by George Wier
“End of your life, more like.”
“Yeah. I was a good cop, once.”
“If there had been proper lighting, you wouldn’t have shot him. You would have spotted it as an air rifle right off.”
“Yeah.”
Could have been. Would have been. Should have been, Billy thought. There’s no such thing. There is only what was and what is. And it’s been eating him up inside ever since.
Billy Strongbow touched Shelby’s armor on the back of his shoulder, then realized Shelby couldn’t feel it and withdrew his hand. “Is the armor heavy?” Billy asked.
“I’m getting used to it.”
“Look, Shelby,” Billy began, but Shelby raised a hand.
“Get in the habit of calling me Danel. That’s my name now.”
“You’re wiping Shelby Knight out of existence for real?”
“I think he’s dead now. Broken heart, maybe. But this new man, he has things to do. Can we get out of this place?”
“Sure. I wanted to see it for myself. You ready to go talk to the kid?”
“I’ll bet he’s not a kid anymore,” Shelby replied.
“Yeah. Look, there’s something you should know.”
Shelby turned to him. His visor was up and his tanned face and eyes squinted against the bright sunlight. “What’s that?”
“Back then this address was listed with the Bureau as a probable gunrunning site. That part of the operation was apparently shut down right after the shooting, but the principle actors are apparently still involved in guns and murder-for-hire.”
“That’s why you came down here, isn’t it? It wasn’t just because of Sheppard.”
“Sheppard drove to Houston—which is the closest FBI Field Office to Austin—to talk to someone in the Bureau because at that moment neither he nor you trusted the local police. Maybe that distrust was misdirected, and maybe it wasn’t, but it just so happens that he talked to the one agent who has had this particular file in his backlog for a long time.”
“What file? Mine, or Moore’s, or which?”
“This illegal arms thing. If I uncovered enough and found something, I was supposed to turn it over to the ATF Bureau Office.”
“Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms. Yeah. Those guys are like federal SWAT.”
“Exactly. But Sheppard didn’t just say your name, he gave me Moore’s. And that set off it’s own set of red-flags in my head.”
“Because Moore had something to do with...this?”
“Yeah, but not what you think. Moore’s was only the latest in a series of killings that can only be described as ‘gangland.’”
“Rival factions. You’re talking about two separated organized crime operations.”
“That’s right.”
“Well shit. All this time, ten years ago and right now. It’s still going on.”
“I think so. Normally that kind of thing gets settled out pretty quickly. But not apparently when everybody decides to go dark at the same time.”
“This is way over my head.”
Billy chuckled. “That’s the problem. If it was over your head, you would have already drowned. It’s only up to your nose, now.”
“A war. I’m caught in the middle of it, and now Rachel is too. Who are they?” Shelby’s teeth and jaws clenched on the words.
“One set is some local drug kingpins. Richard Moore worked for them. It’s in the Moore file, which is tagged with a few other files. I’m willing to bet the fellow missing a hand from last night is in there somewhere as well.”
“Names?”
“I’ll take you back to Sheppard’s and show you the files. You may be able to make more sense of them than I can. But I have a condition.”
“Name it.”
“You tell me anything and everything you know—or even suspect—as we go along. We coordinate with Quinn, which, by the way, we’re overdue to talk to this morning. We’ll give him a chance to redeem himself.”
“And clear my name.”
“Yeah. That would be a bonus.”
“The past,” Shelby said. “It never really dies completely, does it?”
“I don’t know. But maybe together we can kill it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Lionel Luza and Anthony Lampo sat on a wooden bench and waited for the man on the improvised hospital bed to wake up.
“He’s been good to us, till now,” Lionel said. “That’s why I had Benny fix his arm with something he could use.”
Anthony nodded. “Too bad about the hand.”
Lionel shrugged.
There was a flutter from Gil’s eyelids and they slowly open. He stared at the ceiling for a moment, then he looked to his left.
“Hey, Gil,” Lionel said.
Gil nodded.
“So, Gil,” Anthony began, “we’re taking you off of heavy duty. Maybe you can hang around the business. Maybe you can make deliveries for us.”
“Water,” Gil whispered.
“Sure, sure.” Lionel rose, went to nearby sink and returned with a cup brimming with water. The cup was dirty, but Gil drank from it. When he was done, he nodded and Lionel returned the cup to the sink.
“Like I was saying, we’ll keep you in the business, but no, uh, heavy lifting or anything. You’ve got what you might call a...an incapacitating injury.”
“Huh?” Gil asked. His eyes moved slowly from Anthony back to Lionel. Lionel dipped his head in a half-nod, as if gesturing that Gil should have a look. Gil looked down, he raised his left hand to scratch his right—there was an irritating itch there—but his left hand found nothing but air. He felt with his left and encountered cold metal.
“You made it,” Lionel said, “but the hand didn’t.”
“No,” Gil said. He was weak and the two men could hear it in his voice.
