Panic! (9 page)

He got ponderously out of his chair, his soft belly swaying, and followed Bradshaw out to the PBX unit in the main room of the substation. He scratched himself sourly. Forester was due in pretty soon, and him calling now meant he’d gotten onto something—Christ only knew what piddly-ass thing it was—and that in turn meant that Brackeen was probably going to get a late lunch.

He sighed and took the hand mike Bradshaw proffered. He said, “Brackeen.”

Forester’s voice said excitedly, amid gentle static, “Listen, we’ve got a murder.”

A half-formed yawn died on Brackeen’s mouth. “A what?”

“A murder, a murder!”

“The hell you say. Where?”

“Del’s Oasis, out on the Intrastate.”

“Who’s dead?”

“Al Perrins, the guy bought Del out about six months back.”

“How do you know it’s murder?”

“Well, Jesus Christ, he’s got six bullet holes in his chest,” Forester snapped. “What else would you call it?”

Oh, these goddamn snotty bright-faces. “Any sign of who did it?”

“No. But I haven’t had the chance to go over the place yet.”

“You find Perrins yourself?”

“Yeah. I was cruising the area, and I thought I’d stop in for a quick Coke to take the edge off the heat, like I sometimes do.”

A Coke, Brackeen thought. You silly bastard, you.

Forester went on, “But the place was dark, all shut up, and the Closed sign was in the window. It didn’t figure for Perrins to be closed up on a weekday like this, and I thought maybe he was sick or something. I went around back, to that cabin he lives in, and the door glass had been broken in. The place was empty, but the phone wires had been cut and it had been gone through a little; hard to tell if anything was taken. I found the rear window to the café storeroom open, and crawled in to have a look around. Perrins was lying in a pool of blood behind the lunch counter.”

They’re always lying in a pool of blood, Brackeen thought. If you looked at ten thousand violent-homicide reports made by bright-faces like Forester, you’d find that in nine thousand of them the victims were found quote lying in a pool of blood unquote. He said, “All right, hang loose. I’ll be out there in about twenty minutes.”

Forester didn’t respond immediately, and Brackeen took satisfaction in the knowledge that the idea didn’t appeal to him. Finally Forester said, “Maybe you’d better get the county people and State Police out here.”

“Sure,” Brackeen said. “Twenty minutes, Forester.”

He gave the mike back to Bradshaw and told him to put the news of the homicide on the air to the county sheriff’s office—and to the Highway Patrol office—in Kehoe City. Then he located his Stetson and went out to where his cruiser was parked in front. He drove very fast, the way he liked to drive, windows down and the hot, thick air blowing against the textured leather of his face; the siren, shrill and undulatory, turned heads and cleared away the few cars which dotted the streets of Cuenca Seco and the county road beyond.

Brackeen felt a faint, half-forgotten stir of excitement as he sent the cruiser hurtling along the heat-spotted road. There had been a time when the commission of a crime such as murder set the juices flowing warm and deep within him, a time when his position as a representative of the law—of Justice—had inspired grim determination, a need to protect the citizenry from the lawless and the desperate. That time was long dead now—let the bright-faces inflate themselves with righteous vigor—but still, he could not help being interested in what Forester had had to report. A murder, any violent death, was an unheard-of occurrence in Cuenca Seco and environs, the last one having taken place in 1962 and that a husband-wife thing resulting from a protracted drought and flaring tempers, and a revolver kept too handy and too well supplied with bullets; in fact, any kind of overt crime was so rare as to be virtually nonexistent. There was no challenge to the job of law enforcement in Cuenca Seco, and that was the way Brackeen wanted it; but the fact remained that he had been a trained city cop once, dedicated in his own way, and a murder was something he couldn’t take with his usual indifference. That was why he was going to the scene personally, instead of letting Forester and Lydell and the State Highway Patrol have it all to themselves ...

