Hard Return

by J. Carson Black

  He was pretty sure Gary could talk them into going to Louisville. Gary was a great talker. He could talk anybody into anything. Landry had seen him sell some pretty poor-looking horses in his day to people who weren’t just happy to buy them, but thrilled. Gary turned almost everything into a story.

  The hotel provided a complimentary USA Today. Landry went through it, looking first for anything on the shooting, but there was nothing. It was as if it had never happened. The news cycles were getting shorter and shorter, especially when it came to public shootings. They had become the norm. There was almost a “here we go again” quality to the reporting. The news channels had their big story, so they ran with it—probably good for two or three days—before something else flitted across their ADHD brains.

  But one article stood out to him.

  “Female New Mexico Cop Thwarts Bank Robbery, Three Dead.”

  Landry’d always had somewhat of a sixth sense. He knew when something was going to happen, especially if it was a danger to him. He knew when ordnance was about to explode in Iraq, he knew when someone had him in the crosshairs in Afghanistan, he knew when someone was gunning for him.

  Even before he saw the name, he knew it was her.

  He closed his eyes for a moment. Then started reading the article.

  Jolie Burke.

  Maybe it was because he knew she had the ability to do it. That she had taken on many killers on the island in Florida. Maybe because she’d told him she grew up in New Mexico. But it sounded like her.

  He read through quickly. This was just a small piece in USA Today, but he imagined it would become bigger. It had only happened yesterday. He turned the news on and there she was, being interviewed.

  She looked good, like he remembered her. She had the cop sunglasses on; her hair was pulled up tight in a bun. She wore a deputy uniform. The sun beat down on her—it was New Mexico, after all—and she gave the sense she was squinting behind her shades. The female reporter had thrust a mic in her face. Behind them was the bank and a crashed car. Pieces of the car all over the road—a smashed bumper, broken glass.

  “Can you tell us how it unfolded?” the female reporter asked.

  “Quickly,” Jolie said.

  “But can you—”

  “Can I what?” She had a poker face.

  Somebody came over, also wearing a tan-colored sheriff’s uniform, and nodded to her. She said, “Excuse me, I have to go.”

  She turned and was escorted away.

  Landry waited.

  She was gone, off the screen. But there would be a press conference by the sheriff. He just had to wait for it. He turned the sound down.

  Jolie Burke, in another firefight. What were the odds? Even for a sheriff’s deputy, that was a little odd. It used to be that some police officers never shot their weapons in ten, twenty, thirty years. Those days were gone. There were a lot more shootings now. Times changed. But for Jolie to be in a firefight in Florida and three years later in another serious firefight probably beat those odds.

  He read the article.

  An audacious robbery, to say the least. Two cars had been used in the robbery, both of them stolen: a blue 2014 Acura MDX and a silver Mazda CX-5. The blue SUV was used to smash into the glass door of the bank next to the ATM. The silver car was the getaway car. There were three robbers. Two of them were brothers. The ringleader was the older brother, Joseph Terrazas. His brother, Arturo Terrazas, was with him in the first car that crashed into the bank. They had an arsenal of weapons, including an AR-15 and two nine-millimeter handguns with two magazines each. The driver, Monty Chessen, had a shotgun and a semiautomatic pistol. They also had forced the bank manager to open the vault at gunpoint. One of the bank employees was wounded, but it wasn’t too serious—she would live. But they were terrorized. The three robbers were confronted by Doña Ana County sheriff’s deputy Jolie Burke.

  She dispatched all three of them in the gun battle that ensued.

  “Damn fine shooting,” an unidentified Tejar police officer said.

  Damn fine shooting.

  The statistics were piss-poor for cops hitting their targets in a stressful situation. It was not like aiming at a target on a shooting range. Mostly, they missed. They hit their target less than one-third of the time. Other statistics he’d read made it even worse than that: less than 10 percent of the time. That she could hit all three—kill shots no less—was remarkable.

