Dead Bang (2 page)

Behler spun up “JACKPOT” in both eyes.

“Small-time bookmaker and a sometimes Teamster organizer—probably reported it the other way on his taxes?”

Mark made a reflexive pat of the tape recorder concealed in the breast pocket of his raincoat.

“Never heard of him,” I said and took a sip of my soda.

“Who's to protect?” asked Mark. “You weren't a PI then. You worked for the government.”

“If you say so,” I said.

“I'm not asking for state secrets,” said Mark. “Help me out here. Something? Anything! How come they called him Jack the Lookout?”

John Vincenti, a.k.a. Jack the Lookout, had one eye that looked dead at you while the other jerked around like a chameleon searching for a fly. “Beats me,” I said. “All them mobbed-up guys had nicknames.”

“If you were going to be like this, why did you agree to an interview?” asked Mark.

In his “Channel Six Champion” persona, Mark Behler wore tailored double-breasted suits that made his visage square instead of round and a rather good toupee that took a decade off his odometer. Pancake makeup leavened his cheeks for an on-air countenance reminiscent of Jimmy Hoffa on a picket line. And, on air, he wielded the phrase “Isn't it true?” like Jimmy wielded a baseball bat.

“I agreed to have lunch,” I said.

“Lunch at Sbarro's,” he said. He leaned back in his chair and raised his chin for a deep draft through flared nostrils. Paradise settled onto his face. “Ahh,” he said, “boiled pasta, toasted mozzarella, and roasted pepperoni.” He lowered his chin to look me in the eye. “You know they're going to close this place and move down to a booth in the food court. It's never going to be the same.”

“It's in the Woodland Mall,” I said. I'd picked a table in an alcove off
the main dining room, a small space made larger with gold-filigreed mirrors on the wall. “Lots of folks. I didn't think you'd ambush me with a camera crew.”

“You don't trust me?”

“I watch your show,” I said.

“You were on my show.”

“I thought you might be pulling some kind of stunt to get even for the Second Amendment bit we did.”

“I think I made my point very clear,” he said.

“You said, ‘any street corner.'”

“I was speaking euphemistically.”

“You said that you could buy a handgun on any street corner.”

Behler made his eyes large and sputtered, “I didn't mean the street corner outside the studio!”

“You name the street corner and we'll do it again,” I said.

Behler shook a finger. “You know damn good and well the current gun laws can't keep guns off the streets.”

“Buying an unregistered handgun on a street corner is a felony. What do you want—boiled in oil?”

Mark Behler's face reddened. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and folded his hands on the table. After a silent moment, his complexion returned and he exhaled, “I want to talk about John Vincenti. I've got a source. I just need to verify some points.” He threw up his hands and shrugged. “On background, Crissakes.”

“Maybe this is just some old shit that would be better left undisturbed,” I said. “Besides, all I know is what was in the newspaper.”

“Jack Vincenti is dead,” said Mark. “Everybody knows that!”

“If he's dead, it was a Mob hit,” I said. “You want to solve a thirty-year-old Mob hit?”

“
That
would make a good show,” said Mark as if he were considering a new idea.

“The Mob did it,” I said.

Mark said, “Oh, I think I know who shot John Vincenti.”

T
HE SECOND GUNSHOT
stepped on the heels of the first. I knew what it was and still wasted a hot second in hoping for a moron with fireworks. Mark's face froze mid-chew. “Wha'?” he asked, showing me a wad of pasta streaked with red sauce.

A woman gasped, “Oh God, my baby!” Another woman screamed. I started out of my chair but felt like a wedge of fruit suspended in gelatin. A third shot. Mirror tiles on the wall across the alcove exploded and tinkled onto the floor.

People frozen to their chairs by the first two shots now dove for the floor. I listened for a robbery demand and discovered my .45 caliber Detonics in my right hand. To my left, past the corner of the alcove, someone rasped for breath over the hum of the exhaust fans.

“She has a gun!” a man yelled. Another beseeched, “Oh God, please don't—” The fourth shot interrupted his plea.

