In Shadows (3 page)

“Not me!” screamed Reever, coming to and finding himself staring through what had been the windshield right into the barrel of the shotgun.

The guy blew Reever’s head off, and Jake shot the gunman twice in the chest, causing the second shooter to drop down out of sight. But there was no way Jake could make a getaway in the car now. His sedan was wedged in the pocket between the seawall, Reever’s car, and the attackers’ sedan like a bad parallel parking job. But at least he’d opened a little space on the driver’s side.

He whipped open his door and rolled onto the pavement in time to see a set of shoes approaching the other side of the sedan. So he scrambled toward the back bumper. As he crabbed alongside the open rear door of the attackers’ sedan, he was surprised to find himself face to face with José Torrio. The door started to slam shut, but Jake jerked it open and snatched Torrio’s coattail to stop him from exiting the car on the other side. He jammed his pistol into the small of José’s back and shouted at the top of his lungs.

“Drop your weapon. I have your boss!”

The steady thrumming of rain on the roof of the car drowned out any answer and also kept him from seeing where his attacker was positioned.

“You’re fucked, man,” spat Torrio as Jake released his jacket and wrapped his free arm around the man’s throat, dragging him out into the rain where they both crouched between the cars.

“If you don’t drop your weapon I’m going to shoot this asshole!” shouted Jake.

“You aren’t shooting anybody,” said a husky voice behind him.

Huge hands grasped his shoulders, dragging both Jake and José to their feet. Jake’s fingers clawed across José’s throat, latching onto a thin chain that snapped in his hand as José twisted away. Jake felt a pistol barrel pressing into his side, and he knew that in a split second a bullet was going to follow. Without thinking he spun, snapping the man’s pistol aside even as he shoved his own gun into the man’s gut. He pulled the trigger, and the man went down.

Whirling, he found himself face to face with Torrio again, but this time José had a hideaway gun in his hand. Jake lurched to one side as the pistol fired near his face. He jerked the trigger of his own pistol again, and a neat hole appeared on José’s forehead. A bullet whined across the top of the sedan, and Jake spotted another gunman leaning out of the window of a car barreling into the parking lot. He dropped to the ground and scuttled back to the front of his car, crawling along the narrow space between the bumper and the concrete embankment. As a pistol barked again he grabbed the top of the low wall and vaulted over. He hit the sand running. Almost instantly he spotted another set of headlights paralleling the beach, and he knew instinctively that it was yet another batch of Torrio goons trying to cut him off. Either José
really
thought he was dangerous, or he had intended the killing to make a showing for all his boys.

He shoved José’s chain into his pants pocket and dug his cell phone out of his jacket, punching the autodial for the Houston police. When the dispatcher answered, Jake told him in three-word sentences where he was and what was happening. If nothing else they might be able to triangulate the phone and find his body. But with any luck sirens would
sound any minute, and that would drive the shooters off. At the moment, he couldn’t do anything but race along the surf through rain as thick as a wool curtain, trying to put distance between himself and the killers on foot.

Reever had known something was up. But then the guy with the shotgun took point-blank aim and blew his head off. So maybe Reever
was
playing both ends against the middle and got caught, or maybe the Torrios or the Zinos just wanted to kill two birds with one stone.

Jake’s shoes were saturated with water and sand, and he kicked them off. The beach felt cold beneath his bare feet, even as sweat mixed with the rain. There was a flash of light ahead as a car slipped into a hidden drive and headed straight toward the shore to cut him off.

It would take a minute or two for the dispatcher in Houston to get hold of the Galveston police, then another few minutes at least for them to respond. In two minutes he could be dead. The car turned in his direction, and he could hear the engine grumbling as the tires dug into the sand. Maybe the assholes would get stuck.

But the headlights bounced and whipped from side to side as the big sedan roared ahead, and Jake turned to stumble headlong into the pounding surf. The piss-warm water slowed his advance, and chest-high breakers lifted his feet off the sand and drove him back. He glanced over his shoulder. The car was close now.

He dove.

The current was strong but not overpowering, and he swam beneath the waves for all he was worth. He broke the surface on his back, gasping—the pistol cradled on his stomach—praying the car had driven on past. But it had pulled right up to the waterline. He felt a splash beside him even as he heard the dull pounding of a shotgun. He aimed for the lighted interior of the car—he could barely make out
anything else through the deluge—and pulled the trigger again and again. He didn’t expect to hit anything, but at least the fucking goons would have to keep their heads down.

As he fired he continued back-kicking into the surf, and every time he disappeared over another breaker he paddled to one side or the other so that when the next wave took him he didn’t pop up like the same old target in a shooting gallery. If he could make it to deeper water, he’d be safe until the cops arrived. But where were the sirens?

