3 Great Thrillers

by Churton, Alex; Churton, Toby; Locke, John; Lustbader, Eric van; van Lustbader, Eric

  His first day in the back room, Gus tells him, “All my life I was a outcast, someone who wanted t’be happier’n my daddy, but every time I tried, there was a white man standin’ in my way. So finally I gave up, went back here t’my own world where I’m the king of the castle.”

  Through the back door of the Hi-Line come a succession of police detectives. Although they all look different physically, they seem the same to Jack’s brain: they’re hard, flinty-eyed, dyspeptic. To a man, they’ve seen enough—often too much—of the streets they are sworn to protect: too much rage, too much bitterness, too much jealousy and envy, too much blood. They inhabit a swamp eyeball-deep in organized prostitution, drug smuggling, murder for hire, turf warfare. They have murder in their sleep-deprived eyes. Jack can see it; he can smell it, taste it like the tang of acrid smoke.

  They all want the same thing from Gus: shortcuts to turn their perps into collars. They want to make arrests, no fuss, no muss, arrests that stick, that won’t blow back in their faces like street litter. This Gus can do, because what Gus trades in, what makes him his living, is information. Gus’s castle may be at times too small to suit his taste, but it’s populated by a battalion of corner snitches, gang informants he set in place, embittered turncoats, ambitious politicos—the list seems endless.

  Whatever these detectives want, Gus usually has or, if not, can get in a matter of days. All for a price, of course. They pay, with reluctance and a show of crankiness. They know the value of the goods.

  One of Gus’s regulars is a detective by the name of Stanz. His face is as crumpled as a used napkin; his shoulders as meaty as a veteran boxer. His nose is a mess, broken in street brawls when he was Jack’s age and never properly fixed. He smokes like a demon, speaks as if his throat is perpetually clogged with tar and nicotine.

  Decades on the force haven’t dimmed his clothes sense. He opens the button on his smartly tailored suit jacket, lifts his trouser legs fractionally before he sits down on the sofa. He lights an unfiltered Camel, inhales mightily.

  “You did good on the Gonzalez thing.” He hands a thick white envelope to Gus. “That particular sonovabitch won’t be making money off coke or anything else for the foreseeable future.”

  “We aim to please.” Gus stuffs the envelope in a pocket without opening it. Obviously, he trusts Stanz.

  “Speaking of which.” The detective picks a piece of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. “My boss is on my ass like you wouldn’t believe about the deuce murders over McMillan Reservoir.”

  Gus frowns. “I tol’ you. I’m workin’ on it.”

  “Working’s not good enough.” Stanz hunches forward, perching on the edge of the sofa. “These past three weeks my life’s been a living hell—no sleep, no downtime—I can’t even get my usual tug-and-tickle, for fuck’s sake. You know what that does to a man my age? My prostate feels as big as a goddamn softball.”

  The ash trembles precariously at the end of his Camel. “My tit’s in the fire, Gus. Three weeks of interviewing, reinterviewing, poring over old cases, canvassing the neighborhood, scouring every fucking trash can and Dumpster for the knife or whatever the fuck sharp instrument was used to kill the vics. I feel like I’ve run the marathon, and what do I got to put in the report to my loo? What’s he gonna report to the chief of detectives? What’s the chief gonna say to the commish and the mayor? You see the bind I’m in? All that goddamn pressure has more than a trickle-down effect. I’m the guy where the shitstorm’s gonna hit.”

  He grinds out his Camel, stands. “Get me the name of the perp.” He points at Gus. “Otherwise I’m pulling my business, and where I go everyone else is gonna follow.”

  Gus’s eyes go hooded, and Jack, feeling the dangerous crackle of heat lightning in the room, involuntarily takes a step back.

  Gus says in the lazy voice that Jack has already determined means trouble, “You been on the force—what?—thirty years now?”

  “Thirty-three, to be exact.”

  “No.” Gus shakes his head. “Thirty-three years, eight months, seventeen days.”

  Stanz stares, blinking. He has no idea where this is going, the lug. But Jack does, and he can’t help smiling a secret smile.

  “That’s a long time,” Gus drawls. “Lotta shit piles up in those years.”

