The Staked Goat - Jeremiah Healy

by Jeremiah Healy

  "Make him," he said, his voice more desperate than sharp.

  She straddled me and lowered her shoulders. Her mouth was even with my navel, her breasts assuming the outline of my crotch. She began to move very slowly. Fingertips, breasts, lips, and tongue. She was very good. I thought of Beth. And the tubes.

  I heard Ricker groan and rise partly from his seat. Jacquie moaned to him and worked harder.

  "He still no good." Now she sounded desperate.

  "Shit," said Ricker, standing up and reaching to his back pocket. He pulled out a clasp knife and tossed it to her. "Finish him, then. Any way you want."

  Jacquie opened the blade, slashing herself as she did so. She cursed, and the knife clattered to the floor.

  She pummeled me in the balls with her good hand. I clenched my teeth and built up toward a hell of a yell. Jacquie hopped off me and onto the floor to retrieve the knife. Ricker said, "The hell with it," and leveled his revolver on me.

  I heard the glass shatter but the tinkle of the shards was drowned out by the rifle coughing through its own silencer. Ricker's chest opened in three places, the size of peaches, as the high-velocity bullets tumbled through him. He dropped the revolver. One of the rifle rounds struck Jacquie in the shoulder as she straightened up with the knife. It knocked her off balance as Ricker dropped to his knees at her feet, his chest a fountain of blood.

  She shrieked something in Vietnamese as her knife hand went up. She got rattled by the rest of the shooter's magazine. She fell across my groin area, draped lifeless except for blood and the release of the continency muscles.

  I heard a door give way upstairs and more than one set of boots hit the floorboards above my head. Two MPs in combat fatigues preceded J.T. down the stairs.

  Kivens looked around at the mess and said, "God-damn fuck up."

  "I'm fine, J .T. Thanks for asking."

  He waved a hand at me absently and put the other to his face. "I know, I know."

  Nineteen

  -•-

  THE DRIVER HAD STOKED THE HEAT UP IN THE PARKED CAR. My shoes had been under the iron bed. Even wearing a pair of old Curl's fatigue pants and one of his blankets around me, however, I was still shivering. I also had a splitting headache. They had moved Ricker's pickup out of the driveway and replaced it with a nondescript Chevy van. There was a lot of quiet activity around the back of the van.

  Casey came over to our car. J .T. , who was standing outside, spoke to him briefly. Casey went back to the van, and J .T. got back in the car next to me. I still didn't have any real strength, or even feeling, back in my hands and feet. They had carried me out of the basement, cradled between two MPs like an oversized infant.

  J .T. asked me his twentieth question, which I answered the way I had the previous nineteen. By silence.

  "Jesus, John, you might at least have thanked Casey. That was a hell of a piece of shooting he did."

  I glared at J.T., then rested my head back against the seat to control my shaking. I hitched up the blanket a little.

  "John, please—"

  I broke. "You son of a bitch, J .T.! You pulled all those strings and called all those favors to get me a look at the files, and all the time you knew."

  "John, we didn't know in the way—"

  "Oh, c'mon, J .T. You knew like you were writing the script. You put me in that office like it was a clearing and I was a goat. You fucking staked me out to shoot a tiger."

  J.T. turned gloomy. "We didn't want to shoot him."

  "That's great. Terrific. Makes a big difference to the goat."

  "You don't understand, John. I don't know what happened to Al. Truly I don't. He was more your friend than mine, but I want to find out who got him, too. We've known for a long time that there was something going on with the noncoms all through the corps. The MPs, I mean. But we weren't sure just what. Some kind of world-wide network, linked in with the quartermasters and probably set up during 'Nam, or even before. For all we know, it's damn near eternal, passed on from one corrupt sergeant to the next, generation to generation. I was pretty sure Ricker was dirty because of his lifestyle. Not crazy or flamboyant, just higher than it should have been with his army pay. I thought he might be part of the network. We figured to let him take you and then tap his telephone calls."

  "You got a warrant for that?"

  J.T. screwed up his mouth. "C'mon, John, this is the army, remember? We clean our own laundry."

  "Go ahead."

