Then a bearded man in tattered jeans, T-shirt, and jean jacket approached me, and I wasn’t sure whether this was somebody who’d just been released after appearing in a lineup, or Cherry.
“Mr. Walker?” he said, extending a hand.
“That’s right,” I said. “Detective Cherry?”
“Yeah. Come on in.”
He led me down a couple of hallways, then into a small office. Cherry dropped into a metal and plastic chair behind a cluttered desk. I glanced at some mug shots on the wall as I sat down opposite him.
“So you’re with the Metropolitan?” he asked.
I nodded. I didn’t see the sense in being specific about my current status with the paper.
“You got some ID?” he asked.
I fished out my laminated Metropolitan card and tossed it on Cherry’s desk. Fortunately, Magnuson had not thought to make me surrender it. If I were a cop, I’d have had to turn in my shield and my piece, but reporters didn’t carry around that much paraphernalia. Cherry glanced at it, tossed it back.
“Long way from home,” he said. “What brings you up here?”
“The Kickstart shootings,” I said.
“Whoa, that goes back,” he said, sitting up in his chair and leaning forward across his desk. “Man, that was something, certainly by this town’s standards. A triple gang shooting. Watcha looking into that for?”
“It’s kind of complicated,” I said. “But there might be a connection between those shootings and a recent murder in Oakwood. A columnist with that town’s paper got himself killed.”
“Interesting. We were never able to close that one. Had our suspicions, of course, but we never nailed anybody for it.”
“Who was your leading suspect?”
“More like suspects. Those clowns that got killed, they were part of a small-time biker gang called the Slots. They had a running rivalry with the Comets over drugs, hookers, that kind of thing.” I was nodding. “Maybe you already know some of this,” he said.
“I did a bit of reading at the library before coming over. I found your name in a lot of the stories. That’s what led me here. I guess I’m looking for anything that didn’t make the papers, recent developments, that kind of thing.”
“Well, no recent developments. It’s an open file, like I said. Couple odd things, though. I was expecting some retaliation after it went down. Figured the Comets would lose a couple guys, maybe their place would get firebombed, something. But it actually got quieter afterwards. Whatever it was, whoever it was, it kind of brought some peace to the situation. In fact, it was relatively peaceful even before that. Few months earlier, another guy from the Kickstart was killed, car got shoved in front of a train, but not much fallout from that either. And it’s not like crime stopped after that triple shooting. The Comets, they took over from the Slots, they don’t have much competition even to this day.”
“So it worked for them, killing those three,” I said. “They scared this Gary Merker right out of business.”
Cherry looked thoughtful. “Yeah, ol’ Pick got out of Dodge. It seems to have worked out that way. But I was never sure the Comets were responsible. The thing is-we off the record here for a minute?”
“Sure.” I didn’t even have a notepad out.
“We got approval for a slew of wiretaps on the Comets. We got hours and hours of their head guy, Bruce Wingstaff-Wingnut to his detractors-and the rest of his crew, chatting away, and there was never a word about the Kickstart thing, other than being somewhat amazed by it.”
“Maybe they knew they were being listened in on.”
“Well, if they did, then why’d they talk about everything else? Dope deals, busting some guy’s knees who didn’t pay on time, girls they had working for them. All sorts of shit. But nothing about the Kickstart. I mean, they talked about it, but more along the lines of ‘I wonder who the fuck killed those motherfucking Slots?’”
“So they were as baffled as everybody else?”
“Seemed that way.”
“What about Merker and his friend Leonard Edgars? They weren’t there at the time, didn’t get shot.”
“Yeah, there’s that,” Cherry said. There was something in his tone, a hint of skepticism.
“What? What are you thinking?”
“Again, this is off-the-record speculation, but I always thought it was convenient that Merker wasn’t there. Him and Edgars, who he always treated kind of like a brother. The slow-witted one.”
“So what are you saying? That he had someone hit the place after hours, shoot his three former pals, then make off with the receipts for the day?”
Cherry frowned. “No, not that. He’d hardly need to hire someone for a job like that. I suspect Merker would have all the requisite skills.”
“You think Merker did it? That he killed three members of his own gang?”
Cherry raised his hands in the air in a gesture of frustration. “Who knows? It’s just one of the things I’ve been kicking around ever since that night. I wouldn’t even be thinking along that line, except there was that other incident, the one I mentioned a moment ago, happened the year before.”
I waited.
“His number two guy.”
“Eldon Swain,” I said.
Michael Cherry made his hand into a gun and shot it at me. “Bingo. Eldon Swain. Got shoved into the path of a train. He’s in the car, truck comes up behind, rams him right into the front of it. Messy.”
“There’d been another, similar incident.”
“Yeah. One of the Comets died that way. Everything about it was the same. Except the first time, it’s a guy from one gang, second time it’s somebody from another.”
“Okay,” I said.
“We thought Pick-that’s the name I always think of first for Merker-looked good for the first one. Then another guy dies, same M.O. Makes you wonder.” He shook his head. “I wonder where that son of a bitch ended up.”
“He’s in the stun gun business,” I said. “With Edgars.”
“No shit?”
“He just tried to get our cops to buy a bunch of them.”
“Whoa, whoa, hold on,” Cherry said, starting to smile. “Pick is flogging stun guns to cops?”
I nodded.
“Man, that guy has got balls. So, he’s working for a stun gun company?”
“I got the impression he was his own boss. They hit police union meetings. Edgars demonstrates for him. Merker shoots him with the gun, gives Edgars fifty thousand volts. Says he’s done it a couple dozen times to him so far.”
“Jesus. That guy wasn’t working with a full deck of neurons back when I knew him. What must he be like after getting fried with a stun gun a few times?” Cherry kept shaking his head at the audacity of it all. “You know, there’s something about this that rings a bell someplace…” He turned to his computer, started tapping away at some keys. “There was this heist, about six months ago, this place that’s making a new line of stun guns, uses like high- intensity vapor or water or something…”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what he’s selling.”
“Okay, here it is. Like, four dozen of these things were ripped off. In Illinois. There’s not a lot of these out there yet. New technology. That’d be a great way to unload them, sell them to cops. Nice way to bring a guy down without having to kill him, avoid a massive investigation. Regular crooks, they’d rather just have guns. It’s not like they’re going to face Internal Affairs.”
“You don’t honestly think,” I said, “that Merker would try to sell hot stun guns to the police, do you?”
Cherry was smiling ear to ear. “I’m flattered that you think that no cop would ever buy anything stolen.” He kept grinning. “This is beautiful. This would be so Pick. I mean, really, who’d check? Who’d even think that someone would try to sell stolen goods to a bunch of cops? They buy any?”
“I don’t think so. I was covering it for the paper, and Merker got kind of skittish when he found out the press was there. Is it ballsy, selling police stolen goods, or just incredibly stupid?”
“With Pick, it would be a bit of both. One time, he calls us, keep in mind now that at the Kickstart, they’re dealing drugs, girls giving blowjobs upstairs, and he’s on our ass about people parking illegally out front of his
