by Roger Johns
“You’re absolutely correct about that. You cannot afford to make any mistakes. Not any mistakes at all. And do you know what’s the single worst mistake you could possibly make, at this stage of the game? Hmmmm?”
“Getting anyone else involved. I assume you want me, just me, to meet you somewhere to make the exchange.”
“You must be the pride of your department. So quick you are. And that’s exactly what it will be—an exchange. Put all thoughts of a rescue out of your mind. If I think, even for a moment, that a hostage rescue is in the works, there will be no hostages left to rescue.”
The rain had stopped but the streets were still sloppy, and it was hot and dark.
“Fine. What’s my next move?”
“Where are you?”
“I told you. In my car.”
“You’re sounding a bit uppity, Detective. Remember, whatever hand you think you’re playing … I’m holding the trump cards.”
“I’m in my car, in the hospital parking lot,” she said, as she backed into the driveway of her bungalow.
“Which hospital?”
“Baton Rouge General.”
“Get out of your car and walk to the rear, then read off the license plate,” he commanded.
Wallace pressed the trunk release button, as she exited her cruiser. She left the door open and the engine running. She stepped past the rear of her cruiser, reciting the number as she headed for the door to her house.
“Now sit tight, for just a second, while I check something on Google Maps. Just one second. Okay. This incredible piece of technology is telling me that, under current traffic conditions, it should take you no more than fourteen minutes to arrive at the Greenberg residence. Let’s just make it an even fifteen. I wouldn’t want you to feel unduly nervous. Here’s your route, so listen up. Take Government Street east, Jefferson Highway southeast, then regular neighborhood streets from there. Got it?”
“I know the route,” she said, as she entered her house through the carport door.
“Good. Don’t be late.”
“Why don’t you let my wife go?” she heard Colley ask in the background. “One hostage is easier to manage than two, anyway.”
“Why don’t you shut the fuck up, Grandpa? Why don’t I slap your fucking bitch, instead?”
Wallace had heard a lot of people hurl a lot of abuse at Colley in the time they had been partners, and it never bothered her—it was just part of the noise on the street. It came with the job. But hearing him threaten Stella wasn’t the same thing. That was personal. Don kept talking, but the fury in her chest drowned out his words.
“I said, can you believe this asshole?” Don repeated.
“Don’t hurt them,” she murmured, realizing that Don had been talking to her—that his antics were shredding her focus.
“Entirely in your hands, Detective. Entirely in your hands. Although, for the life of me, I can’t see what’s got you so attached to these losers.”
On her first night walking a beat, a gigantic, iced-out meth head went berserk when she and her partner confronted him, trying to defuse an escalating situation. He had head-butted her partner, knocking him out, then turned his attention to Wallace. She eventually subdued him, but not before he roughed her up, taunted her, and put his hands on every inch of her. He’d left her shaking with rage—a dangerous state of mind she swore she’d stay away from. But Colley and Stella’s present circumstances were testing her resolve on that point. First things first, she kept telling herself. First things first.
“When you get here, back into the driveway until your rear driver’s-side door is even with the side door of the house. If I see a plate number coming up the drive that’s different from the one you just read me, Mr. and Mrs. Greenberg will become the late Mr. and Mrs. Greenberg before you can even finish backing up. Clear?”
“Very. And then what?” she asked, moving silently through her house.
“Then, you’re going to take us for a ride,” he said. “And in the meantime, you and I will continue our discussion. Turn off your police radio. If I hear even a hint of a squawk…”
“I understand,” Wallace said, unplugging her landline telephone as she passed it. She didn’t want the ring from some random incoming call to give her away.
“Now…” Don began.
Wallace could tell by his tone that he was gearing up for a brag-fest. Excellent. Just keep him jabbering away, she thought.
“We have a few minutes, so let’s get back to your question about what’s in the little book.”
“I know Gable was a government scientist,” she said. “Are you selling secrets?” She walked to the back of her closet. “Is this some kind of industrial espionage?” she continued, trying not to sound distracted, as she knelt in front of a large, old-fashioned gun safe and quietly spun in the combination.
“Nothing nearly so mundane as that. No, the ineffable Matt Gable was kind enough to discover something that’s going to change the world.”
“Like what?” She looked at her watch. Fourteen minutes.
“I think you already know that, Detective. Our late friend Mr. Gable found a way to make the most popular drug since the invention of organized religion.”
“Ah. Cocaine,” she said, pulling open the safe door. Soundlessly, she unshelved one of her rifles—a Holland & Holland 240. “Everything else, we can already make.” She chambered a round, then stuffed a foam block with six more rounds into one of her pockets. The gun had belonged to her older brother Martin—custom made at great expense, for his twelfth birthday. Even at seven and a half pounds, it was so perfectly balanced it felt nearly weightless. “Won’t this upset a lot of our neighbors to the south?” she asked, sliding the weapon into a soft-side case. “Like the ones in Colombia and Peru?” She strapped on an eight-shot Ruger pistol in an ankle holster and pulled her pants leg down to cover it. The pistol made her feel anxious.
