Sideswipe (35 page)

"And the Honda's got a roof rack. You go to the front door, Jaime, and I'll slip on around to the back. Nobody locks Florida rooms, and I'll come in the back way."

"Don't you think we should get some backup first?"

"If no one's there, we won't need any backup. And if someone's home and resists, I want to take a shot at the bastard. What do you want to do?"

"I'm with you, Sergeant. Why don't we see what happens?"

Hoke took out his pistol. He circled behind the house to cut through the two back yards. Figueras waited, to give Hoke enough time to reach Stanley's yard, then walked up the concrete path to The door. He rapped on it with the barrel of his pistol.

Stanley Sinkiewicz opened the door, left it open, and walked back to his dining room table. Stanley didn't say a word, but sat at the table and began to spoon tomato soup into his mouth. Figueras followed him inside and closed the door with his foot, covering the old man with his weapon. Hoke entered the dining room from the screened porch, also holding his pistol on Stanley. He looked at the old man's lined, pigeon-gray face, and shook his head. Hoke knew an old lag when he saw one, and he could tell, just by looking at this old eon, that the man had spent most of his life in prison. When they finally got his record, it would probably be three feet long.

"Sinkiewicz?" Hoke asked. "We're both police officers."

"I been waiting." Stanley nodded. "But I ain't ate nothing for two days now. I just fixed this soup, not really wanting it, but knew I had to eat something pretty soon. Maya--that's my wife--when she fixed it for me, used to put a little whipped cream in it. The milk in the icebox went sour on me, and I had to fix it with water instead of milk. But it still tastes pretty good, once I got started on it."

"Are you alone, Sinkiewicz?" Figueras asked.

Stanley nodded and crumpled two soda crackers into his soup.

"Do you know Troy Louden?" Hoke said.

Stanley nodded.

"D'you know where he is?"

Stanley pointed down the hall with his spoon. "In the bedroom."

"I thought you said you were alone." Hoke had reholstered his pistol, but he quickly withdrew it again. "'Cuff him, Jaime."

Hoke started down the hall. Figueras handcuffed Stanley's wrists behind his back. Hoke hesitated outside the closed bedroom door, waiting for Figueras to cover him. Figueras, holding his pistol with both hands, stayed ten feet behind Hoke. Hoke twisted the knob, threw open the door, and jumped inside with his gun in front of him.

There was no one else in the room. Figueras joined him. The bed was piled high with a half-dozen sheets, a comforter, a bedspread, and was topped by a woman's red plastic raincoat. There was a discernible mound beneath all of these coverings. Hoke peeled them back from the head of the bed, one at a time, and uncovered Troy Louden as far as his waist. The corpse was ripe, and the washcloth over Troy's face had dried. Hoke picked it gingerly away and thought he could detect the odor of burning almonds, but later he was never sure whether he had or not. Dale Forrest's little.25 caliber slug, a crisscrossed lead dumdum, had hit Troy's left cheek, penetrating the bone, and then fragments had been deflected upward, exploding the left eye and skating through the eye socket. Troy had suffered a good deal of pain before he died. Hoke covered the dead man's face back up with the dry washcloth, then drew the bottom sheet over the upper body and head. He and Figueras went back into the dining room.

Stanley, with his thin arms handcuffed behind his back, was staring at his cooling soup, but he had apparently lost interest in it.

"How long's he been dead?" Figueras asked the old man.

"Three days. I didn't know what else to do. He was suffering, but he wouldn't let me call no doctor or let me take him to the hospital. I brought him home, and when I thought he couldn't stand it no more I gave him two cyanide pills. I didn't know what else to do for him."

"Cyanide?" Hoke said. "Where in hell did you get cyanide?"

"Inside my cane, Sometimes people keep vicious dogs that bite strangers and little kids. They won't bite their owners because they feed them, you know, but you can walk down any sidewalk and they'll come right at you before you know it. So I always kept some pills to poison a bad dog once in a while, when I got the chance. Troy was a good boy, good to me, anyway, maybe because I fed him, too, I guess. But he was a lot like a bad dog. I didn't want to do it, but I didn't know what else to do. I even thought about taking some pills myself. But then I thought, Why should I? I ain't done nothing wrong. Troy managed to keep me out of everything so I wouldn't get involved, so all I'm responsible for is putting to sleep the only person who ever really loved me. Anyone who ever heard Troy cry and carry on that way would've done the same. You just can't imagine."

"Why did he kill all those people?" Hoke said. "Did he say?"

Stanley shook his head. "He never said, but I think I know why. It was the responsibility. Me and Dale and James. We was all too much for him, and he couldn't stand the responsibility. That's what it was..."

Stanley began to cry then, and Hoke didn't try to stop him. He realized that the old man had been holding it in for a long time, and that it would be best to let him get it all out. There would be time for more questions later.

"I'll Mirandize him, Jaime, while you call Chief Sheldon. This is going to be a jurisdictional ordeal, but no matter what you people up here in Palm Beach County think you want to do, I'm taking this old fart back to Miami with me to be tried first for the supermarket murders."

"What difference does it make, Hoke," Jaime said, "whether he's tried down there first, or for the guy?" Figueras pointed down the hall.

"There're lots of reasons, but I'll give you one you can understand. Before the old man and the whore are tried to fry in Raiford, I'm going to make lieutenant out of this case. When the next promotion list is posted, I'm going to be at the head of it."

Hoke was so pleased with the way it sounded that he left off the part about the answer sheets Major Willie Brownley still had in his briefcase.

It was well after nine P.M. that night before Hoke got onto the Sunshine Parkway and headed south for Miami. Stanley, handcuffed to the D-ring Hoke had welded onto the passenger door, sat quietly beside him in the dark. Stanley had promised not to try and run, so Hoke hadn't put leg-irons on him. Ordinarily, the drive to Miami would have been a six- or maybe a seven-cigarette ride, and for the first time, Hoke truly missed his Kools. But he was over the habit, and he wouldn't smoke again. Not smoking, and counting the weight he had lost, his blood pressure was almost normal again for a man his age.

To get around the heavy, crazy traffic at the Golden Glades exchange, which every wise Floridian avoided, if possible, Hoke left the Sunshine Parkway at the Holly- wood exit and picked up I-95 for the rest of the way into the city. As the thousands of lighted windows in the tall Miami buildings came into view, Stanley spoke for the first time on the trip.

"What's going to happen to me, Sergeant?"

"Hell, Pop," Hoke said, not unkindly, "except for the paperwork, it already has."

The End