Hell to Pay (34 page)

Except that two children had seen the car and it had frightened them to death.

LATE AFTERNOON NOW, HIRSCH sprawled upon his sofa in a T-shirt and baggy jeans, bare heels propped on the coffee table, laptop on his thighs. The plan was, send DeLisle and Croome an outline of his theory, give them time to absorb it, then follow with a phone call.

After that, it would be out of his hands.

The town was quiet, the highway, the school on the other side. Hirsch typed steadily, but before he reached the good bit, Spurling and the Chrysler, the desk phone rang.

Leonard Latimer, heat in his voice: “I’m scared Ray’s going to do something stupid.”

“Stupid how? Where are the boys?”

“Not here, thank God. Just come, will you?”

And the prick cut the connection. Hirsch gaped at the handset: catching flies, his mother called it.

H
IRSCH WAS SHUDDERING HIS
way over the Bitter Wash corrugations before he remembered his backup Beretta.

Idiot
.

But he’d stopped work for the day, shed all of the cop
outerwear, shoving his uniform in the laundry basket, dumped the Beretta and his belt and service pistol and cuffs and baton and all that shit into his top drawer. He wasn’t going to drag it all on again, not for the Latimers, so all he’d grabbed was his service pistol. Even in his T-shirt, jeans and battered Asics he was a cop.

Would he need to draw his gun? Maybe Raymond would do everyone a favor and shoot his old man and then himself.

That’s if this emergency involved guns. Leonard didn’t say, did he? Arrogant old shit. Arrogant old shit who doesn’t know that I know he’s about to be at the center of a major bust
.

G
LANCING AT
W
ENDY
S
TREET’S
house before he breached the Latimers’ stately gateposts, Hirsch spotted the aged Volvo. No one in the garden or driveway or on the veranda. The old feeling crept through Hirsch: unfinished business.

He drove deeper onto the property. House and grounds had looked timeworn enough when he was last here, investigating Craig Latimer’s pyromania; now the neglect was more apparent. The lawn, overgrown then, was dying. Wind debris—palm fronds, twigs, branches, plastic bags, seedling containers, a director’s chair—hadn’t been cleared. He steered around a bicycle dumped in the gravel. When he walked the crazy path to the veranda, he stepped over weeds, a cricket bat, dead snails. Meanwhile the gutters above him grew grass clumps and paint flakes peeled from the veranda posts. And a stalactite of bird shit hard against one wall, dropped from a swallows nest high on a light fitting.

God knew the miseries the place contained. Hirsch rapped his knuckles on the door.

L
EONARD
L
ATIMER ANSWERED AND
he didn’t look panicked. Glanced over Hirsch’s shoulder at the HiLux and smiled.

“Come in.”

Smiled because they’d got the drop on Hirsch. At the precise
moment Hirsch stepped into the hallway, Superintendent Spurling came in hard on his heels, holding a .303 rifle, and Raymond Latimer came in on his flank, emerging from the front room with a shotgun.

Wasting no time, Spurling shoved him against the wall, disarmed him, patted him down, ankles included. So the Beretta wouldn’t have done Hirsch much good anyway. “Supe?”

“Shut up.”

Hirsch didn’t. He glanced at Leonard, the only one not armed. “What, you’re the brains of the outfit?”

The patriarch gave him the look he reserved for tradesmen. “Be quiet.”

They stood there crowding him. Hirsch said, “Where’s the Chrysler, Supe?”

Spurling blanched. “What?”

Hirsch kept his voice hardened and deliberate. “The Chrysler that was seen by various people when Melia Donovan died and again when Alison Latimer died.”

Spurling’s narrow face grew tighter. “Who else knows?”

“Internal Investigations.”

Spurling chewed on that. “I don’t believe you. And it changes nothing. I’ll disappear the car, and everything else will have an explanation. Come on.”

“Hang on,” Leonard said, tetchy, irritated. “You were seen? Your car?”

“It’s nothing.”

“How do you know? What possessed you to drive such a distinctive car?”

“You think I was going to drive my own car? Or a police car? Get real.”

“I’d be worried if I were you, Len,” Hirsch said. “I’d—”

A
BLOW TO THE
head, thick, round and numbing. He was unconscious for about a minute, coming to on the parched lawn at the side of the house.

“Get up.”

Hirsch made a show of it. Spurling booted him. “Get a move on.”

