The Walt Longmire Mystery Series Boxed Set Volumes 1-4 (109 page)

The kid in the knit cap called out to me as I got to the corner. “Hey, mister? You’re not supposed to be back here.”

I waved him off. “It’s okay.”

I looked ahead and saw Osgood in a trench coat with his hands in his pockets. His collar was flipped up too, and he nodded as I looked past him. He didn’t make any move to come toward me, so I continued to walk to him, wondering where Vic and Gowder might be, and then Dog paused.

It was at that precise moment that the assistant district attorney’s head exploded.

13

I watched as the headless body fell forward into the pools of rain-water that had collected on the uneven surface of the brick pavement. It wasn’t so much that Osgood’s head had exploded as it had vaporized in a crimson mist that had sprayed me along with Dog.

I had ducked and turned my head to the side with the sound, and I was lucky that I had, because deflected 10-gauge pellets smacked against the side of my hat and stung my neck and shoulder. Dog lunged on the leash and barked ferociously as I hung on to the leather strap and yanked him toward me.

There was a familiar roar, and I watched as a slug from my .45 ricocheted off the surface of the narrow passageway between the buildings. Vic stepped from the doorway of the Academy’s loading dock and moved swiftly toward the alley in a two-handed stance, firing as she went, while Gowder ran toward the chain-link fence with his .40 at the ready.

I looked up from Osgood’s twitching body to the eight-foot barrier with the razor wire strung across the top. I released the leash, and Dog charged toward Vic. I yelled as I started back out of the dead-end alley. “Grab him!”

As I rounded the corner, I took the deepest breath I’d taken since falling onto the street that morning. The pain blurred my vision, and I ran into the kid with the cap, slamming him backward as I stumbled over him and lost my hat. “Yo, man!”

I had regained the sidewalk, and it was a straight shot down Cherry to Broad, but the fifty yards looked like Ten Mile Road. It seemed to take forever, but I turned onto Broad in time to see a large man in a hooded sweatshirt covered with some kind of black rain slicker and with a firearm that looked like one of the old Ithaca Roadblockers sticking out of the unsnapped front; he had just turned the corner at Arch.

I grabbed my side, ran into traffic, and took a diagonal approach that gave me a geometric advantage. I heard brakes squealing as I thundered across Broad and felt the draft of a sedan as it missed me by about a foot. I stumbled a little as I made the median but bulled another car to a full stop on the other side, extended my hands, bounced from the grille, and pivoted across the street as another car swerved and disappeared behind me.

I dodged between two parked cars and turned the corner at Arch as well. People were screaming farther down the block, and a crowd had gathered. “Police! Has anybody seen…” About twelve people pointed south. I turned and ran.

He was cutting the corner and taking a left at the next street and was slowing down. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why he was walking; it was possible that he thought he was clear. I fought the urge to throw up and put my last scrap of energy into the final block.

There was a mob on the sidewalk near the Reading Terminal Market; something must have been going on at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. I looked up through the misting rain and read the moving sign: NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION NATIONAL CONVENTION.

As Vic would say, fuck me. Maybe I could buy a gun from Charlton Heston.

I tried to see the guy in the gray sweatshirt through the throng; he had seemed pretty tall, so I thought I might have a chance. I started walking toward the large overpass, convinced that he’d gone that way, saw a guy with a hood, but it was the wrong color. I wiped the rain from my face and felt a twinge at my neck; I was bleeding. It wasn’t too bad, but I wasn’t going to blend in if things got close.

I caught some movement across the street and a little down the block: gray hood. I couldn’t see the shotgun; he must’ve slipped it under the slicker. If it was actually one of the old Ithaca Mag-10s, he’d never have pitched it; it would be too difficult to get another.

I tried to keep up. He was hurrying now, but not so much that I couldn’t stay with him. He wasn’t going to blend either. He stopped at the next corner, and I panicked for a moment when I thought he was going to hail a taxi; instead, he pulled out a cell phone.

As Vic would say, fuck me again. I had forgotten about Cady’s mobile. I reached into my jacket pocket and dialed 911. He jumped the puddle at the curb, careful to hang onto the gun under his coat, crossed the street, and continued down the block as sirens began whistling through the night around us. A dispatcher answered the line. “Nine-one-one.”