“It will, indeed,” Don said. “But that’s a very high-class problem to have. And, in any event, it’s my problem, not yours.”
She knew she would have exactly one shot to rescue Colley and Stella, and it wouldn’t be with the pistol. The rifle was for the rescue. The Ruger was for revenge. However things turned out, she was pretty sure she would lose her badge for what the Monday morning quarterbacks in Internal Affairs would see as a cowboy operation—even though Don was leaving her no alternatives. She pushed the door to the safe closed, then grabbed a hoodie off a shelf and pulled it on, leaving the hood down for the time being.
She moved back through the silent house to the soundtrack of Don’s endless self-congratulations. Twelve and a half minutes, plenty of time. She just had to keep him talking.
“Are you going to sell this magic formula to the highest bidder, or will you try to make the drug and sell it yourself?”
As she exited the house, she pulled the hood up so it would muffle the change in sound from indoors to out. She covered the distance from the house to the car in tiny, quiet steps.
“I haven’t decided that yet,” he replied.
She laid the rifle case on a folded tarp in the trunk and pushed the lid down, pressing her butt against the lock to muffle the click of the latch.
“Why? Would you like to make a bid?” he laughed. “By the way, where are you, Detective? Give me the intersection you’re approaching. Do it now.”
Wallace checked her watch. Just over twelve minutes remaining. If she had actually been driving from the hospital, she would have traveled almost a quarter of the distance to Colley’s.
“I’m just passing Steele Boulevard.” She slid into the driver’s seat. With her right hand she pulled the hood back off her head and with her left she pulled the car door quietly shut as she headed down her driveway.
“Making good time, I see. Maybe a touch ahead of schedule, by my calculation, but very good, Detective.”
Wallace sped toward the end of her block.
“I’ll interpret your punctuality as a sign of your earnes
tness,” Don continued.
With her dash-mounted flasher still going, she turned onto Government Street and put the pedal down. Without her siren she still had to slow for intersections, but by not having to stop she was covering ground rapidly and she could shave minutes off her travel time, assuming nothing got in her way.
“May I speak to Colley now?”
“No, Detective, you may not. I’m not completely stupid, as you should know by now. Why would I give the two of you an opportunity to plot against me? When I followed you to his house this morning, I thought he was your daddy. Imagine my surprise when I found out he’s your partner. I can only imagine what sort of secret signs and signals the two of you could cram into hello and good-bye. Sorry, but you’ll have to content yourself with little old me.
“Have you ever noticed, Detective, how some people just aren’t cut out to play in the big game? They mistake one clever little technical idea for something bigger. More often it’s the case that the beavering little inventor only invents. It takes someone who can see the bigger picture to properly introduce something to the wider world. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Wallace worked hard to split her focus between negotiating traffic at breakneck speed and listening to Don’s endless prattling.
“Well, I can tell you,” he said, “Matt Gable had no vision. He was just a grubby little toiler.”
Wallace started thinking about Mason. Over and over, she replayed that moment at the back door to Carla’s house. Her hand on his chest. The shake of his head as he shouldered past her through the door. Her failure to make the right choice.
She killed her flashers as she made the turn off Jefferson.
“Nope,” Don continued, “Gable was just a test tube juggler. Nothing more. He was never going to be the one to steal fire from heaven. But I give the devil his due—when it was his turn to get lucky, he made the most of it. But he also made stupid mistakes. Which was how I became aware of him. How I tracked him down. Do you want to know what his biggest blunder was?”
As he veered into a lecture on some kind of statistical gobbledygook, Wallace turned right onto Colley’s street, extinguishing her headlights before she made the turn. Just as Don’s lecture was getting into full swing, she glided to a stop near a line of trees and flowering shrubs that stretched from the curb to the Greenbergs’ backyard. Her car was just out of sight of Colley’s house. She was eight minutes early. If things didn’t work out, she would need three minutes to return to her car and then back the car into the driveway. That left five minutes.
“So what I still don’t understand,” Wallace said, when Don seemed to be winding down, “is how you knew the numbers you were looking at pointed to this discovery. Couldn’t there have been a lot of ways to explain this?”
“There could, indeed, Detective, but as any fan of deductive reasoning can tell you, if you eliminate all the possibilities but one, the one that’s left is the explanation.”
Wallace popped the trunk, pulled up her hood, and got out of the car.
“Wasn’t it your mythical forebear, the famed Sherlock Holmes, who put it so eloquently—after you eliminate the impossible, whatever’s left, however unlikely, that must be the answer?”
She hurried to the rear of the car and slid the Holland & Holland from its case. She prayed the nightlike gloom would let her get from her car to the trees without being seen.
“I never read Sherlock Holmes,” she said, making her way into the trees. “But wouldn’t you have to already be tuned into the idea, before you would even start to focus on possible explanations for what you were seeing?”
“Speaking of what one is seeing, I remember passing Ted Pico’s Diner, on my way over here. No doubt one of this city’s most illustrious five-turd dining establishments. You should be approaching it momentarily. What’s the advertised special, Detective?”