Forester was waiting for him under the wooden awning in front when Brackeen arrived at Del’s Oasis. He had a slender, athletic build and ash-blond hair and intense eyes the color of forged steel; in spite of the heat, his khaki uniform was fresh and crisp except for patches of dust on the trousers that he had apparently gotten from climbing through the storeroom window. He stood officiously, unmoving, watching the approach of his immediate superior without expression.

Brackeen parked his cruiser behind Forester’s, stepped out into the wash of heat from the perpendicular desert sun. He pushed his hat back and crossed under the awning. Forester nodded curtly, his sharp eyes now registering disapproval at what they beheld; he said, “The county and state people coming?”

“They’ll be along,” Brackeen answered. He moved past Forester and entered the oppressive warmth of the café. The shades had been pulled up and the lights were on; the air was thick with flies, buzzing angrily, circling. Brackeen went to the lunch counter and around behind it. Forester had apparently found a blanket somewhere and had used it to cover Perrins; the dead man lay sprawled on his back, one leg twisted under him, arms outflung. Wedging his big buttocks against the shelving beneath the counter, Brackeen knelt and drew the blanket back. Pool of blood, hell; there wasn’t much blood at all. Well, that figured. But the guy had been shot six times, all right, you could count each one of the scorched holes in the dark-spotted front of Perrins’ shirt.

Brackeen frowned slightly. Each of the holes was on the upper chest, left side and middle, over and around the heart, with maybe five inches between the two outside wounds. Some nice shooting—or some careful shooting. He replaced the blanket, stood up, and came out from behind the counter.

Forester was watching him from just inside the screen door. Brackeen looked at him and asked, “You go over the premises?”

“Naturally.”

“Find anything?”

Forester hesitated, and then shrugged, and then said, tightlipped, “I think so.”

“What?”

“In the storeroom.”

Brackeen followed him across and into the storeroom. Near the window, a cot was pressed against the wall; on top of the cot, the handle of a broom wedged through two leather carry loops, was a battered overnight bag, zippered open.

Forester said, “Found that bag under the cot. Probably prints on it.”

“Probably,” Brackeen agreed dryly.

“Clothing and some other stuff inside. Clothes are too small to belong to Perrins.”

“All right,” Brackeen said. “Let’s hear it.”

“Hear what?”

“Your theory.”

Forester smiled grimly. “I figure the bag belongs to a transient, a guy Perrins put up for the night, maybe had do some work around here. The sign up on the roof is freshly painted.”

Well, the bright-face was observant, at least. Brackeen said, “And so you think this transient shot Perrins.”

“That’s right.”

“Where did he get the gun?”

“Could have had it with him. Maybe stolen.”

“And the motive?”

“Robbery—what else?”

“Register cleaned out, is it?”

“Well, no, but that doesn’t have to mean much.”

The hell it doesn’t, Brackeen thought. But he said only, “Why not?”

Forester said, “Maybe the transient didn’t intend to kill Perrins. Maybe he only wanted to intimidate him with the gun. But Perrins could have tried to take it away from him, and the transient panicked and emptied all six loads into Perrins’ chest. Then he ran, so damned shook up he forgot his bag and the money. Panic does that to a man.”

What the hell do you know about panic? Brackeen thought with sudden, vicious anger. You son of a bitching wet-nose, what do you know about anything? Your theory is piss-poor, it’s got holes shot all through it. I was studying law enforcement when you were still crapping your diapers, and even on my first day on the force I could have told you no man in panic ever put six bullets within five inches of each other in another man’s chest. Whoever this transient is, if he exists at all, had nothing much, if anything at all, to do with Perrins’ death. You want to know what this thing looks like? It looks like a professional hit, a contract job, six slugs placed like that is the kind of bull’s-eye shooting hired sluggers go in for—but you’re such a smart-assed one you don’t even see it for your own self-importance.

Brackeen’s eyes smoldered as he looked at Forester—but then, as abruptly as it had come, the anger drained out of him. The old, comfortable apathy returned at once, and he thought: Oh Christ, what’s the use? As contemptuous as he was of Forester, he remembered that he did not want to antagonize him, not with his job hanging the way it was; and the quickest way to give a bright-face like that a potentially disastrous hard-on for him would be to explode his nice pat little theory.

