Strangers (19 page)

Good news, bad news. I had reservations about things turning out this way, but Cheryl had hired me to get her son off the hook for the rapes and if I was right in my thinking and I could convince Sheriff Felix and the D.A., then mission accomplished. I had no control over the rest of it. You do your job the best way you can, and sometimes that means playing the cards the way others in the game have dealt them.

I left Alana in Zastroy's apartment with a stern admonition to keep quiet about what we'd discussed, and made a beeline for High Desert Auto Repair and Towing. The wrecker was there, but Firestone wasn't. “Supposed to work this morning, half a day,” the mechanic on duty told me with some heat, “but he didn't show up. So now I got to work the whole friggin' day unless he hauls his ass in later.”

“Anybody try to call him?”

“Yeah. Not answering his friggin' phone.”

“Where does he live?”

“In one of the shitholes across from Henderson's Auto Dismantlers.”

The mechanic's directions were easy enough to follow. Henderson's was located between the river and the Union Pacific rail yard northeast of town, a larger operation than you'd expect for a place the size of Mineral Springs—a sprawling mare's nest of junk cars in various stages of dissection and decomposition, dominated by a mobile crane and one of those big metal-compressing machines, everything enclosed by a chain-link fence topped with strands of razor wire. There was not much else in the area except the rail yard and two long lines of run-down buildings set back to back, one row facing toward the railroad right of way, the other toward the salvage yard.

The buildings were mostly small single-family dwellings, with a couple of larger, two-story structures sandwiched in: tarpaper and sheet-metal roofs, sagging chimneys, wallboards weathered to a uniform grayness and pitted by the scouring desert winds. Relics from another era, probably been built as homes and boardinghouses for railroad workers, that now served as housing for low-income families and individuals young and old who didn't much care where they slept at night. Mexicans and Native Americans, for the most part, judging from the scattering of people I saw in the yards and on the porches.

Rick Firestone's address was furthermost in the line facing Henderson's across a wide gravel roadway, nothing but desert and the curving line of the river beyond. Some of the rattletrap cars and pickups parked in the area looked as if they belonged behind the salvage yard fence, and would probably end up there one day—a short, easy tow to oblivion. The vehicle parked close to Firestone's place in what passed for a driveway was in better shape than the others, a black Chevy Silverado aged ten to twelve. The kid's wheels: I'd seen it parked at High Desert. So unless he'd caught a ride somewhere with somebody, he was home.

I slanted my car across the foot of the driveway, to block any idea of a fast getaway in the Silverado if it should come to that. Noise from the auto dismantlers, muffled while I was inside the car, hammered at my ears when I got out. Crash, bang, crunch, roar, grind, thud, clatter. Busy over there on an early Saturday afternoon, men and machinery working steadily behind the chain-link fence. Destruction of the old is as much the lifeblood of the auto industry as production of the new, a never-ending process.

I walked up through a front yard that was all barren, crusty earth to the front door. No bell push, so I rapped on the wood with the heel of my hand. The door stayed shut. I knocked again, louder, using my fist this time. If Firestone was moving around inside, I couldn't hear him because of the cacophony across the road.

A third pounding on the door got the same nonresults as the first two. All right, I thought, and rotated the rust-pitted knob. Unlocked; the door creaked inward a little. I shoved it open far enough so that I could poke my head inside.

As soon as I did that, my stomach muscles contracted and the hair began to pull on the back of my neck. It was a feeling I'd had before, a sensing of wrongness—emanation, effluvium, whatever you wanted to call it. I told myself to heed it, not to go in there, but I'm not made that way; curiosity, the need to know, wins out over caution every time. So I eased inside, and found a light switch, and flicked on a ceiling globe that spilled light over the interior.

Right. Violent mechanical destruction wasn't the only kind that underwent a never-ending process.

Somebody had turned Rick Firestone to human scrap with a bullet that had torn away the lower part of his face.

