Dead Men's Dust Page 17

  I leaped and rolled, putting a chair between us. It wasn’t any protection from a high-velocity round, but that wasn’t my purpose. I threw myself into the room to draw the man’s attention to me. Away from Louise.

  Sure enough, he shot at me. I kissed the carpet and tatters of upholstery sifted down on me. Then I was up and moving. So was Rink. The man was caught in a pincer move and there was only one way out. He spun Louise into Rink’s arms. His gun came up. And for one second I feared he would put a bullet in her spine. My response was to fire.

  Lucky son of a bitch jerked aside at the exact same moment and my round nicked only a small portion of his ear—instead of a large chunk of skull. The slippery bastard lurched away from me, and now Louise and Rink were between us. Encumbered with Louise, he couldn’t bring the Mossberg to bear on the man.

  The man took three running steps and dove headlong at the nearest window. Drapes tangled him, glass wedged in his deep blue suit, but then he was crashing out into sunshine. I charged across the room and leaned through the window after him. The man vaulted through the topiary hedge we’d so recently stood behind. That suit of his was going to be a mess.

  As he charged through the neighboring yard toward the street, a pale blue Chevrolet squealed along the asphalt toward him. I got a bead on him. I squeezed. His suit was going to get messier.

  A bullet cracked the window frame next to my head. Splinters of wood jabbed into my cheek. Automatically I flinched, the action transposed to my trigger finger, and my bullet went wide.

  Only one person could have fired on me. The guy I’d already winged. Move, Hunter, or die, my mind screamed at me. I dropped and spun onto my haunches. My gun began to rise, but I was again caught in a snapshot moment.

  The injured man was coming toward me. His mouth was wide with a silent curse. The muzzle of his handgun was a yawning black hole about to suck the life out of me. John’s face flashed through my vision. Eyes sad.

  There was a single crack.

  Despite myself, I jerked against the pain.

  Above me the man swayed. His angry face lengthened in surprise, eyelids shuddering. I saw a deep red blossom on the breast of his silk shirt. His knees folded and he fell toward me. He was limp as I shoved him aside. Beyond him, Harvey Lucas was like an angel with a Glock in his fist.

  “Welcome to the dance,” I said to him.

  Harvey stepped forward and, gripping the shoulder of the man, pulled him over onto his back. Air escaped from the man’s lips. A grunt. A spark remained in his eyes. He made a futile attempt at lifting his gun. Futile because Harvey’s size twelves ground his wrist into the floor.

  “You like hurting girls?” Harvey asked him.

  Then he placed a single round in the man’s open mouth.

  It was a classic hit. One in the heart, one in the head. It’s the only way to make sure your enemy is dead.

  Harvey stretched a hand out to me. I took it and he hauled me up.

  “Thanks, Harvey,” I said. “I owe you.”

  “Was nothin’.” His eyes were a reflection of my own. As a Ranger, he’d known action. But not up close. Eye to eye. Harvey was now one of the exclusive club that Rink and I held lifetime membership in.

  27

  THERE WAS NO TIME FOR CLEANUP.

  We had to move fast.

  Priority was getting Louise away from any backlash from the turmoil at her house. Harvey was up to the task. He took Louise one way with instructions to meet us in an hour. Rink and I streaked away from the house and the rising wail of approaching sirens.

  Away from the cordon of police vehicles, I asked Rink to pull up at a telephone booth.

  The call was enough to ensure that police action would be in our favor. Walter has that effect. It’s the weight a sub-division director of the CIA wields.

  We met at the same diner as last time. Louise was dressed as before. Still good-looking. Still worn around the edges. But she was different now. She held herself tentatively, like every muscle in her body ached. Fear haunted her eyes.

  She was hurting from the beating she’d taken. Scared half to death by what she’d witnessed. I sympathized with her, but that wasn’t why we were there. The men who’d tortured her did so for a reason. She knew more than she was admitting to.

