“Your fingerprints are on the gun,” said George, “and powder marks are on your hand.”
I glanced over to the inert figure of Mrs. Keever. Blood dripped from the seat of her wheelchair. I thought I saw one of her fingers twitch, but I couldn’t be sure. Amaryllis stood there stolidly.
“What—,” gasped Vargas, still standing there flat-footed, “what about your prints?”
George edged nearer to him but kept a body’s-length distance. “Here, can you see this?” He held out his right hand, showing the clear, flexible tape, courtesy of Yvonne, he’d placed on his fingers and palm. She used it, she said, for temporary face-lifts because it was elastic, like real skin. “My prints,” George said, “aren’t on the gun. Only yours. Powder marks on me, then, are irrelevant. You’re cooked, my friend.” He spat out his buck teeth.
“I knew it! I knew it!” cried the Whale.
“You knew my ass,” said George. “Now get on the floor and take the cuffs, or Sergeant Soames will have the pleasure of shooting you as you try to run.”
_____
Sylvan Burrell lurked in the bushes, close to the mission’s ground-floor windows. He enjoyed his occupation as an animal wrangler, which, since the day he started nine years ago with one well-trained dog, never stayed the same from one hour to the next. He had wrapped up his work with the police dogs on The Canary Syndrome, then he had done the TV gig with the hundred mice. Fortunately, this time he hadn’t needed to train the mice to attack humans. Not that it was difficult to do, it was just too weird: the best technique he’d found was to release the mice into an open, coffin-sized packing case, strip to his Speedo, smear his body with peanut butter, then lie down in there with them. They’d swarm him and nibble the peanut butter. So long as he stayed mellow, they never bit. You do that a few times, then the next time you release them, they rush for the nearest human, looking for peanut butter. Sylvan felt that he should be able to find somebody who liked the kinkiness of that situation enough to do the job for him for free. He hadn’t, though.
But tonight was different still than anything he’d done before. He had been told by George Rowe not to panic when he heard shots, although he was prepared to lose Norway 433. “It should be OK, but we might get unlucky,” Rowe had said, as they worked together in the early dawn hours to create a rathole and a PVC tunnel into the chemistry lab, using a tangle of vines beneath the window as cover. “The guy’s a pretty good shot, but the gun’ll be new to him and he won’t have had any practice with it.”
“OK,” Sylvan had said, “though I prefer my animals to die from natural causes.”
The night had cooled off significantly, and he felt comfortable waiting. He smelled the greenness of the shrubs that had taken over the football field, and he was glad to be part of something exciting, although neither Rita nor her friend George Rowe had told him quite what it was. Rita had asked him for this special favor, and he had done it because he liked her. He thought she was a good actress and felt a little baffled as to why she was going to law school.
On and off, he heard dogs barking, mostly in concert as a pack—that is, he didn’t hear fight sounds. So there was a group out there, with a strong leader. He knew about the feral pack of South Central, but had never seen it.
He had released the rat on George’s cue cough, which he’d clearly heard through the open pipe as planned. He’d baited the tunnel’s mouth at the classroom, so the rat headed straight up.
He’d heard the shooting. He knew that the sound of gunfire wasn’t terribly unusual in South Central. You heard it, you perceived whether it was near or far, then you either ignored it or took cover. Simple instinct.
Now, as he waited, decked out in his black SWAT-looking outfit with his equipment—flashlight, a belt pack with rat treats in it (yogurt candy drops), his cell phone, a loop of light rope, work gloves, and the holstered black canister of pepper spray he always carried if he had to go into South Central—a woman hurried along the side of the building, almost bumping into him.
This was, quite oddly, the second person he’d encountered out here; just a few minutes earlier he’d caught sight of another woman, wearing a dress that looked wet in front—it was hard to see in the dark, with only traces of light coming into these shadows from the street. She’d been hunched over, holding her face as if she were crying, but he’d heard no sound. She’d moved silently away and disappeared around the corner.
