by Brian Hodge
He was no criminal. Really, he wasn’t.
He’d only played one on TV.
2
ANOTHER dead cop was just about Andy Connolly’s least favorite thing in the world. You could walk onto the scene and smell the testosterone in the air. Everybody taking it personally, but for their own reasons. Everybody wanting their hand in on it, hungry for their own piece of the shooter. Hoping that the guy would try to fight it out when they caught up with him.
Andy was the first investigator from the state to arrive, although it looked as though he’d been beaten here by half the locals, the Gulp ’n’ Go lot packed with a contingent of La Paz County vehicles. He left his own car near the road, less likely to get a fender dented, and hoofed it across the asphalt.
The gas pumps had been cordoned off with a wide perimeter. Andy aimed for the young uniformed deputy who appeared to be keeping the log of who entered this makeshift pen, and flashed open the wallet with his badge and ID from the Department of Public Safety’s Criminal Investigations Division.
“You the first on the scene?” Andy asked.
“Yes sir. About forty, forty-five minutes ago. I responded to a call from the clerk on duty.” He checked his notes. “Robert Foley. Robbie.” Stammering on the R’s.
Very young, this kid, with short brown hair and babyfat cheeks flushed from the heat. If he’d been on the job more than a year, it couldn’t have been by much, and this looked to be the first day that had truly rattled him. Everything routine up until now…traffic accidents and drunks, domestic punch-outs and paperwork. He wore a pinned nameplate that read FLEMING.
Andy nodded past him, toward the pumps, where he could see a pair of sprawled legs, a tan uniform shirt, and plenty of blood that looked halfway dried by now. The full view was blocked by a couple other county uniforms and the medical examiner, plus a photographer shooting from different angles. Another guy with a video camera dangling at his side. He couldn’t see the DOA’s face.
“Who was it?” he asked Fleming.
“Marvin Boyle.” Fleming hung his head a moment. “Did you know him?”
“Well enough to say hello.” Leaving unsaid that it had been well enough to know he didn’t much like the man. Well enough to suspect that Boyle should’ve retired after putting in his twenty—eighteen, nineteen years ago that would’ve been. But no, he’d just kept plugging along. Their paths had crossed now and again, Boyle always striking him as a relic, a throwback, a man who wouldn’t think he’d done his job if he brought in a suspect without first putting a few knots on his head.
Andy stepped inside the cordon, unwrapped and skinned on a pair of latex gloves. He squatted for a better look, down into the baked outhouse fetor of Boyle’s last digested meal. Boyle was propped crookedly against a trashcan, one leg half-folded beneath him, oak bough arms in a short-sleeved shirt gone limp at his sides. The condition of his face was the only thing Andy hadn’t expected. The shock of sudden death had been exaggerated by some rude treatment.
“They worked him over, too?” Andy said.
“Immediately post-mortem, I’m guessing,” said the M.E. Schreiber, his name; he’d held the office for years. A plump guy with half a headful of gray hair, balancing the loss with a walrus moustache. His soft-looking hands kept massaging his knees as though hunkering down made them ache. “Abrasions and trauma, but no bleeding to speak of, no bruising.”
“Somebody was really pissed off, then.”
Schreiber waved away flies. Fat green ones, they buzzed the slather of drying blood. Two seconds later, back again.
“Know how I’m going to make my fortune? Patent a no-pest strip for body drops. Retire to Alaska, treat fishing injuries.” Schreiber pointed to the chest. “Boyle did all his bleeding down below. He really got a gasket blown. Bet you when I open him up I’ll find that the shot clipped his aorta.”
“Shot twice, was he?” Andy peered closer at the two epicenters of blood loss. “Hard to tell in all that crust.”
Schreiber shook his head. “At the right lateral base of the neck, that one’s an exit.” He pointed at a blackened spot near the bottom of Boyle’s shirt pocket. “There’s your entry. One or two ricochets inside his ribcage and out she tumbled, gentle as you please. No velocity left—the slug was stuck inside his shirt. I’ve already bagged it.”
Andy gave the body a poke in the big doughy belly, confirming the inevitable conclusion: “He wasn’t wearing his vest.”
