Cold Quarry (28 page)

“I meant you.”

“Me?”

I nodded.

“No.” She looked chastened. “I asked you out, didn’t I? How about you?”

“I’m divorced. There was a woman I wanted to ask to marry me, but it looks like that’s pretty much over.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I have a twenty-one-year-old daughter from my marriage.”

“Really?”

“She has a boyfriend. Good young guy. Smart. I’m always lecturing her about keeping herself pure for marriage.”

“I see.” She smiled. “You don’t look old enough to have a daughter that age.” She crossed her long legs, and when she did her robe slipped back up well above her knee. She made no attempt to straighten it.

I looked around the room at the comfortable furnishings.

“Rumor has it you and your friend are in a lot of trouble.”

“No comment.”

“Uh-hum.”

“Are we going to do the reporter thing again?” I asked.

“Hey, now, it’s not that bad. A lot of people are excited to talk to someone in the media.”

“Not in my line of work.”

She nodded. “I understand. I sometimes feel the same about my work.”

“Are you good at it?”

“I’m good at a lot of things,” she said matter-of-factly.

“You haven’t asked me anything more about what my friend and I were doing there at the vet’s office last night.”

“I’ve found it’s best to just let people talk about themselves. They usually get around to answering most of my questions.”

“Is that so?”

“Anyway, I thought detectives were supposed to be the ones asking the questions.”

“Normally.”

“Well, here’s a question: why did you really come here tonight?” She reached her hands up and ran her fingers through her long hair.

“I don’t know.”

She smiled again and looked out her tall windows at the gathering darkness. There was a light dusting of snow on the evergreens outside.

“I guess maybe, when people die, and when dangerous things happen, it can either make you want to retreat into yourself or want to reach out to someone,” I said.

“Is that what you’re doing now, Frank? Reaching out to me?”

“Maybe.”

She uncrossed her legs and shifted a little on the edge of the couch. “You know I didn’t really get a chance to thank you for saving me last night. I’ve never been shot at before.”

“Doesn’t happen to me every day either.”

“That’s good.” She laughed a little and slid over next to me. She reached around behind me and with both hands began massaging my neck. “You’re tense as a drum,” she said.

A soft growl came from the stairwell.

“What was that, the cat?” I asked.

“Fresco’s jealous as the day is long.”

“I have to do some things tonight,” I said.

“Oh?”

“I have to help out a friend who’s in trouble … and I have to do some things I’m a little afraid to do.”

“You don’t seem like the kind of a man who scares easily.”

“I’m not.”

“Then just go ahead and do what you have to. Don’t think too much about it. That’s what I always told myself in the gate at the top of the mountain.”

“Top of the mountain, huh?”

Her fingers felt like a warm balm gently moving back and forth across my shoulders. I turned into her body and then her lips were there, moist and inviting as they melted into mine. She smelled of tangerine and lilac.

“You still haven’t asked me what I was doing there last night,” I said.

“Ummm.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a reporter.”

“Maybe I’ll have to coax it out of you,” she said. But she must have felt my arms tense a little as they raised up to hold her back from our next kiss. She pulled away and sat back on the sofa.

We sat together in silence for a moment.

“This can’t happen right now,” she said. “Can it?”

“No,” I said, as gently as I could. “For a lot of reasons.”

She nodded. “I understand.”

“You don’t want the story?”

“Not if you’re not ready to give it to me.”

“Maybe sometime,” I said.

“Maybe sometime.” She rose from the sofa and straightened out her robe. “I’ll go get you that information on the lab.”

31

A half an hour later, I found myself trolling Charleston’s west end looking for the Connors brothers again. Were the two young white supremacists on the run? If Caleb Connors had been sent back up to the site of Chester’s murder by Bo Higgins to try to find anything that might tell them who had done the shooting, it meant that Higgins was concerned someone was complicating their own plans. Could it be the same man who was trying to frame Jake? Damon Farraday? Had Caleb Connors seen something or found something that might close the loop on who the real killer or killers were? And where was Toronto and why hadn’t he tried to contact me?

