A Hard Ticket Home (Twin Cities P.I. Mac McKenzie Novels)

by David Housewright

  “You will call me tomorrow?” I asked.

  Jamie set the card on the table.

  “If I don’t you’ll only come back, won’t you?”

  Was I that obvious?

  “One more thing, Mrs. Bruder.”

  “Yes?”

  “Why did you leave home?”

  “I hate lies.”

  “Such as?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Must have been a whopper,” I told her.

  I did some tossing and turning in bed. It wasn’t like me to fixate on a woman, especially one so young and inaccessible, yet images of Jamie Carlson Bruder kept floating in the darkness behind my closed eyes. I tried hard not to think about her. The harder I tried, the more impossible the task became. She was a beauty, all right, and I imagined her in ways that were not particularly healthy. Or maybe they were healthy. I don’t know. What would a therapist say? Perhaps he’d say that my subconscious was telling me to let go of Kirsten and move on. Perhaps he’d say I was a pervert and required about fifty years of therapy. I flipped over my pillow, nestled against the cool side, closed my eyes, and thought of Shelby. That probably wasn’t healthy, either. She’s your best friend’s wife! Get over it! Jamie crowded her out, anyway. It was when I started envisioning doing terrible things to her husband—a damned used car salesman, no less—that I gave it up and padded downstairs to my kitchen. I took milk from the refrigerator and drank from the carton before rooting through my cupboards for Oreos.

  I ate a half dozen. While I ate, I rifled my CD collection, discarding the rockers in favor of Etta James, the last of the great jazz divas. I finished the milk and cookies and sprawled out on my sofa, listening to Etta’s honey-drenched voice in the dark. That’s where I fell asleep.

  4

  The pounding on my door was loud enough to wake the dead and at 5:10 a.m. by my watch it had to be. I rolled off my sofa and stubbed my toe against the coffee table. Hopping on one foot while trying to massage the other, I cursed my clumsiness. Yet the pain shocked me awake and my first conscious thought was of a common police practice—we often served warrants early in the morning when the miscreants were too groggy with sleep to put up a fuss. Only why would the cops want to arrest an upstanding citizen like me?

  I hopped to the window in my living room. The sky was streaked with a hard gray—the sun hadn’t yet decided if it wanted to rise—but it was bright enough to reveal a decade-old Buick Regal at rest in front of my house.

  Huh, I thought.

  Turning my head I was able to see a tall, young black man standing on my porch. He was holding the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun flush against the front door just below the spy hole with one hand while lifting the heavy brass knocker with the other.

  Huh, I thought again.

  In the time it took him to knock twice more, I bounded up my stairs, went to my room, slipped the 9 mm Heckler & Koch from the drawer of the table next to my bed, flew down the stairs again, and snuck out my back door. I circled the house, staying low beneath the lip of the porch, working toward the front steps.

  He was still pounding on the door and starting to get anxious about it, scanning the yards of my neighbors, watching for cars on the street. It shouldn’t be taking this long. The black man was about six feet, one-eighty-five, in good shape, wearing jeans and a tan jacket. He was still holding the muzzle of the sawed-off hard against the wood door, staring intently at the spy hole, waiting for the shadow of my eye to pass across it.

  I made myself clear.

  “DROP THE FUCKING GUN!”

  He stopped pounding, his head turned abruptly toward my voice. I was behind him about twenty yards and to his left, sighting on his upper torso even as I watched his hands—always watch the hands.

  “YOU HAVEN’T GOT A CHANCE, BUT YOU GOT A CHOICE!” I warned him.

  He hesitated.

  “DROP IT!”

  He smiled, an amazing thing to do, and swung the sawed-off in a small arch toward me. I was too good a shot to miss from that distance. Wham! Wham! Wham! I hit him three times in the chest. The force of the nine-millimeter slugs lifted and spun him. His legs hit the low, wooden porch railing and he spilled over it into the front yard.