The second woman was a short, big-butted white girl. She stopped and looked him over.
“Who are you?”
“My name’s Sylvan,” he answered cheerfully enough.
She said, “The goddamn van broke down on Vernon and I had to walk back. I got ice cream to pick up! Do you have jumper cables?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“Hey,” she said, peering again at his equipment and so on, “what you doing here, anyway?”
“I’m a wrangler,” he answered.
Wichita pushed out her chest. “A wrangler? You mean like a bounty hunter?”
He didn’t get what she meant. He tried to make it plainer, because she must be a little slow: “There’s a rat upstairs, and I’m here to make sure he doesn’t get hurt.”
“A rat?” Wichita exploded. “Who’s the rat? That bucktooth guy? He’s up there with Dale! Goddamn it, I knew that son of a bitch was a rat from the beginning!”
She took off running.
Chapter 33 – The Whale Founders
The Whale, coherent now, on the tile floor now, amped into bitter anger as he struggled against the cuffs. “So you’re the rat,” he sputtered at George. “What did you do—get caught with that shit on you and turn on me? I want my lawyer!”
“You don’t get what’s happening,” said George. He thrust his knee deeper into Vargas’s back and I latched the cuffs on the man whose wrists were almost too stout for them.
“I was a bigger fish than you all along,” George explained. “I was just pretending to suck up to you, so I could take over. I’ve engineered everything, as you can see.” He left the Whale beached on the floor for the moment.
Vargas understood. “You guys couldn’t get me by the rules, so now you’re setting me up for murder.” He twisted his head to glare at me. “You’re a crooked bitching cop, you’re in his pocket.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Quite a profit center it is too! And I’ve got Culpepper down in that little room, and he’s just given you up.” George looked at me sharply. I gave him a look that said, Yeah, I’m gonna improvise here. As he realized that I’d really handled something down there—he still didn’t know what—comprehension took over, then delight.
The Whale flopped onto his side, to better interact with us. “What happened, did he let her get away? Son of a motherfucker!”
I went on, “Yeah, we’ve got him on kidnapping and assault, of course you know that since you were in there too, using the knife on that poor woman, and he’s gonna yell his ass off about you. He’s already babbling about those two bodies from last year, the guys who were gonna cut a deal with us on what you pulled in Tucson. He called it ‘Thinking Inside the Box.’ Pretty funny. I’m sure you invented that term, right?”
The Whale’s panic rose in his eyes like blood, but at the same time I saw him begin to calculate. With blinding swiftness, he got a grip and started to deal.
“Culpepper’s got nothing on me that won’t pull him down too!” he said rapidly. “I’m the one that can get him! You want the CEO? I just promoted him! He’s the one that knows which dock down there that barrel went off of. Man, that thing sank like a tombstone.” He stopped, almost smirking. “I won’t say more right now, but just you talk to him about that. Just say, ‘Hey Reverend! Which dock? Which dock again?’”
I remembered the one-thumbed Culpepper telling me he’d been a stevedore. Of course: docks, docks plural, down there, well, the Port of Long Beach?
I took a risk. “Before or after the strike?” I asked, the side of my face feeling George’s sur
prise.
“Hah! During! I never had my hands on anything in that barrel!”
Now we knew that by checking the wharf schedules and zeroing in on the docks most isolated, and likeliest to be deserted during last year’s much-publicized labor strike, at least two of the Whale’s victims should be found.
That right there was huge, huge for us. Frame him for murder, get his guard down, then move in to pry some real information from him—information on a capital offense we could give to the police.
The horror of Neneng and the extra advantage that Culpepper gave us were unexpected, but I’d seen a way to use them. And it worked, dammit, it worked.
In a confidential tone—he even managed a sly look—the Whale offered, “I’ll give you Culpepper and fifty grand, cash, apiece, and my whole operation if you let me go now. I was thinking of moving to Seattle, anyway. Let me go, I swear I’ll give you everything.”
