Carl Zimmerman was a compact middleweight who held his gun as if it were a natural extension of his hand, no hesitation in his trigger finger. His dark face was a calm pool.
The solidly built cop Blues had put on the floor had gotten to his feet, his block-cut face flush with embarrassment and anger, anxious for redemption and ready to take Blues on again. He took a step toward Blues, and Carl Zimmerman put a hand on his shoulder and held him back.
'You're going down, Bluestone,' Harry said.
'I told your boy not to put his hands on me,' Blues answered.
'Officer Toland was doing his job and I'm doing mine. Don't make this worse than it already is.'
'Harry?' Mason said again.
'This doesn't concern you, Lou,' Harry answered, not taking his eyes off Blues.
'That's bullshit, Harry, and you know it.'
Harry Ryman was the closest thing Mason had to a father. He and Mason's aunt Claire had been together for years and had been unconventional surrogates for Mason's parents, who had been killed in a car accident when Mason was three years old. Blues had saved Mason's life and was the closest thing Mason had to a brother. Whatever was going down didn't just concern Mason. It threatened to turn his world inside out.
Harry said to Blues, 'I'm gonna cuff you. Everybody gets cuffed, even if we have to shoot them first. You remember that much, don't you, Bluestone?'
Blues looked at Mason, silently asking the obvious with the same flat expression. Mason nodded, telling him to go along. Blues slowly turned his back on Harry, disguising his rage with a casual pivot, extending his arms behind him, managing a defiant posture even in surrender. Harry fastened the handcuffs around Blues's wrists and began reciting the cop's mantra.
'You're under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney-'
'I'm his attorney,' Mason interrupted. 'What's the charge?'
Harry looked at Mason for the first time, a tight smile cutting a thin line across his wide face. Mason saw the satisfaction in Harry's smile and the glow of long-sought vindication in his eyes. He had always warned Mason that Blues would cross the line one day and that he would be there to take him down; that the violent, self-styled justice Blues had employed when he was a cop, and since then, was as corrupt as being on the take. As much as Harry might have longed to make that speech again, instead he said it all with one word.
'Murder.' Harry held Mason's astonished gaze. 'Murder in the first degree,' he added. 'You can talk to your client downtown after we book him.'
Mason watched as they filed out, first the two uniformed cops, then Carl Zimmerman, then Blues. As Harry reached the door, Mason called to him.
'Who was it, Harry?'
Harry had had the steely satisfaction of the triumphant cop when he'd forced Blues to submit moments ago. Now his face sagged as he looked at Mason, seeing him for the first time as an adversary. Harry thought about the battle that lay ahead between them before responding.
'Jack Cullan. Couldn't have been some punk. It had to be Jack Fucking Cullan.' Harry turned away, disappearing into the wind as the door closed behind him.
CHAPTER THREE
Mason scraped the crystallized snow off the windshield of his Jeep Cherokee. The cast-iron sky hung low enough that he half expected to scrape it off the glass as well. His car was parked behind the bar, a reminder that covered parking was the only perk he missed from his days as a downtown lawyer. The Jeep was strictly bad- weather transportation. His TR6 was hibernating in his garage, waiting for a top-down day.
He drove north on Broadway, a signature street of rising and falling fortunes Kansas City wore like an asphalt ID bracelet. From the lip of the Missouri River on the north edge of downtown to the Country Club Plaza shopping district, forty-seven blocks south, Broadway was high-rise and low-rise, professionals and payday loans, insurance and uninsurable, homes and homeless, the Big Man and the Little Man elbowing each other for position.
Mason wondered how Blues had been linked to Cullan's murder. As far as he knew, they had never even met. Maybe something had happened between them when Blues was a cop, something that led to Cullan's murder years later. Mason dismissed that as unlikely. Blues didn't carry grudges for years. He settled them or expunged them.
It was possible that Cullan had surfaced in one of the cases Blues had handled as a private investigator, as either a target or a client. Blues didn't talk with Mason about his cases, unless he needed Mason's help.
Before he bought the bar, Blues taught piano at the Conservatory of Music. Cullan hadn't seemed the type to take up music late in life, and teaching someone the difference between bass clef and treble clef wasn't likely to drive Blues to murder. At his worst, Blues would tell a student to play the radio instead of the piano.
Harry Ryman was right about one thing. Blues had his own system of justice and he didn't hesitate to use violence to enforce it. For Blues, violence was a great equalizer, leveling the playing field against long odds. Few people would use it, even those who threatened it. The threat without follow-through was weak, a shortcoming Blues couldn't abide. Blues wasn't casual about violence, though. He wielded it with the precision and purpose of a surgeon using a scalpel.
Blues and Harry were partners when Blues was a rookie cop and Harry was the veteran who was supposed to teach him about the street. Harry was by the book and Blues wrote his own book. Their partnership, and Blues's career as a cop, ended six years earlier when Blues shot and killed a woman during a drug bust. Internal Affairs gave Blues the choice of quitting or being prosecuted. He quit.
Harry had warned Mason against working with Blues, predicting that Blues would go down one day and that Harry would be there, waiting. Blues shrugged when Mason told him what Harry said, refusing to talk about the case that had fractured their relationship.
Saying that Harry and Blues hated each other was too simple an explanation. Harry and Blues shared a wound neither man could heal. Whenever the three of them were together, Mason felt like he was on the bomb squad, trying to guess whether Blues or Harry would go off first.
CHAPTER FOUR
'Sergeant Peterson,' Mason said, reading the desk sergeant's name tag, 'I'm Lou Mason. Harry Ryman brought Wilson Bluestone in a few minutes ago. I'm Bluestone's lawyer.'
Peterson was reading USA Today. He looked at Mason over his half-glasses, sighed his resentment at Mason's intrusion, dropped his paper, and picked up the phone.
'He's here,' he said and hung up, returning to his paper.
A civilian police department employee materialized and escorted Mason to the second-floor detective squad room, pointing him to a hard-backed chair. The squad room reflected the uninspired use of public money-pale walls, faded vanilla tile, and banged-up steel desks covered with the antiseptic details of destroyed lives.
Mason waited while the crosscurrents of cops and their cases flowed around him. He'd been here before, waiting to be questioned and accused. An ambivalent mix of urgency and resignation permeated the place. Cops had a special sweat, born of the need to preserve and protect and the fearful realization that they were too often outnumbered. That sweat was strongest in homicide.
Homicide cops took the darkest confessions of the cruelest impulses. They sweet-talked, cajoled, and deceived the guilty into speaking the unspeakable. The more they heard, the more they were overwhelmed by one simple truth: there were more people willing to kill than they could stop from killing. Sterile statistics on closed cases couldn't mask the smell of blood and the taste for vengeance that clung to homicide cops like a second skin.
Justice was supposed to cleanse them, but the pressure to make an arrest could wash justice down the