  More amazing than that: What were the odds that three years after Florida, she would be in the headlines again?

  Until today, he hadn’t thought of Jolie Burke in years but now she was there, front and center.

  Landry knew her. He had fought beside her. When you depend on someone in a battle situation, you get to know them in short order. There’s no mating dance. He felt he knew her as well as anybody, and Jolie Burke was not the type to seek headlines.

  He imagined she would have been offered a whole string of elite positions after Florida. But there she was, in a one-horse town in New Mexico.

  Some people just found trouble. The fact that she worked in law enforcement enhanced that probability.

  He felt a sudden urge to see her. For one thing, she had a skill he did not have: she was a cop. Not just a cop—she had been a homicide detective back in Florida.

  He needed to see her for another reason: If someone killed Luke to draw him out, Landry had an enemy who knew he was alive. And if that person had learned it—directly or indirectly—from Jolie Burke, he needed to know.

  Landry was nothing if not thorough.

  CHAPTER 14

  Noah Cochran, 18: Noah was in drama and band. You would always see him at school parties, and he was a popular kid who recently came out to his school. Noah was one of seven children. He moved here his sophomore year from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He loved movies and TV shows like Breaking Bad and Justified, and wanted to be a writer—his stories always had dark themes. He recently uploaded his first story, “The Murder,” onto Amazon.com. His horror and fantasy stories were popular with his schoolmates. —“In Memoriam,” Special Section, the Los Angeles Times

  Landry took the red-eye to El Paso. He rented a four-wheel-drive SUV (one of the most common on the road in a common color—gray) and drove the sixty-three miles to Tejar. Jolie Burke’s house was on the outskirts of town, near the river.

  At this time of year, the river wasn’t much of a river at all—it was a dry riverbed.

  The daytime temperature in Tejar yesterday had reached eighty-five degrees, but the morning air was chilly. Clear days and dry conditions led to a cooldown at night. The air lacked moisture, which would have retained the day’s heat. It was downright chilly when he reached the outskirts of Tejar, and still dark.

  Lights off, Landry followed the graded dirt road to Jolie’s house. He parked a mile back, in a patch of mesquites off the road, and walked in. He went the long way around, staying away from the road.

  There were cottonwoods along the riverbed, and Landry set up to watch the house and the road.

  Everything was still in the gray predawn. Jolie’s house dark.

  He heard an engine idling slowly along in the not-too-far distance. Faint at first but coming his way. The engine cut off.

  He worked his way toward the sound.

  A car door opened, slow and stealthy, just a little creak. Then there was the sound of the car door coming to—no click, just a touch of metal to metal.

  When the door opened, a dim light flickered on and off briefly in the trees across the riverbed. The dome light of the car.

  This told him something right off the bat. Whoever was driving the car was an amateur. He hadn’t even bothered to make sure the dome light stayed off.

  Landry waited.

  Thinking: What were the odds?

  Actually, the odds were pretty good. If someone planned to retaliate,
if they were nearby, they would strike as soon as possible and capitalize on surprising their victim.

  He looked over at the house. Still dark. The cottonwood tree dwarfed the house, which was little more than a miner’s shack. Across the front was a low bunkhouse porch. No steps, just a drop-off of about four inches to the dirt, like you saw in the westerns.

  A tiny breeze sprang up, dry, and the cottonwood tree’s leaves stirred, restive, and then the breeze gave up and everything was still again.

  He heard the click of a boot on rock as the owner of the car walked up the road. His movements furtive and quiet, but not furtive and quiet enough.

  Landry followed him.

  The man was dressed in black from head to toe. He wore combat-style boots, probably knockoffs. Everything about him was sloppy. But Landry could feel the anger coming off him, radiating like the heat from the sun behind the mountain.

  Landry had read in one of the accounts of the robbery that there was a brother. On the run, a fugitive, the brains of the gang that smashed into the bank. He was one of three brothers. Two of them were dead. It didn’t take a super-sleuth to think that this might be the third Terrazas brother, Carlos, looking for revenge. Stupidly looking for revenge.