  I moved toward him quickly, keeping the gun trained on his chest, my hands shaking slightly, my breath coming fast. I knew right away he was dead. I didn’t have to touch him, didn’t have to feel for a pulse, didn’t have to hold a mirror to his nostrils. He was dead, his leg and arm twisted under his body. He looked like he had fallen from the sky. I watched him for a long time, watched until repulsion over what I had done made me stagger to a corner of my house hidden by an ancient pine tree and throw up.

  There are so many emergencies and so few officers to respond, sometimes 911 will ring ten, twenty, thirty times or more before it’s answered. Only at five-twenty-five in the morning it was answered on the second ring. I asked for the cops. They routed me to the St. Anthony Village Police Department. Not to be confused with St. Anthony Park, St. Anthony Village is a northern suburb nowhere near Falcon Heights, yet supplies police services for it just the same. I told them a man was dead in my front yard. Then I went upstairs. Three navy blue squad cars with distinctive gray stripes were parked in front of my house by the time I finished buttoning my shirt. I left the Heckler & Koch in the bedroom.

  I stepped out of the front door onto the porch, pushing my shirt tails into my pants. All three officers reached for their guns, yet no one pulled. I made sure they saw my empty hands, then did a slow pirouette to prove I had concealed nothing. They kept their hands resting on their gun butts just the same. They were good boys.

  “You do this?” one of them asked. His voice was nervous and a little too loud. His name tag read T. JOHNSON. He ran six feet, one-eighty-five, the same size as the dead man.

  “Yes.”

  “Come down.”

  I descended three of the four steps before he grabbed my shoulder, pulled me off the steps, spun me around, and pushed my face against the low, wooden porch railing. He wound one cuff over my right wrist and brought it down behind my back. He brought my left wrist around and secured it tightly. For good measure he pushed my face into the railing, again.

  “Hey, c’mon.”

  He bounced me off the railing a third time and sat me on the top step.

  “This guy is dead,” one officer said, his fingers on the black man’s carotid artery.

  “How?” Johnson asked.

  “Asphyxiation,” I said.

  “There are three bullet holes in his chest,” the officer answered.

  “That’s why he stopped breathing.” Sometimes I just can’t help myself—we all deal with fear in our own way.

  “Shut up.” Johnson smacked me on the side of my face.

  Two more officers arrived by that time, making five. They all seemed so young. Each took a turn at examining the body. Finally, I yelled, “Hey, you bozos! Didn’t anyone ever teach you about maintaining the integrity of a crime scene?”

  Johnson didn’t like that. He took a few steps toward me and I braced, waiting for another blow. It didn’t come. Before he could raise his hand two men drove up in an unmarked car. The driver was white and wore sergeant stripes. The passenger was a big black man, bigger than Johnson by three inches, heavier by forty pounds. He wore plain clothes and an imperious expression.

  He looked at the officers one by one, would have looked them each straight in the eye except all but Johnson had bowed their heads, school kids caught playing while their teacher was in the hall. I couldn’t help but smile. He was a crime dog. I could see it in his face.

  The sergeant went through the crowd of officers, dispersing them. He fit all of Hollywood’s criteria of an ideal law enforcement officer—tall, mean, a perpetual squint. I watched from the steps as he examined the body, moving around it like he’d seen dead men before. Finally, he looked up at me.

  “You didn’t like him at all, did you?”

  I almost smiled,
probably would have except that was the moment Tiger started yapping from the sidewalk. Tiger was a purebred schnauzer owned by Karl Olson, my next-door neighbor. He was straining at the leash that Karl held tight with his right hand. In his left, Karl carried a small plastic bag containing Tiger’s morning deposits. The expression on his face made me think that Karl thought I also belonged in the plastic bag.

  “Can we do this inside?” I asked.

  The crime dog nodded. He stopped me when I tried to move past him, took my chin in a huge hand, held my face steady so he could get a good look at it.

  “There’s swelling,” he said.

  “I must have fallen down the stairs,” I told him.

  He released my face and we went inside. Johnson held the door open for us. He avoided the crime dog’s gaze as we passed.