But a small perversity made him press it just a little. “How do you explain the place being shut up the way it was? And the phone wires being cut? A guy jammed up with panic doesn’t take the time to do those things.”

Forester had an answer for that. “He could have done them first, maybe forced Perrins to close up at the point of the gun. He probably figured to tie Perrins up, and leave him here in the closed café. That would buy him enough time to get away.”

“Was the front door locked?”

“From the inside. He went out through the storeroom window, looks like—same way I got in.”

“How do you think he left here?”

“On foot.”

“Where? Up to the highway?”

“Sure, looking to hitch a ride.”

“Did Perrins have a car?”

“Naturally.”

“Is it here now?”

“Around back, by the cabin.”

“Then why didn’t this transient take the car?”

“Well, maybe he planned to,” Forester said, and there was anger in his voice now. “But it’s not running. I talked to Perrins yesterday, and he was working on it in his spare time. Listen, what’s the idea of all these questions? If you’ve got a better idea about what happened here today, why don’t you say so?”

Brackeen subsided. If he pushed it any further, Forester was liable to get peeved and put Lydell down on him for fair. Lydell was one of these Bible-thumping bigots, and a political hack on top of that, and he demanded harmony in his office and between his men—not to mention what he considered strict moral and ethical behavior; he wasn’t particularly fond of Brackeen to begin with, and it would not take much prodding to open his eyes all the way and then to make that final cut of the thread. So the hell with it; Lydell could chew up the bright-face’s presumptions, if he cared to, though he was such a goddamned incompetent that that wasn’t likely. Or maybe the State Highway Patrol investigators, who were pretty facile if too bloody plodding for Brackeen’s taste, might deflate him a little later on. In any case, the thing for Brackeen to do was to keep his mouth shut and fade into the background, especially when Lydell arrived.

He said, “No, I don’t have a better idea, Forester. I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to start interrogating you.”

Forester looked at him steadily for a moment, and then made a magnanimous gesture that almost contemptuously reversed their roles. “Sure,” he said. “Sure, that’s all right.”

They went outside again, and Forester resumed his former position under the awning, waiting for the county units and the Highway Patrol, ready to send any arriving and curious citizens on their way. Brackeen left him and wandered around behind the café. The ground was rough and graveled there, but he could make out what looked to be faint tire impressions up close beside the rear wall. So it could be this transient of Forester’s had a car, he thought. Or it could be Perrins had some broad out recently to spend the night.

Or it could be a professional slugger parked his car around here just this morning, for one reason or another.

He went to the cabin and stepped inside. It had been gone through, for a fact, but the job had been a methodical one. Guys under panic, or pressure of any kind, didn’t conduct searches as neat and businesslike as this one had obviously been; guys looking for money, valuables, were always in a hurry, always sloppy. The only ones who were careful, unhurried, were the professionals, after a particular item or items. Transient, Forester’s skinny ass. A pro—one, possibly two. Why? Well, maybe Perrins had a past. Maybe Perrins had been hooked in with the Organization, or some independent outfit, in one way or another. Maybe Perrins had been dangerous to somebody.

Any way you wanted it, a professional hit.

And the hell with it.

Brackeen went out and around to the front again, and two county cars and two Highway Patrol cars and an ambulance had arrived from Kehoe City. Lydell was there, fat, sixtyish, as officious as Forester, eyes brightly excited at the prospect of his involvement in a violent death. A man named Hollowell was there, a special investigator attached to the sheriff’s office—short, balding, jocular, carrying two camera cases and a large bag which contained, as he made a point of explaining to Brackeen and Forester, the latest in fingerprinting and evidence-gathering equipment. Two plain-clothes State Highway Patrol investigators were there; their names were Gottlieb and Sanchez—which did not particularly endear them to Lydell—and they were both tall and dark and stoic.