by Brad Smith
‘Last night was bad,’ Bug said.
Chino shook his head. ‘We were never there. Anybody asks, you say you were home alone, watching football. Michigan and Nebraska.’
Bug silently mouthed the words. Michigan and Nebraska.
‘We were never there,’ Chino said again.
At the bar called Hard Ten, Tommy Jakes leaned back in his chair and watched as Chino walked over and put the bag on the table in front of him. Chino’s partner Bug skulked along behind, his eyes darting left and right. Tommy didn’t look in the bag but turned toward Bones, who came over to grab it. He went out the back door, presumably heading for the clubhouse across the way. It wouldn’t look good, counting that much money in front of the few customers who were in the bar.
‘It’s short,’ Chino said when Bones was gone.
Tommy Jakes raised an eyebrow. ‘How short?’
‘Four grand.’
‘And why is that?’
‘Because like I told you, the fucking Indian made off with the original score,’ Chino said. ‘I had to raise this on my own. Fifty-one is what I came up with. On pretty fucking short notice too.’
‘But you owe me fifty-five thousand,’ Tommy said. ‘Why would you bring me fifty-one? And I told you that I wasn’t in the mood for stories about thieving Indians.’
Chino exhaled, exasperated. ‘I’ll get you the rest.’
‘When?’
‘Soon as I can,’ Chino said. ‘I got some scrap to move. I was waiting for the price to go up. But if you’re in a hurry—’
Tommy shook his head in disbelief. ‘You want me to wait until the price of scrap goes up? You cheat me and then you want me to wait for the price of scrap to go up?’
Chino began to speak but then, looking at Tommy Jakes, thought better of it. He shook his head. They sat there in silence until Bones came back a few minutes later.
‘Fifty-one thousand,’ he told Tommy.
Tommy didn’t reply. After a moment he looked over at Bug, who’d been sitting quietly, nursing his substantial hangover and trying to keep out of Tommy Jakes’s crosshairs.
‘What about you, squirrel?’ Tommy asked. ‘You got four thousand dollars?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Tell me,’ Tommy said. ‘What’s your name again – Larry? Tell me, Larry, what happened to the money you guys brought across the border?’
Bug began to sweat. Chino turned in his chair. He had a feeling that Bug was about to tell Tommy Jakes anything Tommy wanted to know. And, for a moron, Bug knew a lot.
‘He doesn’t know,’ Chino cut in. ‘He wasn’t there. It was just me and the Indian. Bug set me up with the guy and that was it. He wasn’t there.’
‘I wasn’t there,’ Bug said. He grabbed at the story like a drowning man reaching for a rope.
Tommy Jakes had heard enough. He didn’t believe any of it.
‘Get me the rest of my money,’ he said as he stood. ‘You think I won’t kill you both for four grand? You just try me.’
When the two had gone Tommy asked Joni to bring him a couple of ounces of the good Buffalo Trace. He and Bones sat at the corner table and watched the pool players in the back room. There were four of them, kids in their twenties. They’d been hanging around the bar for a few months now. They all owned Harleys and wanted to join the Wild. They were too eager and wouldn’t get in, not at that age, but they came in handy when there were errands to run. Errands that might result in police involvement. Tommy had a doctor on the hook, a middle-aged dermatologist with a thing for strippers and coke. He wrote scripts for Tommy whenever he was told to and Tommy got the kids to fill them at the various pharmacies in the city. It was a good gig but it wouldn’t last. One of these days the good doctor would get found out and the kid presenting the prescription that day would go down with him. Until then, it was a profitable scheme.
Tommy sipped the Kentucky bourbon and glanced over at Bones, who was drinking soda. Bones never drank in the bar. Something about losing his edge. Alone in the clubhouse he would sometimes get stupid drunk, but never out in public.
‘So Chino shows up here one day, claiming he’s been ripped off,’ Tommy said. ‘Two days later he’s carrying a bag with fifty grand in it. You figure he had it all along, Bones?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘The money today, a lot of it was brand new bills,’ Bones said. ‘Monty always pays with used hundreds.’
‘Maybe this time was different.’
