Justice for None: Texas Justice Book #1 (31 page)

“You’re never going to see that money,” Erath cut him off. “And neither will your partners. I’ve got warrants for both those shit-heads, too. We’ll see which one of you talks first. The winner gets life, no parole,” he winked at Val. “That’s something to think about down at Lew Sterret.”

“I did not kill Abby,” Val said, knowing it was pointless. He paused, sighed and shook his head wearily. He had only one option left. He had to trust Erath. “But I do know where the money is. I can take you to it.”

Erath barked a laugh and more blood leaked from his nose.

“Save it for your lawyer. Maybe if you give up the cash he can get the charges reduced to murder two. You might just get to see your grandkids someday. Of course you’ll be squinting through the bars.” Erath pointed at the kitchen door again then noticed Gruene still standing there. He frowned.

“Go on, Sally,” he said to her. “The sooner we get this over with the sooner we can get home.”

Gruene didn’t move. She was staring at Val, her eyes out of focus, lifeless, her lips a brittle line.

“Sally,” Erath snapped, blotting his nose with the bloody handkerchief. Gruene shifted her eyes to her partner, but her expression remained zombie-like. “Go on,” he said impatiently. “I got him covered.”

“No, Henry,” she said, shaking her head in slow motion as her gaze returned to Valentine.

Erath cocked his head in confusion. “Just make the call, Sally. We’ll pile him in and you can go home and get some rest. You look like crap.”

“No,” she said again. She took a step toward her partner, but her eyes never left Valentine. That’s when Val noticed that Gruene had taken the .45 out of the Ziploc bag. She was gripping it by the butt, her finger on the trigger.

“What?” Erath said, his confusion deepening. He looked at the pistol in Gruene’s hand then back at her face. “Sally—”

Gruene cut him off. “I have business to transact with Mr. Justice. Henry.”

“Business?” Erath said, sounding suddenly wary. “What—” that was as far as he got before Gruene aimed the .45 from the hip like a gunfighter, straight at Erath’s belly.

The color drained from Erath’s face. “Jesus, Sally, put that gun down.”

Gruene didn’t comply. She took another step closer to her partner.

“I’m sorry, Henry,” she said as she stepped forward, jammed the .45 into his ribs and pulled the trigger twice.

With the muzzle pressed tight to Erath’s flesh, the sound of the gunshots wasn’t much louder than a pair of very large firecrackers, but Erath spun around like he had been hit with a wrecking ball. His feet got tangled and he went down, crashing face-first into the concrete floor, already dead. At that range, Val knew, the .45’s concussion would have instantly ruptured every organ in Erath’s body.

Gruene dropped to a squat beside her dead partner, reached under his coat and jerked his pistol from its holster.

Val was too shocked to make a move. 

“Jesus, you killed him,” he said, mystified.

“No, I didn’t,” Gruene said as she brought Erath’s gun up in her left hand, cocking it in the same motion. She aimed it at Val’s chest. “You did.”

Gruene pulled the trigger, the single shot sounding like a cannon inside the narrow confines of the garage, her aim point blank.

52

Victoria
drove a shaky ten blocks away from Herby’s before turning into the parking lot of the Super Mercado on Columbia Avenue. She parked facing a bank of plate glass windows with ‘Velasquez Fruteria y Taqueria’ painted across them in flowing script. She killed the engine then sat there gulping down breath after breath. Her heart was rattling against her ribcage and her hands were trembling as she fumbled her phone out of her purse and started to dial 9-1-1. But she only got to the first 1 before she stopped, having reached the same conclusion that she had reached when she found Herby and Foster. She couldn’t call the cops! She had just fled the scene of three homicides! She had been a prosecutor for far too long not to see the end result of such a 911 call. To see how her story of Laroy Hockley, Garland Sutton and a mysterious gunmen would play out. She’d be cuffed and booked before she got ten words out. And Laroy would be laughing at her from the wrong side of the prison bars.

“No,” she said aloud. No cops. Not yet. Not until she had something to give them. Instead, she punched up Jack’s number again, but she got only his voice mail. She left a terse message, explaining what had happened in as few words as possible and warning Jack to be on the lookout for Laroy. She hung up and stowed the phone in her purse.

That’s when she remembered the PAC paperwork she had found hidden under Herby’s butt.