*   *   *

I backed out, turned, and drew half a dozen long, deep breaths of the cold sage-spiced air. The road was empty; the only activity in the area was over at Henderson's. I took another breath to finish clearing my lungs and the tightening of my emotional grip, then went back inside and shut the door against the throbbing noise from across the road.

Firestone lay sprawled on his back in front of a battered black woodstove. The weapon that had blown him away must have been high-caliber to do as much damage as it had to his face, and to splatter blood and bone fragments and brain matter over the stove, the wall behind it, parts of a couple of pieces of mismatched furniture. I squatted next to him, trying not to look at the carnage, and gingerly lifted an outflung hand. Cold. Some residual stiffness, but not much. Rigor had come and was mostly gone now; he'd been dead at least a dozen hours, probably more like fifteen or sixteen.

The hand I'd lifted was his left. When I lowered it to the floor, I saw that the Omega chronometer was no longer strapped to the wrist.

I stood up again with my stomach kicking a little. The smell in there was bad, a nasty admixture of woodsmoke and stale tobacco smoke, food leftovers and rotting garbage, blood and gore and the faint trapped odor of cordite. This room was a mess; so was what I could see of a kitchenette, a bedroom through an open doorway. So messy I couldn't tell whether or not it was mostly in its natural state or if it had also been ransacked. In any case, Firestone had been a slob.

The big questions now were the identity of his killer and the motive for the shooting. I had a notion on that, but notions aren't proof—not that it was up to me to supply proof.

Okay, I thought, you've seen enough. Get out of here, report it.

But I didn't leave right away. Contrarily, my legs carried me around the room, avoiding the blood spatters, and then into the kitchenette, the bedroom, a filthy bathroom, a cluttered storage room in back. I didn't touch much of anything, and when I did I used elbows, knuckles, the backs of my hands.

Items of interest: Half a carton of cigarettes and an open bottle of cheap bourbon in the kitchenette. Two packets of condoms, one half full, the other sealed, in a drawer in a living room cabinet. And in that same drawer, a box of soft-nose, hundred-and-eighty-grain 30.06 rifle cartridges. Items of value, both in the bedroom: a big, shiny-new professional mechanic's toolkit, and a fairly new, scope-sighted Remington 30.06, uncased and shoved just out of sight under the bed. One more question answered, at least to my satisfaction: Firestone had been the desert shooter and Jeep killer. Seen me when I gassed up before heading to Lost Horse, figured out where I was going, and followed me out there in the tow truck to set up the ambush.

All right. Enough.

I went outside again, made the call to the sheriff's department from inside my car so I could hear and be heard.

*   *   *

The first responder was a deputy I hadn't seen before, but I did not have to spend much time with him. Less than five minutes after he showed, Sheriff Felix came barreling up with his cruiser's bar lights flashing but no siren. He bestowed one of his long, hard looks on me before he said, “You the one who reported what happened here?”

“What I found here, yes.”

“Trouble follows you, doesn't it. Or maybe it's that you go looking for it.”

“Not something like this.”

“All right. I'll talk to you after I've had a look inside. Don't go anywhere.”

“I won't. Staying put.”

Felix and the deputy went into the house. While they were in there, a Bedrock County ambulance and a black sedan arrived in tandem and disgorged a couple of white-coated EMTs and an elderly individual carrying a doctor's satchel. They, too, disappeared inside. Pretty soon another deputy showed up, and by then there was a sizable crowd of the ghoulish types who flock to any kind of tragedy. Some of them came from the neighboring dwellings, a couple from the auto dismantlers; the rest materialized like sharks that catch the scent of blood at great distances.

A couple of people who'd seen me talking to the sheriff approached to ask what was going on. I grunted nonresponses; I was in no mood to be accommodating or polite. While the newly arrived deputy took care of crowd control, I stood off by myself wearing a fierce look to discourage any more random questions. Except for the rise and fall of voices, the cold afternoon was quiet for a little time; the noisy work had quit temporarily at Henderson's. But then a train horn sounded in the distance, and a long freight came rattling through the nearby yards with the horn going off again at irregular intervals. As keyed up and noise sensitive as I was, the hooting and rumbling had me grinding my teeth while it lasted.