The area around the trees was littered with leaves and dry twigs, forcing her to move slowly as she painstakingly swept the dark ground with her eyes, searching for safe, noiseless spots to place her feet. It took her a moment to drag her focus back to what Don was saying.
“I’ve already passed it. An employee was out with one of those long poles, changing the letters on the sign out front, so I don’t know. Shall I go back?”
She moved cautiously, her left hand extended for balance as she tiptoed through the brush, her swollen right hand gripping the rifle. Despite its balance, the weight of the gun was starting to make her hand throb.
“Don’t be stupid,” he spat. “Where are you … exactly?”
“I’m approaching Audubon Avenue,” she said, hoping her estimate of time and distance was reasonably close to what he would expect.
“Good girl. Steady as she goes.”
A twig snapped underfoot. She slowed further, unwilling to risk another noise.
The wind picked up and the sky darkened further as evening fell. It was getting hot inside the hoodie, so the breeze felt good.
“You don’t want to fumble this close to the goal line. T-minus seven minutes and counting.”
Like a deer that senses the hunter nearby, Wallace moved with excruciating precision.
“So tell me, Detective. What’s our good buddy Mason like in the sack? The betting line at the office is that he has a little dick and even less imagination. Or maybe it’s the other way around, I can’t remember.”
“I know you killed Matt and I assume you killed Overman and Carla. How do you go about deciding that some amount of money is worth killing people for?” Wallace asked, ignoring his taunt.
“Cocaine is a bloody game. If I put the cartels out of business, maybe the body count drops and I’m a benefactor to the human race. In any event, maybe you should just worry about getting here on time.”
THIRTY-ONE
Wallace had been in the Greenbergs’ house more times than she could count. She could probably walk it end-to-end with her eyes closed. In fact, if she closed her eyes now, she could visualize the layout and its furnishings, room-by-room.
“But I am sincerely curious … what made you even think of looking for this?” she asked, hoping her open-ended question would trigger another of bout of self-aggrandizing speechifying. She needed to free herself of the need to contribute to the conversation.
“Don’t jerk me off. I can tell you’re trying to keep me talking so you don’t have to. If you’re trying to think up some heroic stunt to save the day, forget it. I’m several moves ahead of you, so don’t get the idea you’ll outsmart me. Ain’t gonna happen. Now start counting backward from a hundred.”
She made it to seventy-nine before Don had enough.
“Very good. You know your numbers pretty well. Wanna try the alphabet now?”
“Forward or backward?” she asked, scrambling to reassemble her scattered thoughts.
“Fuck you. Just pay attention to what you’re doing. I don’t want you crashing into something because you were trying to drive and chew gum at the same time.”
Wallace waited for Don to continue with his chatter, but he remained quiet. A wave of panic washed through her as he let the silence stretch. Perhaps he had suddenly seen through her.
“Penny for your thoughts,” he said, with a casual chuckle, as if he had sensed the effect his silence was having on her.
“Just focusing on the road.” She exhaled loudly, realizing she had been holding her breath.
“I’m curious about something. In all of your time policing this fair city, did you ever actually cross paths with Ronnie Overman? Meet him face-to-face.”
“No. I never had the pleasure.”
“Too bad. Gable wasn’t much to write home about, but Ronnie Overman was actually quite impressive. He had a nose for opportunity and an uncommonly strong sense of initiative. Who knows, under different circumstances, he and I might have been able to join forces. In the end, though, he crumbled. He became eager to give up the goods on Gable, especially after feeling the gentle caress of the snake and the nasty pinch
of the pliers.”
Wallace heard a car on the street behind her. Its windows must have been open. Faint strains of happy forties swing music drifted in her direction, then trailed off as the car continued deeper into the neighborhood. Unconsciously, she pressed the thick fabric of her hoodie against her earpiece.
“After their first meeting, Overman had been impressed enough with Gable that he had been ready to sign the boy up, but not before he checked him out,” Don said. “One never knows when a narc might be running that done-to-death scam of posing as a rogue government chemist with grand ideas and an axe to grind, so Overman hired a private investigator to check Gable out. Doesn’t that strike you as hilarious, Detective? A career criminal hiring a legitimate detective to help him make his criminal enterprise more profitable. I stand in awe of the man … well, of his memory, anyway. That right there saved me a ton of time and effort, because good old Ron Ron was able to share Gable’s name and home address with me.”
As Don’s soliloquy continued, Wallace worked her way through the maze of shrubbery along the side of the house, one careful step at a time, until she reached the gate that led through the fence into the backyard. At the same time, she continued her mental walk around through the Greenberg house.
She struggled to recall the details of what she would be able to see out of the rear-facing windows if she were sitting at the little bistro table in the kitchen, or leaning against the counter watching Colley fix dinner, or lounging on the couch against the back wall of the TV room upstairs, or sitting on the wicker stool under the built-in desk near the side door off the kitchen. From each of these places, Wallace focused on the part of the view through windows that included the roof of the gazebo near the back of the lot.
Once she had the view from inside to outside fixed in her mind, she transposed her point of view onto the gazebo rooftop and turned her mental images around so she could look from outside to inside—from the gazebo rooftop into the back of the house.