  I led the crime dog to my bedroom and gestured at the nine on the night stand. He retrieved it and sniffed the barrel.

  “Oh yeah, she’s been working.”

  “No, I killed him with a slingshot.”

  Along with fear-induced insolence, I also have a problem with authority. To my mother’s great embarrassment, I was thrown out of the Cub Scouts for refusing direction. Not Boy Scouts, mind you. Cub Scouts.

  “Tell me about it,” he said patiently.

  I told him I found the deceased pounding on my door. I told him the deceased was brandishing a sawed-off shotgun. I told him I gave the deceased a choice, but not a chance.

  “Hmm,” he grunted.

  “Chief?” a voice called from downstairs.

  “Up here.”

  A moment later, the sergeant entered my bedroom carrying several plastic bags. He set them all on the mattress, then held them up one at a time.

  “Wheel gun. Twenty-two caliber. Choice of professionals everywhere. The bullet doesn’t pass through the body. Instead it bounces around inside, nipping at various vital organs. He was carrying it in his waist band.”

  A second bag.

  “Two twelve-gauge shotgun shells. Fits the sawed-off. I left that in the car.” While looking at me, the sergeant added, “Apparently he didn’t feel the need for a lot of ammo.”

  A third plastic bag containing a brown wallet.

  “Minnesota driver’s license in the name of Bradley Young. Photo matches the dead man. Ran the Buick. Also owned by the dead man.”

  “Ever see him before?” the chief asked.

  I shook my head.

  The fourth bag held a white number ten envelope.

  “Don’t have a firm count, but I figure at least three thousand dollars in twenties and fifties.”

  “This doesn’t make sense,” I interrupted. “He comes at me like a professional, but using his own car? Carrying his ID? The motive stuffed in his pocket? That’s amateur night.”

  “Not a pro,” the chief said softly. “A soldier. A member of the rank and file recruited for this one job.”

  “A gang-banger?” I asked.

  The sergeant referred to his notebook before offering, “No colors, no insignia, no visible tattoos.”

  “Hmm,” the chief grunted again.

  “So why would he want to whack you?” the sergeant asked.

  It bothers me when people use words like whack, waste, hit, off, do, grease, zap, and burn when they mean kill. It’s like they’re trying to pretend sudden, violent death isn’t such a terrible thing.

  “The word is kill,” I told the sergeant.

  He replied angrily, “You don’t think I know that?”

  Of course he would.

  “You still haven’t answered the question,” the chief reminded me. “Why would he want to kill you?”

  “I swear to God I don’t know.”

  “Think about it.”

  “I have. Believe me, I have.”

  The idea that the murder attempt was somehow connected to my search for Jamie Carlson flared bright. If you found a woman who didn’t want to be found and twelve hours later someone tried to assassinate you, what would you think? Only a young woman, married, with a child, living your basic upper-middle-class American dream—I couldn’t make it work. I decided to keep my suspicions to myself until I had a chance to see her again. Why drag Jamie into this if she was innocent? She had enough to worry about.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I said.

  “Hmm.”

  A few minutes later I was on the front porch again. The sergeant was directing a couple of technicians from Ramsey County around the body of Bradley Young. The techs moved quietly, efficiently, with the easy camaraderie of men who share the same profession.

  The chief didn’t have a crime, he had self-defense. An investigation would be conducted—about twenty percent of all deaths rate an official inquiry, including one hundred percent of all deaths where the victim is shot three times in the chest. Evidence would be presented to a grand jury. In the meantime, I thought it would be wise for me to cooperate completely, so when the chief said, “You’re coming down to the house with us, I want a written statement,” I nodded my head vigorously.

  Besides, I needed to get away from the body of Bradley Young before I again became nauseous over what I had done.

  “Johnson. Take off the cuffs.”

  Johnson moved behind me with his key.

  “Do I have to?” he asked.

