Authors: John Gilstrap
Ricky had to smile. Only Logan could take comfort in twisted logic like that. Still, that kind of confidence couldn't help but rub off. Maybe he had a good point. One thing was sure: right or wrong, making other people dead beat the hell out of being dead yourself.
Ricky took a deep breath and nodded his surrender. "Okay, Patrick, we'll do it all tonight. But I want your promise on something first, okay?"
Logan cocked his head.
"I want you to promise me that we'll do the hits my way. I'll get you in close enough that Ortega will know who's popping him, but beyond that, you do it my way, okay?"
Logan looked as if he wanted to argue, but he nodded nonetheless. way."
"Because this is what I do. This kind of thing is my specialty."
"Ricky, quit selling. I already said I'd do it."
Ricky searched for signs that the boss was lying, but ended up liking what he saw. "All right, then." Ricky reached into the zippered backpack that had been lounging at his feet and pulled out a Ziploc bag with a Glock nine-millimeter inside. Holding the bag by a top corner, he dangled it in front of Logan.
"Here's your weapon. It's clean. It'll trace back to some doper in Spokane."
Logan reached for the bag, but Ricky pulled it back out of reach. "Listen to me now. There's not a fingerprint on this thing. I loaded it with gloves on, and you need to handle it with gloves. Don't take it out of the bag until you're at the school. That way, you won't get fibers on it that'll trace back here."
"What about a silencer?"
Ricky shook his head. "No way. You're going to be shooting in a crowd, so you want the noise. You want the panic. And don't worry about the brass. Just let it fly."
Logan nodded. Clearly, he was imagining the scene in his head.
"Now your biggest problem is gonna be Pena, okay? You gotta take him out first, and you gotta do that one fast. I'd prefer that you take them both fast, but I know you'll want to play with Ortega, so I won't even bother to tell you. But Pena's a fucking animal, okay, Pat? An animal. You don't take him out first, he'll shoot every fucking person in that room till he gets you, understand?"
"I understand. What kind of ammunition did you load me with?"
"Devastators. Seventeen of them. You hit an arm, it's coming off. Anywhere above the belly button and between the shoulders, the guy dies with hamburger for guts."
Now there was an image Logan could wrap his mind around. "How are you gonna take the Martin bitch and her hubby?"
Ricky smiled knowingly and slung his arm over the back of his chair. Hoping to make a point, he answered, "With as little drama as possible.
"I need to talk to you about Bobby and Susan Martin," Russell said, tucking his credentials away. Heather Gannon seemed oblivious to the two-year-old who hung from the sleeve of her Eddie Bauer
sweatshirt. The kid wore a diaper and a T-shirt and its name was Terry For the life of him, Russell couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl.
"What have they done?"
"We don't know that they've done anything, ma'am," Russell replied as cheerfully as he could. Fact was, no one had yet invented a way to casually inquire about someone's neighbours without raising eyebrows. "I just wanted to ask some questions, if that's okay."
Heather looked on the cusp when little Terry decided the issue for her, pulling her off-balance into the foyer. "Come on in," she called over her shoulder.
Russell stepped into Tara. A grand stairway rose steeply from the center of the entryway to join a railed balcony that ran along all four walls overhead. On the ground floor, where Russell would have expected wallpaper and a few paintings, the Gannons had opted for a ten-foot-high mural that spanned the entire perimeter of the entry hall, featuring red-jacketed men on horseback scaring the living shit out of a fox that, to Russell's eye, was nowhere to be found.
"How nice," he said. A much better icebreaker than "This is tackiest waste of money I've ever seen."
"Thank you," said Heather, prying her child off her arm. "It was done by Antoine Phillipe." She pronounced the artist's name with a kind of awe that he was clearly invited to share, but the effort was wasted. Call him a cynic, but Russell's mind conjured up the image of a pony-tailed, out-of-work artist named Tony Phillips who needed some folding money and had devised a way to score big.