“This is Sheriff Walt Longmire of Absaroka County, Wyoming. I’ve got a 10-32 at the southwest corner of Filbert and 11th. I am tailing a homicide suspect who just killed Assistant District Attorney Vince Osgood at the Academy of Fine Arts, and I need assistance.”

There was a pause, but not much of one. “Sheriff, that was Filbert and 11th?”

“Roger that. A black male, tall, with a gray, hooded sweatshirt and a long, black rain slicker, headed east at a quick walking pace. The subject is armed with a tactical shotgun.”

“Roger that. Can you stay on the line?”

I laughed a short laugh with very little humor in it. “I’d really rather not have this cell phone in my hands when I catch up with him.” I started closing the phone as I crossed the street; the man was only about ninety feet ahead and slightly to the left. It was the guy from the crack house, Shanker DuVall.

“Sheriff…?”

I closed the phone and stuffed it back in my suit jacket, and silently cursed as he took a left at the next block and disappeared north up 10th. I picked up the pace and saw him slip across a parking lot behind the Greyhound Bus Terminal. I cut across the street at a diagonal, again hoping to gain a little distance.

There were rows of buses, most of them running, and I walked alongside one. DuVall was in front of another row on the opposite side of the lot; he was talking on the cell phone again.

There was a DMZ of about twenty yards that I wouldn’t be able to cross without him seeing me. I stopped and started to pull the phone from my pocket when I heard a thumping noise and looked up to see an angry bus driver yelling at me. Even through the windshield and the noise of the diesel, I could hear him plainly. “Hey buddy! You can’t be out here!” I motioned for him to keep quiet, but he honked the air horn, and the noise was tremendous. “Buddy, you’re not allowed out here!”

There wasn’t much choice, so I crossed the lot in the direction that I had last seen DuVall, but he was gone. I glanced between the parked buses and tried not to think about the last time I’d seen most of Vince Osgood.

When I got to the area where the shooter had been standing, I peered around the parked bus and saw nothing but a concrete wall and some weeds. I stooped down, checking to see if I could see any feet, but it was so dark there wasn’t any way to tell. I slid along the corrugated side of the big vehicle and wished I had my sidearm.

There was a pole at the end of the row nearest me, but it shed only scattered blocks of light through the bus windows. I wiped the rain off my face again, stepped around a large puddle, turned sideways, and started sliding between the concrete wall and the back of the bus; I figured it was the only direction DuVall could have gone. There was just enough room for me to squeeze after him. Evidently, he hadn’t had any trouble, but then he hadn’t had any trouble squeezing between two buildings and shooting Osgood either. It was possible that he’d left and that I was alone, playing Greyhound limbo for my own amusement. I tried not to think about the alternative.

I stopped for a second and listened, thinking I heard talking. I listened again, but there was nothing. The driver revved the engine of the bus I was pressed against a few times to get the big motor cleared out; I closed my eyes and held my breath until the cloud of exhaust and soot dissipated. The noise was all-encompassing, and I could see the access doors to the engine rattling as I turned my head and looked down the barrel of an Ithaca Mag-10 Roadblocker shotgun.

I could see only part of his face in the dark and within the shadows of the hood, but I could see his lips moving as his finger tightened around the trigger mechanism.

“What?” Here I was, trapped between a bus and a hard spot, and I couldn’t hear the last words I would ever listen to. He paused and then spoke again. His voice was much louder, but I still couldn’t make out the words. “What?”

“I said, I was gonna let you live!”

I yelled back. “Thank you.”

“But…” And he pulled the trigger.

The Ithaca Mag-10 Roadblocker was introduced a few decades back as a tactical 10-gauge designed to stop cars; hence the name Roadblocker. It was expensive, heavy, and carried only three rounds, the idea being that three two-ounce helpings of lead served at just over the sound barrier were enough. However, it had problems that could only be corrected with a longer forcing tube; without the modification, it had a propensity to jam.

And it did.

His eyes widened, and I saw him continue to pull the trigger as I slapped the barrel up; just because it hadn’t gone off didn’t mean that it still wouldn’t.

And it did.