I nested my right fist into the palm of my left hand and pushed the pistol out to arm's length while I searched over the top of the slide for the front sight. I heard a scuffle and a muffled fifth shot, but the shooter had to be to my left, around the corner and out of my sight. Mark lay face down on the floor at my feet. I sidestepped over him, to my right, to get a better view of the main dining room.

In the main aisle, a woman on the long cusp of middle age struggled to her feet from under the inert hulk of a man in a tan suit. Not quite five
feet tall, she couldn't have weighed a hundred pounds with a brick in her pocket. Her short gray hair had been permed into tight curls. Her blank face and hairdo made her head look like a gray lightbulb screwed into the neck of a cream-colored Windbreaker, which she wore zipped to the neck. A broad wipe of bright red blood swept down the jacket and trailed off onto her white silk slacks. A stainless steel five-shot revolver dangled from her right hand.

“Detectives,” I growled. “It's over. Put it down.”

She passed me an uninterested glance, popped open the cylinder, and shucked the brass onto the body at her feet.

“Fine, it's empty,” I told her. “Now just let go of it.” I took a step toward her. “You can give it to me. It'll be safe.”

She took a bullet from the slash pocket of her jacket and thumbed it into the cylinder.

I stopped and racked the hammer of the Detonics with my left thumb. “Don't do that. Just let go of the gun.”

She thumbed another round into the revolver.

Mark scuffled to his feet and announced, “Mark Behler, Channel Six News.”

“Just freeze like you are,” I told her. “You can get out of this if you don't move.”

She shifted her eye to Mark while she slid another silver cartridge into the revolver. Deadpan, she said, “There
is
a God.”

Mark snatched the tape recorder out of his pocket and held it out toward the woman. “Why did you do this?”

“Please put it down, ma'am,” I said. “Stop loading it.”

Mark started around on my left. “Hey, where did you get the gun?” he inquired like a child asking after a tin whistle. I board-checked him into the tables and lost my sight picture. The woman loaded the last two chambers, swung the cylinder closed with a flourish, and fixed me with insolent eyes.

I hung my front sight on the right side of her ten-ring. “Please, just set the gun down, ma'am. Please.”

I took up the slack in the trigger. “Just put the gun down and walk away, ma'am.” I said, “I won't try to stop you. Please, just put it down and go. No one will bother you. You can just walk away if you put the gun down.”

She showed me arched eyebrows that had been plucked clean and penciled on. A half inch of drool traced down from the taut line of her pale-pink-painted lips. She began to raise the revolver in our direction.

I said, “Don't do it!”

She thumbed back the hammer of her revolver.

I took the shot, but it seemed like only a pop, and I made a panicked glance inspection of my pistol to see if it had misfired. I found the hammer cocked and the slide in battery. The woman hung, suspended in the air. I could see the soles of her running shoes. Her revolver fired. Plate glass exploded in the mall. Instinct dictated that I pull a double tap, but I managed to get my finger out of the trigger guard before I felt my chest and arms tense twice.

• • •

Detective Lieutenant Gerald Van Huis of the Kentwood Police Department knelt his six-foot-four, two-hundred-and-plenty pound frame among the scattered chairs. His charcoal-colored raincoat, sized and styled for his previous decade, looked like a tarp thrown over a Jeep. He lifted the broken tabletop that had fallen onto the woman and made a whistle that sounded like a falling bomb. With two fingers he felt for a pulse, made a negative wag of his head, and turned his mop of sandy hair to look me in the face.

“Jesus Christ, Hardin,” he said. “You just whacked somebody's gramma.”

I closed my eyes and shook my head.

Van Huis asked, “Where's your gun?”

“On my hip.” I pulled my suit coat open for him to see.

He reached up to take it, but stopped. “God's sake, Hardin, it's cocked and locked.”

“My hands were shaking. I didn't think I could ease the hammer down, so I thumbed up the safety and holstered it.”

Van Huis grabbed the black pipe that had been the stanchion for the broken table and pulled himself to his feet. “You think you can clear it now?”