  I gave a formal statement to a neatly pressed stenographer in a white interrogation room in the cleanest police station I had ever seen. The building was one of those flat, ultra-modern, energy-efficient, multipurpose brick jobs that also housed most of the suburb’s other facilities—city hall, community center, parks and recreation, water treatment plant. It was next to a sprawling network of baseball diamonds, football and soccer fields, six well-kept tennis courts, and a fenced-in obstacle course where teenage extremists could practice death-defying feats on skateboards. If I had been their age, I probably would have joined them.

  After I finished, Officer Johnson sat me in a molded plastic chair outside an oak door. On the door at about eye level if you’re six feet was a name plate that read, CHIEF B. CASEY. I made me think of Bernie Casey, who was a wide receiver for the Rams before he became a pretty good actor and painter. Nowadays, anyone who can do two things well is considered a Renaissance man. Three things and you’re off the charts, people don’t know what to call you.

  “What does the ‘B’ stand for,” I asked Johnson.

  “Bart. But don’t call him that. He doesn’t like it.”

  I could relate to that.

  Across from my chair was a glass display case. While I waited, I studied its contents: 9 mm Intratec spring knife, .22 carbine with bayonet, 12-gauge shotgun, nunchucks, timing chain, Louisville Slugger, and a rusted tire iron. A typed index card taped to the outside of the case read: “Weapons used to attack St. Anthony Village police officers in the month of August.” I shuddered, wondering what September would bring.

  Some time after noon Chief Casey arrived.

  “Inside,” he said, hurrying past me.

  His office was small and windowless and extremely cluttered. The chief sat behind a dark wood desk that was far too big for the room and motioned me to the only chair that was empty.

  The chief read my statement twice. When he finished, he told me to sign it.

  I did.

  He said, “The assistant county attorney wants to speak with you.”

  “I bet.”

  “Don’t go anywhere I can’t find you.”

  He had no right to say that. Unless you’re actually charged with a crime, you have every legal right to go anywhere you please, even France. Only I didn’t argue the point. Where would I go?

  “Johnson,” he called.

  Officer Johnson and I did a dance number in the doorway until we figured a safe way to pass each other. As I left I heard the chief speak sternly to him.

  “Johnson, I don’t like cops who are loose with their hands.”

  It took an hour to drive home, feed the ducks, take a shower, get dress
ed again, and snap a holstered 9 mm Beretta to my belt. The Beretta nine-millimeter is the official sidearm of the United States Armed Forces and is the standard issue of law enforcement agencies throughout the country, including Minneapolis. If the St. Paul cops had used it instead of the Glock 17, my whole life might have been different.

  I slipped a black sport coat over the Beretta and stared at myself in the full-length mirror. The gun was properly concealed. No one would know it was there. But I knew.

  I hate guns.

  The street where Jamie Carlson Bruder lived was empty. No surprise there. You live in a half-million-dollar house, how often would you go outside? And quiet—well, that’s why people bought half-million-dollar homes in this neighborhood, because it was quiet. Yet something was terribly wrong. I felt it as I parked my SUV in the same spot as the evening before and walked to Jamie’s front door. I knew it in the same way that I knew my mother had died before anyone had the chance to tell me.

  I used the doorbell, then knocked loudly. When no one answered, I circled the house, peeking into windows as I went, ignoring this time the trellis of roses. There was no BMW in the driveway, no beautiful blond scratching in the dirt. I pounded hard on the back door. No reply. It was only seventy-five, but it felt a good twenty degrees warmer. I used the back of my hand to wipe sweat off my forehead.

  Colin Gernes used to like burglars, would speak longingly of the good old days when burglars were gentlemen thieves who gently jimmied windows and doors, who were actually considerate of their victim’s possessions, who never carried, never hurt anyone—Gernes’s kind of crook. That was before cocaine. That was before junkies gave burglary a bad name by smashing windows with bricks and hammers, beating, raping, and killing anyone unfortunate enough to be inside, running off with the loot to their junkie fence for ten cents on the dollar or a gram of low-grade dope. That’s what I was thinking of as I slipped the burglary tools out of my inside jacket pocket—the “new” burglar.