching the tossed chair.

  Walt slipped out of the vehicle and shouted, “You! Stop! Yes, you!” He moved at a run toward the spread of broken glass.

  “Stand back, please,” Walt said.

  “I clean up broken glass all the time, Sheriff. I’m good,” the guy said. “I’ll be careful.”

  “It’s not that,” Walt said, again amazed that a dozen deputies and local officers could be on the scene and none within shouting range, none paying any attention to the actions of their superior officer. Things needed to change.

  “Deputy!” Walt hollered.

  Three appeared within seconds: one from the other side of the broken window, and two from around the corner at the back of the club.

  “Gloves,” Walt said, addressing the nearest, Kramer, on the other side of the missing window. “I want this chair collected and bagged. I want it handled by the edges of the seat-not the back, not the legs. Are you clear on that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “See if they have a clean garbage bag-”

  “No prob
lem,” said the Casino employee, leaning the broom against the exterior wall. “You want me to get one?”

  “Better get two,” Walt said. “Go on.” He explained to his deputy how he wanted it done, how he was to treat the chair as a murder weapon. That the deputy would personally be responsible to log the chair as evidence and then to transport it to the Meridian lab the following day for a full fingerprint analysis.

  “And I want every shard of glass collected by hand as well. The glass on the sidewalk, and the broken glass in the frame. I want it placed in a bag-plastic-and sealed and labeled. It goes with the chair to the lab and they’re to test for blood evidence.” Pointing through the window, he said, “There’s a toothpick in that food basket that may have come out of the mouth of our shooter. It’s to be DNA-tested at the same time. Anything they get is to be run through every database known to man. One of our own was shot tonight, and while it doesn’t look as bad as it might have been, we are on this. Cross every t, dot every i. No procedural screw-ups on this. You double-check everything you do before you do it. You do it right the first time. We owe that to Tommy. Are we good?”

  “We’re good.”

  “So someone pull some tape here and cordon off the crime scene inside and out. Somebody act like a sheriff’s deputy for a change, would you please?”

  The two at the end got moving, as did Kramer. Walt considered apologizing for the outburst. It was born more of concern for Tommy Brandon than the failures of his men.

  But he didn’t correct himself. He rushed back to the Jeep, hoping he’d put the fear of God into his team. Marveling at how Brandon’s being wounded had so deeply affected him.

  37

  From the moment Gail entered Emergency, Walt sensed she blamed him for the shooting. She didn’t say as much, but she didn’t have to. The first look she gave him he interpreted as, “How could you?” and the second, “I’ll bet you’re just loving this.” He didn’t need a translator. He’d lived with her for over a decade.