‘I called him after I counted it,’ Bones said.
‘What did he say?’
‘It was used hundreds.’
Tommy had another drink. ‘So where does a fucking loser like Chino come up with fifty large in two days? And what’s with the new bills? It’s not counterfeit, is it, Bones?’
‘I don’t think so. That’s out of Chino’s range.’
Tommy laughed. ‘I had this image of him and that other nitwit printing money in a basement somewhere. Except they would have walked in here with ink all over their hands.’ He watched the pool players for a full minute, thinking it over. ‘Where do you get new bills? You get them at a bank. Maybe Chino robbed a bank. But if anybody robbed a bank around here it would have been on the news. So what else – maybe Chino sold something and whoever paid him got the cash from a bank. Chino’s got property over in Markham County somewhere. Maybe he sold it. He’s always saying some farmer wants to buy it.’
Bones shrugged. ‘Do you care where he got it?’
Tommy considered the question. ‘No,’ he decided. ‘What else did Monty have to say?’
‘Said he liked the Indian. Called him Tonto. Wonders why he’s not working for us directly.’
Tommy Jakes lifted the bourbon to his lips. ‘That’s a good question, Bones,’ he said before he drank.
FOURTEEN
Carl was eating rice pudding when the cop Dunbar came into the room. This time he had a woman with him, a lanky redhead wearing jeans and a blazer. She had a badge clipped to her belt and her jacket flared above her hip, where her gun was. Dunbar introduced her as Detective Rachel Pulford.
‘Hello, Carl,’ she said.
Carl nodded, his mouth full. He swallowed and pushed the plastic bowl away from him. He’d had little appetite since being admitted. His left arm was strapped against his body, keeping the shoulder immobile. He had eight stitches in his scalp above his temple and a couple dozen more in each of his wrists. The doctor who had sewn him up said that he had come very close to bleeding to death and that they’d given him ten units of blood. He’d told Carl that he was a lucky man. Carl wasn’t feeling particularly lucky.
‘How are you doing?’ Dunbar asked now.
‘All right,’ Carl said. He had met Dunbar earlier. He was a big man with a bit of a gut, maybe early sixties. His graying hair was worn slightly long, giving him the appearance of a shaggy bear. His voice was even and quiet. In fact he appeared to be a quiet man.
‘The doctor tells me your shoulder surgery is scheduled for tomorrow.’
‘That’s what I hear,’ Carl said. ‘You know – unless I try to kill myself again.’
Dunbar gave Pulford a glance.
‘I guess you’ve been watching the news,’ she said to Carl, nodding toward the little TV screen suspended by the bed.
Carl just looked at her.
‘We can’t control what a fire marshal says to a reporter,’ Dunbar said. ‘For what it’s worth, we don’t think you tried to kill yourself, Carl. Moreover, I believe everything you told me yesterday. That’s why Rachel is here. This is now a murder investigation. On top of robbery, arson, home invasion and assault.’
Carl sat silently for a moment, looking at the wall across the room. ‘I asked the doctors about Stacy and they said they didn’t know anything. She died in the fire?’
‘Yes, she did,’ Dunbar said. ‘They got a positive ID from her dental records.’
Carl exhaled. ‘What happened to her?’
‘In the
fire?’
‘No. I mean afterward.’
‘Her parents are here. They’re taking her remains back to British Columbia.’
‘What about a funeral?’
‘I don’t know anything about that,’ Dunbar said.
‘I want to go to the funeral,’ Carl said.
‘The doctors might not be in favor of that,’ Pulford told him. ‘We can try to find out the details.’
Her voice was low and even. She was trying to be reasonable, Carl knew. It wasn’t a practical idea, him getting out of bed and flying across country to go to a funeral. A funeral where nobody would even know who the hell he was. But there was nothing in him that felt like being reasonable.
‘I talked to one of your neighbors the night of the fire,’ Dunbar said. ‘She said she saw a truck parked in a lane about a half mile west of your farm. A white Dodge truck.’
Carl nodded. ‘There’s a dirt road there, leads down to the river.’
‘You know the vehicle?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Carl said. ‘Lot of people park there to go fishing. It was a pickup?’