She dug the paperwork from her back pocket, unfolded it, propped it on the steering wheel, and skimmed through it again. The absurdity of Herby Lubbock being the treasurer of Nolan Swisher’s PAC jumped out at her again. Even an idiot could have seen the conflict of interest in a defense attorney working on the County Sheriff’s reelection campaign. But what did it have to do with Valentine and the Sutton family, if anything? It all seem linked, the money, the murders and now political corruption, but it was like a connect the dots puzzle without any numbers; if you worked at it hard enough you could draw any picture you wanted. She needed help, but she had nowhere to turn…

Except Cory Logan.

Yes! Something like this would have the US Attorney’s office salivating, and with the Justice Department behind her…

Victoria ditched the paperwork and grabbed her purse off the seat. It was a mess, everything jumbled together, but she found her wallet and dug out Logan’s business card. She pinned the card to the steering wheel with her thumb and grabbed her phone again. She dialed but Logan didn’t answer. It was Saturday, almost six o’clock in the evening. Victoria left a message after the beep.

“This is Division Chief Victoria Justice,” she said, knowing that she might not have that title for much longer. “Herby Lubbock is dead. Call me.” She rattled off her cell number and hung up, hoping that her message had been cryptic enough to be explained away in court, if it came to that.

Jesus, now she was thinking like a
felon.
How much lower could she possibly go?

Her phone rang almost immediately. She answered without checking the caller ID.

“You’ll have to explain that message,” Logan said tersely. “Lubbock’s dead? How?”

“Not over the phone,” she said. “I have something for you.
Just you,”
she added, cringing at the way that sounded. She was thinking more and more like a crook with every passing minute.

Logan went silent, but she could hear him breathing into the phone. “All right,” he said grudgingly. “Meet me at the courthouse. I’ll be in the basement cafeteria. And this better not be bullshit, counselor.”

Victoria didn’t argue. “Give me fifteen minutes,” she said and hung up.

It
took her closer to twenty minutes to make it to the Crowley Building. She parked on the first floor of the garage, which was packed with cars. Even on a Saturday the building was busy. Justice never sleeps, she thought wryly as she crossed to the side entrance. She was digging for her ID card when the glass door swung outward and Nolan Swisher emerged, his Stetson in his hand. He was still wearing the same saggy brown suit he’d had on when she’d seen him at the jail the day before.

“Hello, Victoria,” he said, his voice as dry as West Texas. “I was just fixing to call you. About your husband.” He stopped there and sniffed the air as his eyes traveled over her rumpled and torn clothing. “Is that gasoline I smell?”

Victoria ignored the question. “What about Valentine?” she demanded. “What the hell have you done?”

The skin on Nolan’s face went tight to the bone, giving his shriveled face an even more skeletal cast. He took the time to settle his hat on his head and straighten the brim before he replied.

“I
haven’t done anything, but Judge Pinto just issued another warrant for Valentine’s arrest. DPD didn’t want any part of it, so they passed it on to me,” he said and paused to let that sink in. “Considering the fact that Valentine has killed seven men, we have to consider him a high risk felon.”

The words ‘high risk felon’ hit Victoria right in the gut. Those were the words that the Special Tactics Unit used when they really meant ‘shoot on sight.’ She started to reply, to protest, but Swisher had more to say.

“I assigned the warrant to Deputy Erath and the Special Tactics Unit. If you value your husband’s life, I’d suggest you tell him to turn himself in.”

Victoria’s breath caught in her throat. Val and Henry Erath was an almost certain gunfight in the making, but she
couldn’t
ask Val to turn himself in. His life would be in even greater danger inside the jail complex. Between crooked deputies and cop-hating criminals, Val would catch a shank between the shoulder blades before breakfast was served.

Nolan brushed past her. “Pardon me,” he said and headed for a rust orange Ford F-150 that was parked in a reserved space on the first row.

He wasn’t going to get away that easily.

“Laroy Hockley just killed Herby Lubbock and Debbie Foster,” Victoria snapped at his back. Nolan didn’t miss a step. He didn’t even act like he had heard her. “And I’m betting he killed Abby Sutton too,” she added, her voice rising.

The sheriff stopped beside his truck. He looked even more frail standing beside the oversized pickup, but that would buy him no slack. Too many people had died. He turned to face her. In the shadow of his hat brim, his eyes were hard as railroad spikes.

“We’ve got a murder weapon with your husband’s fingerprints on it,” he said. “You need to face the hard fact that your husband killed that girl and he’s gonna die for it. The only thing you need to decide is whether it’ll be on the street or in the lethal injection chamber.”