  Understanding comes at last to Stanz. “Now, wait a minute.”

  “Five years ago, the Ochoa takedown,” Gus continues as if Stanz hasn’t said a word. “Along with the thirty kees of coke, twenty-five mil was found with him, but only twenty-three made it into the police evidence room. Eighteen months ago, a Hispanic down. Forensics found a gun in his hand, but we both know that when you shot him he was unarmed, ’cause you bought the gun from me. And, my goodness, I have the paperwork to prove it.”

  Stanz’s face is flushed red. “Hey, you told me—”

  “This’s a game you don’t wanna be playin’ with me.” Gus’s inner rage has boiled up into his eyes.

  Stanz turns away for a moment, gathering himself. At length, he says, “I’d never threaten you, Gus. You know that, we go back a long way.”

  Gus’s bulk fills up the space; his rage seems to have sucked all the oxygen out of the room.

  Stanz is trying his best not to breathe hard. “We good now?” he asks.

  It looks like he can’t wait to get the hell out of there.

  18

  “Is Pete going to be all right?”

  “The doctor says he will be,” Jack said. “He’s been taken to Bethesda Medical. He’ll get the best of care.”

  Jack had volunteered to drive Chris Armitage home. A fine mesh of sleet slanted down from a pewter sky. The car’s tires made a hissing noise as they slithered along the road.

  Armitage shivered. “Until they torture him again.”

  “He won’t be tortured again.”

  “Damn straight he won’t.” Armitage was huddled against the passenger’s-side window, as far away from Jack as he could get. “I’m filing a complaint with the Attorney General’s office.”

  “I’d advise against it.” Jack got on the George Washington Memorial Parkway, heading toward the District. “If you do, Garner will haul you in again. I also guarantee the Attorney General won’t ever see the complaint.”

  “Then I’ll take it public—any one of the news outlets would jump at this story.”

  “Garner would love that. In the blink of an eye, he and his people will prove you’re a crank, and whatever credibility you’re trying to build for your movement will be shot to hell.”

  Armitage regarded him for a moment. “What are you? The good cop?”

  “I’m the good guy,” Jack said. “The only one you’re likely to meet in the next few weeks.”

  Armitage appeared to chew this over for some time. “If you’re such a good guy, tell me what the hell is going on.”

  Jack maneuvered around a lumbering semi. “I can’t do that.”

  Armitage’s voice was intensely bitter. “This is a nightmare.”

  Every twenty seconds, Jack’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. “Tell me about your organization.”

  Armitage grunted. “For a start, we’re not E-Two. Nothing like it, in fact.”

  A gray BMW 5 Series had taken up station two cars behind theirs.

  “But you know about E-Two.” Jack was careful to keep whatever tension he was feeling out of his voice.

  “Of course I do.” Armitage pointed. “Can we get some more heat? I’m freezing.”

  Jack turned up the heater. “It’s the fear draining out of you.”

  “Who says it’s going? I feel like it’ll be a part of me for the rest of my life.”

  Jack switched to the center lane. The gray BMW waited several minutes, then followed.

  “Every movement has its radical element,” Armitage was saying, “but to tar us with the same brush—well, it’s like saying all Muslims are terrorists.”

  There was an exit coming up. Jack switched to the left lane. “You�
�d be surprised at how many Americans believe that.”

  “Fifty years ago, most Americans believed that Jews had horns,” Armitage said. “That’s part of what’s wrong with this country, what we’re fighting against.”

  Here came the gray BMW, nosing into the left lane.

  “I can imagine Garner and his people still believing that,” Jack said tartly.

  “Why do you say ‘Garner and his people’? Aren’t you one of them?”

  “I was brought in to keep them honest.” That was one way to look at it, Jack thought. “Their philosophy isn’t mine.”

  “Anyway, thank you. You probably saved Peter’s life.”

  Jack was aware of Armitage studying his face.

  “Unless it was all an act. Was it?”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “How do I know you’re not lying?” Armitage said.

  Jack laughed. “You don’t.”

  “I don’t see what’s funny,” Armitage said in a wounded voice.

  “I was going to say, you have to take it on faith that I’m telling the truth.”