I nodded, and Van Huis produced a large clear-plastic evidence bag from the pocket of his raincoat. I snapped open the strap on my high-rise hip holster and lifted my pistol clear. I mashed the magazine release with my thumb. Van Huis held the bag open like a kid on Halloween, and I dropped in the magazine. It took both hands to lock the slide to the rear. My left palm, over the receiver, caught the extracted live round. I eased my Detonics into the bag and dropped the loose round in after it. Behind me, I heard someone holster a pistol.

“Still carrying hollow points,” Van Huis said nonchalantly as he sealed the bag. He produced a pen and started writing on the tag. “April ninth?”

“Tenth,” I said. “It's Wednesday.” I looked at my watch. “Twelve forty-seven p.m. And, no, I have not been drinking, and I am not taking any prescription medications.”

A smoke smile drifted across his face but quickly dissipated. “What the hell happened here?”

I'd already said enough to give my attorney fits, so I went with “Lady came in and shot up the place.”

“She shoot at you?”

“She shot all over.”

“She direct a threat at you?”

“She was pretty much a threat to everybody, including the three people she shot.” I fixed my eyes on the detective's. “You can write this down, ‘I – was – in – fear – for – my – life.'”

Van Huis handed the evidence bag to a uniformed officer who stepped around from behind me. The officer left, and Van Huis dug a notepad out of the breast pocket of his suit jacket. While he wrote, he asked, “What exactly did she say?”

“She said, ‘There
is
a God.'”

Van Huis wrote and then turned his eyes up to me without moving his head. “I need to see your permit to carry and your private ticket.”

I fished out my ID case and handed the items over, along with the registration for the Detonics.

Van Huis thumbed the cards and noted the numbers. “This for the pistol you just handed over?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Your permit says ‘while on duty for Peter A. Ladin Investigative Associates.' You working here today?”

I own the company. I'm always on duty.

“I was being interviewed by Mark Behler about the private industry for his TV show.”

Van Huis rolled his eyes up from the pad again. “That requires that you be armed?”

How many body bags did you want to fill?

“I was on duty.”

Van Huis handed the cards back but held his hard gaze. “Where were you when this happened?”

I pointed sideways with my thumb. “In the alcove seating.”

No way out except past the woman with the gun.

While Van Huis wrote, he said, “She was out here in the dining room.”

“She shot into the alcove. You'll find a bullet hole in the wall.”

“Lieutenant, if you're done here, I need to take some pictures,” said
Patty Oates, the evidence tech from the Kentwood Police. I recognized her voice. She was a regular at the American Society for Industrial Security dinner meetings, which provided an interface for the public and private factions of law enforcement. The meetings had become crowded with blue serge since the Nine-Eleven tragedy—a proactive law enforcement mission suddenly all the rage.

I turned, and she gave me a nod. Since the last time I had seen her, she'd had her light auburn hair cut quite short. She wore blue coveralls with police patches on both shoulders and latex gloves. She wagged her camera at Van Huis.

The lieutenant's eyebrows crowded into storm clouds, but after a throat-clearing noise, he said, “I suppose I could interview Mr. Hardin outside the tape.”

“‘Preciate that, Boss, but it's a zoo out there. We have all the TV crews and half the population milling around.”

“I need a picture of the bullet hole in the wall in the alcove,” he said.

“Already got it,” she said.

Van Huis nodded toward the alcove, and we strolled the dozen steps to get there. He looked from the bullet hole back to where the woman's body lay and then at me. “That's twenty—twenty-five feet. You said your hands were shaking.”

“After she was down,” I said. “Adrenalin.”

He nodded and thumbed up a page in his notes. “You say anything to her?”

No, I just stood up and capped the old bat because my pizza was cold, and I was tired of making nice with the TV dickhead.

A little louder, Van Huis said, “You say anything to her?”

“I told her to put the gun down.”

“Like how? You have your weapon in your hand?”

“Mark Behler had a tape recorder running,” I said. “Listen to the tape.”

“Behler's tape recorder has a bullet hole in it. How'd that happen?”

“When the woman was on the floor, Behler ran around me and shoved it in her face. He asked her where she got the gun. She whispered something to him and then lifted her revolver to plug him. He fended the muzzle off with the tape recorder.”