Murder Straight Up

16

A low fog swam through the chilled air, making the shapes of houses indistinct.

I used the rear exit of Kelly’s apartment house, taking the steps quickly. In back was a yard with clotheslines that I had to stoop under in the murk. The alley was gravel. The end of the block was lost in the fog. I had the impression of being in — a tunnel that had no end.

I reached the beginning of Kelly’s block and looked as far up the street as I could. From what I could see, he was still parked there across from her place. Watching. Waiting. I wasn’t sure for what.

I was both angry and afraid. Dave Curtis’s murder was baffling; about all I was sure of was that the Tomlin kid wasn’t guilty. Several people whom Edelman wasn’t even investigating seemed to have reasonably good motives for having killed the anchorman. And there was the man in the black XKE. Whoever he was. Whatever he wanted.

I got on his side of the street behind a tree and began to carefully make my way up the block. As I got closer I started to recognize the indistinct sounds of a car radio. His. The street was deserted enough, the fog thick enough, the blooming spring vegetation wild enough to make me feel almost lost in a bayou. My heart worked harder than it should have because I was frightened. Every former cop has stories of a buddy who approached the wrong car on the wrong night and got his face blown away. You get leery as you get older. I had no idea what I’d find when I got there.

The XKE was running. Its powerful but overly sensitive engine thrummed in the gloom. I was close enough to see the faint green glow of the dashboard through the rear window. I picked up a large rock that would give my punch the effect of a blackjack.

I got down off the curb doing my duck squat- and paused. I could see the shape of his head. Staring straight ahead. Smoking a cigarette. Fog rolled around his car like currents on the bottom of the ocean. The night kept the sound of his car radio indistinct. For a moment I had the sense that this was all a nightmare. It had that quality. But I was sweating and I had to go to the bathroom and I was scared in an oddly exhilarating way. It was real. I hefted the rock again and got ready to move.

The sonofabitch was a mastermind.

I was no more than two feet from his rear bumper when the XKE door flew open and a big bald guy wearing a fashionable leather topcoat pulled six feet five of himself to the pavement and put a Magnum on range with the middle of my forehead.

“You ain’t exactly quiet, you stupid bastard,” he said.

He came over. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Fog swirled around him like smoke. In the streetlight I couldn’t quite make out his features, just that for all his flashy style they were brutal.

“I want the tapes,” he said.

The dampness wasn’t doing much for my voice. Neither was his Magnum. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He crossed to me in no more than three steps, picked me up with impressive ease and slammed me against the back of his XKE.

“I want the tapes, asshole, and I want them now.”

All I could think of were the videotapes that Kelly Ford had in her office, the ones of Curtis interviewing the kid. But I had the feeling that these weren’t the tapes the man was after. “I don’t have them.”

“Then you know who’s got them?”

“I don’t even know what tapes you’re talking about.”

“Motherfucker.” He slammed me against the car again, and this time he put the cold hard end of the piece just above my nose. “She got it?”

“Who?”

He nodded across the street.

I had to take the chance. He had me pinned down with his left hand while his right held the Magnum. I took the only chance I had. With my left hand I dug my fingers deep enough into his left eye to feel it start to swim free of its socket. With my right hand I slammed the barrel of the Magnum away from my head.

It exploded so loudly that I lost all hearing as I dove for the fog and darkness behind the big elm where I’d been hiding.

The Magnum had blown out his back window. You could hear the neighborhood come alive, see the lights behind the gloom, sense the terror.

“You motherfucker,” he said, and started after me.

He wasn’t worth a damn as a tracker. Not any more than I had been sneaking up on him. He stepped through bushes and made enough noise to scare away all the animals in a seven-mile radius. He tripped on the sidewalk and swore. And his leather coat reminded me of the squeaking of bedsprings in a motel for adulterers.

I kept moving backward toward the point where, somewhere in the fog, my car was waiting. I already had the keys in my hand. Ready.

We probably heard the siren at the same time. Somewhere in the night it made its way toward us, probably acompanied by some very pissed-off police officers. This was a respectable middle-class neighborhood. You didn’t go around firing Magnums in it.

“Shit,” he said.

I was behind a bush. Watching him.

He stamped a foot like a peeved little boy, jammed the big gun into his coat and then started running back to his car. He made an impressive spectacle running like that. Put you in mind of a deft-footed fullback.

I felt my way through the scents of grass and apple blossoms and coldness and found my car.

He hit the street about five yards ahead of me, his lights slashing the gloom, his tires peeling out stunt-man style on the pavement.

I went after him. He knew something I didn’t. That was one reason. And he’d pissed me off. I hadn’t looked real sharp sneaking up on him, nor had I looked real sharp decorating the back of his XKE while he held a gun to my head. Most of us don’t like to be reminded that we’re less good at our chosen calling than we think we are.