  Foolish, yes, but Landry knew that even foolish killers were dangerous. In fact, in most instances, they were more dangerous, because you never knew what they were going to do.

  Landry worked his way through the desert, keeping his eye on Terrazas’s progress along the road. He wasn’t exactly an armored tank division, but his boots clicked often enough on gravel and rocks to make him easy to track by sound, along with his breathing.

  Foolish.

  Landry knew where he was going. Jolie Burke’s house was around the bend. He took a shortcut and set up behind the wooden gate of a fallen-down tack shed on the property. At this time of day it was just another dark cutout in the grayness. He waited.

  The boot crunching stopped.

  Carlos had decided to get stealthy. He melted into the mesquite and creosote alongside the road, but Landry still saw him pushing his way through the whiplike branches of the creosote bushes. Landry tracked his progress, wishing he’d pick it up.

  As Carlos came to the edge of the clearing, he decided it was time to lurk. He crouched behind the propane tank, under the restive cottonwood tree. Waiting to ambush her when she came out to go to work?

  Landry took advantage of the darkness. He was close, and he moved closer.

  Carlos lay down on his stomach behind the propane tank, rifle at the ready. He reached around for something, fumbled, and realized he needed to stand up to reach it. His torso was twisted slightly to the left, propped up by one hand, his other hand reaching for something in his pocket.

  That was when Landry got him.

  It was quick. He stepped up behind him, pressed down on Carlos’ neck, and at the same time grabbed an ear. He held fast to the other side of his head, pulling backward but with a sharp twist at the same time—one good jerk. Snap. The man sagged. Dead instantly, his neck broken. The thing in his pocket had fallen out onto the dirt. It was a Twix bar.

  Landry gently laid him out on the ground, pocketed the Twix bar, and considered his options.

  Landry had a cat once. The cat hunted. It always brought Landry its kill as a gift. It would lay the mangled corpse at Landry’s feet.

  Landry looked at the dark house and the tall cottonwood tree, black against the navy sky. He didn’t think Jolie Burke would like the gift. The guy was big—six foot four and two sixty at least. Dead weight. Normally, Landry would leave him where he was, but again, this was not the kind of gift Jolie would like. So he would drag him into the brush and cover him up, and when Jolie left for her shift, he would take it somewhere else.

  As he bent down to drag the corpse, he heard the unmistakable rack of an automatic weapon.

  “Drop it.”

  From the sound of the woman’s voice, she meant business.

  Still straddling the body, Landry dropped the dead man’s arms and held his own hands high. “Jolie?”

  “I’ve got the drop on you, so don’t move.”

  “Let me at least straighten up. It’s uncomfortable with my ass in the air.”

  “I always did like your ass. In fact, it was your ass I recognized—that’s what kept me from shooting you.”

  Landry grinned but kept his hands high. “Glad to hear it, since I spent my life covering it. About time it paid me back.”

  “So’s this a friend of yours?”

  “No. And I’m thinking he’s no friend of yours, either. Let’s talk.”

  The sky had lightened to gray. In the distance, the mountains were dark blue cutouts against the pale sky. The sun getting ready to spill over. First, a faint peach glow, and eventually stove-burner red.

  They sat on the porch drinking coffee.

  It was good coffee. Some kind of hazelnut blend.

  Landry was still embarrassed, but he didn’t draw attention to it.

  Instead, he said, “I hope there’s not another brother.”

  “Nope,” Jolie said. “That’s the last.”

  He didn’t have to ask. Jolie had known there was another brother, known that he was a hothead, and known he would be coming for her. But the question was, “Why didn’t you let the police handle it?”

  Jolie held her coffee mug in her hands, not by the handle. As if she was trying to warm her fingers. Which was ridiculous, because despite the last cool breath of dawn, the sun was hitting them both in the eye. “They don’t like me.”