  She’d already swallowed a cup of black coffee and was asking for more when we walked in. Harvey, playing chaperone, was sitting opposite her in the same booth. He looked as sharp as Samuel L. Jackson did in the remake of Shaft.

  In contrast, I felt, and probably looked, like someone who’d slept in his clothes and tended to his ablutions in a tiny bowl in a cramped bathroom. Though washed and shaved, my body felt gritty and as rumpled as my shirt. The splinters of wood in my cheek itched like hell.

  I sat down in no mood for wasting time.

  “So what’ve you got to tell us, Louise?” I asked.

  Louise shook her head, reaching for her coffee. I put my hand over her cup and she snapped her face to mine. There was fear there, but not a little anger. Good. It was the ideal mix.

  “You haven’t come up with anything that’d help us find John?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “I haven’t exactly had the time, considering I was held captive all morning.”

  “Have you seen the news?”

  From the tight grimace on her face, I could tell that she had.

  “Have you spoken to the FBI yet?”

  “Yes. They were at my place half the night. Another reason I didn’t get around to looking for clues.”

  “So what did you tell them?”

  “Just what I told you.”

  “Which is just about nothing,” I said. Sarcasm was heavy in my voice, but I was in no frame of mind to worry about hurting her feelings. In my estimation, she wasn’t the sensitive type anyway.

  “I don’t know anything.”

  “Bullshit!” I said a little too loudly. The waitress behind the serving counter shot me a concerned look. I raised an apologetic hand. The waitress nodded and went on about her business. She knew when to keep her nose out of other people’s affairs.

  “The men who were in your house,” I said. “What did you tell them?”

  “Nothing,” she said. Her voice was strident. She pawed at the tail of her blouse, hitching it up. Her ribs were red and swollen from repeated whacks from the Yellow Pages. “Why do you think they were hitting me?”

  Okay, then. She did have a point.

  She didn’t tell them anything. But it didn’t mean there was nothing to tell.

  Her hands were icy cold when I took them in mine.

  “Now, Louise. We’re going to start over again. This time you tell me what you know. Okay? You asked me here to help find John. I’ve traveled thousands of miles. The least you can do is tell me the goddamn truth.”

  Louise prized her hands free, then looked down at the table. I thought I detected a tear at the corner of one eye, but I could have been mistaken. She pushed her hair off her face, maybe surreptitiously wiping away the tear. When she looked up at me, it was with clear, defiant eyes.

  “John’s no killer,” she said.

  “I know that,” I told her. “But he has been up to something illegal. And you know exactly what it is.”

  She shook her head, a lock of hair breaking loose and floating across her features. “If I say anything, he could go to prison.”

  I snorted. “If you say nothing he’ll be going to prison for a damn sight longer.”

  “If he doesn’t go to the gas chamber, that is,” Rink added for emphasis.

  “He didn’t kill anyone,” Louise said. She was adamant. Her fingernails dug at the tabletop. “He was with me when some of the murders took place. I can swear to that!”

  “You have to prove it, though,” I pointed out. “Your solemn word isn’t worth shit, Louise. Can you also give him an alibi for the other times of death?”

  “That’s the problem,” she said. She glanced over at the waitress, checking that she wasn’t
listening. She leaned toward me and whispered, “If I say where he really was, he’ll get put in prison anyway.”

  I looked at Harvey, then at Rink, for support. Both sat with frowns on their faces. It was helpful having such sage council at hand. When I spoke, I’d lost the hard edge to my voice. “Tell me what he’s been up to, Louise. If I’m going to help John, I need to know.”

  She chewed at the corner of her lower lip. Any other time it would have looked as sexy as hell. Not now, though. She simply looked like a woman terrified of the consequences of her next words. “The delivery job,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  She shook her mane of hair. “It’s not what you think.”

  “Not drugs?” I asked.

  Louise looked like I’d just thrown salt in her face. “No. Not drugs. Do you think I’d stand by him if he ever went near that crap?”

