Where the dead lay

TWENTY-NINE

McMurphy was sitting alone in a booth in the dark rear corner of Vic ’n’ Vitos. He had a gigantic half-eaten thin-crust pizza pie cut into diagonal slices resting in front of him. Behr slid into the booth and saw that the guy was still in his dusty black suit, but now he wore a white shirt under it with two different shades of lipstick smeared on the collar. He was using his slender musician’s fingers to pluck spicy homemade giardinare from a massive jar and arrange it on a slice of the pizza. McMurphy gave him a nod hello and started in on the slice with small, mincing bites. He was skinny as a rail but seemed to eat full-time, not to mention that Behr had tried the giardinare at Vic ’n’ Vitos, and just a taste of the pickled vegetables was enough to burn a hole clean through a stomach.

“So this guy, his name is Austin. He actually worked-fricking worked-at a shake house. You believe that, man? He seemed pretty interested in the money for info aspect.”

The whole “snitch on the payroll” concept was not one that Behr was in a position to afford. “Let me know when you’re ready,” he said, leaning his elbows up on the table.

McMurphy nodded again, this time to himself, like he was steeling himself to do something unpleasant. Maybe he was just sorry to be saying good-bye to what was left of his pizza. The nodding continued on, growing in energy until it seemed like the guy was turning into a bobblehead doll.

“You all right?” Behr asked.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, “you know, just geeked.”

“Geeked over what?” Behr asked, but got no answer, save a nervous giggle from Kid. A tremorlike sideways twitch of the head was starting to develop in him, too. Behr looked deep into his eyes. There was a lot of sparkle, but not enough coherence. “What are you on?” Behr demanded.

“Nothing,” Kid said.

“No?”

“No, man,” Kid pleaded, looking hurt. “Just geeked to be helping-”

“’Cause I won’t deal with you if you’re on something,” Behr said flatly, trying to figure out what it was-coke, meth, pills-or whether he was just a freak.

“I had a few Beam and Cokes and a few of these,” he pointed at a half-killed pint of the black that had lost its head.

“What’s a few?”

“Just a few. Don’t worry, after my last tour I could probably drink a gallon of Beam and not even feel it.”

“Congratulations,” Behr said, standing and lifting a diamond-shaped piece of pizza, half of which he ate with a single bite. “So where are we headed?”

The answer was Fionn MacCool’s, an Irish pub out in Fishers. The brick building tried to re-create the Dublin effect and housed a bar, tables, a dance floor, and a small stage where live music and toe dancing were performed. The place was popular with the young smart set, and around St. Patrick’s Day was sure to be full of “Drunk Me I’m Irish” T-shirts and green beer puke running in the street. Behr wasn’t a regular. Tonight there was no live band, but he and Kid McMurphy entered on loud music playing from the sound system and a pretty good crowd of drinkers, and Behr quickly saw that he was with a local celebrity. McMurphy greeted about three-quarters of the patrons with handshakes and hugs for the guys and double kisses in the European style for the girls. Behr heard more than a few requests for McMurphy to do some shots, play a song on the stage, or come “smoke up later.” What they didn’t encounter was the guy they’d come looking for. After scouting around for a while, McMurphy flagged down a passing waitress.

“Yo, you seen Austin around?” he asked.

“Austin Tuck?” she wondered.

“Yeah.”

“He’s out on the deck with Davey Veln,” she said. McMurphy led the way toward the side door that led onto the outdoor space.

“He’s probably playing cornhole,” McMurphy said. “He’s freaking awesome at cornhole.”

The deck was more crowded than inside. Music was pumping out there as well, and groups of drinkers, mainly blond-haired post-college girls, were standing jammed around tables, while players, mainly big-boned farm boys, were clustered around two cornhole pitches. Slanted wooden boxes were placed bottom up about ten yards apart while two-man teams tossed fabric bags filled with corn kernels at small holes cut into the tops of them. It was the kind of game that was only likely to catch on in agricultural country, and copious drinking certainly enhanced its amusements. Three points were scored for every bag that went in the hole, and one point for every bag that landed on the board but didn’t go in, if Behr recalled. He’d only played once or twice. It just wasn’t in his blood, he guessed.

“There he is,” McMurphy said, and pointed at a pair of young men standing by the far rail. One was tall and husky, with a shaved head and the sloping shoulders and overdeveloped traps of a college wrestler. The other was midsized but showing some lean muscle under his tank top. He had several tattoos covering his arms and creeping up his neck, and also sported some big-gauge hole earrings in his earlobes.

“Which one?” Behr asked.

“Guy with the shaved dome.”

“Well, come on.”

