Blackbird (11 page)

For local reporters the lack of hard information meant a lot of background coverage, opinion pieces and miscellaneous filler. Some of it was about me, one editor actually calling me a ‘tragic figure’ and a dogged nemesis of killers and rapists because of what had happened to my partner’s wife and daughter six years ago. I tried to generate a mental picture of a dogged nemesis but only got an image of Snoopy in a trench coat.

But what happened to Bo’s family – and what Bo and I
did because of it – was no cartoon, and there was no way to deny it had changed me. I still saw flashes of their faces everywhere, in mirrors and windows, or out of the corner of my eye, as if I couldn’t completely agree with myself that they were gone for good. Jana said it had changed me, that I was less empathic and harder than the man she married.

‘I’ll take that at bedtime, baby,’ she said. ‘But when was the last time I got you to watch a female movie with me? You won’t even eat eggs over easy any more.’

And it wasn’t only Jana who saw something different in me.

‘
That’s
what I’m talkin’ about,’ Mouncey had said after watching through the two-way as I was questioning a high-school sophomore I’d brought in for shooting his stepfather through the heart with a crossbow. ‘You gettin’ to be some kinda bad po-lice.’

Bo had been one of only two long-term partners I ever worked with, the other being Floyd Zito, a story in himself, who had the kind of unpredictability and atmosphere of danger about him that made him interesting to women and kept bystanders alert. Bo, who’d partnered with me for six and a half years before he died, hadn’t had quite that kind of star quality. He’d been tough and lanky, about my height, quick and coordinated enough to play shortstop but looking at first glance more like a beach bum, and he’d come closer than anybody I ever met to being a man without fear. He’d also been too much of a gambler, the kind of guy who ordered raw jalapenos with everything and saved the worm at the bottom of the mescal bottle for dessert.

But the night I got myself shot for the second time I’d come around long enough to hear him praying aloud and
with no embarrassment beside my hospital bed: ‘Lord, I know I’ve been out of touch for a while, but this fool here is my partner that I’m nearly used to by now and I need him out there with me because when it comes to having a guy’s back he’s not that bad, so I humbly beseech that you will see fit to keep his haemoglobin up and his white count down, and if you can do anything about his IQ now while we’ve got him in the shop, that’d be much appreciated too.’

His wife Lynn, from an old Arkadelphia family, was shy and thoughtful, had a magical touch with potted plants, flowerbeds, or anything else that grew, and loved opera and ballet. She had raised their daughter Kimberly to be a classical guitar player like herself, a thinker and an animal lover, and I enjoyed the serious way Kim talked with me, along with her spur-of-the-moment guitar recitals whenever she had learned a new piece.

Kim was eleven and her mother thirty-three when they died. A sidewalk drug dealer named Jeremy Tidwell carjacked their Kia when they stopped for a light on their way back from an after-birthday pool party some of Kim’s friends had thrown for her. Sixteen hours later a family on a picnic found the Kia at Fox Lake, and an hour after that a reserve deputy found their nude bodies. Both had been raped, strangled and left posed in sexual positions.

‘Oh Christ, no, Bis, no. No. No,’ Bo whispered, his knees buckling.

Hugging him, holding him up, blinded by my own tears and choking on the rocks in my throat, I said, ‘Hold on, man, hold on. I’ve got you. Just hold on.’

Tidwell was caught that afternoon at the back of the old cemetery on Spring Road. There were no civilians at the scene yet, and the uniforms who had run him down
double-checked that their collar microphones were off and sent word back mouth-to-ear to ask if Bo and I wanted to come up. Bo should have been on leave by then, and he shouldn’t have been carrying his weapon. Everybody knew it was a mistake for him to be here and armed, but it was a mistake everybody in the department was willing to make. Anyway, nobody had been able to look into his eyes and ask for his gun or try to make him go home.

‘Suspect’s right in there, sir,’ a uniform said tightly. ‘You want to take him?’

The killer, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, old jeans out at one knee and ratty sneakers, stood with his back against the wall of the sexton’s shed, trying to pull a couple of sprigs of chokecherry over in front of him as if they could protect him. He was thin, with jailhouse swastikas, skulls and dragons up and down his arms, SS lightning bolts on one side of his neck and a patchy beard that had never quite come in. As I registered these things I clearly saw what was going to happen, but too late, because in the same moment I was already hearing Bo’s gun clear its holster.