  I placed my hands flat on the table, leaned forward to stare in her face. “Depends on how much you love him.”

  Louise snorted and gave me the dead eye.

  “Okay. Sorry. I don’t doubt that you love him.”

  “It wasn’t drugs,” she stated.

  “Okay,” I said, relieved. “So what was he doing?”

  Louise picked up her coffee in defiance, drained it, placed the cup back down. A stall while she ordered the words in her mind. “He was couriering.”

  “Couriering what?”

  “It wasn’t so much what as who he was doing it for.” She glanced around again. “Like I said, if the police find out, he’ll be in deep shit.”

  “Let’s worry about finding John first,” I said. “We can worry about the police later.”

  Louise dropped her head in acquiescence.

  “He stole something. Something big.”

  I blinked. “Something big?”

  “That’s all I know. He wouldn’t say what it was.”

  I pushed my hands through my hair, back down over my face, then leaned my elbows on the table. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I finally said. Though I knew she wasn’t. John had got very good at hiding secrets toward the end.

  “Honestly. He wouldn’t say, so I didn’t ask. Whatever it was, he said he could sell it, to make life better for everyone,” she said. As if that made things all right.

  I swore under my breath. I knew exactly where this was taking us now. Who the fake CIA agents probably were. “Who was he working for?”

  “Sigmund Petoskey,” she said.

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “But who was he collecting from?”

  “I don’t know for sure. A gangster from up north. Henry-something-or-other.”

  “Hendrickson?”

  “Yes. That’s it.”

  “The men who were beating you this morning,” I said. “They work for Hendrickson, huh?”

  “They’re the ones that John’s running from,” she agreed. She turned her face to the table, began playing with her empty cup.

  “Have they been pressuring you for John’s whereabouts?” I asked. “Before this morning, I mean.”

  Without answering, she leaned back, lifted up her blouse. I saw a toned abdomen. She pulled down the waistband of her skirt and there were three definite cigarette burns peeking above her panty line. “I’d show you more,” she said, “only I don’t know you as well as my gynecologist.”

  I bit down on my lip. One thing I was sure about: there was going to be a reckoning with the two who’d escaped us this morning.

  “Why didn’t you say something, Louise? We could’ve stopped them from hurting you again.”

  Her downcast eyelids trembled. “I was trying to protect John.”

  I looked at Harvey. “Any word on the street about the two who got away from us?”

  “Nothing, Hunter,” he replied. “You ask me, they heard the news and took off to the Mojave to try an’ pick up John’s trail. Which I suggest is probably your best play, too.”

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Rink told me.

  Yeah. Me, too. But there were still a few loose ends I wanted to clear up first. When we’d raided Petoskey’s building, I thought he’d been too ready to talk. Made me wonder if he’d been hiding something else about John. His anger at my brother had never been about a gambling debt. It had all been about this something big Louise mentioned. “Louise, what involvement did John have with Petoskey?”

  She pulled her hair into a rope with her hands. “Petoskey was paying him decent money to drive up-country. I don’t know where he was going, but he was gone about three days each time. He’d come back with his van loaded with packing crates and he’d drop them off at a warehouse Petoskey owns. That was his only part in it.”

  “What happened to the packing crates after they were dropped off?”

  “I don’t know, John didn’t tell me.”

  “And you’ve no idea what was inside them?”

  “No.”

  Rink asked, “Any word about what Petoskey is up to, Harvey?”

  “Nope,” Harvey said. “Petoskey’s probably only playing the middle man. Likely, whatever’s in the crates is getting shipped out of the country.”

  “Where to?” I asked.

  “Beats me, man,” Harvey said.

  I had my suspicions but let them lie for now.

  “What do you think?” Rink asked me. “Petoskey, Russian Mob? The Mambo Kings, Cuban? You think there’s some kind of communist connection? You know where I’m going with this?”

  “Could be. But it’s not our concern just now. I’m more interested in finding John before anyone else gets to him.”

