Misty gave me a look, walked Ashby into the other room, and shut the door, muffling his voice. Now it almost sounded like a dance beat from a distant party. She came back in and shook her head. “Even if the . . . heads . . . could somehow talk, what would the killers be shutting them up about?”
“You got me there. It’s got to be simple, whatever it is. I know it. Why can’t I get
“Hess, Ashby’s gone. You want me to go in the other room, too? Please take a breath.”
I stopped in my tracks and practically smiled. “You want to rephrase that?”
She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean. Calm down.”
I sat down. “I’ll do what I can. The only obvious thing would be so they couldn’t identify the killers. But so what if they did? No one listens to chakz. Their last words would be to some cop on trash duty before they were carted off to be burned or crushed.”
“Even
“One or two at last count. Anyone who doesn’t live in a shantytown or the Bones thinks the laws on the books are enough to protect us. Maybe they suspect the laws aren’t upheld, but no one’s really asking. If you were the killer, it wouldn’t matter, unless you were . . .” I let the sentence trail off and left my mouth half-open. Maybe if I didn’t say it, it wouldn’t be true.
“What? Unless you were what?”
“Unless you were someone paid to uphold those laws. If word got out, you wouldn’t do time, but you might lose your job.”
“You mean a cop?”
“I’m thinking worse than that. What if it’s Tom Booth?”
“No. Hess, you always said he was a good guy.”
“When it comes to the living. I’ve never seen anyone hate chakz as much as he does. Never met anyone who took an overturned conviction more personally. What if he decided to correct what he thought of as injustices? He started with Colin Wilson; then the hakker attack pretty much handed him Boyle.” I grabbed my neck again. “Funny, you’d think he’d start with me. Maybe he’s saving me for last. What if there are more out there and he’s planning on going after them, too?”
Misty rushed up and buried her head in my shoulder. “Hess, if it is him, what are we going to do?”
I shrugged, absently patting her back. “Move out of the state.”
14
Misty was already packing, but I couldn’t let go just yet. I was too involved. See, if Booth really loved Lenore, this could be his way of working things out. Wish he’d tried talk therapy or medication. But that made the loose ends my responsibility in more ways than one. Not only was I the one who figured it out; I was his motive.
I couldn’t see getting any justice for Boyle and Wilson. As for Turgeon, my best guess was that he was alive, but the hired goons had put the fear of Booth into him. Sure, a fancy lawyer could tackle a chief detective in the courts, but not without the leads I’d gathered. Unless I somehow stumbled on my client as he was walking down the street, trying to find Turgeon was a dead end. Mostly I was thinking that if there were others on the hit list, I had to find and warn them. And since the only way to figure out who else was at risk meant using a police database, that meant one more trip into the lion’s den.
I thought it best not to mention that to Misty, so while she and Ashby were busy sorting what to bring and what to leave behind, I stepped into the hall and made a call to my old partner, Jimmy Hazen. He was with Booth when they followed me back home that day. Last time I saw him, I was covered in my wife’s blood. He didn’t appear in court, but he signed a deposition describing in detail what an asshole I was.
I had to talk fast, real fast.
“Haze? It’s Mann. Don’t hang up.”
He hung up. I dialed again.
“Look, we both know what you think of me, so before you hang up again, just think for a second that it must be something pretty important. I’d need a damn good reason, right?”
The silence that followed was achingly long, a void in the air like the gaps in my memory. Finally he answered, voice deader than any chak’s. Two words: “Go on.”
I told him some of what I knew, leaving out any mention of Booth. I tried to make it sound like a psycho was involved, that maybe Turgeon, a liveblood, was in danger. When he didn’t cut me off immediately, I slowed down, let him fill in the blanks, but in the end he just said, “So what?”
“Haze, let me have a terminal for an hour, anytime, day or night. One hour. I swear if it doesn’t pan out I’ll lie down and let you kick the shit out of me all day long.”
“I wouldn’t want to get my shoes dirty, you son of a bitch.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
Another pause, then: “Sign a confession. Gimme a statement
I clamped my mouth so tightly I nearly crushed a molar. One wrong word and I’d lose him. I wanted to tell him I didn’t do it, but between the two of us, how many times had we heard that from a perp? And I didn’t even really remember. I took a different tack.
“A statement from a chak isn’t admissible in court.”
“I know. Call it a souvenir.”
“What about the liveblood? What about Turgeon?”
“That’s why I’m making the offer, on the off chance you didn’t imagine the whole thing. Find something real on him, you can let me know. Right now I’ve gotta take a piss, then have a drink so I can forget we had this conversation. Do we have a deal?”
“Fine.”
“Back entrance, midnight. You get half an hour.” He hung up.
Never has any idiot, alive or dead, been happier to have successfully invited himself into hell.
15
Unfortunately, Ashby insisted on tagging along. He’d gathered from the conversation with Misty that all the excitement had something to do with Frank, and his loyalty to Boyle trumped whatever he saw in Misty. It was as if there was a whole amusement park in his head, and all day long, all the rides were free.
I couldn’t see Booth pulling two late nights in the same week, and I’d just been in and out of the morgue, so I figured it was as safe as it was going to get. I thought about bringing Misty, too, but she was into the packing. Besides, for all I knew there might be outstanding charges against her, and I never knew when the fact that the police didn’t connect us might come in handy. She wasn’t eager to come with, in any case.
With so much business in Fort Hammer conducted long after dark, the buses run late. I used to think the city looked better at night because you can see less of it, but in some places what you don’t see makes it worse. There are spots along those streets where the shadows vibrate like they’re hungry, others where the inky nothing is plain sad.
Around about Eastman Avenue, it gets even darker than that. No one’s bothered to fix the streetlights for years. Block after block, the only light came from the headlights on our bus. What didn’t shine on potholes caught the husks of empty stores and apartment buildings, the spaces between the structural supports all holding a blackness thick as tar.
I was keeping it together pretty well until then. Now I was getting tense, imagining Booth leaping from the dark, clippers in hand. Adding to my sense of vulnerability, the windowpane by our seat was missing. If my nightmare decided to come through, the only thing to stop the blade would be the air.
At last the fluorescents in an all-night gas station appeared, a rectangular moon in a parking-lot sky. My