“Look, you’re lucky to be alive,” Anthony said. “You lost a lot of blood. You were in shock. It was touch and go there for a bit. The doc dug a bullet out of your left shoulder, but the hand was too far gone. You should have gone to the Emergency Room. You might have had a better chance. But that’s hindsight, you know.”
“I’m a hitman,” Gil said. “I’m the best there is.”
“You were a hitman. Now you’re all washed up at it.” This from Lionel. Gil looked at the ceiling, at the patterns of the tiles.
“You have to know,” Anthony said, “that we had to decide whether to keep you going or let you become fish food. But you’ve done good work for us in the past, and we appreciate that. Now, if you want to hang around, we can put you to work. But there won’t be any of the your old work. You have to know that.”
“Skillet?” Gil asked.
Lionel laughed. “Now there’s a fellow with some promise. You need to be thankful to him. He saved your life.”
“You’re replacing me...with Skillet?”
Lionel and Anthony exchanged glances.
They watched as Gil’s jaw tightened and slowly loosened. His face flushed scarlet, but even this faded after a few minutes.
“Look, we got some work to do,” Lionel said. “Benny will be back to check on you in an hour or two. If you need some pain medicine, it’s right over there by the sink. Benny said that when you first get up, you have to go slow because you might faint. But you’ll be all right in a few days.”
“I won’t be all right,” Gil said, the anger still set in his features. “I’ve got this to remind me.” He held up the stump of his right arm. The metal had a number of brads sticking up out of the base plate.
“In the future,” Anthony said, “you can be fitted with whatever you might need for a particular job. Look at it like...well, like you can be a walking Swiss Army Knife.”
“Thanks,” Gil said, “but there are other people that may need my services.”
The faces of both of the men sagged a trifle. Looking at them, Gil realized he had made a mistake—possibly a fatal one.
“What other people?” Lionel asked.
Gil said the
first thing that came to his mind in an effort to cover. “I’ve heard that there are people looking for my services. I had to turn them down because I was already on this stupid job about the girl.”
“Yeah?” Anthony said. “Well, tell you what, we have to be somewhere in about fifteen minutes. We won’t be gone more than a couple of hours. When we get back, maybe you can tell us about what went wrong and who cut off your hand...while you were performing our contract on the girl.”
“Sure,” Gil said.
The two men turned and left. Gil heard a key turning in the door lock. A deadbolt had slid into place, locking him in a dingy and dim room with cold fluorescent lighting and an ugly pattern on the ceiling above him.
“Right now,” Quinn Thompson said over the speakers in Billy Strongbow’s car, “we’re running damage control over here. If we find out where he is, I’ll personally let you two know. If you find out, you’ll do the same, right? That is, before you actually do anything, right?”
Shelby nodded to Billy.
“Of course,” Billy said.
“What kind of damage?” Shelby asked.
Quinn sighed, and both men could hear it. The truth was that all three of them were exhausted. “Former Detective Roberts dropped a copy of the ballistics report on both the Moore murder and the Holloway shooting off with the news media. They called us to verify it and asked if you were the number one suspect. The call was transferred to me, but the Chief and I already covered the subjects of a leak, so I was ready. Shelby, I flat-out denied that you were even a suspect. These reporters want to run with the story, but the Chief has a little bit of pull with them. They’ll run with some kind of story on tonight’s news if we haven’t found Terry by then. It would sure help if we could capture, preferably alive, one or two of the bozos who came to kill me last night.”
“I’m about to meet with Rachel’s mom and Sully. Two men tried to kill her yesterday—”
“Was that yesterday?” Billy interjected.
“Shit,” Shelby said. “It’s all starting to run together. Quinn, two men tried to kill her...recently, and I want to check with Sully to see if they were the same two bozos who came gunning for you.”
“Sully?” Quinn asked. “Do you mean Sully Kross?”
“The same.”
“I didn’t know that guy was still alive. He was a suspect in a number of unsolved murders a long time ago.”
“The Turf Wars,” Billy said. “That’s ancient history. It was a fight between two sets of thugs run by two different...uh, madames.”
“You mean Rachel’s mother,” Quinn said.
“Right. But I never said that out loud.”
“Got it.”
“We’re almost back to Sheppard’s place,” Billy said. “We have to let you go.”
“Sheppard. Who the hell is Sheppard?”
“It’s a long story,” Shelby said. “I’ll fill you in later.”
They pulled into the driveway at Sheppard’s and Shelby recognized the red MG. He hadn’t seen the car in over ten years. “Aw hell. They’re already here.”
“Who’s there?” Quinn asked.
“Rachel’s mom. And Sully.”
“Watch your back,” Quinn said.
“It’s safe. They’re...family.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Quinn hung up.
After they were parked but before Billy could kill the motor, Billy’s phone rang again. It was Quinn.
Billy tapped his dashboard and routed the call through the speakers again.
“Did you miss us already?” Billy asked.
“Look, I just got word. Lily Ward’s house just exploded.”
“What?” Shelby said. “The house in Pemberton Heights?”
“The same.”
“Well damn. I suppose I’ve got to go inside this place and give the old lady some bad news. That is, if she’s here and not dead.”