“Hockley just tried to
kidnap
me.” Victoria bellowed, her voice echoing off the concrete walls. “He was going to
kill
me.”

Nolan shook his head, turned away, climbed into the truck, and banged the door closed. He cranked it up, backed out and headed for the exit at a funeral-procession pace. Never once did he look back at her.

Victoria stood there for a full minute after Swisher had left the garage before she dug her phone out of her purse and called Valentine again. The call went directly to voice mail. She slammed her phone back into her purse, considering what she should do next? Finally, she decided that there was nothing she could do except keep her meeting with Cory Logan. At this point she had nowhere else to turn. She entered the building, showed her ID to the deputy and headed for the cafeteria.

Logan was waiting for her just outside the cafeteria’s swinging doors, leaning against the beige cinderblocks. He didn’t offer a greeting.

“Too many deputies hanging around in there,” he said as he pushed off the wall and headed back toward the garage. He didn’t comment on her appearance or the smell of gasoline drifting off of her.

Victoria didn’t argue. Mutely, she fell into step beside him. Once inside the garage, she pulled her keys from her purse, but Logan shook his head.

“We’ll take my car,” he said. “Until I get your statement on paper and notarized, you’re not getting out of my sight.”

Victoria started to protest, but Logan was doing exactly what she would have done with a suspect in a homicide: keeping her under lock and key until he had what he wanted. That realization didn’t make her feel any better, but she acquiesced without argument. She was too tired to fight about it.

Hell, she was lucky she wasn’t already in handcuffs.

53

The
bullet from Erath’s gun punched into Val’s left shoulder, tearing straight through his bicep, carving a path through the scar tissue left by Lamar’s axe attack four years before. The impact spun him on his heel, bounced him off the aluminum garage door and sent him to the floor in a pile, his shoulder pulsing blood and sending out a shockwave of pain that lit up every conduit in his skull. But Val had been hurt before. He had been shot and axed and stabbed. Even as a part of his brain short-circuited, another part, the inheritance from his career behind a gun, bellowed for him to react, to fight for his life. But, with his hands cuffed behind his back, there was nothing he could do but lie there and wait for Gruene to finish the job.

But Gruene didn’t fire again. She stared down at him as the blood pumped from his shoulder, her expression remote, a scientist looking at a tacked-down insect. “Where’s the money?” she said.

Val’s rage made him briefly forget the pain. “No,” he said. “You’ll have to kill me.”

Gruene’s expression remained flat as she reached under her jacket and unhooked something bulky from her belt. Something that looked more like a blow-dryer than a weapon, but Val recognized it for what it was: a Taser. It was larger than the ones DPD had issued to patrol officers back when Val was in uniform, but he was betting that the twelve-hundred volts of electricity it delivered was just as effective.

“I’m not going to kill you, but I don’t think you’re going to like this a whole lot better,” Gruene said as she raised the Taser and fired.

The Taser went off with a muffled ‘pop’ and a flash of sparks that sent two metal barbs hurtling through the air, trailing their copper leads. The barbs speared Val dead-center in the chest, ripping through his shirt, burying themselves deeply into his flesh.

Gruene squeezed the trigger.

The juice hit him like liquid fire pumped straight into his veins. Every joint in his body locked tight and he crawfished up from the floor, his teeth clenched so fiercely that they felt as if they might shatter. An eternity seemed to pass before Gruene cut the current. Val flopped back to the floor, limp as a worn out rubber band, his nostrils filled with the cindery smell of a lightning storm, his ears crackling like an AM radio station.

“Where’s the money?” she asked again.

Val made no reply; he couldn’t even breathe. And Gruene wasn’t going to be patient. She hit him again with the juice.

A thin ‘scree’ escaped past Val’s teeth through a windpipe that was cinched tight by electrical current. Every vein in his body burned, every muscle knotted tight. Three long seconds ticked past at the slogging tempo of a funeral dirge before the current was broken again and Val collapsed back to the concrete, barely conscious. A thin trickle of smoke rose from his shirtfront toward the rafters of the garage.

Gruene didn’t ask the question a third time, she just hit the Taser’s trigger, juicing him with another twelve-hundred volts.

All the circuit breakers in Val’s head popped and a dark wave sucked him out to sea.