  "Well, he used only pay phones and a different one each time. So we put a bug on the cellar window there, and we hoped he'd tip something while you kept him talking."

  "But all he did was confirm that he, and Curl, and somebody else was in 'the club'. ”

  "Yeah, I know." The gloomy look again. "And now we've got two unauthorized bodies."

  "What about old Curl?”

  J .T. waved his hand. "We haven't touched him. He'll probably come back here sometime tomorrow.

  He'll find a broken window and door and a lot of blood sort of clumsily cleaned up in his basement. Then he'll try calling Ricker to piss and moan about it. When he doesn't reach Ricker, maybe our luck will change and he'll call somebody else in the network. Or maybe he'll panic and run. Maybe even run to someone else in the club."

  "How do you plan to prosecute these boys with so much 'fruit of the poisonous tree' lying around in the form of wiretaps, and homicide, and—"

  "We don't prosecute, John. We just get 'em."

  I looked back over to the van. A subofficial graves registration. It all started to sink in."

  "Can you take me back to my hotel now?"

  J.T. tapped the driver, a slim blond MP in dress greens. "Go ahead, Squires."

  "Yessir." He shifted into drive, and we pulled away from the house.

  J .T. said, "You don't have a hotel anymore, or even luggage. Remember? Old Curl checked you out. I'll take you to a safe house we use sometimes. We can outfit and feed you there."

  And debrief me and debrief me and debrief me.

  "Fine," I said and started thinking again.

  Squires drove along the Interstate. I had a rough idea where we were. I saw a sign saying REST STOP, THREE MILES.

  "We're going to have to stop at that rest area ahead," I said.

  "John, we're only—"

  "Now, look, J.T., goddamn it!" I snapped. "I've been knocked out, shot up, and stabbed at, and I goddamn want to go to the head. A real head. Now."

  “O.K., O.K.," said J.T. "You're entitled, O.K.? Squires?"

  "Yessir?" '

  "Pull in at the stop."

  "Yessir."

  A few minutes later Squires swung the sedan off the highway and into the rest area lot. There were only two other cars and a brightly illuminated log cabin with a small RESTROOMS AND SNACKS sign. The MP parked curbside and turned off the engine. He pocketed the key. "Sir, if you don't mind, I'd like to go, too."

  "Sure, Squires. Go ahead."

  Good trooper, I thought. Knew enough to make coming with me seem his request rather than J .T. 's order. So I wouldn't feel "in custody." Squires was lifer material.

  We got out, me leaving the blanket and walking quickly but uncertainly to the cabin doorway. A fat man, who wore a park ranger uniform none too well, sat behind a counter marked "Tuckville Rest Area." He barely glanced up from a magazine as we walked by him.

  Squires held the door for me. I walked in and sagged a little against a sink.

  “You all right, sir?” asked Squires.

  "A little unsteady, but O.K. Thanks."

  "Yessir."

  I made my way to the nearest stall and clanged in. I dropped my pants, let out a groan, and smacked my hand hard, like it was my head, against the sidewall. I stumbled and shuffled to my left so that my right shoulder faced the door.

  Squires knocked. "Sir?" He gingerly pushed the door inward.

  I truly was groggy, and he was a lot younger and more recently trained than I was. I was slumped half against the toilet paper dis
penser, using my left hand to clutch the toilet seat.

  Squires leaned down. "Sir?"

  I swung my right elbow up and out as hard as I could. It caught him on the right cheekbone and snapped his head back into the part—open stall door. I rose up and gave him a short, quick left to the nose, and he caved in. I didn't think I'd broken anything on either of us.

  I buttoned up and stepped over him. I picked his pocket for his car keys and his holster for his weapon. I unloaded the weapon and dropped it into the next john. I clutched my stomach and dry-heaved my way out the door and toward the fat ranger.

  "Hey," I said breathlessly, "the soldier and I are both sick as dogs. I think it's food poisoning. We got a buddy in the car outside. Get him. Quick, quick!"

  The ranger bustled up and out a door next to the counter, the door locking behind him. As soon as he was outside, I grabbed a map and climbed over the counter. I unlocked and stepped out the back door, circling behind the cabin. I got around the corner just as J.T.'s heels disappeared into the cabin. The ranger was close behind him, snorting huge clouds of cold air.