The sound of the buses was bad enough, but the blast from the business end of the 10-gauge shotgun made me hear a high-pitched squeal that felt like a band saw cutting through my brain. I held the barrel above me as the back glass and parts of the bus’s aluminum skin skittered down on my face. He tugged at the heated metal of the shotgun, but I yanked, and the weapon came loose, skimmed over me, and clattered onto the ground.

I turned my head, but he was gone. I sidestepped and looked down; he had fallen, and his arm was lodged between the dual wheels of the Greyhound—center shot to the head. I looked up, and Gowder stood about ten yards away in a two-handed stance with his .40 still pointed at the now-dead man.

He looked up at me and said something, but all I could hear was the ringing and all I could do was look back, breathe as deeply as my ribs would allow, and try to stop shaking.

* * *

It was a source of great interest to the Philadelphia Police Department and the District Attorney’s Office of Southeastern Pennsylvania that Shankar DuVall was leaking onto a stainless-steel table at the city morgue. Gowder said that he got a ride to my call, started walking, and when he saw someone trying to shoot somebody behind the bus, he had taken appropriate, if deadly, action. I was glad that he had, and I reflected that opinion in my formal statement and recorded interview for the investigators.

I looked at the battered tactical shotgun lying on the table between us; it hadn’t had an easy life, and I was starting to think that I hadn’t, either. Gowder was sitting across from me without his gun or his badge. Both of us periodically glanced at the large mirror on the wall under the military clock and wondered who was on the other side. It was 2:33
A.M
. I smiled at him and listened to my voice; it sounded as if I were underwater. I could talk, but I still couldn’t hear that well. “I’m glad you shot a bad guy, or we’d be here all night.”

He smiled and said something.

“What?” He smiled some more and pointed to his own ears. “They say it isn’t permanent, that it should get progressively better in the next seventy-two hours, half of which I intend to be asleep.” He looked at the surface of the table and probably was seeing all sorts of things that were not there. After a while, I placed a hand out and got his attention, the dark eyes slowly rising to mine. “If you hadn’t shot him, I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

He nodded. After a while, he nodded some more.

They turned us loose; they were through with me, but Gowder would have to sit through another battery of interviews in the morning. By the time we got to the main hallway of the third floor, there was a group waiting for us.

Asa Katz leaned against the wall, and I almost didn’t recognize him in tennis shoes, jeans, and a blue windbreaker. Every time I’d seen him, he’d looked like a print ad for
GQ,
but right now he just looked like one tired cop. Vic was also there, still in her clothes from the reception. She looked great and was the only one of us who didn’t look exhausted.

Katz spoke to Gowder and then said something to me.

“What?”

They spoke among themselves, and then Vic smiled up at me, slipping her arm through mine and leading me down the hallway and into the elevator. She took Cady’s cell and called someone as we left the Roundhouse.

* * *

She thanked the cops who had given us a ride back to Cady’s, unlocked the door, and watched as I walked over to the refrigerator and pulled out a beer; I was feeling a little edgy and thought a nightcap might help. I motioned to Vic and she nodded yes, so I pulled another one from the icebox.

Dog came over for a wag and a pet. I placed the two beers on the counter, sat at one of the stools, and ruffled his ears. My .45 was lying there, along with my hat. I touched the brim and watched as it pivoted on the crown in a lazy circle.

Vic opened the Yuengling longnecks and slid mine toward me. I sighed and smiled at her as she looked back at the door and Dog barked. Maybe it was my ears—most likely it was recent circumstance—but I found my hand on the big Colt as Vic paid the delivery guy and came back with a pizza box. She acted like she hadn’t seen my hand on my gun, put the pepperoni with extra cheese and anchovies on half on the table, and retrieved two plates and silverware. She pulled two paper towels from the holder above the sink, handed me one, and said something.

“What?”

She shook her head, opened the box, and placed a slice with anchovies on my plate. I wasn’t particularly hungry, but as near as I could remember, I hadn’t eaten since lunch. I chewed in a mechanical fashion and sipped my beer.

I tried not to laugh at the situation; here we were with so much to say, and I couldn’t hear. I made a conscious effort to not look over to the couch, but something stirred rather deeply in the reptilian coil of my primal nature, and I felt very much like doing it again.