“He, um…he hated wearing a vest,” Fleming piped up from behind. “He wouldn’t do it. Said it made him break out in a rash.”
Andy grunted. “I’m sure his baby-smooth skin will be a great comfort to his grieving widow.”
“He said only pussies wear a vest.” Fleming felt compelled to elaborate for some reason. “He said if you couldn’t stare down a perp mano a mano, you’ve got no business being out here in the first place.”
“Stare down a perp hand-to-hand?” Andy said. “That doesn’t even make sense.”
Fleming’s forehead crinkled. “Mano a mano doesn’t mean man-to-man?”
“Man is hombre. Mano means hand.”
Unconvinced, Fleming looked at Schreiber, who nodded, not without pity, and said, “He’s right, son.”
“Well,” Fleming huffed, “Boyle thought it meant man-to-man.”
“And stupid is pretty much the same in either language,” Andy muttered to Schreiber.
At the entry wound, a glimpse of odd color caught Andy’s eye. He tapped a fingertip around Boyle’s pocket, felt a thin rectangle, then opened the pocket for a peek inside. When he couldn’t slip the item free, since it was glued into place with tacky blood, he held the pocket wide for Schreiber to see.
“Look at that,” Andy said. “Looks like his bank card in there. Got shot through his ATM card.”
“If he’d been carrying a platinum card, maybe we wouldn’t be here right now.”
“On a county salary?” said the photographer. “Good one.”
“How about his sidearm?” Andy pointed to the empty holster. “Anybody seen his gun?” Nobody had. “He’s not sitting on it, is he?”
Schreiber looked hesitant. “If you want me to reach under there, I’ll do it, but if it’s all the same to you, I’d really just as soon wait until he’s moved to check.”
“And you a doctor.”
“It’s nurses who empty bedpans.”
Andy glanced back over his shoulder at Fleming. “Deputy. Do you know what kind of gun he carried?”
“Yes sir. Three-fifty-seven mag. Colt Python, nickled.”
“How’s that compare with what you found near the exit wound?” he asked Schreiber.
“It was mangled some, some fragmentation, but that’s about right. I couldn’t swear it wasn’t a thirty-eight, though. But considering the damage just the one shot did, that it went clean through him, left to right, and on an angle…I’d bet on a magnum load for that.”
“Let’s roll him enough to spot-check underneath,” Andy said. “I really want to know if that gun’s here or on the loose.”
He and Schreiber grappled with the body by the shoulders, shifting the dead weight toward one hip and averting their faces when a fresh wave of stench wafted up. They glanced at the concrete, then rolled him back into place.
“Okay, so now we know. We’ve got a self-styled badass running around who took Boyle’s gun away from him—from a guy who’s what, six-three, -four?—and didn’t hesitate to drop him with it.”
Andy pushed himself upright again, his own knees feeling a little creaky. He skinned off his gloves and cleared away from the pumps and the body. Outside the yellow tape cordon he stopped beside Fleming and pointed due south.
“About a hundred and fifty miles that way there’s a country called Mexico,” he said. “Where we’re standing right now used to belong to it. It wouldn’t hurt you to have a working knowledge of the language.”
“It’s my feeling,” Fleming said, “that if those people plan on comin
g north into my country, they ought to have the decency to plan on speaking my language.”
“Your call,” Andy nodded. “How you wish things were…or how they really are.”
He wondered if Marvin Boyle, who lived in a world where no man on the side of justice needed to stoop to body armor, would have been able to live with himself had he been saved by it. Deny the incident ever took place; tell his grandchildren how the bullet had pinged harmlessly off his rib, knocked out an overhead light. So drink your milk, kids—builds strong bones.
Andy passed a sea of pulverized plate glass fanned out across the asphalt from a shattered store window. Inside, locals besieged the counter area. He waved down Sheriff Beech, who broke from a female deputy and shouldered through to meet Andy halfway.
“Thanks for coming,” he said. “You didn’t waste any time.”
“Got the call on my way back from Quartzsite. In court. Ninety minutes ago I was on the stand. Sorry as hell to have to end the day like this.”
