The Killing Kind

31

“Jesus Christ,” breathed Garfield. “This was no fucking accident.” The intersection of Campbell and East 22nd was a mess of pebbled glass and sundered metal, with splashes of crimson all around. Local PD had set up a wide perimeter around the scene-a small act of kindness to any pedestrians who might happen by. Not many did. Campbell and East 22nd crossed in the short stretch between the highway overpass to the east, and the gentle rise of Hospital Hill to the west-a squat, unattractive no-man’s-land of overgrown, chain-linked vacant lots, low-slung yellow-brick commercial buildings, and satellite parking for the rambling medical complex that sprawled across ten city blocks.

The ambulance lay on its side in the center of the intersection, resting at a diagonal to the right angles of the streets. The driver was facedown in a pool of his own blood some twenty yards from where it sat-thrown by the force of the crash, Garfield thought at first. But the windshield, though fractured, was intact, and when he examined the man, he found his back riddled with bullet holes, as if he’d run and been gunned down.

Garfield circled the ambulance, its undercarriage still warm enough to raise a sweat on his brow as he passed. As he reached the back, he saw the left-hand-now bottommost-rear door was open, gravity keeping its right-hand mate closed. Across it lay the remains of the pretty young EMT Garfield had tried to flirt with-Sofia, he recalled. “You’d do well to remember it,” she’d told him, though looking at her now-arms extended, fingernails split against the sun-bleached blacktop as though she’d tried desperately to escape, her head a pulpy mess thanks to a couple close-range gunshots-he failed to see how the knowledge did him any good.

Garfield crouched beside her. One glassy eye devoid of life stared vaguely in his direction. He resisted the urge to close it. Doing so would only serve to contaminate the crime scene. A glance past her into the ambulance showed a mess of upturned medical equipment amid which lay two crumpled uniformed officers. One’s face was gone-shot clean through, a hollow concave like a gore-filled watermelon left behind. The other took two to the chest, but must have kept on ticking, because he’d also been choked with what looked to be some kind of handmade garrote- his face gray-blue, his lolling tongue purple, his eyes bulging and splotched red from burst vessels.

There was no sign of the patient they’d been transporting. Of Garfield’s witness.

Garfield cursed again. Looked away.

A black-and-white stopped alongside him. The back door opened. A haggard-looking Charlie Thompson stepped out. “What’ve we got?” she asked, her voice suggesting exhaustion so profound, she was beyond the capacity of registering any further surprise.

“A fucking mess is what we’ve got. Both cops and EMTs are dead, and our witness is missing. Guess your ghost just jumped a couple spots on our Most Wanted list.”

“How do you figure?” she asked.

“Ain’t it obvious? We had a witness who’d laid eyes on the guy-tangled with him, even-and he knew it. So he somehow gave our boys the slip at the casino and came here to take our witness out.”

Thompson shook her head. “Doesn’t track,” she said. “Witness or not, we had eyes on my ghost already-my eyes. He could have killed me in the banquet hall and didn’t. And I can’t have been the only other soul to see him-once our questioning of the casino patrons is complete, there’ll be a few more folks who did. Not to mention, the whole damn building’s wired for video, which means some camera somewhere must’ve captured him. So going to all this effort just to kill one witness of many doesn’t make a load of sense. Besides, even if he wanted to, how’d he beat them here to make his play? They were in an emergency vehicle traveling at speed with the benefit of lights and sirens. No way he could have gotten here ahead of them.”

“Okay, then, Matlock-what do you think happened here?”

“Matlock was a lawyer, dumbass-if you wanna play all snide, at least get your reference right.” Her comeback was a reflex, and she regretted it as soon as she said it. Garfield’s prick-mode was a defense mechanism, nothing more, and she should know better than to rise to the bait. Particularly when she was about to make his day a whole lot worse.

“I think your so-called witness did this,” she said. Garfield made to object, but Thompson overrode him. “We know he tangled with my ghost and lived. And we know my ghost’s job didn’t go as planned. He meant to get to Leonwood before Leonwood got to Palomera-that much he made clear in the banquet hall. So my guess is, your witness was, in fact, here to get my ghost-to kill him, I mean. Only my ghost got away.”

Garfield paled. “No-it had to be your guy. It had to.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, not unkindly, “but it wasn’t.”

“You can’t know that for sure,” he said. He looked away from her, toward the lights of the medical complex.

“I can, Hank,” she said. “I do. And you would, too, if you weren’t so blinded by what you’d prefer to see.”

“The hell’re you talking about?”

“The shots,” said Thompson, nodding toward the upturned vehicle. “They came from inside the ambulance.”

As her words sunk in, Garfield sat down hard on the pavement. He felt dizzy. Sick. Worthless. He was complicit in these deaths-an accessory, an accomplice. He’d given the bastard an escape route. Practically marched him past the barricades. He knew he’d never forgive himself for what he’d done.

The bass-drum thud of an approaching helicopter roused him slightly. A news chopper, likely peeling off from the swarm that hovered over Pendleton’s like blowflies over carrion when they caught wind on their scanner of yet another juicy morsel for their never-ending misery buffet just down the road.

“Hey!” Garfield called to one of the uniforms manning the cordon. “Get them out of here, would you? This is a crime scene.”

“Actually, sir, dispatch just patched them through-they said there’s something the agent in charge should see!”

Thompson and Garfield exchanged a glance, and then both took off at a run for the officer. Garfield’s legs were longer, his soul more desperate in that moment for a win, and he beat his partner there. When he grabbed the radio, he didn’t bother to identify himself, instead saying: “Tell me you people have eyes on the guy who did this.”

“Wish we did!” came the shouted, radio-garbled reply.

“Then why’re you calling?”

But their answer didn’t make any damned sense. Garfield asked them to repeat it, assuming he’d simply misheard, but he hadn’t. They’d said, “There’s something written on the ambulance.”

Garfield and Thompson trotted back over to the upturned wreck. After a moment’s hesitation while she considered scaling it herself, Thompson laced her hands together and offered them to Garfield. He placed a foot inside, and Thompson hoisted him up. He clambered awkwardly onto the skyward-facing side panel of the ambulance and was faced with letters, upside down and three feet high-letters scrawled in blood.

He tilted his head. The message resolved. Garfield read it along with several hundred thousand viewers at home- to say nothing of the millions who’d see it that night when the story of the day’s events went national:

BE SEEING YOU, COWBOY.