‘Give yourself time to think, Bo,’ I said. ‘That’s all I’m asking – just think about where we’re goin’ here, partner.’

‘Hey, man, I give up, okay?’ the tattooed doper whined. ‘I give up, man. Don’t shoot. Jesus Christ, my hands are up, dig?’ He cried and snuffled, a worm of snot tracking down his upper lip. ‘Don’t shoot me, man.’

But my attention was on Bo. The muscles and tendons in his hands stood out like cables under the skin as he gripped his Glock, sweat gathering in beads on his unshaven face. He was a man chiselled out of grey rock, not moving, disconnected from ordinary time and space, his reality now only himself, Tidwell, and the .40 he held dead on the bridge
of Tidwell’s nose. The uniforms silently scanned the cemetery, the road and the edge of the woods, looking everywhere except at us, the energy of the moment so monstrous that it filled the air with the smell of hot metal.

‘Bo,’ I said. ‘Not like this.’

‘Yeah, just like this,’ Bo said softly, and I saw his will build and converge and flow down his arms toward his white-knuckled hands and the trigger of the Glock.

In some ways I knew Bo’s reactions better than my own. I screamed ‘
YOUR SIX!
’, and in the half-second it broke Bo’s concentration and he involuntarily glanced back over his shoulder, I was on Tidwell. I feinted a quick left and then threw the best right I had, and he was down, me right there on top of him, driving the right in again and again, no skill or timing, only force, seeing Lynn and Kim lying dead and posed like white dolls in the privet.

‘
Like THIS!
’ I screamed, now as disconnected from the rest of the universe as Bo had been, my reality turning the colour of arterial blood and time itself grinding silently to a standstill as I slammed my fists again and again and again into the murderer’s face, until the broken bones of my hands and Tidwell’s face protruded in bloody splinters through the torn skin. From somewhere came the sound of hopeless sobbing in a voice like the hoarse bellow of some scaled thing out of another age, but I had no understanding then that the soul-sick, chest-ripping sound was coming from my own throat.

Some unmeasurable time later the uniforms entered my red dream and pulled me off the guy. They told me the next day that it had taken five of them. Holding me back, they turned their collar mikes back on. ‘It’s okay, sir, you got him,’ one of them enunciated. ‘He’s down, sir,’ said another.
‘You can take it easy now – we’ll cuff him and get the meat wagon out here, get the EMTs to check out your injuries.’ And, ‘The suspect never should have resisted arrest like that, sir.’ And, ‘Lucky you were able to restrain him before he could injure any more officers.’

And Bo, braced against a black marble headstone, retching himself dry.

Tidwell survived to stand trial, where he was found guilty and condemned to death by lethal injection – a sentence that was never carried out because sixteen months after he cleared through intake at Huntsville another inmate shanked him in the neck over a cigarette.

But to Bo none of it seemed to matter. After the deaths he said less and less and began gradually slowing down, like a man moving underwater. And even though he became more like them every day, he didn’t belong to the communion of the dead either. He wouldn’t talk to me about it or let me make an appointment for him with Max, his belief in any world outside the darkness he now inhabited apparently gone for ever.

But eventually he started trying to talk a good game. ‘I’m okay, man,’ he said. ‘I think I’m starting to pull out of it.’

It’s amazing how being told what you want to hear can shut down your cerebral cortex. And, to be fair, Bo did seem to come back just a little, reconnecting with the world here and there. I noticed it as we sat on the deck behind my house drinking Dos Equis and keeping watch over a smoking brisket. I had just had the cast cut off my hand and wrist and was trying to get used to two-handedness again.

Bo said, ‘See you still got Boat-zilla over there – ’

‘
Bufordine
,’ I said.

‘Okay,
Bufordine
. You gotta be the only guy in the world who’d name a bass boat – ’

‘LA named her,’ I said.

‘Well, that explains it,’ he said. ‘So, ever take that monster out to the lake any more?’ There was a hint of life in his voice that I hadn’t heard since before the killings.

‘Not as much as Jana and LA say I should. Why?’

‘Just thinking. I used to be so hot for it, but I haven’t been out in years. Now I doubt I’ll ever get the old mojo back.’

