mountain air is good for you, that it smells fresh without the taint of the city. They say a lot of things. All I could smell was smoke from the distant fire that killed Andrea Cotter, the first girl I ever loved. A cop becomes intimately familiar with what fire does to the human body. The image of Andrea’s charred body flashed into my head and I shuddered. Although it felt like a million years since I’d last done crowd control at a fire scene, I could taste the acrid stink of burnt hair on my tongue and in my nostrils.
Bang! I stopped in my tracks, trying to remember the date. August
… Christ, it was the anniversary of the Fir Grove fire. Was it the thirty-fourth anniversary? The thirty-fifth? I couldn’t recall. It had been so many lies, so many secrets, so many lifetimes ago. Brightman had done his research. He was going to kill the last woman I loved where the first had been murdered. It was all so symmetrical in a twisted kind of way.
I had to put Andrea Cotter out of my head. Three and a half decades had passed and she was as dead as she was ever going to be. She had met the end of time, the clock had stopped ticking on her nevers and forevers. Katy’s clock was still running. She was who I had to think about. I couldn’t let Brightman play with my head. He already had too much of an advantage. I slammed my trunk shut.
“Stop!” a voice came out of the darkness.
“Ralphy Barto.”
“You remember?”
“I remember. Hitting you in the eye like that, it was a lucky shot.”
“Not for me.”
“As I recall, you were trying to kill me at the time.”
“There was that,” he said, a smile in his voice. “You carrying?”
“I got my. 38 tucked into the small of my back. You want me to-”
“No, thanks,” he said, stepping out of the darkness. “I’ll handle it.”
He was carrying a submachine gun of some kind, a long, thick sound suppressor on the end of its barrel. In spite of the eye patch and years, Barto actually looked better than he had in 1983 and I told him as much.
“Yeah, I take care of myself these days. Anyone in the car?”
“Brightman told me to come alone.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Before I could say anything else, Barto sprayed my car with bullets. The rate of fire was amazing, the suppressor-silencer is a misnomer-keeping each shot down to a loud snap and hiss. He paid careful attention to the trunk and backseat.
“No,” I said too late. “I’m alone.”
“That you are, my friend.” He replaced the clip, took my. 38, and patted me down. He knew I wouldn’t risk Katy’s life by trying anything. “Christ, you smell like puke. You’re scared, huh? Somehow, I didn’t figure you as a puker.”
“Bad shrimp.”
“Cute,” he said. “Listen, he’s gonna kill her one way or the other. There’s nothing I can do about that, but if you wanna run, I won’t shoot you. I’ll lay this thing down and you can split.”
“I can’t do that.”
“I know, but I figured I’d ask. Come on. Up the hill. You try anything now, I’ll wound you and it won’t change anything.”
“Is she okay?” I asked.
“She’s a little freaked, I guess.”
“Has he hurt her?”
“Not really.”
It was a tough climb up the hill. We stopped at the top to rest a minute before heading toward where the guest parking lot had been. The parking field was gone as were the wildly overgrown hedges that had once marked the rear boundary of the lot, but the concrete steps that led down to where the pool area and ball courts used to be still remained. The same could not be said for the pool and courts themselves. Now nothing but a great flat field with hills in the distance appeared in the beam of my flashlight. We started across the field.
About fifty yards on was where the late Anton Harder had established his angry white boys town: a collection of ratty trailers, abandoned cars, and abandoned souls. The people who lived there were a ragtag collection of losers, misfits, and bigots. Harder had his own reasons for choosing the Fir Grove property as base camp. His mother, Missy, a hotel chambermaid, had died in the fire. As the flames had consumed his mother, the hate had consumed him. He had even built a shrine to her not very far away from the foundation of the workers’ quarters.
“Come on, let’s go.” Barto nudged me along with his gun.
We kept on ahead, insects hurtling themselves into my hand as they flew toward the source of the light.
“Did you kill the kid?”
“Yeah,” he said, as if he were telling me the time.
I was glad I hadn’t run when he gave me the chance. He would have shot me. I could see where this was headed. Brightman would kill Katy and Barto would kill me. It was to be a neat and tidy little package of revenge.
“The other kid, the one really named Patrick, are you going to kill him too?”
“You know, Prager, that’s pretty good. How did you know there was two of them?”
“I wasn’t sure until earlier today. The tattoo artist confirmed that wasn’t her work on the autopsy photos of John James that my man showed her. But I think I had doubts the night I found the kid’s body. He just didn’t look quite right and I could never figure out why the kid would’ve lied to me about his name when there was nothing to gain by it. I guess Patrick is the one that looks more like Katy’s brother.”
“I don’t know. They looked the same to me. Maybe it’s the one eye thing. You ask me, it was a lot of trouble to go through because of a grudge, but I’m not paying the freight.”
“You think Connie Geary knows what she’s been paying for?” I asked.
“Moe, you figured a lot of this shit out. I’m impressed. I gotta hand it to you, you’re pretty fucking smart.”
“Yeah, just not smart enough. I’m the one walking with the gun stuck in his back. So, Ralph, you didn’t answer me. Are you going to kill the other kid?”
“Nah.”
“No!”
“No. He’s already dead. Brightman killed him in front of your wife. Wanted to give her some closure after all we put her through. It was the least we could do.” Barto snickered as he had on the phone, his true nature showing itself.
That did it. I lost control and spun around swinging. I caught Barto off guard, but I wasn’t quite quick enough. I got in one good punch, but it glanced off his jaw. He simply stepped back, letting my momentum and gravity pull me down.
“Nice try,” he said. “I’m gonna enjoy killing you. Let’s go!”
I ignored the threat and tried to regain my equilibrium. I couldn’t let him get to me anymore. I started talking.
“What about Martello?”
“That asshole, what about him? Truth is, it took you a lot longer to get to him than we figured. We thought you’d interview him right away, but you never was very conventional in the way you did things. I suppose if you were, I’d still have my left eye, you’d have your gold shield, and Brightman’d be president. You shoulda just left things alone back then, Moe. What did finding the truth get you anyway?” Barto coughed and spit. “Fucking bugs keep getting in my throat.”
“That’s why you picked a pewter Yukon, because Martello drove one!”
“Right. Good thing he liked a roomy ride. It would’ve been hell for me if he drove a Miata. I’d look pretty stupid driving them kids around behind the wheel of one of those little things. Woulda looked like the clown car at the circus. Let me tell you something about that guy Martello, Moe, he mighta come after you one day on his own. He fucking hated you.”
“When you told Ray what you had in mind for him, did he feel any better about you sacrificing his life in a just