I was happy. And I have to say, he was so invitingly conspiratorial, I almost wanted to take the deal.
Suddenly I remembered what Gramma Gladys had communicated to me: Don’t be yourself! Well, I certainly had not been myself, I’d taken on the aspect of a pregnant junkie, then a dead police officer. I suppose if I’d thought it worthwhile to impersonate a one-eyed Laplander, I’d have done that too.
Yes, I was happy, and naturally I thought we were home free.
But I’d forgotten the other thing Gramma Gladys emphasized to me, something about just when you think…
The process of Everything Going To Hell started with a crash at the door. I turned.
Wichita, all tight T-shirt and stomper boots, tore into the room like a mad buffalo.
“Hold it!” she commanded, and my heart went cold to hear her crazed tone and just the whole damn oh, shit of it. She waved her pistol, which looked insanely big—like it could hold about fifty bullets. George had told me she carried a 9mm Conti-Boch, which meant nothing to me, except that it sounded aggressive.
I glanced at Amaryllis, whose nostrils were flaring at Wichita’s unexpected, disastrous return. She remained near Diane Keever’s crumpled body. And because of the bedlam that happened next, that was the last I noticed of her, until later.
My fake gun was holstered, and I knew that the only thing left in George’s were blanks. Nevertheless, Wichita couldn’t cover us all at once, and she couldn’t shoot us all at once, and there were a few of us to shoot.
Her face froze as she realized that very thing. All she’d wanted to do was save her boss—her boyfriend, sugar daddy, whatever.
George was already reacting, moving subtly out of Wichita’s central vision. As she glared at me, trying to decide what to do, he dropped behind the longest lab counter and crab-walked in a second to the other end, only a few feet from her.
He looked back at me and his eyes said, Do something now!
I drew my gun, wound up, and hurled it at her as fast and hard as I could. It struck her shoulder, even though she saw it coming. She also saw George leap from behind the black-topped lab counter.
She knew, probably, just about as much about gunfighting as I did, but she knew how to pull the trigger, and boy, that’s what she did. He grabbed for the gun but she was fast, and with those massive haunches, she had a low, stable center of gravity. Her gun spat fire as he lunged for her wrist.
I rushed forward, but something like a well-padded locomotive slammed me from behind, and I went down headlong, skidding on the floor. The Whale was up, and after plowing me out of his way, he belly-flopped onto the George-Wichita pile, handcuffs and all.
Bullets flew around the room like popcorn as Wichita’s gun snapped this way and that.
George, I perceived, would have gotten Wichita in hand in another instant, but the thrashing bulk of the Whale threw everything into question.
I couldn’t believe we’d been in total control just a few seconds ago, and now were fighting for our lives. What should I do, lie there and wait for the shooting to stop? No, no.
I scrambled to my feet and hurled myself into the fight for Wichita’s gun, attaching myself to the Whale’s back and circling his throat with my arm. I pulled my forearm into his windpipe as hard as I could. I wanted to kill him, and next I wanted to kill that fucking Wichita.
Her gun kept going off.
The Whale’s skin was slippery, he was sweating and so was I. The whole world was pouring sweat.
A bullet zinged past my ear with a terrifying whine.
I’d been expecting the volunteers down in the dormitories, if not whichever few guards were on duty, to have stampeded in here by now. But of course, all they’d heard were gunshots, and I guess it’s like when you suspect a fire behind a door—you feel for heat, and if you detect it, you don’t open it. What idiot would?
All the more surprising, then, when so much more hell broke loose. The door banged, and this time I heard a voice I really did not want to hear. It was Denny’s, and here he came through the door pointing a big-ass gun, and he wasn’t alone.
This was a very bad thing.
And it was an impossible thing: I was counting on Gina to keep this guy away! Where was my sister? A horrible image of her lying somewhere with her throat slit by this criminal asshole flashed through my mind as I kept struggling to strangle the Whale.
