Avenging Angel (26 page)

“He’s hurt, but he’s a tough old buzzard. We sent him back in the Jeep cussing us all until he passed out. I don’t know if he’ll make it. I sure hope so.”

Wager felt fingers press against his forehead and a thumb at his eyelids. The gesture brought pain jabbing from ear to ear.

“Okay—okay, take it easy. You got a bad concussion and a not-so-bad cut. But I think that’s all. An ambulance is on the way, but it’ll take a few hours. We’ll get you and the others out of here as soon as we can.”

“Zenas? His boys?” An undertow of blackness started to pull at him and he had to struggle to hear what Hodges answered.

“He blew hell out of the one with the Thompson submachine gun. Then they come down a rope ladder when we broke in. Left you up there alone.” Hodges sniffed. “Now he’s down the canyon seeing about his people. He said to tell you thanks, but he still thinks they could have done it without any Gentile help. Which is a bunch of crap.”

Wager could now squint through half-open eyes. Outside someone had set kerosene lanterns in a circle, and the soft light played over a ring of prisoners who were squatting facing away from each other. Around the circle deputies lounged, rifles on arms, and watched.

“Which one’s Willis?”

“That one—the one with the long beard.”

He saw only the profile, a thick nose that jutted out over the mustache and gray-streaked beard, a forehead slanting back from bushy eyebrows. The man’s back was straight and he stared not at the ground like the others, but levelly and unblinking into the night. The blackness pulled at Wager, a swirling feeling, and gave him time for only that glimpse; but as he slid away, it seemed right that such a vision should be brief.

His room at the county hospital was in the west corridor, and in the afternoons before the nurse came by to turn the blinds against the lowering sun Wager could look across the spray-dotted line of horizon toward a sky whose paleness marked the heat of the benchland. It still took a good deal of effort to overcome the drowsiness that seemed to be a constant state and that made it so difficult to think clearly.

“It will be a few days, Detective Wager, before you feel normal. You’re lucky you didn’t become comatose. Or worse.” The doctor jotted something on the chart, nodded briskly, and went out, a nurse and an orderly in his wake.

After another day or two, he could get up without reeling and could stay awake longer, and he even began to get out of bed and walk the few steps down to Tice’s room. He waited until after the midday visiting hours, because the sheriff’s wife sat for every minute of every visiting period and held the man’s thick fingers, so he and Wager couldn’t really talk. In fact, Wager suspected that Tice fell asleep on purpose when his wife’s solicitations grew too long.

“Sheriff? You awake?”

“Hell, yes. How come they let you up and keep me in this damn thing?”

“They’re afraid your guts will drop out.”

“Not after that damn doctor sewed them in so tight. Every goddamn stitch is pulling.”

“What did Hodges say about Zenas and his people? They moving out?”

“Naw. They say that’s home and that’s where they’ll stay.”

The cost of Willis’s raid had been two dogs poisoned, three attackers dead, and three more seriously wounded. The deputies had four wounded, including Tice and Wager, and one dead. But nobody said much about Yates. The surviving attackers, Willis among them, had been trucked off to Denver to face the homicide charges waiting there. That was the place to find out which of them had killed Kruse and the Beauchamps. Besides, the Grant County commissioners said they didn’t have funds to feed that many prisoners for the time their trial would take. They were glad to get shut of them.

“Hodges did say,” the sheriff went on, “that the Kruse family was out there all right. He thinks Zenas married himself to the widows.”

“Sweet Jesus.”

“Maybe sweet sixteen by the time he’s through.”

“Does Zenas think any more of Willis’s followers will come up from Mexico?”

“Earl says he’s pretty cocky about that. Claims God helped him lead a victory over the Antichrist, and now his Church of God’s Peaceful Blessing is shown to be the only true church. Who knows—maybe Zenas will go on the warpath now. I just hope to hell it’s in somebody else’s county and after I retire.”

Back in his own bed, Wager let the ever-present hazy feeling well up and send him to the edge of sleep. He was just about to slide over the rim when the telephone beside his bed buzzed sharply.