  Rink exhaled. “You want me to wait before I call this in?”

  “Yeah, Rink. The last thing I want is more involvement from the government. It’s bad enough we had to call in a cleanup crew for this morning. As far as Walter’s concerned, we offed a hit man. That’s all.”

  Walter had come through for us on this one. However, just the sniff of foreign involvement would mean the entire weight of the Central Intelligence Agency coming down on us like an avalanche. At best our movements would be severely hindered, at worst we’d be locked in a small dark place for fear we’d jeopardize their mission. Our suspicions had to remain just that.

  “Don’t worry, Rink. If things do turn out as we suspect, Petoskey will be made to pay when this is over with,” I told him.

  Louise watched us with dawning horror. Panic was building in her and I gave her a look to stop her from raising her voice. But she did blurt it out. Maybe it was more of a frantic whisper. “Are you saying those men at my house could be terrorists?”

  “No, I’m not saying that,” I told her.

  “They could’ve killed me.”

  “Of course,” I said. It was pointless lying. If the beating didn’t finally get what they wanted from her, who knows what they would have done next? Louise’s face fell. She wrapped her arms around her body as if to stop her aching ribs from exploding. She rocked in place.

  I felt shitty. After all she’d been through, I wasn’t coming across as the sympathetic type. Sure, she’d been lying…at first. But what woman wouldn’t do that to protect her man? It was probably the ideal time to give her a little hope again.

  “Now that they’ve got a lead on John, I guarantee you won’t see them again,” I said.

  “But what if they don’t find John? Won’t they come back?”

  “They won’t,” I promised. Not if I stopped them first.

  Louise was growing despondent again, speeding up her back-and-forth movement. She snatched the rope of hair into the corner of her mouth and began gnawing on it.

  “At least we’ve got a starting point,” I said. “We’ll leave for Los Angeles this afternoon, try and pick up John’s trail from there.”

  “Why Los Angeles?” she asked, coming to a sudden halt. I wondered if I’d touched on something she knew. But she didn’t say anything, only waited for me.

  “It’s obvious that John was headed west. His car was found abandoned o
nly a few hours from Los Angeles; I’m betting that’s where he is now.”

  “Some big-time players out on the West Coast,” Rink agreed. “You think John’s out there looking for a buyer?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  If John wasn’t the killer of those people at the motel, something had suddenly become very obvious to me. The real killer and John had crossed paths. Maybe John was already dead, buried somewhere out in the Mojave Desert. In all likelihood, the killer now had what John had stolen, which probably meant he’d be looking for a buyer for it. That meant the killer was probably in the L.A. area trying to hook up with one of these big-time players. Whatever this something big turned out to be, it was a curse; he was welcome to the damned thing. But if he had killed John, he’d just made himself a major enemy.

  28

  “KEN BIANCHI AND ANGELO BUONO,” CAIN WHISPERED TO himself.

  As serial killers go, their names aren’t easily recalled. Not like Bundy or Gacy. Not until their singular epithet is apparent: the Hillside Strangler. Now that’s a name that’s familiar to every American citizen over the age of puberty.

  Cousins Bianchi and Buono terrorized the western states in the 1970s, raping and killing in unison. The law only caught up with them after Bianchi’s lust became too great and, without the aid of his partner, he’d botched the abduction of two women.

  It isn’t often that killers work together. As far as Cain was concerned, Bianchi and Buono were the only true serial killers to do so. Which was why he’d been toying with the notion that the world was overdue for another terrible twosome.

  The thought hadn’t appealed for long. For a number of reasons. John Telfer didn’t have the gall to pull the trigger when he’d had the opportunity. He was no killer. He was a thief who deserved only to be punished. But mainly, why the hell should John freaking Telfer share any of his glory?

  No, any thought of a fledgling partnership was out the window. Telfer had to die. Perhaps he’d even be Cain’s magnum opus, his announcement to the world. The death that would make him famous.