I caught a small break. The whore’s real name was Beatrice. She was working the bars on Washington Street and said she’d seen Caleb Connors a little earlier in the evening in a different bar down the street and that she’d seen his brother with him too.

“Caleb, he’s the one with the firebird tattoo on his shoulder, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, that’s him.”

I put a twenty down on the bar and thanked her.

“Anytime
you’re
asking, baby. Anytime.”

I drove past the brothers’ house again. Nothing—no car in the driveway and the place was locked up tight. It was growing later and I was running out of bars.

I had just walked out the door of the latest when I spotted the bright orange GTO the neighbor had said the brothers drove. It was rounding the corner onto Washington a couple of blocks down and headed in my direction. As the car approached, even though the windows were slightly fogged, I could make out four people inside. One of the brothers drove while the other sat in back and each had a young woman seated beside him. The rear stereo speakers thumped down the street. A front window on the passenger side cracked open, smoke blew out from the opening, and a set of long slender fingers flicked ash onto the pavement as they passed.

Betty’s Buick sat just a few spaces away. I kept my eye on their taillights as I unlocked the door, climbed in, fired up the engine, and pulled into a slow-moving line of traffic a few cars behind them.

They were about as hard to follow as a Snoopy blimp. Obviously in party mode, whichever brother was driving cruised casually down Washington for a while, took a right on Pennsylvania beneath the interstate, and only sped up gradually after taking another right and heading into a neighborhood of drab dwellings interspersed with the occasional vacant lot. I kept the Buick back a block or so. When the car turned into the driveway of one of the houses, I pulled into a line of parked vehicles and watched from a distance while the four of them climbed out, the two in the back giggling and clinging to one another like hounds in heat as they extricated themselves from the long two-door and weaved their way with the other two in through the front door of the house.

I checked the cylinder on my .357 as well as the backup pocket 9mm I’d strapped to my ankle before swinging the Mossberg onto the seat next to me. I wore one of Jake’s oversized long hunting coats I’d also picked up before leaving his place. The short-stock shotgun slid nicely under one arm and you’d have to look closely to see I was carrying it. I decided to give them a few minutes to let the party swing into high gear before making my grand entrance. A blast of cold wind shook the Buick. I checked my watch and waited.

Twenty minutes later I climbed out and made my way down the sidewalk toward the house. The street was empty and dead quiet. People who were at home on a cold Sunday night had holed up behind the blue halo of their color televisions, eating, drinking, arguing; some, especially the younger ones, making love.

One thing troubled me. If any of my own two pairs of lovebirds was armed and I didn’t happen to catch everyone in the same room, someone could obviously get a jump on me. But a night without risk is like a night without darkness.

The house was a small pale ranch with mismatched shutters on the windows. The drapes had been pulled. More loud music beat its hollow noise from inside as I approached across the mud-caked front lawn. Thinking about Chester, I said a silent prayer as I stepped on the front porch.

The front door was unlocked, which almost made it too easy. I pushed through it as quickly and quietly as I could, swinging the shotgun up to waist level as I entered.

“Hey! What the fuck?”

They were all four in the living room, directly in front of me. Each one was naked from the waist up and one of the two girls, who’d been performing a little dance, also had her blue jeans down around her knees. The air was thick with marijuana smoke. The two brothers lay on either end of an L-shaped sofa. Four empty shot glasses, half a six-pack of beer, and a bottle of tequila were strewn about the floor at their feet. The other, nondancing girl gave a sharp scream and removed her fingers from inside the open zipper of one of the brothers, both of whom looked to be too stoned at the moment to do much other than make the aforementioned comment and stare warily at the long barrel of the gun. Lucky for me, the music drowned out the girl’s voice. I closed the front door with a soft thud behind me.

“Sorry to have to crash your little party,” I said.

The girls rushed to pull their clothes back on or at least hold T-shirts in front of their naked breasts, but the brothers didn’t move. Caleb Connors’s tattoo was clearly visible and his eyes slowly evolved into recognition as he studied the fading bruise on my face.