Two blocks away the fog lifted somewhat, and then I really got on his ass. I swooped up behind him on the damp streets at eighty miles an hour. At first he didn’t know what to do, so he did something very stupid. He leaned out the window and took a shot at me. The explosion claimed the left half of my windshield. For a guy who had a vested interest in the police not finding us, this guy was none too bright. On the other hand, maybe he didn’t need or even want to be bright. As a cop I’d met many men who had no brains. But they had cunning and they had hatred, and sometimes those things will take you much farther than brains.

He fishtailed around a corner and I saw then, the wide way he took it, that he wasn’t much of a driver. He must have had the idea that we were in a TV show, maybe “The Rockford Files” with all its car chases, and we were going to make our cars do things they’d never done before. But it wasn’t that way at all. Right now we were very dangerous and stupid citizens endangering the lives of many other citizens by shooting up and down narrow streets that were meant for thirty-mph traffic at best.

His next trick was to jam on the brakes hard enough to make a ninety-degree turn and go down an alley.

There was no way I could stop, and for a time I lost him. At the head of the block I pulled into the curb and killed my lights. I sat there sweating and panting and cursing. I had to piss so bad I had the terrible uncomfortable feeling that I was going to wet my pants, and I was shaking so bad from nerves that even the soles of my feet were wet. He wasn’t worth a shit as a stunt-car man and neither was I, but for some reason we were trying to prove otherwise to each other.

He came back out of the alley a few moments later. He was driving fast but not too fast. He didn’t see me at all until I jerked on my headlights two blocks later. Under the foggy streetlight his blasted-out back window looked obscene. He shot at me again.

I floored my gas pedal. He responded by hitting maybe a hundred miles an hour. This time he was going to get rid of me and for good.

Then we hit the intersection. I saw the semi before he did. Even if he had seen it, it wouldn’t have mattered.

He went under it or tried to — or that’s what it looked like, anyway — and just when he hit it the roof sheered off. Then the car kept going beneath the semi and I didn’t see anything, just heard things: shattering glass and tearing metal and the big semi trying to stop.

I got my own car over to the side of the intersection and reacted without really considering what I was doing.

The intersection ran north-south to an old highway. On all four sides were businesses shut down for the night. In the fog the XKE’s lights shot straight up into the air like a beacon. I got over to the semi and looked up at the driver. He just sat behind his wheel and rubbed his face as if none of this were real. He could have been crying. I couldn’t tell for sure.

I’d brought my flashlight with me. I knew I had to work quickly. I got down on my knees beneath the trailer of the semi and started crawling in. There was a suffocating smell of gas and car oil. Sticking out from where the door had been I saw a hand. I swallowed and kept going. When I was fully under the trailer, I saw that gas was leaking from the tank to the ground. Now I had to worry not only about the arrival of the authorities but an explosion.

I pushed my hands inside the mangled door and pulled him out. His face looked as if somebody had worked it over with razor blades. He was meat and blood and bone and nothing more at all. Cop instinct had me reach over and feel for a pulse. You never knew. But I knew now, of course. He was dead.

I had a minute or two at best. I tried his back pocket first and that was a mistake for two reasons. First, I had to waste time jamming my hand between his body and the car seat. Second, he didn’t carry a billfold. Instead he carried a wallet, and I found it, sweaty and anxious, moments later inside his fancy leather coat. I didn’t take all his ID, but I did take everything but his driver’s license and money.

The gas leak was getting worse. I pulled myself out from the wreckage, drenched in gas, car oil and blood. By the time I struggled to my feet again, lost once more in the fog, I heard a siren nearby and I saw a face even closer.

The truck driver, a tall guy who looked as if he could probably tell you more than you cared to know about the history of the Grand Ole Opry, said, “There somebody else in that car?”

I just started walking away. I’d gotten what I’d come for.

He grabbed me. Spun me around. “Hey, this is serious shit, mister. I asked if there was somebody else in that car.”

I ripped his hand away from me. “He’s dead, and it wasn’t your fault and when the police look at the accident they’ll see that it wasn’t your fault. Okay?” I felt sorry for him. I was being a prick. But I couldn’t help it. I needed to be out of there. Fast.

“Goddammit, he’s fuckin’ dead!” the driver said. He was obviously a good man, and this was all bullshit he didn’t deserve.

“It’ll be all right. You weren’t responsible in any way. All right?”

“He’s fuckin’ dead?”

This is not an uncommon reaction at traffic accidents. Shock and guilt. We’re a lot more fragile than the macho boys let on.

I patted him on the shoulder again. I didn’t know what else to do. The siren was drawing nearer.

Then I broke into a run and got into my car and got out of there.