‘That’s what she thought. She didn’t think anything of it at the time. Probably nothing, like you say.’
‘They had to have wheels somewhere,’ Carl said. ‘There were no vehicles around when I went up to the house. It was planned.’
There were two chairs along the wall and Pulford pulled one over beside the bed and sat. ‘You’re right, it doesn’t appear that this was a random thing,’ she said. ‘From what you told Detective Dunbar, Frances Rourke was targeted. Do you agree?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘But you said the leader called her the TV lady,’ she said.
‘Yeah.’
‘So who do you think did this?’
Carl stared at her. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You saw their faces,’ Pulford persisted. ‘Two of them at least. You’re absolutely certain you never saw them before?’
‘If I’d recognized them, I would know who they were. I just told you I don’t.’ Carl looked over at Dunbar. ‘What is this?’
Pulford looked at Dunbar as well, as if waiting for him to explain. But he gave her nothing. Apparently it was her show.
‘Here’s the thing, Carl,’ she said. ‘You’ve had some problems with the law before. And you’ve served time in the past. You were in Wellington Detention for fourteen months a couple of years ago. We have to assume you associated with some bad people in there, the kind of people who might commit an act like this.’
‘I’ve gone from being an attempted suicide to an accomplice?’ Carl asked.
‘No,’ Pulford said emphatically. ‘But do you recall anyone at Wellington who might have seemed overly interested in the farm, or in Frances? Somebody asking questions? It’s obvious that these people were under the impression that Frances had easy access to a lot of money. Do you recall anyone like that?’
‘I never talked about Frances in there,’ Carl said.
‘Did you talk about the farm?’ Pulford persisted. ‘How successful it was?’
‘If I talked about it, it wouldn’t have been like that. I wouldn’t have made it out to be a place where somebody could score big. What is this about – what do you know?’
‘We don’t know anything, Carl,’ Dunbar said. ‘We need to make a connection of some sort. If we can figure out the connection, maybe we can find out who did this.’
‘You ever read In Cold Blood?’ Pulford asked. ‘Somebody told a story in prison about a farmer with a lot of cash on hand and a few months later two guys showed up and murdered the whole family. It has happened.’
Carl thought back to his time at Wellington. He never talked about Frances, or money, or even the farm in general. And there had been nothing familiar about the two men who’d removed their masks.
‘Never happened with me,’ he said.
‘Did Frances have enemies?’ Pulford asked.
‘Nobody who would do this.’
‘What does that mean? Who were her enemies?’
‘I don’t know if enemies is the proper term,’ Carl said. ‘She’s pissed off a few politicians and some local farmers, the ones using GMO seeds and feeding their livestock steroids and stuff. Those people didn’t raid the house the other night.’
‘I suspect not,’ Dunbar said.
‘Have you seen her?’ Carl asked.
‘Frances? I haven’t seen her, but you know she’s not … responding.’
‘She’s unconscious, pretty much all they’re telling me.’
‘They told me that too,’ Dunbar said.
Carl looked down at the sheet covering him. His right hand opened and closed by his side, the fingers flexing. His eyes were dark and he seemed to be fighting himself over something.
‘What else did they say?’ he asked finally.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Was she assaulted?’
Dunbar looked at Pulford.
‘They did a vaginal swab and found nothing to suggest she’d been raped,’ Pulford said.
Carl exhaled, looking down at the sheet that covered him. It seemed that he relaxed, just a little. After a few moments he looked up at Dunbar.
‘Something I remembered after you left. When Frances gave them the money, the forty-seven grand, one of them said something. He said maybe it was enough.’
‘Enough for what?’ Pulford asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Carl said.
‘Which of the three said it?’ Dunbar asked.
‘The skinny one with the bad teeth,’ Carl replied. ‘The one bothering Stacy.’
Pulford took a notebook from her pocket and wrote in it. ‘Enough,’ she said softly, as if turning it over in her head.
‘So what if there is no connection?’ Carl asked. ‘What if it’s just somebody who saw Frances on TV and assumed she had money? It wouldn’t be hard to find the farm.’
