Crow's Landing (16 page)

“Maybe. I got no idea,” Brownie said. He grew defiant. “I didn't get a fucking chance to follow up because I had to go to the fucking hospital because some crazy cunt tried to cut my fucking ear off. Okay?”

The cowboy with the Russian accent got a kick out of Brownie's tirade. He actually slapped his knee. Even Hoffman smiled.

“Glad you're enjoying this,” Brownie said. “Next time I'll call somebody else.”

“You'll heal,” Hoffman said. “What we need to know is how
she
knows. And whether she's working as a free agent or if Parson sent her.”

“How would Parson know about it?”

Hoffman hesitated for a long moment. “No idea. But if she's working for him, then we know she's not going to involve the police. Because we don't want the police involved, Brownie. They don't and I don't and
you
don't. You do understand that.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Brownie said.

“But if she's on her own, I got no idea what she's up to,” Hoffman said. “And we need to find out. So where does he live?”

“Where does who live?” Brownie asked.

“Virgil Cain.”

Dusty worked until three the next afternoon and then told the foreman she needed to leave early. She could tell that he was curious. She had taken yesterday off to go to Kimball's Point and now she was asking for more time, even if it was only a couple of hours. She was still new on the job and taking time off, especially without giving good reason, was not a good idea. He told her to go ahead, but she could tell by his tone that he wouldn't tolerate her making a habit of it.

She wasn't all that thrilled about walking into the Arch Street station but there didn't seem to be any other way. Besides, it wasn't as if she hadn't been there before. In fact, she'd been there a number of times in her past, usually under arrest. She hadn't been back since the night things turned to shit on the river, and she was hoping she wouldn't run into any of the cops who had known her back then, or even earlier. Her Jefferson Park days. Cops come and go, but then seven years really wasn't a long time.

She parked along the street and walked over to the station. On her past visits to the place, she had never entered by the front door before. Under arrest, she had always been driven into the rear parking lot and brought up into the station from below.

It was a different feeling, walking through the front door, and not just because she wasn't wearing handcuffs. The place was a little cleaner out front, and the walls were covered with
posters showing cops in various acts of serving the community—a smiling cop directing traffic at an intersection while a parade passed by, another helping a child on the playground, and a third tending to a wounded puppy. Apparently somebody on the force had a Norman Rockwell fixation, and that somebody had been put in charge of sprucing up the department's image. She noticed that there were no posters of clean-cut cops kicking the shit out of crackheads down by the river, or of jolly patrolmen pocketing bribes from the bar owners selling to underage students. Maybe those posters were still being made.

A woman of about fifty, in uniform, was behind the front counter, talking to an older man, who was complaining about being ticketed for something or other. There was another cop, a man also in uniform, sitting at a row of desks just beyond the counter. Dusty didn't recognize either of them.

After the woman finally convinced the man that he had to go to traffic court to vent about the horrific injustice inflicted upon him by some bylaw officer, Dusty approached her. She was taking a chance even being there but she needed to eliminate certain scenarios, and this was the first. Maybe she'd get lucky and it would be the last as well.

“Would Detective Hoffman be in?” she asked.

“I'd have to check,” the woman said. As she spoke she was writing something on a pad in front of her. Dusty wondered if she was making a note about the irate old man who'd just left, in the event he really lost it and ended up on a roof somewhere with a hunting rifle. All over a parking ticket. “What's this about?” the woman asked when she finished.

Dusty shrugged. “Just need to talk to him.”

The woman nodded. “And just him?”

“Yeah.”

“Hold on then.” The woman picked up the phone and hit a number.

“Who's she looking for?” the man at the desk behind her asked. “Dick Hoffman?”

“Yeah.”

“He's gone.”

The woman put the phone down. “What do you mean—gone?”

“Took his pension. As of yesterday, I believe.”

The woman turned to Dusty. “There you go. You want to talk to somebody else?”

Dusty shook her head. “No.”