'You're welcome to study some of the detail if you'd like."
Russell smiled politely but didn't respond. As he pushed the door closed behind him, he instinctively opened his jacket. Carrying a gun made no sense if you didn't have quick access to it, and he wasn't yet ready to rule this woman out as delusional. "Is there a place where we can sit down?"
Little Terry was crying now, sitting on the stone floor and kicking his feet.
"What do you want?" Heather barked at the child, and the crying became a wail. Heather raised her head to the ceiling and yelled, "Margarita!" When Margarita-whoever the hell she was-didn't respond in five seconds, Heather called the name again, only this time
much louder.
Russell heard a long string of Spanish words spilling over the railing above and behind, and he looked up to see a round, little woman of about fifty hurrying to get to the stairs. She wore the uniform of a maid, and the expression of someone who feared losing it.
"For God's sake, Margarita, where have you been? He's been just crazy this afternoon!"
Margarita answered in heavily accented English that Russell could understand only slightly better than the Spanish. He distinctly heard the word bathroom, though, and he found himself feeling sorry for the woman, who apparently needed permission to take a dump. She bowed and apologized and then hurried off with little Terry in tow.
Finally alone, Heather straightened and brushed herself off. "There," she said with a puff of air that made it sound as if she'd just won an arm-wrestling match. "He can be quite a handful."
"Must be nice to have a stunt mother on standby," Russell said with a smile.
Heather hesitated a moment before deciding to take the comment in good humor. "Margarita's a godsend. Shall we go and sit in the parlor?"
Another first, Russell thought. To his knowledge, he'd never been in a parlor before. Lots of living rooms and family rooms and even the occasional library, but never a parlor. He followed his hostess through an archway off the foyer, in effect turning his back on Tara and entering the Cheyenne Social Club. He wondered where one shops to find so much red velvet and gold tassels.
"Please help yourself to a seat."
Heather perched on the edge of a garish chaise lounge while a deceptively innocent-looking chair consumed Russell whole.
Heather smiled as her visitor struggled to rescue his butt. "I should have warned you. But don't you just love antiques?"
Artists and yard sales see you coming for miles, he didn't say. "So, how long have you known the Martins?"
Heather stewed on that one for a few seconds and appeared to be close to answering when her features darkened. "I don't know how I feel about answering questions like this without knowing what it's all about. I mean, suppose I get them in trouble?"
Russell took out his notebook. "Do they regularly engage in activities that would get them in trouble?" He loved asking questions like that, and Heather's reaction made it all the more worthwhile.
"Oh, heavens, I don't know," she blustered, pulling on her sweatshirt as if suddenly struck with a hot flash. "I don't think so. I mean, well, I don't really know, come to think of it. Certainly I haven't witnessed any, but you never really know about people, do you?"
Russell smiled patiently and wrote doodles in his book that he hoped might look like illegible handwriting. "No, I guess you don't." He scowled thoughtfully as he doodled a little more. Finally he looked up. "You were saying?"
As planned, Heather seemed utterly confused. "Was I saying something?"
"About the Martins."
"Oh, yes, of course." She paused. "Where were we?"
"You were about to tell me how long you've known them." Nothing like drawing a few squiggles in a notebook to get hesitant neighbours to squeal on their friends.
"Well, they've lived next door for maybe six, seven months, I guess. But I can't say that I've ever really known them." She added that last part quickly, as if to separate herself from whatever bad things they might have done.
"How would you characterize them as neighbours?"
She shrugged. "Nice enough, I suppose. They keep to themselves a lot, but then so do we all around here. These five-acre lots sort of keep People at arm's length."
"Do they seem to get along well together? Mr. and Mrs. Martin, I mean."
"I suppose. Like I said, we don't spend much time with them." Russell jotted a note. "When was the last time you spoke with either of them?"