When
Val awoke, lying on his side on the cool concrete, he knew he had been unconscious for a long time because it was darker inside the garage. Not quite night yet, but very close. He looked down the length of his body to see the Taser’s steel probes still lodged in his chest. His shirt was crusty with dried blood, so his shoulder must have stopped bleeding. He cocked his head for a look at the damage and found himself staring at a bright red rag jutting from his shoulder like a crimson flower. It took him a moment to realize that Gruene had stuffed a dirty shop rag into the bullet hole. If he didn’t bleed to death the infection would probably kill him.

Val managed to sit up, the effort making his head spin and his wounded shoulder scream. It took him a moment to spot Gruene by the kitchen doorway, her cell phone pressed to her ear.

“No. He won’t talk.” She was silent for a moment and her eyes cut to Val. Eyes that glowed yellow in the waning light like a rat peering out of a sewer grate. “He’s awake,” she said then added, “Shortly.” She listened for a moment longer, then broke the connection, stowed the phone and came forward out of the shadows. She leaned down over him and peered into his eyes, tilting her head this way and that like a doctor in a soap opera.

“You’ll live,” she finally pronounced. The Taser was still in her hand, hanging heavily from her bony fingers, its wire leads spooled haphazardly across the concrete floor.

Val had to work his tongue in his mouth to gather enough spit to reply, but he was feeling surprisingly better. The pain in his shoulder had receded to a pulsing ache, but he wasn’t fooled by that. He knew it was just shock setting in.

“Jesus loves me,” he managed to say, his voice little more than a whisper.

Gruene ignored the comment. “I’m going to help you up. Do anything stupid and I’ll get you up with this.” She waved the Taser in his face.

Val didn’t argue. He wasn’t sure if he could survive another dose of the Taser. With Gruene gripping him under his good arm, steadying him, he managed to shove himself up, but it took almost everything he had left to do it.

Gruene backed away from him. She waved him toward the kitchen door, past Erath’s corpse.

The floor around the dead deputy was a sea of dark red going sticky at the edges. Val circled the blood, taking it slow, moving with the jerky step of a broken tin soldier, concentrating on every footfall. Gruene stayed close behind him, prodding him along with the Taser’s blunt snout. In that way they navigated their way through the disarray of the kitchen and living room and exited the house onto the front porch.

Night was settling over the neighborhood, the shadows around the houses deep, the sun’s last rays turning the cloudless sky pink. Houselights and televisions glowed behind curtained windows. No one was outside. It was still way too hot. The temperature wouldn’t drop out of the nineties until well after midnight.

“We’ll be taking your car, Mr. Justice,” Gruene said with a curious formality, like she was still a cop and this was all routine. She nudged him with the Taser again. “You’ll be up front with me, but if you make a move I’ll juice you.”

Val didn’t reply. He went gingerly down the steps, almost falling once, and crossed to the Mustang. Gruene opened the passenger side door and waved him inside. He turned and fell into the seat. It took a tremendous effort to get his legs up and in. Gruene stood there until he had accomplished the task then pitched the Taser past his face, into the driver’s seat before slamming the door closed. She circled the car, retrieved the Taser and started the engine, her face painted green by the dash lights. She backed into the street then paused and looked toward him. She was about to say something when her eyes suddenly jumped past him to the street.

“Shit!” she yelped, her eyes lighting up with panic, her hand darting to the .45 tucked into her waistband.

Val twisted his head, inciting a fresh wave of pain from his shoulder, to see that a DPD patrol car had just pulled to the curb in front of Erath’s SUV. The car’s door opened and the dome light popped on to reveal Gary Griggs’ huge red face peering through the windshield. He lifted a hand at Val then started to heave himself out of the car.

Gary wasn’t going to make it.

Gruene swung up Val’s 45 and fired straight through the passenger side window, working the trigger three times in rapid succession, turning the safety glass into a blizzard of tiny fragments.

Gruene was a good shot. The three bullets stitched a neat line across the patrol car’s driver’s side windshield. Half blinded by the flash of the .45, Val still saw Garry flinch with the impact of the heavy caliber rounds then tumble slowly out the patrol car’s open door, dragged down by his massive belly. Gary sprawled face-first into the street.

Val bellowed a wordless roar and turned toward Gruene, but she was ready for him. The juice hit him like a lightning bolt, exploding through his already charred mental circuitry, blowing up his brain like a hand grenade.

The dark wave crashed down on him again, bearing him mercifully under.