Walking back to her truck, she decided to take a stroll down to the farmers market, a few blocks away. She bought strawberries and tomatoes and fresh corn on the cob. It was the first corn of the season. Travis was going through an anti-vegetable stage and she would use the strawberries as a reward for his eating the corn. She would even stop for ice cream to go with the strawberries. She walked back to her truck but instead of starting it, she sat there and ate a few strawberries from the basket while she thought about what she knew, even though it wasn't a hell of a lot at this point.

On one level, things made less sense than ever. It had bothered her that the guy who had shown up at the marina and taken the cylinder had not asked Virgil Cain for any identification, or even for his name. He had taken the boat and left. That didn't sound like something a cop would do. Dusty had encountered her fair share of police and she knew that most of them would go to the other extreme, take down the names of everybody within five miles of the place, ask a bunch of stupid questions that had nothing to do with anything, and make note of the temperature and wind direction to boot.
And all in that formal language they like to spout in front of a judge. Saying “persons of interest” instead of suspects, or “I attended to his residence” instead of just saying they went to somebody's house. But that hadn't been the case with the cylinder. This was strictly a hit-and-run. It was only natural for Cain to assume the guy wasn't a real cop.

But Dusty knew two things now that she didn't know before. One was that the man who seized the cylinder
was
a real cop, not a phony one. And two, it was now obvious why he'd acted the way he had at the marina. One day he seizes the cylinder and two days later he decides to retire. He had no intention of turning the dope over to the drug squad.

Or did he? What if the retirement story was bogus? If Dusty knew one thing about the police, it was that lying was their stock-in-trade. Maybe the two cops she'd encountered at the front desk were in on it. One playing ignorant and the other in the know.

One of two things could be true. The first was that Hoffman was dirty. He'd stumbled on a shitload of cocaine and decided to go free agent with it and sell it to the highest bidder. Which would explain his sudden retirement, and which meant that nobody would be trying to connect the drugs to Dusty. Whatever this cop Hoffman was going to do with the coke, he was doing it for his own benefit.

Which would mean that Dusty was out of the picture.

The second scenario wasn't as rosy. Maybe the police were running a sting. Right now they had a hundred pounds of cocaine they couldn't connect to anyone. They could dump it down the drain, but flushing it without busting anybody wasn't going to give them any satisfaction. They knew damn well it was Parson who brought the shit up from down south. And they knew Dusty had been the legal owner of the boat
that brought it. So what if this was all a scam? They'd invented the story about Hoffman retiring and sent him underground. An unhappy cop looking to make a deal.

Dusty wondered now if it was Hoffman who had contacted Parson in the first place. Parson hadn't said it was a cop, but then that was Parson's way. Tell half of what he knew, and make sure half of that was bullshit. But who else could it have been, if it wasn't Hoffman? It sure as hell wasn't Virgil Cain.

She needed to find out. She really wanted to learn that Hoffman was on the take, that he was the dirtiest of cops. Then she would be out of it. She could go back to work and hope she never heard from any of them again.

Parson's business card was on the dash of the truck, where he'd tossed it that day at the construction site. She reached for it, taking note of the address, out on Van Wies Point Road. He'd moved since becoming a vintage car expert. She put the truck in gear and started across town.

The house was large and impressive and old, with leaded windows and a circular drive out front. A second driveway curled around the house, past an inground pool and down to a large brick garage that sat overlooking the river. The garage was of a more recent construction, and it had six doors across the front. It looked as if it could house a dozen vehicles.

There was a blond woman sunbathing topless on a lounge by the pool, with a cool drink by her elbow. She had pouty lips and large gold hoops in her earlobes. When Dusty drove past her in the old truck, she sat up and stared, removing her shades for a better look.

Two of the garage doors were open and a black Escalade and the red Camaro Parson had been driving at the site were parked out in front. There was a navy blue Mercedes convertible
there too, new or close to it, with the top down. As Dusty pulled up, she could see Parson inside, carefully polishing the hood of a '67 Corvette.