It was the better part of ten minutes before Felix came back out. He saw me, made a beckoning motion, and fast-walked to his cruiser. Turned there and stood in that stolid way of his as I joined him, ready and waiting to listen.

I said, “Can we do this inside the car? More privacy.”

He had no objection. At another motion from him, I went around to the passenger side. He waited until I got in before he opened the driver's door and slid in under the wheel, turning his body so that he was facing me in the cramped space. The barrel of a console-mounted riot gun jutted up at an angle between us like an obscene phallus.

“All right,” he said, “talk to me.”

“Firestone didn't show up for work this morning, so I came out here to see if he was home. No answer to my knock. The front door was ajar”—little white butt-covering lie—“so I pushed it all the way open and saw him lying there on the floor when I took a step inside.”

“You go all the way in to where he was?”

“Yes, on the chance that he might still be alive. I couldn't see the wound clearly from the doorway. But I didn't touch him or anything else.”

“Shot sometime between eight and eleven last night, the coroner says. Where were you during that time? For the record.”

“With Mrs. Hatcher until around nine or so. Then back in my room at the Goldtown.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I had no reason to shoot Firestone, Sheriff.”

“I didn't say you did,” Felix said. “Why'd you want to see him?”

Here we go, I thought. “Because I found out some things that lead me to believe he's the one who committed those three rapes, not Cody Hatcher. And not only the rapes, but most of the car break-ins and other burglaries over the past year.”

If any of this surprised him, he didn't show it. That long, hard stare again. Then, “What things?”

I laid it all out for him, sequentially and in detail. Still nothing showed in his poker face to indicate whether or not he'd ever thought along the same lines; I might have been reciting a long list of baseball statistics. But I had the sense that he was processing my version, examining it for plausibility and for flaws. Joe Felix may have been an old-school rural lawman, but he was neither a fool nor closed-minded, and I had never doubted the fact that he was a man who took his job seriously. He wouldn't like having to admit he'd made a mistake in arresting Cody Hatcher for rape, but if he were convinced that he had, he'd make the admission readily enough.

At length he said, “Why didn't you come to me with all of this before?”

“I only just put it together this morning, after the talk with Alana Farmer. I wanted to throw a few more questions at Firestone, see what I could get out of him, make sure I was on the right track. Then I would have come straight to you. God's honest truth.”

He didn't say anything.

I said, “It makes sense, doesn't it? The way I've laid it out?”

“Maybe. But it's all hearsay and speculation. No proof.”

“When you arrest Firestone's killer, you'll have all the proof necessary.”

“If being mixed up in the robberies is why he was killed. A falling out with whoever he was selling the stolen goods to, that your idea?”

“Something along those lines.”

“And you think that might be who?”

“I don't know, but I can make a guess. So can you.”

“I don't act on guesses. You ought to know that.”

“Cody Hatcher might be able to make it more than guesswork.”

“He might, if he can be made to talk. But it'd mean incriminating himself, adding to the trouble he's in, and he knows it.”

“Situation's different now, with Firestone dead. I think he can be prodded into spilling everything he knows if it'll get him off the hook for the criminal assaults. Better a short prison sentence than a long one. Or a bullet in the head like Firestone got.”

“If you're right.”

“If I'm right,” I agreed. “What are my chances of doing the prodding, Sheriff? With his lawyer on hand and you and the D.A. monitoring the conversation? Seems to me he'd be more likely to open up to a friend of his mother's than anybody in a position of authority. And I've had some experience with that kind of thing.”

No immediate answer, at least partly because a rising buzz of voices, audible even inside the cruiser, announced that the coroner and the EMTs had emerged with Rick Firestone's sheet-covered body. Felix got out of the cruiser, leaving me no choice but to follow suit. Across its roof he said in clipped tones, “You can leave now. But be at my office at five o'clock.”

“Does that mean I can see Cody Hatcher?”