On his feet now, rocky, Hirsch said, “Where are we going?”

“Shut up.”

“What’s the story going to be?”

Spurling drove the butt of the rifle into his stomach. He fell. They waited as he regained his footing. Began to prod him across the yard and beyond the sheds to the track leading to the tin hut.

“You’re joking.”

“Makes perfect sense, actually,” Spurling said, punching again with the rifle butt.

The pain seemed to stab through Hirsch and lodge behind his left eye. He stumbled. They waited, Spurling saying, “Quit stalling.”

The creek had retreated to a stretch of fetid mud between muddy pools, the edges dense with dying reeds. Sheep had tried to reach the water, churning the damper soil. A dead sheep floated in the largest pool and a live one struggled feebly to escape. No one but Hirsch noticed it.

He said, “You clowns aren’t farmers.”

“What?” said Raymond Latimer. They were on the flat area beside the hut’s crooked chimney and he punched the shotgun butt into Hirsch’s stomach. “What would you know?”

Hirsch got his breath back. “You’ve run the place into the ground. All that money poured into the latest toy, big shots in the district, you can’t even pay your grocery bills, you’re a laughingstock.”

“Fuck you.”

“You’re pathetic the way you’ve always let your old man call the shots as if he were clever or deserving of respect.” Hirsch tutted, shook his head. “You’re just a sad little pedophile, that’s how you’ll be remembered.”

Stretching it but, right now, goading these losers, driving a
wedge between them, was all Hirsch had. What he got out of it was a bit of confusion and outrage and another blow to the guts.

Spurling looked on, irritated. “Do we have to do this? Why are you even listening to him? Get on with it.”

“Yeah, get on with it, Raymond. Take orders, it’s what you’re good at. Spurling cleaned up your mess now it’s your turn to clean up.”

“I don’t take orders from anyone.”

“Just shut the fuck up, Ray. Stop listening. Put him out of his misery.”

Hirsch ignored both men, gazing curiously at Leonard, the queer blankness in the man. “You must be proud of your boy, Len.”

Leonard blinked, character, life, returning to his face, and they all saw it, a flicker that dismissed the son.

“Dad?” said the son. He looked at the shotgun as if it were a gadget beyond his figuring.

“Can’t you idiots see what he’s doing? Shoot him, Raymond, for fuck’s sake.”

“Yeah, take another order, Ray.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Raymond said, jutting his sulky jaw at the dry grasses.

“Come on, Ray,” Hirsch said, “it’s easy, just another staged suicide, and we know how expertly your wife’s was staged. You’d think a cop would know how, but old Spurls here made one error after another. Let you down, didn’t he? Maybe you’ll do a better job, though why anyone would think I’d come out here and shoot myself with another man’s gun, I don’t know. Did you idiots think it through?”

“Yeah, we thought it through,” Spurling said. “You’re going down a mine shaft, hotshot. No one will ever find you.”

“Same as you did with Gemma, right?”

“What? No. Don’t know where she is.”

“Yeah, right,” Hirsch said. “Meanwhile they have all your names, guys. You three, Venn, Logan, Coulter, McAskill …”

Ray looked hunted. “Who has?”

“Sex crimes.”

“He’s lying,” Spurling said.

“How does he know our names then?”

“Ray, shoot the prick, all right? You owe me.”

The shotgun was a hot potato and Ray Latimer tried to shove it into his father’s hands. “I can’t, Dad. You do it.”

“It was your fucking wife got us into this,” Leonard said.

“
You
got him into it, Lenny boy,” Hirsch said. “You knocked him around all through childhood, gave him sick ideas about sex and women so he’d go along with you and this other sick fuck.”

“One of you kill him,” Spurling said.

Ray Latimer continued to push the shotgun at his father, who backpedaled, saying, “The fuck are you doing? Grow up, you snivelling great calf.”

“You must be so proud, Supe,” Hirsch said.

Spurling, distracted and disgusted, said, “What?”

“The caliber of your fellow pedos.”

“You don’t know anything about it,” Spurling said, watching the Latimer psychodrama. He glanced at his watch, yelled, “We haven’t got all day. One of you had better come and shoot this cunt.”

Hirsch was churning and thought he’d vomit. He swallowed, swallowed again and kept his voice even: “I suppose you’ve got Kropp running damage control. He’ll send in a report about my mental state, plant some evidence, disappear my car.”

Spurling frowned at him, half an eye on the Latimers. “What? Kropp? What are you on about?”