‘I don’t want to hear you say we’re getting too old for it, Bo.’

He smiled. ‘Too old? Naw, never gonna happen, bud.’

Eventually, he gave me all his gear, the Shimanos, graphite and boron rods and fancy Garcias, sonar rigs and trolling motors, a thousand dollars’ worth of crankbaits, spinnerbaits and topwaters, stacking the stuff in a corner of my garage one afternoon after shift, the suspicion of bourbon on his breath just strong enough to make you think of looking at your watch.

‘Somebody should get some use out of the stuff,’ he said. ‘Might as well be you.’

It wasn’t until almost a week later that I got it. Leaning back in the recliner, thinking of nothing, I must have drifted back to some Psychology 101 lecture and connected it with other bits and pieces, including the ghostly calendar that floated up before my mind’s eye, today’s date circled in red. But not just any red – this was the red of still-wet blood. Today was the first anniversary of the murders.

‘Holy Jesus!’ I yelled, lunging up out of the chair, grabbing for the phone I knew would be useless, jabbing in the
numbers for Bo’s desk at Three, his apartment, his cell, his sister in Sugar Hill. No answer anywhere.

Clawing at my pocket for the keys, I made it across the lawn to the driveway in my best imitation of a dead run – what Jana called my
homo habilis
hustle – got the 250 started and burned out for Sylvan Memorial Park. I blew through the lights all the way out to the interstate and south on the bypass to 77, fishtailing through the gate at Sylvan, slewing past the great angel standing vigil over Joy Therone, jumping the curbs to cut across the orderly islands of dead on my way back to Lynn’s and Kim’s graves under the old willow oaks near the fence at the eastern edge of the cemetery.

I called in an Officer Needs Assistance when I saw Bo’s dark blue Mustang up ahead on the gravel drive, driver’s door open. Standing beside his wife’s pink granite headstone, dressed in wrinkled white cotton shorts, a yellow golf shirt with food and coffee stains down the front, and unlaced sneakers, Bo waved carelessly to me as I slid to a stop. In his other hand he held his Glock loosely at his side, tapping it against his thigh as he watched me, a cockeyed smile on his face. He hadn’t shaved in days, and his fly was open. He was well into the false-clarity stage of drunkenness.

‘Wait,’ I said as I got out. ‘Just wait, Bo.’ I was hearing the first sirens in the distance and thinking hard about the distance between Bo and where I stood.

‘Hi, Bis,’ he said, raising the Glock, jamming the muzzle up under his chin. ‘And ’bye.’

The ten feet separating us looked like a light year to me, but our time was up. My knees grated with shards of glass as I charged. Bo knew all about the knees. But never in our years as partners had he seen me motivated like I
was at this moment; maybe he’d underestimate me. Maybe he’d smell the cold breath of eternity and slow his trigger-squeeze half a second.

Something about his expression in that microscopic sliver of time told me it did surprise him to see how fast I was coming. But of course I wasn’t fast enough. The automatic popped as I slammed into him, a pink spray of blood, brain and bone fragments fanning up and back from the crown of his head, his body collapsing through my arms as I caught hopelessly at his slack dead weight. Trying idiotically to break his fall.

Kneeling beside him, looking down into the now-vacant coolness of his eyes, I tried to see some hint, some microscopic reflection, of Bo and his family finally together again. I wanted them to be – willed them to be – and to know it. I couldn’t make myself believe it, but neither would I ever let go of the hope.

I stared at the message slips in my hand for a few more seconds, but I had stopped reading them because I’d stopped caring what was on them. I had no heart for phone calls or reporters. There was nothing I wanted to say to anybody about the murder, the investigation, or anything else. I tossed the pink squares at my desktop, watching a couple of them catch the air and flutter across the desk and onto the floor.

Bertie appeared beside me carrying several sheets of paper and handed them to me, saying, ‘Crime scene update. Wayne told me to tell you it’s on the website, and maybe this would be a good time for you to say a little prayer for all the trees out there laying down their lives so we can have our hard copies.’

‘Wayne said all that?’

‘I’m sure he would have if I’d kept him on the line.’

I tossed the update sheets on my desk and started picking up stray message slips from the floor, thinking about what people pray for and what kind of answers they think they’re getting.