  “They don’t like you?”

  “No. They think I’m a grandstander.”

  Landry looked around: at the broken-down ranch building across the clearing, the propane tank, the sagging porch that was only one half step up from the dirt. “Because of Florida?”

  She nodded. She looked neat, even at this time of the morning. Her hair wasn’t in a bun like it had been on television, but it was certainly sleek. “They think I attract trouble.”

  Landry thought of the daring robbery, and the shot-up street—three bad guys lying in the middle of town bleeding out. “They have a point,” he said.

  “What was I supposed to do? Let them get away?”

  Landry sipped his coffee and didn’t answer. He liked the hazelnut. She’d put some cream into it for him.

  A coyote yipped, followed by his friends—a high-pitched, manic yammer. The brother, Carlos Terrazas, was under a blue tarp, stowed in the old tack shed while they decided what to do with him.

  Landry said, “Why did you come here?”

  Jolie shrugged. “It’s home.”

  “Tejar?”

  “No. New Mexico. The job was here. We’ve got to figure out what we’re going to do. I wish you hadn’t snapped his neck.”

  Landry regretted that, too.

  “No way that’s going to look like self-defense.”

  “We’ll have to get rid of him.”

  “How?”

  “We’ll figure it out.”

  “Well for God’s sake we have to get it taken care of before the flies start showing up. Or rigor sets in. Jesus!”

  Landry realized this was far worse than a breach of etiquette. His thoughtless actions had put her in a bind. She had been more than capable of dispatching Carlos herself, and now he’d made it worse. “So what were you planning to do?”

  “Shoot him in the face.”

  “What if he got you first?”

  Shrug.

  “For what it’s worth, I don’t think he would have got you first.”

  Jolie stared at the mountain opposite. “Me neither.”

  Landry said, “I could bury him.”

  “Here?”

  “Somewhere in those foothills.”

  “Better get to it, then.”
/>   Landry said, “What time is it?”

  “Half past six.”

  “I have a better idea,” he said.

  They removed Terrazas’s big boots, wrapped him in a tarp, and loaded him into the back of the rental SUV.

  “You don’t want to take his clothes off?” Jolie asked.

  “No, just in case I get stopped. A naked guy in the back would draw attention.”

  “No kidding. This way it looks like he’s sleeping.”

  “Crashed out in the back. You have a newspaper? We can put it over his head like he’s dozing off.”

  Jolie produced a newspaper and handed it to him. “You sure you don’t want me to go along?”

  “If it’s just me I’ll look like one employee doing his job.”

  “Right again.”

  Landry grinned and did his best Arnold impression. “I’ll be back.”

  He drove by the crematory he’d seen on his way into town. Nobody was there. The rear parking lot was empty of cars except for two company pickup vans. The parking area was bordered on one side by a narrow gravel alley. There were businesses on the other side, their roofs hardly visible above the tall stucco wall they all shared. He chose the pickup van farther from the alley, a white Ford Econoline, which was parked nose-in to the back of the building. The place was dark. No one around. Landry jimmied the van’s lock with a door tool Jolie had the sense to own. He admired the fact that, like him, her motto was “Be prepared.” She’d used it a few times in the course of her career as a homicide detective.

  He rummaged around in the van and found a body bag and a box of toe tags, then pulled the gurney out of the van and drew it around to the back of his rental SUV. There, he spread the bag flat out on the gurney and moved Terrazas onto it. Not easy—Terrazas was very heavy. Landry scrawled a name on the toe tag in illegible cursive and hooked it on Terrazas’s big toe, then split open the corpse’s cheap black tee with a pocketknife and tore it down the middle. He pulled off Terrazas’s black jeans and underwear and tore the remaining material out from under him, leaving him naked as a jaybird. All that was left to do now was remove the knockoff Rolex. He left the man’s rings, which were unremarkable. He didn’t want to cut his fingers off—talk about obvious. Finally, he zipped up the body bag and rolled it up to the back of the van.