‘That obviously makes it more difficult to catch these guys,’ Pulford said. ‘The hardest crime to solve is one where there’s no common ground between the victim and the perpetrator.’
‘You telling me you’re not going to catch them?’
‘We’ll get them,’ Dunbar said. ‘Right now, you’re our best lead. You saw two of them. We want you to look at some pictures. Mug shots.’
‘Bring them in,’ Carl said.
‘We can wait until after your surgery, when you’re feeling better,’ Pulford said.
‘I can look at pictures right now.’
‘The doctor said you lost a lot of blood,’ she said. ‘It will take a while for you to bounce back. Let’s give it a couple of days.’
Carl started to protest further, then stopped. Maybe they were right in this. He’d been lightheaded since coming to in the emergency ward that night, with the IV in his arm and only a foggy memory of what had happened. Details had been coming back to him slowly ever since.
‘Are you confident you’d recognize them?’ Pulford asked.
‘I will recognize them,’ Carl said.
‘Sorry, but we have to ask this,’ Pulford said. ‘Will you testify against them in court?’
‘I will. You don’t need to ask me that again.’
‘I was hoping the Wellington angle might have panned out,’ Pulford said as they walked across the hospital parking lot.
Dunbar shook his head. ‘Burns had a good look at two of them,’ he reminded her. ‘If they were men he’d done time with, he’d have remembered.’
Pulford unlocked the car. ‘I was thinking more along the lines of six degrees of separation. He talked to somebody who talked to somebody. That kind of thing.’
‘He looks to be a man who keeps his own counsel,’ Dunbar said. ‘And probably more so when locked up.’
‘I got that from him.’ Pulford put the car in gear and they drove out of the underground and into the bright autumn sunlight. ‘To tell you the truth, he doesn’t seem the jailbird type in general.’
‘He s
hot a guy who raped his daughter. Before you got here.’
‘Really?’ Pulford said. ‘Is there something there? Somebody looking for revenge? Maybe they were after him and not Frances Rourke.’
‘Given the principals of the case, I doubt it,’ Dunbar said. ‘And keep in mind they weren’t exactly after Frances Rourke. They were after the money. Things went south when she couldn’t raise the hundred grand. They showed up wearing masks, which means they intended to leave everyone alive. But they got to drinking and maybe drugging and then the money was short. And the shit hit the fan.’
‘That’s an understatement,’ Pulford said. ‘What about the one saying that maybe it was enough? What is that?’
‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ Dunbar replied. ‘It suggests they needed the money for something specific. They wanted a hundred thousand but maybe fifty was enough? That’s odd. And what do you buy for fifty grand?’
‘Drugs.’
Dunbar shook his head. ‘But not for personal use. That much money, there had to be something else.’
They drove in silence for a while.
‘I have another question,’ Pulford said at length. ‘Frances Rourke is roughly my size. Five seven, maybe five eight. I’d say about a hundred and thirty pounds. Carl Burns claims he carried her up those stairs and out of the house when she was unconscious. That’s dead weight. You’re buying that?’
‘Yes.’
Pulford glanced over. ‘Keep in mind he had a badly dislocated shoulder. Yet he still managed. I have my doubts.’
‘I don’t.’ Dunbar gave Pulford a long look. ‘You’ve never been in love, have you?’
They drove into Rose City to the RCTV studio on Front Street. Pulford had called ahead and they were met in the foyer by a woman named Christina. She was forty-something, tall and attractive, although she looked drawn and stressed, her eyes red. The three of them went up a floor, to an open studio, where they were joined by a pudgy kid who introduced himself as Shawn. They were both producers of some kind. Shawn wanted to be in charge, even though he was obviously years younger than the woman.
‘What do you need from us?’ he asked.
Dunbar left Pulford to do the talking as he wandered about the room. The set was built as half a kitchen. There was a faux granite counter with gas burners and a grill. A refrigerator and a wine rack, fully stocked. Dunbar expected the bottles to be empty but when he checked, they weren’t. He realized now that, although he knew of the show in passing, he had never actually watched it. He would have to ask his wife if she had seen it.