“Hey,” he said. “You’re that fucking guy from up in the woods.”

“See what happens when you go pointing shotguns in people’s faces, Caleb? Comes back to haunt you.”

“Caleb?” The other brother turned on him. “Jesus, man, what’d you do, tell this asshole your name?”

“I didn’t tell him jack shit. I had my mask on just like I told you.”

“And you let him take the gun away from you.”

“I told you, man. I was going to let him go and he sucker punched me.”

“Now, boys, let’s not quibble over who told whom what. The way you guys parade around town you might as well be wearing neon signs that say Stonewall Rangers.”

“Stonewall Rangers?” The girl who’d had her hand down Mart’s pants looked at the brothers with anger. “You two don’t run with that bunch of nutcases, do you?”

“Uh-oh,” I said. “Love is such a fleeting thing.”

The muscles in each of the boys’ arms flexed involuntarily, and if they hadn’t been so wasted I might’ve been worried they would try something.

“Don’t even think about it, gentlemen. Unless you’d like to talk it over and decide which one gets it in the face first.”

“Fuck you, man.” Still the lack of vocabulary. Caleb’s nose was running, but he made no move to wipe it.

“The good news for you all is that I’m only here after information,” I said. “Unless, of course, you decide to be difficult. In which case I’ve got a cell phone and will be more than happy to talk this whole matter over with the Charleston City Police or the Kanawha County Sheriffs Department.”

I was bluffing, of course, since heading downtown to the sheriff’s department was one of the last things I actually wanted to do at the moment. But they didn’t know that. The boys both appeared to be slowly processing whatever options they might have. Their brains, dulled by the smoke and booze and probably not among the quickest to begin with, moved like molasses.

“Sweetie pie,” Matt said to the girl who’d spoken. “If you knew what the Rangers was really doing you wouldn’t talk like that. We’re freedom fighters. You should keep your dumb cunt mouth shut unless you know what y’all are talking about.”

“Fuck you,” she said. “I let you two jerk offs in here to party with us and this is what I find out? You’re a couple of loonies, that’s what you are.”

The music mercifully paused for a few seconds between songs.

“Please turn it down,” I said. The girl who obviously lived there went to the stereo components piled on a table against the wall and turned off the receiver.

“Thank you. Matt, now that we can finally all hear ourselves think, maybe you can start by telling me what your brother was doing up there on Chester Carew’s land.”

Matt Connors looked at his older brother, who glared back at him. “I ain’t gonna tell you jack shit, mister.”

“Oh, no?” I kept the shotgun in one hand and with the other slid the .357 from my inside jacket pocket. Before leaving the car, I’d fitted a silencer onto the end of the barrel. “I’m not going to waste time giving you a bruise or anything like you did to me, Caleb.” I raised the handgun and pointed it toward his forehead. “Let’s see, if I aim this just right, the exit wound won’t make too much of a splatter of your brain matter on the couch.”

“Jesus.” The young man’s lip trembled.

“He’s bluffing, man,” the younger brother said. “Can’t you see that?”

I swung the gun toward his end of the couch and squeezed off a round. Everyone jumped and the other girl screamed. The bullet blew a sizeable hole in the piece of furniture less than two inches from Matt’s leg. Little bits of foam exploded into the air and onto the carpet while other finer particles confettied through the air.

“Fuck!”

“I know you’re not so concerned with yourself, Matt, so how about I just start with your brother’s kneecaps? He won’t even bleed to death if you tell me what I want before I have to shoot up the rest of him.”

There was a short silence then Matt Connors said, “What do you want to know again, asshole?”

“What Caleb was doing up there.”

He looked at his brother.

“Shit,” Caleb said. “Go ahead and tell him.”

“He was looking to see if the dude who killed that old man and all those cops being up there had screwed up our plans.”

“Your plans to fly and track the pigeons with the nerve gas.”

His mouth went flat. He said nothing.

“You better not tell him any more, man,” his brother cried.

I almost shot out Caleb’s kneecap then. But I didn’t want to interrupt his brother if he might keep talking.