Dusty had picked up a takeout coffee on the drive across town. She got out, coffee in hand, and walked into the garage. Once inside, she sensed another presence and glanced to her left to see Cherry leaning against a workbench, drinking a Coors Light. Cherry, with his dyed hair, his gold chains, and his pumped-up physique. Drinking that horse piss because he was worried about his waistline. Dusty hadn't seen Cherry since before she'd gone to prison. But his name had come up, and quite recently. She was surprised to see him there.

“Hey, there's my girl,” Parson said, straightening up from his work.

“Your girl's over by the pool, sunburning her fake tits,” Dusty told him.

Parson laughed at that, then nodded past her. “You remember Cherry,” he said.

Dusty never gave Cherry a glance. “Yeah,” she said.

“What do you know?” Parson asked.

“I know you're fucking with me, as usual,” she said. “Why didn't you tell me the guy who's got the cylinder is a cop named Hoffman?”

“I didn't mention that?”

“No, you didn't. What the fuck is going on?”

Parson tossed the cloth onto the hood of the 'Vette. “I really don't know. How did you find out it was Hoffman?”

“I had a long conversation with the guy who phoned it in when the thing came off the river,” Dusty said. “An ex-cop named Brownie, a fat fucking lush with a low threshold for pain.”

“He gave Hoffman up?”

“Oh, he told me all kinds of things,” Dusty said. Now she glanced at Cherry, without wanting to. He dropped his gaze to the concrete floor, as if something of interest had suddenly caught his fancy. She quickly turned back to Parson. “He told me this Hoffman has money problems, and he's looking to sell the coke to get himself square. Which is what he would tell me if that was true, but it's also what he might say if the police were trying to set somebody up here.”

“Somebody like me?” Parson asked.

“That'd be good by me,” Dusty said. “They nail your ass and I'll go home and sleep like a baby. No, it's me I'm worried about.”

“You didn't used to be so selfish.”

“I don't have time for your bullshit, Parson,” she told him. “What's this guy saying? Is he trying to sell you the coke?”

“Yeah.”

She exhaled. She glanced out the big doors. The blonde was again reclining on the lounge, stretched out in the sun like a lazy hound. “So you have two choices,” she said as she watched the woman. “You can buy it and hope for the best, which would bite you on the ass if it turned out to be a setup. Or you could tell him to fuck off, and then you're out of it.” She had a sip of coffee before turning back to Parson. “Now doesn't door number two sound like the smart choice?”

“It's my property, Dusty.”

“I don't need to be reminded about whose property it is,” she told him. “You forget who you're talking to? All I want is to be kept out of it. You can understand that, can't you? I did three fucking years for this.”

“He was asking about you,” Parson said.

The words rolled off his tongue so easily, so matter-of-fact, and yet she was almost positive he was lying. Almost. She
turned and walked away from him, toward the back of the garage where a large window overlooked the river. She stood there a moment, trying to gather herself. There was no reason to believe him. He would do anything or say anything. She knew that better than anyone.

She looked past the manicured lawn to the water beyond and then she saw the boat. It was moored alongside an elaborate dock of cedar and stainless steel. At first she thought it was another Chris-Craft, a similar model, but looking closer she realized it wasn't. And when the current suddenly shifted, blowing the boat sideways slightly, she saw the name etched in gold along the bow.

Down Along Coast.

She knew that Parson would be watching her, knowing what she was seeing, and she spoke without turning. “How'd you manage that?”

“Bought it at the police auction,” he said. Proud of himself. “Should've seen their faces. They had already torn it to pieces once, looking for more dope, and after I bought it they did it again, just to make sure.”

“Why would you buy it?”

“I'm a sentimental guy, Dusty.”

“No, you're not,” she said. She turned and walked back toward him. “You have no idea how badly I want to be clear of all this.”