Crystal Meth Cowboys (22 page)

Wes aimed low and left and calmly center stitched the other twin with half a dozen rounds from crotch to chin. He died standing up. The van roared off with Bell's duct taped ankles dangling from the open door.

The head man, hand clasped across his fleshy throat, blood pumping through his fingers, hoisted his gun hand. Wes Lyedecker's first burst cut him in half. The second burst turned him into a crowd.

Wes dropped the empty gun, pried the black steel .45 semi-automatic from the man's death grip and scrambled up the blood-slicked ramp. The cargo van had a ten second head start. The most Wes could hope for was a clear shot at a distant tire. He stuck his head above ground. He was outside the grounds of the plant, the cinderblock wall behind him. A dirt road sheltered by shrubs of cliffrose headed east toward the river. A dark green van sat parked two hundred yards down the road.

Squad cars, their doors winged open, blocked the van. Cops, shotguns leveled, approached the van from both sides. PsychoSarge had come through.

In his eagerness to join the takedown Wes put too much pressure on his plant foot and pitched forward, sprawling face first in the mud. A large hand grabbed the back of his belt. "It's me," said a deep somnolent voice from beneath the sea.

Wes watched the white-dusted mud recede as an arm winched him up smoothly and set him back on his feet. Wes turned around to face Cyril Reese in street clothes, wearing his gunbelt over a pair of jeans. Reese held the cuff chain of a manacled suspect in his other hand. The young-voiced man, the one who had held Bell's feet. The
man's front was also covered in mud. His eyes were glassy. Reese had blindsided him.

"Nice collar," said Wes.

Reese did not reply. He was regarding Wes oddly, almost as if he were impressed. "Man," said Reese, unleashing a million watt smile, sliding his almond eyes back toward the underground room. "You play to win, don't you?"

Wes shrugged and ducked his head shyly. What could he say? The man was right.

Chapter 22

"I want Dr. Wog," croaked Bell as he was being wheeled into the ER. The on-duty physician, a moon-faced Asian woman who looked about eighteen, said, "What?"

Wes helped an orderly guide the gurney through the emergency entrance to the Wislow hospital. "The Pakistani doctor, the one with the glasses."

"Doctor Herat."

"Yes. Call him."

"But I'm the on duty…"

"
Call him
," said Wes. Bell had been spitting blood in the van on the ride over. Reese drove. The other cops stayed behind to secure their prisoners and gather evidence. Wes had a brief satisfying encounter with PsychoSarge before climbing through the sliding side door and trying to make Bell comfortable amidst acrid beakers, jars of chemicals, test tubes and bunsen burners. He rested Bell's head on a leather satchel containing twenty freezer bags filled with white powder.

Wes berated himself. Two tightly-clustered high caliber rounds was one too many. One round would have been enough to knock him backward. Bell sounded awful. What if he had ruptured Bell's esophagus? He knew Bell would rather be dead than unable to speak.

The moon-faced doctor instructed the admitting clerk to call Doctor Herat. Bell looked wicked pale as Wes pushed the gurney and the orderly pulled. They stopped next to bed one in the three bed ER, the one with all the resuscitation equipment behind it. Sherri rushed in behind them, still in her gardening clothes, flip flops flapping.

"How is he?" she asked the room, not sure who was in charge.

"He's alive," said the doctor, examining Bell's eyes with a pen light.

The orderly hooked his hands under Bell's armpits. Wes picked up Bell's boots. Sherri stepped up to support his middle as they counted three and shifted Bell to the bed. He landed with a groan. The duty nurse bustled in and began turning on machines. Wes decided to leave before Sherri asked him what had happened.

"He'll be fine," said Wes to the back of her head and walked on down the hall. Twenty paces later he pushed through swinging doors and entered the general admissions reception area, the converted high school gym with the thirty foot ceiling.

The place was almost empty. One rotund teenage girl waited in an orange plastic scoop chair, her chin on her hand, her fingernails dark purple. Wes Lyedecker's fists clenched and unclenched repeatedly as he looked around for another opponent. He had already vanquished PsychoSarge.

Wes had surrendered the black metal .45 into evidence at Sgt. Harrick's gruff command, then described the location of the two firearms he had used in subduing Bell's kidnappers, sending the Sergeant huffing and puffing up the long dirt road to retrieve them. He tried to picture Sgt. Harrick's expression when he discovered the SKS sticking straight up.