At first all I heard was yelling, lots of it, guys’ voices shouting syllables that didn’t register on me at the moment; I heard Wichita beneath it all, screaming and flapping like a chicken because George had probably busted her arm getting the gun away, which he had done just as Denny came; and when the shouting coalesced into words, I heard, “Police! Police! Drop it, drop it, get down, get down!”
“Huh?” I said.
It was the real deal: these guys behind Denny, to my astonishment, were the actual LAPD, they had guns and SWAT armor, and they poured into the room, five or six of them, and it was extremely chaotic for about thirty seconds until everybody stopped, and Wichita’s gun scuttled to the floor and we all obeyed the order to get down on the goddamn floor and shut up.
The few seconds of gunshot-free silence that followed were so beautiful to me I cannot tell you.
Then, from my facedown position, with a cop’s requisite knee in the small of my back, I heard George, totally inexplicably, laughing quietly.
“Shut up,” said a cop.
Denny said, “It’s OK, Ang, let him up. Let her up too. No, not her—the little one.”
The knee lifted away, and I scrambled upright.
My mind worked ferociously to try to figure out what was going on. And what had been going on.
Denny—a cop?
He was in plain clothes, the others were in uniform.
If he was a cop tonight, he’d been a cop all along.
The whole fucking time! While he was hanging out with Vargas and Wichita and his family of thugs, while he sat at my dinner table and told that shit about his so-called job, everything.
I stared at him, and he smiled slightly in my direction as he handled the action in concert with an LAPD lieutenant, who was calling out Miranda rights.
Behind me, I heard someone crying.
Denny knew exactly what had happened, he knew exactly who everybody was, and he knew who he wanted to take into custody and who he didn’t.
“You son of a bitch,” George told him good-naturedly as he brushed himself off, “you sneaky son of a bitch.” He stretched himself and moved his neck from side to side. Wichita whimpered in her shackles. I wanted to kick her in the head, the murderous wench.
Slowly, Amaryllis rose from where she was—essentially she had draped herself over the slumped form of Diane Keever, covering her head and torso, like a human blanket. She unfolded herself and stood upright, looking down at the old widow, panting as if she’d just outrun the hounds of hell.
Mrs. Keever was crying.
Amaryllis asked, “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Keever, “help me up.”
Amaryllis extended her stur
dy brown arm, and the parchment-pale hand fitted itself on it, and slowly, dripping blood, sweat, and tears, Diane Keever rose to her feet.
“Get the medics over here,” said an officer.
“No,” I said, “it’s fake blood, she’s OK. All she needs is a towel.” Yes. Diane Keever had just acted the role of her life. And she’d done it beautifully, triggering the compressed-air squib with her hand under the lap robe at the exact instant George fired the blank at her chest. I hadn’t seen it, but I knew it looked fantastic (George confirmed this later), especially since Chino had added, inside the condom full of fake blood, bits of pink sponge that blew out along with the blood. Just great. We had scored Diane’s white blouse with a razor blade over where Chino had taped the squib, to make sure the explosion looked good, and I sure wished I’d seen it.
And now Diane Keever was crying. She spat out Yvonne’s now-spent blood capsule and clutched the wad of paper towels I handed her. Too overcome even to wipe her face, she took a tottering half step and threw herself into Amaryllis’s arms.
“You covered me,” she sobbed, her body wracking so hard I feared she’d disintegrate. “They were shooting real bullets, and you covered me.”
Amaryllis held her, and looked over her head, her eyes a mile away. “I didn’t have time to think about it.”
I contradicted, “Yes, you did.”
“You made the choice,” sobbed Mrs. Keever.
“Stop crying now,” Amaryllis scolded, and I could see that all the years of guilt were gone, vanished. Banished. Her face was clear and exhausted, and until that moment, I hadn’t realized how much of her had been held tight by the past.
As for Diane Keever, she wept with the release of decades of hatred and anger. Amaryllis had, with her single act of self-sacrifice, plucked her out of the hell she’d built for herself for so many years.
The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set Page 61