“Right, right,” McMurphy said, and walked toward the pair, who each held a pint of beer and flipped around a beanbag while they waited for their turn at the game.

“Hey, Austin,” McMurphy said, and the big man turned and tried to focus.

“What up, Kid,” Austin said. The other man, Davey Veln, nodded as well. They didn’t seem to notice Behr.

“This guy needs to talk to you,” McMurphy said. Only now did the pair register Behr’s presence. “Remember the thing I mentioned, about the money…?”

“What about?” Austin said, turning toward Behr. He might have been a big guy, gym muscled, but there was no will in this Austin. Behr could see that right away. Behr could also see he was powerfully drunk. His eyes were glassy and distant.

“About your old job,” Behr said.

“No thanks-,” Austin began, trying for defiant cool, but just sounding hesitant.

“Look, bro, we’re next up for cornhole, so you can either wait… or better yet, buzz off,” Veln said, squaring with Behr. So Austin was the bigger of the two, but Veln was dominant, Behr realized.

“I’m not talking to you,” Behr said, then angled toward Austin. “You’ll play later. Let’s go.”

“You don’t get it, dude. These are the qualies for the big tourney, so he can’t play later,” Veln said with menace. “And he’s also not fucking interested.”

Behr’s hand shot up and his finger found its way through the gauge in Veln’s right ear. He grabbed on tight and yanked down, doubling the man over.

“Ahh, shit!” Veln yelped in surprise and pain.

“I said I wasn’t talking to you,” Behr snarled, grabbing the man’s hair with his other hand and cocking his head back. “Now if you want to keep your goddamned ear-and I’m not talking about the lobe, because I’m not gonna pull down, I’m gonna pull up and take the whole damn thing-you’ll head to the bar for another drink and get the hell out of my face,” Behr said, and twisted hard for good measure.

“Fuck! All right, all right,” Veln almost whined. Behr let him go and he straightened. Behr glared at him, the guy’s eyes as wide as saucers with shock. “Fuck,” he said again, and hurried to the bar through a small crowd of onlookers who had noticed the confrontation.

Behr took the glass and beanbag out of Austin’s hands and shoved them at McMurphy. Then Behr closed the space, backing Austin into a corner formed by the wrought-iron rails of the patio.

“What the hell is this about? What are you doing to me here, Kid?” Austin said, stunned by the violence.

“Don’t talk to him. Talk to me,” Behr said, putting his face close enough to see Austin’s big, dirty pores.

“Okay. You want to know? You know already. I did some security…”

“At a pea-shake house?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“And some shit went down. So I quit and I never went back. And that’s it.”

“That’s not enough.”

“That’s all you’re getting.”

“And where was this?”

“I’m not saying.”

“The fuck you’re not.”

“Said too much already.”

Behr shook his head and looked at this Austin. The guy was scared. Too scared to talk. There were a lot of ways to go about interrogating someone and developing information. Army Field Manual 2-22.3: Human Intelligence Collector Operations, suggests that people tend to want to talk when under stress, and respond to kindness.” That worked better for the police, who had a stressful setting at their disposal, and Behr wasn’t about to hand out any kindness. There was the “Mutt and Jeff,” more currently known as “good cop-bad cop.” But he worked alone. There was the “we know all.” Again, it was tough to pull off solo. There was “rapid-fire questioning,” which could produce inconsistencies that he could then challenge, but this wasn’t yielding much at the moment. It was too late for “ego up,” that is, flattering to create a bond. “False flag,” in which he would pretend he had the same interests as the person in question, just didn’t apply. Methods got more complicated from there. The truth was, Behr had to manufacture his own stressful situation to cause the subject to be afraid not to talk, and he needed to do it in a hurry. Do what the cops can’t, he thought.

“You’re gonna give me what you know,” Behr said.

“Or what, you gonna grab my ear? You can’t fucking touch me. Here or anywhere else. Come on, you know you can’t do anything that’ll make me tell you any-fucking-thing,” Austin stated, making his stand. The attitude pushed Behr right into the red zone. He felt McMurphy staring at him. When he was a cop he’d had to put a guy away clean and according to Hoyle. If a cop puts a guy away wrong, and the guy does a stretch of years, then the cop has a problem. Every bench press that guy does while he’s away has that cop’s name on it, saving it until he’s out and comes looking. But he wasn’t a cop.

Do what the cops can’t.

“More than three grams,” Behr said.

“What?” Austin asked, his drunken eyes pinching in concentration.

“More than three grams,” Behr repeated.

A blank look is all that came back at him. Good, silence was a first step.