Chief of Police Frank Sunomoka pushed through the front door. He looked puny under the high ceiling. They met at the end of a row of plastic chairs.

"What's his condition?"

"He's alive," said Wes. "He should be fine."

The Chief started to push past. Wes blocked his path. "Sir, we have a problem that requires your immediate attention."

The Chief backed up two steps to neutralize Lyedecker's height advantage. "What?" His eyes said that this had better be good.

"Sir, I think…that is, we
need
to issue a warrantless arrest order for John Aubuchon. I have reason to believe he will flee the jurisdiction."

"On what charge?"

"11-379 H&S, felony manufacture of a controlled substance."

The Chief made no move to go. Wes had captured his attention for the moment. "Sir, WPD officers seized a cargo van leaving the diatomaceous earth plant with a fully-equipped methamphetamine lab and at least twenty pounds of product. There were two rooms and a tunnel excavated beneath a shack inside the property. The main room had ventilation, running water, electricity and a concrete floor. They…"

The Chief silenced him with an imperial gesture. He took his time before speaking. "I specifically instructed you not to pursue this investigation on your own."

"Yes, sir." The Chief prompted Wes with his eyebrows. "I, we, did not pursue it, sir."

Bell groaned audibly from down the hall. The Chief and Wes stopped to listen. The Chief said, "Then how did you and Bell happen to discover this lab?"

"Well, sir, I gather Bell was walking his dogs before shift. They must've strayed onto the property. I was at Bell's house to give him a lift to work when I heard gunfire and dogs barking from behind the wall."

The Chief looked decidedly unconvinced. "You are a probationary officer."

"Yes, sir."

"Telling me to order the arrest of the city's largest employer based on information developed from what is probably a tainted search."

"Sir
, I responded to an officer in distress and, at great personal risk, prevented his abduction and probable murder. My actions were fully justified under the law," said Lyedecker with some passion. "Sir, they
poured
concrete
. No way that meth lab was there without John Aubuchon's knowledge and approval."

The Chief looked away, examined the empty corners of the cavernous room. He closed his eyes and rubbed his eyelids. "And where are these drugs and paraphenalia?"

"Officer Reese drove them to the station."

It was Reese who came through, not PsychoSarge. Sherri had called him at home. He drove to the plant, heard muffled gunfire, followed the dog howl and radioed for backup, directing the troops to the area.

"I'll make my decision when I see the evidence," said Chief Sunomoka and walked on.

Wes turned to follow. He had to suck his bloody left shoe off the linoleum before peglegging after the Chief, who seemed quite intent on leaving him behind. "
Sir
," called Wes just before Sunomoka pushed through the swinging doors that led down the corridor to the ER. "The drug dealers were
disassembling
the lab. Aubuchon may already be out the door."

The Chief winged open one of the swinging doors. Wes continued quickly. "Aubuchon knew the risks. He would have prepared for this day. He probably transferred ownership of the plant to an offshore holding company and he would
definitely
have a private jet on call at a nearby airport. I believe there are three within fifty miles."

The Chief of Police turned to face Wes Lyedecker. His black eyes smiled menacingly. "How did the drug dealers know in advance that Officer Bell's dogs would wander onto the property?"

"Uhh, well…"

"This was a
coincidence
?"

"I guess so, must've been." Wes didn't want to explain about Florence, it would expose his lie about Bell stumbling onto the lab. And Wes had plans for the Mayor-elect. "Sir, if John Aubuchon's half as smart as we both
know he is he's already ten miles down the road. That's the only course of action that makes sense for him."

The teenage girl with the purple fingernails shielded her brow from a shaft of sunlight. The Chief shifted his onyx stare from Lyedecker's face to above his shoulder. Wes turned to see a TV camera crew, led by the young anchorwoman from the eleven o'clock news, burst through the front doors of the old gym. In the two seconds left him Wes said, "Unless John Aubuchon has acquired our co-operation."

This remark had the desired effect. Chief Sunomoka was boiling with righteous indignation when the anchorwoman stuck a microphone in his face and the halogen light on the betacam pinned him to the back wall like a moth.