  Armitage managed a smile. “Oh, I have faith—faith in mankind, faith in science, faith that reason will win out over the engines of reinforcement built up by religion. Reason doesn’t require a priest or a rabbi or an imam to exist.”

  “You sound very sure of yourself.”

  “I ought to,” Armitage said. “I used to be a priest.”

  This interested Jack almost as much as the gray BMW did. “You fall out of bed?”

  “I know what you’re thinking—but, no, it wasn’t a girl. It was more simple than that, really, and that made the revelation ever more profound. I woke up one day and realized that the world of religion was totally out of sync with the world I was living in, the world all around me, the world I was administering to. The bishops and archbishops I knew—my spiritual leaders—didn’t have a clue about what was happening in the real world, and furthermore, they didn’t care.”

  Armitage put his head back; his eyes turned inward. “One day, I made the mistake of voicing my concerns to them. They dismissed them out of hand, but from that moment on, I could tell that I was a danger to them. I was shut out of policy decisions even within my own parish.”

  They continued to move south on the parkway. “So you left.”

  Armitage nodded. “Whatever ties I’d felt with the irrational, faith-based world were severed. I found myself drawn instead to physics, quantum mechanics, organic chemistry—not as a scientist, per se, but as a means of understanding the world. I discovered that all these disciplines are empirical absolutes. They can be defined. Even better, they can be quantified. They’re not subject to interpretation.

  “Look, organized religions poison everything. They keep people superstitious, ignorant, and intolerant of anyone who’s not like them. They also falsely bestow power on people who have no business being in power.”

  “Speaking of which,” Jack said, “hold on.”

  He had been keeping to just under the speed limit, but with the off-ramp just over a hundred yards away, he floored the gas pedal. The car jumped forward. Jack hauled the wheel over, entering the center lane to an angry blare of horns. He slowed abruptly to allow a truck to get in front of him, then wedged the car into the right lane, onto the off-ramp at a frightening rate of speed.

  Behind them, he could hear the shriek of rubber being flayed off the BMW’s tires, the scream of horns, squeals of brakes being jammed on.

  Armitage twisted around as far as his seat belt would allow. “You didn’t lose them,” he said.

  “When I want to lose them,” Jack said, “I will.”

  He prepared to turn off Dolley Madison Parkway almost immediately, making a left onto Kirby Road, but up ahead he saw one of those wheeled temporary signs with a grid of tiny lights blinking a message. The problem was, he couldn’t read it. The array of lights swarmed like a hive of bees. He was coming up on it fast, there was no time to find his set point, to command his dyslexic brain to read what it refused to read, so he made the left off the parkway.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Armitage shouted, bracing his hands against the dashboard.

  Jack could see what he meant. The access to Kirby Road was blocked off. They sliced through a pair of wooden barricades, hit a potholed roadbed partially stripped to the bone. Workmen scattered, shouting and gesticulating wildly. The car dipped into a pothole, then bounced upward, coming down hard on its shocks.

  The wheel vibrated under Jack’s hands. “What did the sign say?”

  “What d’you mean?” Armitage was bewildered. “You could read it as well as I could.”

  “Just tell me what it said!” Jack shouted.

  “It said Kirby Road was under construction for the next half mile.”

  There was no help for it now. “Hang on,” Jack said grimly.

  They jounced over the rutted roadbed, Jack swinging the car back and forth in order to avoid the deepest holes. The bone-jarring half mile seemed to take forever; then the car reared up onto smooth tarmac. Jack could see the gray BMW negotiating the road behind them.

  Swiveling back around, Armitage said, “Why is someone following us?”

  “Damn good question.”

  Jack flicked open his phone, dialed his ATF office, which was not five minutes away. “It’s McClure; get me Bennett,” he said as soon as someone answered. Chief Rodney Bennett came on the line right away.

  “How’s it hanging, Jack?”

  “I’ll know in a couple of minutes, Chief. I’ve got a high-powered tail on me. Late-model gray BMW Five Series. Three minutes from now I’ll be on Claiborne Drive. I need a stop ’n’ shop.”

  “I’m all over it,” Bennett growled.

  “Right. Later.” He folded away his phone.

  “Open the glove box,” he said to Armitage. “Take out a pad and pen.”