At that moment the front door of Sheppard’s business opened and Lily Ward stuck her arm up and waved.
“Scratch that last statement,” Billy said. “The old bitch is still alive. She’s fifteen feet away from me right this minute.”
“Like I said—” Quinn began.
“I know. Watch our backs.”
Shelby tapped the dashboard and hung up the call.
“Shit,” Shelby and Billy said simultaneously.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Former Detective Terrance “Terry” Roberts had enjoyed better days during his lifetime, but few had, thus far, been worse. His plans were pretty much in ruins. He had pushed Quinn Thompson too far, and when it was apparent the man was not going to play along, he had sent Gil to take him out. It would have cost him ten thousand dollars—and every dollar spent would have been worth it—but the contract killer had not only not delivered, he was not answering his phone. In the early morning hours he turned in his badge and tendered his resignation with a damning letter that placed the blame on the Police Department’s inability to arrest Shelby Knight squarely upon the shoulders of Chief of Detectives Quinn Thompson. In addition, he had dropped off copies of the ballistics reports showing both the Holloway shooting and the Moore murder as having been carried out from the business end of Shelby Knight’s Smith & Wesson nine millimeter.
“Quit the department, huh?” Cleve Roberts, Terry’s older brother, asked. It was both a derisive and rhetorical question. “My God, our mother did raise an utter fool.”
“I had to,” Terry said. “I showed my hand when I threatened his life. From that point on, there was no going back. I thought he would knuckle under. I misread him.”
From his second floor window balcony overlooking Ladybird Lake, the water appeared cool and tranquil. The lake was level-controlled. The only times he had ever seen the level any different from what it was now was after a hard rain lasting days at a time, in which case you could sit and watch the water level slowly rise to the top of the boat dock and eventually inundate it. This meant that the dam spillway, ten miles southeast, was shedding water at a slower rate than the lake was taking it on. Terry turned his head to look to the left. A family was loading itself into a large pleasure boat at the public docks next to the Captain’s Table, a glorified hamburger stand that doubled as a bar, right on the waterfront in the Ski Shores community. It was an isolated, not-very-well-known spot along the Colorado River.
“Why the hell did you come here?” Cleve asked him. This question was decidedly not rhetorical.
“I have to wait and see how Quinn is going to play it. He doesn’t have enough evidence to come after me. Frankly, I haven’t left him so much as a thread. But if he does, if Quinn and a couple of officers come by my house to talk to me or arrest me, I’ve got a neighbor watching and I’ll get a call. Then I’ll know.”
Cleve sat under the shade of a large umbrella. A folding card table sat in front of his ponderous, hairy bare belly, upon which were the disassembled parts of a Daewoo AR-15 submachine gun. Next to this was a conversion kit—completely illegal—that would turn the semi-automatic weapon into a fully automatic killing machine. Next to this was two full extended clips, each holding thirty rounds, and a large drug containing two hundred rounds—what was commonly know as “bull’s balls.”
“I hope once you get that call you’ll be leaving.”
“There’s nothing tying me to you,” Terry said. “They won’t know to come here.”
Terry turned to face his brother and Cleve looked up at him. “You don’t know what they don’t or do know. You’re starting to get sloppy.”
“Me? I’m sloppy? You were supposed to shut down your stupid gun operation years ago. Tell me, are you still in the middle of a turf war with those drug guys?”
“I was never in a war with anybody. Anybody that I go to war with is going to wind up dead. Hand me one of those cigars.” Cleve gestured to the miniature humidor on the deck railing.
“Smoking will kill you,” Terry said, but he opened the humidor, extracted a c
igar, the cutter and a lighter, and handed it to his brother.
“So will the idiocy of little brothers,” Cleve said. He neatly sliced off the end of the cigar, poked the stogie into the corner of his mouth, lit it and began to puff away at it.
“Those things stink,” Terry said.
“So do you. Why don’t you go inside and leave me in peace for awhile. I’m trying to concentrate here.”
“I might do that. I have a call to make anyway.”
Terry ducked inside the house and saw his nephew, Paul, removing a beer from the refrigerator.
“Hey,” Paul said. Paul was twenty-eight years old and essentially unemployed. It was surprising that he wasn’t larger than his father, since he ate and drank far more and did far less.
“Hey yourself. Let me have the kitchen, will ya? I’ve got a call to make.”
Paul shrugged, pulled the top on his beer, took a long pull at it, then walked away.
Terry pulled up Gil’s phone number and dialed it, expecting the call to go unanswered like all his other calls since late last night. It was answered, however, on the first ring. The man on the other end was not Gil.
“Yeah?” the man said.
“Where’s Gil?”
“Gil is...you might call it ‘benched’ for the duration.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“You the fellah that sent us to that cops house last night?” the man asked.
“Maybe.”
“Well, let me tell you, that whole thing was fucked, man. I’m tellin’ you. This fellow cut Gil’s hand off with a sword. Now I’m in charge.”
“Well shit. A sword, you say?”
“Yeah.”
