Bad Guys

34

WE BOTH RAN TO THE BALCONY, but Trimble edged in front of me to get out there first. I noticed he was careful not to touch the railing as he peered over, so I followed his lead. Ten floors down, the lower half of Eddie Mayhew was sprawled across the short hood of a minivan, and the rest of him had gone through the windshield. The van’s alarm system had kicked in and was whooping.

“Terrific,” said Trimble, going back into the room. He took the case off a pillow and wiped down the back of the chair he’d grabbed, the handles of the over-the-shoulder bag. “Did you touch anything?” he asked me.

“We didn’t kill him,” I said. “You didn’t kill him. He jumped.”

“Yeah, well, I had every reason to have tossed him off the balcony, so I might as well have. Did you touch anything?”

“No. I don’t think so.” I honestly wasn’t certain, shaken as I was by what I’d just seen.

To be sure, Trimble used the pillowcase to wipe down the doorknobs, and the last thing he did was open the door with it, then tossed the case back into the room. “Put it back on the pillow,” he told me, and I did.

And then we were in the hall, heading for the elevator. But Trimble shouldered open a door under an Exit sign and we were in the stairwell. “I don’t want anyone downstairs seeing an elevator come up to ten,” he said. He was running down the steps, taking two at a time. We did about a flight every five seconds, and about a minute later, we were back on the first floor, going down a hallway and out a side entrance that wasn’t locked from the inside.

I had thought we’d be hearing sirens by the time we went outside, but there was only the distant wailing of the van’s alarm from around the other side of the building. As if reading my mind, Trimble said, “No one pays any attention to those things.”

It was true. Anytime I hear an alarm go off, I figure someone’s hit the wrong button on their remote key by mistake.

We got into Trimble’s car, me behind the wheel again. I could still see the gun down by the pedal. “Drive out slow,” he said. “We don’t want anyone thinking this is a getaway vehicle.”

I glanced at the dashboard clock. It was time for another call to home base.

Trimble got out his cell, entered the number. “Can’t get a signal,” he said.

“What?”

“I can’t get a signal. It’s says No Service. Let me try again.” He entered Bullock’s number again, put the phone to his ear. “Cut out. Fucking cells.”

I went to reach for mine, then realized it was in a cardboard box on Bullock’s desk. “Try again!” I said.

“Okay, hang on, it’s ringing.” A pause. “Hey, it’s me. Checking in… Yeah, I was having trouble getting a signal. Everything okay there?” Another pause. “We’re on our way back, actually… We had a visit with Eddie… No, listen, let me tell you about it when we get back… Yeah, bye.”

Trimble cleared his throat. “I think Bullock could sense that things didn’t go as well as they might have.”

I had us on the highway to downtown. Trimble seemed contemplative.

“Imagine what that must have been like, huh?” he said. “Ten floors down. Then splat.”

“Imagine,” I said, “thinking that was preferable to being taken back to see Bullock.”

As we got closer to downtown I asked Trimble what was on his mind.

“I was thinking about when you have a scarf, or a shirt maybe, and you get a tear at one end, say, and the threads start coming apart. And you try to tidy up the edges, you snip off the loose strings, but then, after another day or so, there are more loose threads. And you realize that the thing is just going to keep unraveling and there isn’t a fucking thing you can do about it.”

I slowed for a red light.

“You know how many people have to die tonight for things to not unravel?” Trimble asked. I thought it was more a rhetorical question, so I didn’t say anything. “You, of course. And your daughter. And Eddie would have had to, if he hadn’t taken care of that himself. And his wife, of course. That one’s going to haunt me forever. There’s enough witnesses to fill a streetcar.”

“Some have died already,” I said. “There’s a photographer at my paper. His name was Stan Wannaker, and your friend Bullock smashed his head in a car door earlier this evening. Not to get anything from him. Just to settle a score. And Lawrence is still probably iffy. It’s only luck that’s kept him alive. When Bullock left him, he had to believe he was leaving him for dead.”

Trimble said nothing. I guess he didn’t have the energy this time to defend Bullock on that one. He was staring out the window. It was odd. He seemed at peace somehow, like maybe he’d arrived at some kind of a decision.

“One time,” he said, letting out a small chuckle, “Lawrence and I, back when we were in uniform, we got partnered up one time, years before we’d end up together as detectives, and we get a call, a jumper, a hotel like the Ramada, must have been thirty floors or so. And there’s a guy hanging off the other side of the balcony, the railing behind him, you know, leaning forward, holding on from behind?”

“I think I see it,” I said.

“So Lawrence and I-never Larry, right?-go into the room where the balcony is, and the guy says to stand back, or he’ll let go if we come out there. So I stand back in the room and Lawrence gets into the room next door and goes out onto that balcony so he can talk to the guy without getting too close. And Lawrence looks down, and he tells the guy that his balcony, the one Lawrence is standing on, is way better to jump from than the one the guy is on.”

“Why?”

“Lawrence is looking down, and he says to the guy, ‘If you jump from your balcony, you might catch the edge of the pool, maybe hit the water, and you’ll probably just bust your spine or something, and you’ll be in a wheelchair the rest of your life sucking your meals through a straw. But if you come around to the next room, and jump off this balcony, you’ll catch the parking lot, and you’ll be dead in a second.’

“So the guy starts thinking about it, thinks maybe Lawrence is onto something, so he comes in off the balcony, and he’s walking through the room and he says to me, ‘Your partner says I have to jump off the other balcony,’ and I say okay, and escort him next door, and then together, Lawrence and I subdue this guy till the psycho ward arrives.” Trimble smiled to himself. “Saved that dumbass’s life. We pissed ourselves laughing all night over that.”

“That’s kind of amazing. Smart, too.”

“Oh, he was good, Lawrence was. He always had a good feel for people, good judge of character.”

Neither of us said anything for a few seconds.

“Maybe he made a mistake in my case,” Trimble said.

“You can still make this right,” I said. “Maybe you can’t undo all the mistakes you’ve made, but maybe you can keep any more big ones from happening.”

Trimble shook his head, bemused. He looked over at me. “Sometimes you just have to play the hand you’re dealt.”

I didn’t know what he meant by that.

We were heading down Wyndham, Bullock’s house half a block away. “What about it, Trimble?” I asked. “How’s this going to play out? I’d kind of like to have some idea before we go in there.”

“Yeah, me too,” he said. His gun appeared in his lap, gripped tightly in his right hand. “Park the car and get out.”

We opened the doors at the same time, and I was half out of the front seat as Trimble was coming around the back of the car.

“Shit,” I said. “I dropped my wallet.”

And I leaned back into the car, reached up by the accelerator, and slipped my hand around the cold metal of the gun grip. Quickly, before Trimble was around my side of the car, I slipped the gun into the pocket of my jacket. I’d already been patted down once. The odds were that I wouldn’t be again.

Together, we walked into the house.