Heather thought for a moment, then snapped her fingers. "Oh, of course, that's easy. That would have been at the reception after the miscarriage."
Russell looked confused. "Miscarriage?" When Bobby had told the story, he'd made it sound as if a child had actually died.
"Yeah, a few weeks ago, I guess. I think it was pretty late-term, too.
They took it very hard."
This detail interested him. At what point does a miscarriage become a stillbirth? He couldn't put his finger on why this could matter, but his instincts told him that it was significant. He wrote a note-a real one this time-and boldly underlined it, so he wouldn't forget. "You say they took it hard. How do you mean?"
"Well, they seemed to be in mourning, you know? I heard from some of the other neighbours that they'd been trying and trying to have a baby, and then to lose one so late. Well, I guess they just took it hard."
"You said this happened a few weeks ago. Could you be more specific? Four weeks? Eight weeks?"
Heather thought for a moment. "I guess it was maybe six weeks ago, two months max. It really was very sad. Bobby in particular seemed torn apart over it. Susan got real quiet-probably quieter than she should have been-but Bobby was just a mess."
"Just a mess doesn't mean anything to me. Could you be more specific?"
Heather grunted in a way that showed growing exasperation. "He was, you know, a mess. You could see it in his walk, in the way he'd wave back when I said hi. He just seemed to be a very, very sad man."
Russell nodded sympathetically. Your heart has to go out to anyone who's suffered that kind of loss. He thought of the box of Pampers in the garage and remembered how long his own mother had hung on to his father's clothes after he'd passed away. Like Bobby Martin, she'd been able to get the box as far as the garage, but for years was unable to actually let go of them. Up in the bedroom, she'd bought a wooden valet stand just to hold his dad's favorite sweater vest and hat.
At least for the Martins, the diapers would still have a valid use, he thought, once they got around to having another child. Footprints.
Russell had delved so far into sentimentality that he'd nearly forgotten a piece of the puzzle. The only set of footprints common to the grave site, the murder scene, and the road belonged to a child. If the Martins had no children, then where did those prints come from?
"Have you seen anything of the Martins in the past few days? Say, within the last week?"
"You mean to speak to?"
Russell shrugged. "To speak to, to wave to, to casually observe."
"I think they went away this weekend. On Friday I saw them loading camping gear into the car." Heather shivered at the thought of it. "You've really got to love the outdoors to camp in this weather. It's cold out there."
Russell allowed himself a chuckle. "Not the frontier type, eh?"
She recoiled from the thought. "Me? Keep your tents. I'm room service and cable TV all the way."
Okay, Russell thought, she swam in money had no taste, and never worried about where to put her mother-of-the-year awards, but at least she was honest about herself. In his book, that counted for quite a lot.
Frankly, he'd been hoping that this interview would be more productive. As it was, all he'd really got out of it was that the people he suspected of murder were in fact really nice folks. Why was that always the case? He was just about to ask the sweeping is-there-anything-else-I-should-know question and move on when his cell phone rang.
Russell took a whole two rings to find the damn thing in his jacket pocket. Between his wallet, gun, handcuffs, credentials, and cell phone, he swore he carried an extra ten pounds of crap around with him every day. Offering an apologetic smile to his hostess, he opened his StarTAC and brought it up to his ear. "Coates."
"Hi, Russell, this is Tim," said the familiar voice from the other end.
"I thought I'd catch you up on a few details. We got a positive ID on the stiff. His name was Jacob Stanns, and he lives out here in West Virginia with his brother, Samuel. I'm heading out there to chat him up and see what we can find."
Russell wrote the victim's name into his book. "Okay, good. Anything else?"
"Not much, really. But I did get the 911 call traced to a little all-night convenience store outside of Winchester, Virginia. Some state troopers talked to the kid who was working last night, and while they didn't have any pictures to show, the description the kid gave of the customer came awfully close to the description on the Martin guy's driver's license. It might be time to reach out and touch him."