  Armitage did as he was told.

  Precisely three minutes later, Jack took a left onto Claiborne Drive. This was a high-rent district with large, gracious homes, spacious front lawns, expensive landscaping.

  Jack, one eye on the rearview mirror, saw the gray BMW corner after them, its distinctive front end just entering Claiborne.

  “Why are you slowing down?” Armitage was truly alarmed now. “They’ll be on top of us before—!”

  “Shut up and take down the BMW’s tag number,” Jack snapped.

  “Got it,” Armitage said, scribbling hurriedly.

  Jack heard sirens on Kirby, heading straight for them.

  With the BMW close enough to rear-end him, he suddenly veered to the left. The BMW jumped the curb, plowed over a lawn, through a low hedge of boxwood, veered out of sight around the side of the house just as a pair of ATF cars, lights flashing, sirens wailing, tore up Osborne Drive, bracketing Jack’s car.

  19

  “The man we got t’see, he don’t like people he don’t know,” Gus says. “Plus, he don’t like whitey, so that makes two strikes against you.”

  “You want me to stay in the car?” Jack says.

  Gus turns the wheel over, rolls slowly down T Street SE. “Huh. You stay in the car, the Marmoset he liable to come over, shoot you through the head. He don’t ask me, should I do sumthin’. It don’t smell kosher to him, he acts.”

  “What’s a marmoset?” Jack asks.

  “Some kinda monkey, I think, likes the treetops in forests, sumthin’ like that, anyway.”

  “You ever see one? I mean a real marmoset.”

  “Me, no.”

  Gus’s eyes are scanning the street. Jack can feel something in Gus condensing with concentration.

  “When you think I got time t’go to the zoo?” Between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets, Gus pulls into the curb, turns off the engine.

  “This here’s Anacostia, no place fo’ you, okay? So jes’ keep close t’ me, don’t say a word, and do yo’ thing, got me?”

  “Gotcha,” Jack says.

  The Continental’s
enormous engine ticks over like a clock winding down. The heat of the early evening seeps in, begins to weigh on the air-conditioned air. Gus grunts, opens the driver’s door.

  They’re on a street of narrow row houses sided with peeling wooden slats. Tiny overgrown front yards are divided by cyclone fencing. A huge German shepherd starts to bark, throwing itself against the fence as its jaws snap.

  “Hey, Godzilla.” Gus strolls over to the fence, Jack right behind him. “Marmoset’s neighbor keeps Zilla half-starved so he’ll go for anybody gets too close.” Gus digs in his pocket, pulls out a handful of dog biscuits, launches them over the fence. “Can’t stand to see a animal mistreated.”

  As Godzilla cracks down on the first biscuit, Gus and Jack approach the next house. “My father, he was a dogcatcher,” Gus says. “Man, he hated his job—dealing with ’em alla time—the rabies, the mistreatment, he come up against it all.”

  Gus leads them up the steps of a house painted the color of the evening sky. It has neat white shutters and a roof without the tar paper patches of its neighbors.

  “This it here.” He raps on the door.

  There’s a short pause, then, “Come on in,” a male voice calls.

  The instant Gus opens the door, three gunshots ring out, and Gus throws Jack unceremoniously back out onto the stoop. Jack’s ears ring, he can’t hear a thing, but from his prone position he sees Gus pull a Magnum.357 from his jacket, bang open the door. He shouts something to Jack as he vanishes into the interior, but Jack can’t hear what it is.

  Jack pushes himself up and runs inside. As he passes the door, he sees three bullet holes ripped clear through the wood. It’s strange to feel himself moving, but to hear nothing except the ringing in his ears, beneath which is a dead, all-encompassing silence. It’s as if the world has been stuffed solid with cotton balls.

  Sprinting after Gus, he finds himself in a dimly lit room, so cluttered with books, records, magazines, strewn clothes, hats, shoes, sneakers that it seems like a maze. The ceiling fixtures have been removed, leaving bare patches like the hide of a mangy dog. Instead, a multitude of lamps on tables, chairs, the floor provide weird colored light. It’s a moment before Jack realizes that all the lampshades are draped with colored bits of fabric, dimming the illumination as well as dyeing it.