“Gabe? How are you?” It was Jo, her voice bright and healthy as usual, and with that special note that seemed to say she was glad to hear him. “Did I wake you?”

“Fine. And no. In fact, I was thinking what a waste all this time in bed is.”

“We’ll make up for it—I know just the cure.”

“That’s a fine cure.” And it was. “Did Doyle have any luck with the prisoners yet?”

“No. I saw Willis Beauchamp going to the arraignment. He’s scary!”

“He won’t be scaring anybody for a long time.”

“I hope so. But not one of them’s admitting anything about the Beauchamp family, not even to their lawyer. The DA indicted them all for the murders and for conspiracy to commit murder. But a lot of them can prove they were in Mexico when the Beauchamp family was killed, and none of the weapons that were found match the ones used in the Beauchamp shootings. It’s going to be circumstantial evidence again. Kolagny thinks it’s going to be hard to prove.”

“Is that bastard the prosecutor?”

“No, the DA himself. I hear he was really angry at Kolagny for taking a reduced plea on the Ellison garroting. Besides,” she added, “this case has a lot of publicity—Gargan has a front-page article on it almost every day. And the DA’s up for re-election.”

Ah, the eccentric wheels of justice. “The ones they don’t get for the Beauchamps will be sent up for attempted murder out here.”

“They could serve as much time for that as for killing those children. That’s ironic.”

“Yeah.” It wasn’t his worry now. He’d done what he could to establish order, and if the law was chaotic that was somebody else’s problem. To hell with it.

“Gargan’s stories make Sheriff Tice look real good. But he hasn’t even mentioned you, Gabe.”

“From him, that’s a compliment.”

“Oh, and Max wanted to know how you feel. Since we couldn’t make Polly’s barbecue, he wants to have a little get-together to celebrate your coming back.”

Polly. And another get-together. If Wager needed one thing to prove that despite what happened to him the rest of the world went about its own business, it was Polly.

“He really was worried about you, Gabe. He didn’t say anything, but you could see it. Gabe? Are you there?”

“I’m here.” All he’d have to do was say he didn’t feel like it. You say that enough times and people start to leave you alone. Even Polly.

“Max really wanted me to ask you.”

Which, of course, was the real issue. “What’s she have in mind this time, a luau?”

“It’s Max. He wants us all to go to the Brother’s. Sandwiches and beer and a big welcome back.”

“Oh.” Then, “You want to go?”

“Yes!”

So did Wager. “Tell him we’ll be there.”

After Jo had hung up, Wager lay in the air-conditioned room and drowsily watched the afternoon thunderstorms form where the desert heat of the benchland met the cooler mountain air. The first sign was a wisp, like fraying steam, that lifted swiftly on the thermal drafts. Then the wisp thickened into a pearl-gray haze, and rising out of that came a more defined, thicker cloud that caught the sun whitely on one side while its eastern half was left dark with shadow. Sometimes, farther away, a larger upsweep of cloud towered even higher through gray, wind-sculpted ledges to fan out into a fluffy mushroom form. Those were the ones that, as they pushed up the mountain flanks, would flatten in the jet stream and shape into anvil heads and sail majestically above the lightning and hail and thundering rains they pounded onto the huddled earth below. Half asleep, he watched one cloud rise and move slowly nearer, towering and twisting silently into a mottled silver-and-black mass, whose center began to look like a standing figure. To each side, billows of inexorably moving cloud fanned and curved and spread like gigantic wings.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Gabe Wager Novels

“M
R.
S
HELDON, IF
you have need of an attorney, you can call one.”

Max Axton’s voice rumbled like distant thunder. From down the carpeted hall came the muffled ring of a telephone and the mutter of the duty watch answering. Like Max’s voice, the sound deepened the silence of the almost empty Homicide offices.

Sheldon, his eyes blurry behind thick lenses, looked from Axton to homicide detective Gabe Wager, then back to the big man who rested his elbows on the desk.

“You think I did it? You think I killed my own wife?”