  I chugged to the car, got in, and turned the key. I eased away from the curb and slid back onto the Interstate.

  The map showed a reasonably wide state road three miles on. I took it and headed east. Toward the town where a friend from college lived.

  Cockeysville. Cockeysville, Maryland. A name that stays with you. Arnie had sent a Christmas card from there every year since we graduated. With any luck, he still lived there, commuting to Johns Hopkins where he taught philosophy publicly and railed against the military-industrial establishment privately. As I drove toward the town, my mind kept switching around what I knew. From the photo in the file, I was pretty certain which case Al had stumbled on. The problem was, I couldn't see quite how. From his eavesdropping in the cellar, J.T. knew about the list, but if Jacquie had told me the truth, he wou1dn't find it. Still, he'd be able to reconstruct it, and the photo with the younger Ricker in it should tip him off. Al, however, hadn't had access to the files, so he must have found the bad guy some other way. Since I didn't have, or particularly care to have, access to J.T. and the army's computers anymore, I figured probably there was only one way for me to find Al's killer. The same way Al had.

  Whatever that was.

  I hit Cockeysville and pulled up to three phone booths before I found one that had a book. I had the book open, shivering in my blanket, before I realized that I didn't have a dime anyway. The address would do. Arnie, or Arnold. Neumeier. The Ds, the Ls, Na, Ne . . .

  There was something there, something fuzzy, vibrating in there with the headache and being muffled by it. My hands were shaking, and I was too tired to make sense of it.

  I found Arnie's address. I got back in the car and crisscrossed streets till I hit his. I knocked on his door just as dawn was breaking. After he got over the shock of my being there and my appearance, what little I could tell him confirmed his view of the armed services. He led me in his car to an all-night supermarket eight miles south, where we parked the government car. Then we drove back to his house. Arnie fed me and loaned me fifty dollars and some winter clothes. He dropped me off at a bus station over the Delaware line and said "for chrissake" to stay in touch from now on.

  I took a Trailways Scenic Cruiser to Providence, sleeping most of the way. I changed to the train and got off an hour and five minutes later at South Station in Boston. The cabbie told me it was 4:15 P.M. I thought about playing possum somewhere, but I needed more money and wanted a licensed weapon. I was willing to chance that J .T. or an allied paramilitary force had staked out my apartment.

  They needn't have bothered.

  The cabbie pulled to at stop and swiveled around with a shrug. "Hey, Mac. You sure you wanted Number Fifty-eight?"

  I nodded, more at the blackened rubble than at him. My whole building was gone. As in blown up and burned down.

  I had him drive me to Cambridge. I got off in Harvard Square, bought a "late stocks" edition Globe and had two screwdrivers in the Casablanca, an after-work and academic hang-out for the post-mixer set. I opened the paper. My building, or rather its destruction, made page one.

  The explosion occurred at 10:00 A.M. On the nose. No doubt of it, because the antiques dealer across the street was just setting a mantel clock when the blast shattered his front windows. The resultant tire raged for nearly two hours. The manager of the drycleaner on the street level was badly shaken. All the residential tenants save one were accounted for, miraculously out of the building during working hours. One body, badly burned, was found that seemed to match the missing tenant's description. Police were "withholding any names until a positive identification could be made and relatives contacted." Due to the suspicious nature of the fire, the arson squad and other authorities were investigating. There was a photograph accompanying the story. In the corner of the picture was a hulking black man I'd bet was Murphy.

  The anonymous tenant was, of course, me. The question then became, who was the guy everybody thought was me?

  I had two candidates.

  One was Marco. He'd gotten the Coopers. He'd try to get me. MO in the ballpark with explosion and fire. Marco just got careless with his implements.

  Second choice was old Curl. Maybe doubled back, half in the tank, to rip me off. Maybe thought of something else he should have done. Marco has visited in the meantime, however, and bad timing cashiers old Curl.

  I wasn't too broken up about either candidate. Whoever it was, however, I wanted to stay dead awhile. If Marco was dead, I still had to deal with Al's killer. If Curl was dead, Marco was alive, and I couldn't see any percentage in advising the elder D'Amico brother that he'd shot the wrong duck. To stay dead, however, would require some immediate action.