Beech nodded tersely. Couldn’t help but feel for him. He’d had his badge for the last two elections but today was every bit as new to him as it was for Fleming out there. He had more land than people to watch out for. Only Greenlee County, on the opposite side of the state, had fewer residents.
“You’ve got somebody made for this already, right?”
“Unless it was a stolen card, he left his signature and Visa number for us. Jamey Michael Sheppard, age twenty-nine. From L.A. I’m waiting for a photo ID from the California DMV so we can confirm it with Genius over there.”
He tipped his head toward the counter, where a red-haired scarecrow of a boy was the center of attention, telling the same tale he’d be telling for beers the rest of this year. Oblivious as a deputy sauntered behind him to the slushie machine to pump a refill the color of bloody snow.
“What’s he like?” Andy asked.
“Having the time of his worthless life,” Beech grumbled.
Andy didn’t envy the sheriff the pressures he was suddenly under, Boyle’s death bringing out the posse mentality of his department. Everyone ready to storm the cabinet for long-guns and go hunting. Shackled by jurisdiction, they itched for what they probably could not have. Marvin Boyle was dead an hour and already this Jamey Sheppard could’ve been in any of four other counties—Mohave, Yavapai, Maricopa, Yuma. Or, right about now, crossing the state line back into California, where he hoped they’d been able to scramble a checkpoint.
“You got a vehicle on him?”
“A Mitsubishi Mirage, midnight blue, three or four years old. Registered to a Samantha Emerson, of Burbank.” He read off the plate numbers from his notes. “Marvin furnished that himself. He radioed in for a check on it at three-fifty-four. Just a few minutes before this happened.”
“Any idea why? What about it caught his eye?”
“The dispatcher changed shifts at four. Still trying to get hold of her, see if he said anything else.” Sheriff Beech shrugged with resignation. “Until we get the ID confirmed, I’m inclined to believe it may not have been Jamey Sheppard. Just somebody who got his wallet. Sheppard’s got no record at all. Or hardly anything. You know the worst thing there is to find on him? An unpaid speeding ticket in South Dakota two years ago. That’s it. Does that sound to you like somebody who needs to leave Marvin Boyle dead on a concrete slab?”
“Ted Bundy looked pretty good on paper too for a while. Wonder what was in the trunk. Owner of the car, maybe?”
And he needed to hear how this had played out. Andy worked his way to the counter and introduced himself to the red-haired kid.
“Robbie, isn’t it?”
A single cool nod. “Just like the nametag says.”
“How about you give me your take on what happened here.”
“Well now, where were you twenty-five minutes ago?” the kid said. Bobbing his head on that scrawny neck of his, cocky with celebrity.
Andy sighed, everything he saw and heard telling him that here was one more living exhibit why he never wanted kids of his own. They grew up into delinquents or imbeciles or both.
“My timing’s no good for your busy schedule, is it?” Andy said. “Look at it this way: You told it already? That was the rehearsal. Right now’s the real thing.”
“Well, as you’re no doubt aware yourself, it was a majorly hot afternoon here on Route Six-Oh,” Robbie began, and described what sounded like typical slow roadside store traffic. Until Marvin Boyle comes in, uses the bathroom, then hangs around, out of the heat and seeming in no hurry to leave. Fifteen, twenty minutes later, Jamey Sheppard arrives, his time inside overlapping with Boyle’s by no more than a minute, because Boyle then slips outside to his cruiser. Presumably that would have been when he’d made his final radio call, something about Sheppard striking him as wrong.
“And then Jamey, he came up to my counter with two bottles of chocolate coffee and paid for those. Plus some gas.”
“Did anything about his mood hit you as being a little off? Strange?”
Robbie shook his head. “He was in a great mood, looked like to me. He gave me his autograph and seemed glad to do it.”
“Autograph. You don’t mean just signing the credit receipt, do you?”
“No, I recognized him! I mean, he gives me his autograph and then he tries to blow my head off. Is that being an asshole or what?”
“Yeah, unbelievable,” Andy said flatly. “You recognized him from where?”