“Kropp’s not involved?”

Spurling snorted. “Kropp’s got nothing to do with any of this. The man’s a disgrace.”

“And you’re not?”

One eye on the Latimers, Spurling said, “Some time in the next few weeks your HiLux will be found out in the dry country
with an empty fuel tank. Your phone will be on the seat, flat battery. You wandered off, lost all sense of direction, no water, blazing sun, delirious, you probably fell in a mine shaft.” He paused, smiled at Hirsch. “Meanwhile I’ll poke around in your office files.”

And manage the flow of information
, Hirsch thought.
Paint me as corrupt after all, or off on an erratic course of my own, willfully misreading evidence, trying to atone for my crooked past
. He felt ill and drained and couldn’t breathe and thought of Alison Latimer, her panic attacks and arrhythmia.

Spurling shouted, “What are you arseholes doing?”

Leonard and Raymond Latimer were enacting a strange, sad, wordless dance, the son pressing the shotgun onto his father almost as if proffering a gift and seeking an embrace, the father disgusted with him.

Then Leonard snatched the gun, shoved his son in the chest with it and swung it neatly to his shoulder, the bore swinging around on Hirsch.

A little voice crying from the rocks across the creek, “Stop it.”

From Hirsch’s point of view, it was a good thing that Katie Street then clarified her point by shooting Leonard with what he assumed was the missing Latimer rifle.

T
HE BULLET PUNCHED INTO
the patriarch’s belly and he
oof
ed in surprise and pain. He doubled over. He took one step back, and another, tossed the shotgun weakly away and lowered himself to the ground, taking the weight with his right hand. The collapse was slow, economical, almost graceful. All stared; no one said anything.

Ray Latimer moved first, starting toward his father as if wanting to give comfort but expecting to be lashed for it, and, too late, Spurling swung around on Hirsch with the rifle. But Hirsch wasn’t there, he’d uncoiled from the starting block, leading with his shoulder. He took the superintendent full on, driving the air from his lungs. Hirsch heard the rifle crack in his ear, and then
he was deaf, the bullet whining off over the rocks on the other side of the creek. Thinking,
I hope Katie kept her head down
, he began a dance for possession of the rifle as crazy as the Latimers’ for the shotgun. He spun around and around with Spurling, spinning the man at the wall of the hut. He was young and he was fit; Spurling was a desk jockey. The superintendent smacked against the rusty metal and bounced off, limp suddenly. Hirsch snatched the rifle.

First he backed away until all three men were inside his field of fire. Then he called, “You can come out now.”

Katie Street’s spectacular impudence and daring had ebbed a little. She emerged edgy, ready to run, taking stock before picking her way across the creek bed. Now she was running toward Hirsch, stepping wide of Leonard Latimer as if he might still harm her. She reached Hirsch. She got as close to him as she could.

He hugged her thin shoulders briefly. “Where’s the gun?”

She pointed across the creek at the rocks. “Over there.”

“Just as well you pinched it.”

She was a little indignant. “No one would listen to me about that car. Lots of times I saw it. Today I saw it go in Mr. Latimer’s place.” She pointed toward the Vimy Ridge gates.

“You’ve been hiding the gun all this while?”

She toed the dirt. “In my tree house.”

“Listen, girlie,” Spurling said, “this is a very bad man. Go and tell your mother to call the police.”

“He
is
the police,” Katie said, and Hirsch could feel her warmth pressing against his hip.

TWO DAYS LATER, HIRSCH debriefed with Wendy Street over a glass of wine, Wendy holding her glass to the light a little crookedly, saying a little slurringly, “I have to say my daughter seems quite phlegmatic about shooting a man. ‘Mr. Latimer was going to shoot Paul so I shot him.’ ”

“Just as well she did,” Hirsch said. “Just as well she’s not agonizing over it.”

They were in the kitchen, late afternoon, Bob Dylan drifting from the speakers,
They’re selling postcards of the hanging
. The sun, seeking a way in past the blind above the sink, lit Wendy’s hair, the finer, flyaway strands so burning in the light that Hirsch wanted to reach out and tame them.

“A counselor’s been offered, but I don’t know that she needs one. What do you think?”

He almost answered, “You know her better than me,” but that was too easy. He glanced at Katie, who was belly-down, chin-up before the TV set in the adjoining sunroom. “She’s clearly suffering.”