“One day-and you won’t know when-you’ll go to get in your car and the cops will roll up on you and take you down. And you know what? They’re gonna find more than three grams of Charlie or rock in the dash, or the spare, or somewhere,” Behr said. “It doesn’t matter which. Because more than three grams of it makes it a Class C felony-”

“You’re gonna fuckin’ flake me?” Austin asked, his eyes focused in understanding now.

“Oh yeah. But guess what? It won’t just be some lame Class C beat that nets you four years. Because when it goes down you’ll happen to be parked within a thousand feet of a school, or park, or housing project-”

“Fuck-”

“That’s Class B automatic. But how hard will it be for the prosecutor to make the leap to Class A? After all, they’ll find a wad of five-dollar bills and vials and balloons and some other shit that makes it clear your intent is to deal. That’s twenty to fifty, the presumptive sentence being thirty years,” Behr said. “Thirty years in the state pen getting banged in the pants… well, that’ll probably stop after about ten years when you’re too old.” He grabbed a fistful of Austin’s shirt. “Maybe you think I won’t do it. Do I sound like I won’t do it?”

Austin’s face turned to bread dough. The man looked positively sick. “Fine. The fuck do I care. Get me a drink and I’ll tell you.”

“Get him one, Kid,” Behr instructed, and McMurphy scampered off for the bar. Austin’s gaze followed him.

“Fucking Kid. He told me you’d pay me for info. I knew it was bullshit, that’s why I changed my mind-”

“Forget that. What happened?”

“I was working for a guy. Keeping order. Collecting the money. Guarding the payouts. It was the easiest job ever. Nobody stirred up dick. They just wanted to play. Tons of money was rolling in.”

“And then?”

“Then one day the house got taken down. Some thick-neck bastards came through the back door and whacked the dude’s father.”

“Whacked him like killed him?”

“Whacked him with a pipe or a flashlight or something. They were all carrying weapons. Might’ve killed the old guy.”

“How many?”

“Three. Two were young, the other was older.”

“White, black, Latino?”

“White,” Austin said, seeming to relive some unpleasant moments in his mind. “Soon as I saw it, I beat feet out of there, on account of what I knew. Chilled over Louisville for a couple of weeks with a cousin.”

“Did you?” Behr asked. “What exactly did you know?”

Before Austin could answer, Kid McMurphy showed up again, empty-handed. “Waitress is bringing it,” he said.

Then Austin spoke again. “I’d heard that freelance shaking was over in this town. That a group of guys-a family-was making a play to incorporate it. I heard they were killing anybody got in their way.”

“Killing people?” Behr asked. He knew he was involved in a serious deal, but he wasn’t in the mood to be fed an urban myth.

“That’s what I heard-that they’re like a murder machine. And people are believing it. Nobody’s saying fuck-all or getting in their way.” Austin paused, as a waitress with three tall cola drinks on her tray stepped over with the pinch-toed walk of a second-rate stripper in her tall shoes.

“Thanks, Rose,” McMurphy said, took one glass and handed one to Austin. Rose looked scared, like she knew something heavy was going on. “I didn’t know what you drank, so I got you a double Beam and Coke, just like us,” McMurphy told him. Behr gestured to McMurphy that he should take the remaining glass, and that’s what Kid did.

“Who are these guys, this family?” Behr asked, when the waitress had drifted away.

“I don’t know. Some brothers and a father or uncle.”

“Name?”

“The people who are whispering aren’t whispering that.” Austin turned into the glare on Behr’s face. “So go ahead and fill my car with weight if you want, I’m telling you I don’t know,” he said, and drank down half his drink.

“Who was your boss?”

“Name is Hector.”

“Hector who? He’s Latin?”

“Yeah, Hector. He’s a Honduran. Never caught his last name. I was only with him two months and we never exchanged business cards.”

“That’s great,” Behr said. “I want to talk to him. He still around?”

“Not if he’s smart-and he was pretty smart. Tough little bastard, too. I heard he kept shaking afterward. Even managed to keep some players. Then I heard he stopped. Then I quit asking and quit listening. I think he split. Shut down the spot.”

“I’ll ask him myself,” Behr said. Austin drained his drink, then he took the extra off McMurphy and started in on it.

“Would’ve been a different deal that day if I’d been packing,” Austin said, mostly to himself. “Next time I work security, I go heavy-”

“Better yet, why don’t you find a different field?” Behr said.

“I guess…,” Austin breathed, the last of the defiance going out of his sagging shoulders.

“I’ll just need that address,” Behr said. Austin gave it to him and Behr made to leave.

“Hey, man…,” McMurphy said, “could I grab a ride?”

Behr stopped. “You just want to help, right?” he asked. Kid McMurphy nodded. “Get yourself home, that’ll help,” Behr said, and headed for the door.