“From off the TV, man. He was on a Mountain Dew commercial.” Robbie slid a napkin across the counter and spun it with a flourish for Andy to read.
“‘Radical Dude Number Three’?”
“His character,” Robbie said with reverence.
Andy scanned it again. Try using an electronic tuner on your guitar for a change. “So the two of you talked about playing guitar, did you?”
“No, not a word.” Robbie’s voice dropped to an awestruck hush. “That’s what’s so spooky. He must be psychic. It’s like he just looked into my soul…and he knew.”
Andy could see it now: a legend in the making. This story was going to sprout extra heads and appendages every time it won Robbie a free drink. By Christmas, Sheppard would be materializing out of shimmering desert heat on a horse that snorted fire and left smoldering hoof prints. Andy decided to wait until they were through before breaking it to the kid that he wouldn’t be keeping that autograph.
“All right,” he said. “So Sheppard pays for his gas and coffee and leaves you his autograph. Any more magic moments between you two?”
Robbie said that this was when Sheppard had left the store. Admitting he hadn’t been watching every moment afterward, not at first—no reason to.
But assume it played something like this: Sheppard returns to his car and Boyle sidles up to check him out, get a fix on whatever vibe started nagging at him inside the store. Because the next time Robbie notices either of them, they’re standing face-to-face between the car and the gas pumps. Whatever they’re saying, Robbie can’t hear it, not with a window and twenty yards of distance in between. The exchange doesn’t look friendly, doesn’t look antagonistic. In other words, it looks like any routine traffic stop.
Sheppard pulls something from his wallet and hands it over, then retrieves something from the car and shows him that too. License and registration. Deputy Boyle appears grudgingly satisfied, so it’s looking as though this must be about a whole lot of nothing…except the two of them talk for another minute or two. Boyle takes a few steps away, then turns, says one more thing. Sheppard laughs, or smiles at least—and that’s when it all explodes.
“He’s an old man, right, I never saw an old man move that fast,” said Robbie. “He was in there like Oscar De La Hoya, bam! In the guy’s face, zero seconds flat, spun him around and threw him up against his car. And hard, too, man—wham! Assume the position, scumbag!”
“He said that? You could hear what they were saying now?”
“No, no, no.” Robbie waved his hand. �
��I’m just giving you the full flavor of how it happened.”
“How about we try leaving out the flavor additives from here on.”
“Whatever,” Robbie said. “So Deputy Marv, he had him up against the car, right. Had him covered with his gun. Right snug up against the back of the guy’s head. And then, well, I don’t know how he pulled it off, but Sheppard went down the side of the car. Slipped away slicker than snot. He was behind the car a few seconds, so I couldn’t see what he was doing. But if you want to know my theory, he had him a gun hid, or maybe he took Deputy Marv’s on the way down, it happened so fast. You know, like in a Steven Seagal movie? Next thing I know, boom!—Sheppard’s shot him from below. But it only staggered him a little. Deputy Marv must’ve been pretty tough for an old man, too. He reached down, picked the guy up off the ground, and all of a sudden it’s World Federation Wrestling out there and he’s got him in an airplane spin. Then he dropped him on the car and fell over, and Sheppard —”
“Hold on a second. Did Deputy Boyle shoot back?”
“Nah. I thought he was gonna rip the guy apart with his bare hands.”
No way could Boyle have still had his sidearm at this point. Andy nodded for Robbie to continue.
“So he fell over, and Sheppard, man, he went ballistic. He was standing over Deputy Marv and started unloading right into him.” Robbie whipped his pale arms into a two-handed shooter’s stance and aimed down at an imaginary victim before his feet. “Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Like that. Empties the gun into him.”
“You’re sure about that, are you?”
“Sure as I got two good eyes.”
“Is it possible Sheppard was missing with his shots?”
“Are you kidding? Standing right on top of him like that?”
And Boyle lying out there dead of a single wound. If it hadn’t happened already, they’d obviously come to the point at which the excitement had overloaded Robbie’s circuits. The kind of witness prosecutors had to coach overtime and caused defense attorneys to lick their chops.
“All right, so what’d Sheppard do next?”