Wager shifted his gaze from Sheldon and the mustache that straggled across his suddenly gray and vulnerable face. In the daylight, the office windows looked out over southwest Denver toward Pikes Peak some sixty miles away. On good days you could see its humped outline, powder-blue snowfields, and rock against the slightly darker horizon. Ten, maybe twenty times a year, you could see it sharply etched with its own glow; most of the time you couldn’t because of the smog. Now, you could only see the freckled lights of office towers thrusting up at the south edge of Denver—the other downtown, local boosters liked to call it. Even this late, there were those columns of glowing dots. Cleaning crews, probably.

“I didn’t! For God’s sake, I loved her! I been nearly crazy—she didn’t come home from work and I called and then I called you guys, the cops, and for five days. … I didn’t kill her! I loved her!”

“All right, Mr. Sheldon. All right, now.” Axton’s voice didn’t rise or accuse. It stayed as calm as a stone—like, Wager thought, Axton himself. “All right, we’re not saying you did anything. We’re only saying you can have an attorney if you want one.”

“But then why—”

“Because the law says so, Mr. Sheldon. If, while we interview you, something comes up that might possibly incriminate you, then the law entitles you to have a lawyer present.”

That wasn’t quite accurate, Wager knew. Sheldon wasn’t under arrest, so he didn’t need the Miranda warning. But it sometimes shook information out of people who confused the warning with an accusation, and it covered anything let slip by a witness-turned-suspect. It was a good idea, and he guessed that Axton felt the same way Wager did: this grieving husband wasn’t telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but.

“If you can prove indigence, Mr. Sheldon, then a public defender will be provided for you. Do you understand?”

“I understand.” The man’s cheeks pulsed with weak anger as he tugged at the few hairs that formed the corner of his mustache. “‘Indigence’? That’s ‘poor’? I ain’t poor! And what I don’t understand is why you guys are laying it on me! Why don’t you look for the son of a bitch that did it!”

That’s what they were doing. When a husband was killed, you looked at the wife; when the wife was blown away, you looked at the husband. He or she didn’t always turn out to be the murderer, but the odds were in your favor.

Wager flipped open the new manila folder labeled
SHELDON, ANNETTE E.,
and glanced at the crime report sheet. The victim had been found at twilight by one Marie Voiatsi, who had returned home from a week-long business trip to Omaha, Topeka, and Kansas City. She decided to look around her backyard before dark—check on the irises and tomatoes and hollyhocks that grew tall along the waist-high fence lining the back alley. But she found more than aphids. She found a hole mashed in the hollyhocks, and, filling that hole, the sprawled, half-nude body of a female: Caucasian, twenty to twenty-five years old, long bleached-blond hair, eyes of unknown color because the magpies had eaten them. By late evening, Ross and Devereaux—the two detectives on the four-to-midnight shift—had surveyed the crime scene, interviewed the neighbors, and finally got a lead on the victim from the Missing Persons file. Official identification came just before midnight when Kenneth Sheldon was taken to the morgue, where he named the victim as his wife, Annette. When Wager and Axton reported in for the midnight tour, they found Mr. Sheldon sitting alone, bent under the weight of the cold fluorescent lights.

“That’s the victim’s husband,” muttered Devereaux. “We just brought him from the morgue and haven’t asked him a thing yet. He needed some time to settle down.”

“Thanks.” Under the new team concept in the Homicide Division, cases were no longer assigned exclusively to individual detectives, but were worked by each shift in the division. It was supposed to provide more continuous coverage of the cases. Maybe it did. But to Wager’s mind, something was lost: the tenacity that a detective brought to “his” case. Some detectives, anyway. A lot of people liked the new system because it helped ensure a forty-hour week. When quitting time rolled around, you just turned to the oncoming shift and said, “It’s all yours.”

Wager studied the slumped figure sitting beside one of the half-dozen metal desks that the homicide detectives shared. The man was just out of earshot, but judging from the unblinking way he stared at the floor, he wouldn’t have heard them anyway. “How’d she get it?”