  TWENTY

  -•-

  IT WAS.T EASY GETTING THROUGH TO A RANKING POLICE officer when you refuse to give your name. I ascended the scale, slightly disguising my voice for Detective Cross when she picked up. If confidential informants help solve only a few crimes, it may be because they spend most of their lives on hold.

  "Murphy here. Who is this?"

  "Lieutenant, when I tell you my name, I don't want it repeated by you on your end of the line, understand?"

  "Shit. Mr. Lazarus, I presume."

  I almost laughed. "That's pretty good, Lieutenant, but at the moment my sense of humor isn't what it might be."

  "Christ, I can't see why. If I was you, I'd be jumping for joy about now."

  "Listen, Lieutenant, let me connect a few dots for you and then ask you a favor, O.K.?"

  "I'm listening."

  "Since I'm not dead, the unidentified man is probably Marco D'Amico or an army sergeant from D.C. named Curly Mayhew. M-A-Y-H-E-W, I think. I'm not sure that Curly is his real name, but it might be."

  "Go on."

  "I figure somebody rigged my place to blow like the Coopers. Either Marco or someone else."

  I heard some background conversation at his end. Murphy lowered his voice a notch. "I got a call from an ADA named Meagher who said you had Marco pegged for the Cooper killings. Where does the someone else come in?"

  "I'm not sure. That's the favor part."

  "Let's hear it."

  "I need to stay dead a couple of days. That probably means that the lab report on the body has to be delayed awhile. Maybe lost in somebody's in-box, but you'd know better on that."

  "Uh-unh, no way. I got Meagher on my ass on this one. She's been calling me every two hours since the office got word on the blast."

  "I can let her in, too. No problem. She'll stop pressing you."

  Murphy was silent.

  "Murphy?"

  "Yeah."

  "Can you help me out?"

  A shorter pause. "I don't like it. A body should be identified. Family and all."

  "I don't like it either. But I'm not aware that Mayhew has any family, and if it's Marco, well, his parents at worst think they have a son for a few more days."

&
nbsp; "I still don't like it."

  "I don't like a lot of things, Lieutenant. I don't like my apartment getting blown up, or my neighbors left homeless, or my best friend from the army getting killed, or—"

  "Awright, awright. But I got a job to do. And a job to keep, get me?"

  "I got you. But I still need a couple of days."

  Murphy grunted. "O.K. Two days. Then I've got to follow through. "

  "I really appreciate it, Lieutenant."

  "Yeah. Listen, I want to hear from you. Use this number."

  I wrote down the seven digits.

  He continued. "I want to hear from you tomorrow morning and tomorrow night. Got it?"

  "Yes. Thanks."

  "Bye-bye."

  "Oh, Lieutenant, one more thing."

  "Yeah?"

  "Can you lend me a few hundred bucks?"

  Murphy laughed, a good deep roar. "Shit, man, with your present credit prospects, I wouldn't lend you a dime unless you were a cat!"

  "As in nine lives?"

  "You got it."

  "Nice talkin' with you."

  I dialed the DA's office asking for Nancy Meagher. Telling her secretary I was Lieutenant Murphy, I was put right through.

  "Lieutenant?"

  "Sort of."

  “What?"

  "You see I was a lieutenant before I made captain, but I'm retired now, or discharged if you want to be."

  "Oh my God," she said, followed by a cough and a little choking sound. "Is it . . ."

  "It's me, Nancy. Safe and more or less sound."

  "Oh, God, just a minute .... "

  I could hear her smiling and blowing her nose. "John?"

  "Listen, I'm sorry for joking like that. I didn't—”

  "Oh," she said with one terminal sniffle. "That's all right. I'm . . . fine, now. What happened, who—"

  I repeated for her my suspicions about Marco and for Curly.

  "How does the army lit into all this?"

  "I can't tell you now."

  "What can you tell me?"

  "That I was pleased to hear you were ragging Murphy about me."

  A short laugh. "Besides that?"

  "Not much. Nancy, I'm sorry to have to ask this, but I need some money."