Wes ducked into the men's room. The brown metal toilet stalls and speckled gray tile reminded him of high school. A hundred years ago and a million miles away. Wes put his left shoe in a square sink with porcelain spigots and rolled up his pants leg. The concertina wire had sliced him good. He ran hot water on a brown paper towel and pressed it to the blood still burbling from the crusted wound. It didn't hurt. He was too focused to feel pain. Wes hoped he'd lit a fire under Shitamoko, hoped he would face the camera and issue an APB for John Aubuchon, wanted for felony manufacture of a controlled substance. But hope was for homos, as his freshman football coach used to say. He needed to get back out there and force the issue.

Wes regarded himself in the mirror as he reached for another paper towel. He looked almost rugged, face sunburned, hair and eyebrows wind blown. He pushed a lock of hair off his forehead. Definitely rugged.

When Wes returned to the old gym he saw that Florence Jillison had joined the Chief in front of the camera. She was making a heartfelt statement with quivering lips. Wes pushed through the swinging doors and quick stepped down the corridor to the ER.

Sherri stood back from the fray with a knuckle in her teeth. The duty nurse prepped a syringe while the young doctor watched Bell's heart monitor with a frown. The blue screen pulsed with jagged thunderbolts and the palp monitor sounded like a drum solo. Bell lay beached on the table, his t-shirt sliced open, a fat plastic tube gurgling in his mouth. His bullet-scorched extra large blue dress shirt and kevlar vest were draped over a chair in the righthand corner of the room. That explained the groan. They had to sit Bell up to remove the vest.

"Let's get his boots off," said Wes.

"Oh," said Sherri. They stepped up and unzipped Bell's patent leather boots. Wes moved to the righthand corner, patted down the pocket of Bell's shirt and felt the tape recorder.

Now what? His polo shirt didn't have a breast pocket. A pants pocket wouldn't work. Wes picked up Bell's extra large dress shirt and buttoned it over his own. He edged over to the bed. Bell had a grapefruit-sized purple contusion in the middle of his chest. Wes reached out for Bell's long, pale blue hand. Bell stared up at him with a startled, far away look that Wes recognized. "The dogs are OK," said Wes, squeezing Bell's hand. "They're gonna be just fine." Bell squeezed back, weakly.

Wes turned and walked out of the ER, past Sherri clutching Bell's boots to her breast, past a grim-faced Dr. Heart who said "What is happening?" over and over in his singsong voice.

Wes Lyedecker was out of earshot when the moon-faced young doctor said, “He's ready for surgery. We're just waiting on the scrub tech."

Wes marched down the corridor and felt himself grinning. He would have to give Bell a massive ration of shit about his Boss Hogg-is-the-culprit theory. When Bell recovered, as he absolutely would. Though he ate and drank
like a feudal lord and had only seen the inside of a gym on television, there was something indestructible about Bell.

Wes tried deep breathing to calm the electric energy howling through his bones. He flexed his body from his ears to his Achilles'. It didn't help. He needed contact, a clean hit in the open field, to clear his system. Was this what an overdose of methamphetamine felt like?

He paused at the swinging doors, wondering if the Chief had issued an APD for John Aubuchon. Not likely, not with Florence standing beside him urging caution, telling him to carefully examine all the evidence while the only living person who could implicate her fled the country at mach one. But there was someone else who knew. If Wes Lyedecker could just get his adrenals under control and conduct a skillful interrogation, Florence Jillison could implicate Florence Jillison.

Wes plucked the cassette recorder from his breast pocket. He pushed play. Bell must have been ambushed. The thirty-minute mini-cassette was blank. Wes sighted Florence through the door window. She was still on camera. Wes adjusted the microphone input level to 8, depressed the red button, checked to make sure the tape was rolling, dropped the recorder back into his breast pocket, tucked Bell's blue dress shirt into the top of his gray flannel slacks and pushed through the swinging doors.

Florence was wearing an apricot scarf that added a note of color to her black and white houndstooth skirt and white stand-up collar cotton blouse. She concluded her on camera statement and rushed over to Wes Lyedecker. "How
is
he?"

Wes led her back through the swinging doors and ducked into a little hall off the main corridor. Florence followed. When they were safely out of sight he said, "It's touch and go.” He fingered the bullet holes in Bell's blue shirt. "He's lucky to be alive at all."