As he squinted through the darkness, rain, and waves, still kicking and paddling wildly, a shadow moved across the beach, as though a cloud even darker than the solid overcast above had swept between the shore and the sun. Another wave caught him, and a stinging sensation lightninged up the right side of his chest, paralyzing him for an instant. The pistol dropped away into the water, and Jake heard the delayed crack of the shot that had hit him. Horror-stricken, he felt himself rising upward, spread-eagled, flopping like a landed fish. Blood spread across his sodden jacket. Twisting to face the beach, he could only watch as gun barrels flashed repeatedly, and he held his breath, waiting for the shot that would kill him.

But through the haze of the saltwater and rain it appeared as though the guns were firing
up and down
the beach. Had the cops finally arrived? Had he missed the sirens? Surely they wouldn’t have come without them.

Then, abruptly, the firing ceased. Jake counted off one minute. Two. He was hesitant to swim back toward shore, but with only one good arm he was afraid of being dragged out by the tide. Finally he heard the wail of sirens, but it seemed like hours before he spotted a cruiser’s high beams barreling down the beach with lights flashing overhead.

When he reached water shallow enough to stand in, he staggered through the waves toward the cops who were
approaching the sedan with drawn pistols. One of the patrolmen saw him and blinded Jake with his flashlight.

“Detective Crowley!” shouted Jake, fumbling for his shield.

The cop signaled Jake in with the flashlight. But it wasn’t until he got a closer look at Jake’s badge that the officer relaxed. In the glow of the headlights the cop’s red hair shone like neon. But then all of Jake’s senses seemed heightened. By that time a second cruiser had pulled up alongside the sedan, and all the cops were flashing their lights up and down the beach. A flurry of footprints muddled the sand. Jake peered at the tide pools around the car and noticed that they were more blood than saltwater.

“Where are they?” he asked a burly officer with a black mustache and a beet-red complexion.

The man shrugged. “Two down in front of the car. One more down the beach. All shot to hell.” He glanced at Jake’s shoulder. “You hit?”

Jake gingerly pulled aside his jacket. From the hole in his shirt it looked like he should have a bullet in his right lung. But he felt okay except for the damned stinging. Feeling was working its way back into his arm and fingers at least. The cop eased Jake back against the sedan and ripped open his shirt.

“Lucky sonofabitch,” said the mustachioed cop, whistling through his teeth.

The hole was low because he’d been lying on his back in the surf. But the bullet had only torn some skin as it bounced over his ribs, skittering off his collarbone, now exposed like one of the white shells on this beach.

“Come on,” said the redheaded officer as the other policeman left to join the other cops near the shooters’ sedan. “Hop in my car. I’ll get you to the hospital.”

Jake shook his head. “I want to see the men that were shooting at me.”

“You need stitches.”

“I’m not going to bleed to death,” said Jake.

The cop finally shrugged. “Want to tell me what happened?”

When Jake had finished recapping the attack, the cop just stared at him. “You didn’t kill these guys down here with any handgun,” he said.

“They’re all dead?” said Jake, shaken. He recalled the shots going
down
the beach. Who had they been shooting at if not him or the arriving police?

“They’re dead, all right.”

Jake staggered around to the front of the cruiser where the other officers held their flashlights on the corpses.

Jake had seen plenty of bodies before. Auto accidents, murder victims, suicides. Harris County wasn’t LA, but Texans didn’t like being outdone by Californians. They had their own host of serial killers, bar fighters, and road ragers. And of course shoot-’em-ups were as traditional as rodeos. But these guys looked like they’d been in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Their bodies were riddled with bullet holes and shotgun wounds.

The redheaded cop ambled close enough to question Jake with his eyes.

“What I told you was what I saw,” Jake croaked, swallowing a giant lump in his throat.

“How long ago did the shooting stop?”

“Maybe four, five minutes.”

“Nobody else with you or on the beach but Torrio’s men?”

“No one I saw,” said Jake.

Lights and sirens were coming from both ends of the beach now. Jake started to say that the cars were going to destroy any footprints or tire tracks, but the rain was already accomplishing that.

“Okay, then,” said the cop, coaxing Jake toward his car. “There’s no sense
us
standing here getting pummeled.”

Jake slid into the passenger side of the cruiser, and the officer dropped into the driver’s seat, flipping on the heat.

“There’s bandages in the console. You want me to put something on that wound?”

Jake shook his head, ripping open one of the packs of cotton gauze. He smeared the cloth with an antiseptic and pressed it against the gash, grimacing not so much in pain but at the awful sensation of some alien substance oozing
into
his flesh.

The radio crackled. “Looks like we got another one washing up.”

Jake nodded into the wall of rain. “Let’s go.”

The car dug into the sand, then slid and slithered along the beach to a second dark sedan bogged down near the surf. The cop was out first, trotting toward the headlights of the other cruisers. Jake followed slowly, ignoring the pain that was beginning to radiate from his ribs.

One body lay on the sand, and two uniformed officers were up to their waists in the breakers dragging another corpse toward the beach.

Jake felt a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach.

“You okay?” said the redheaded cop. “You’re looking pretty pale.”

“I’m all right,” insisted Jake.

But he wasn’t and he knew it. For fourteen years he had miraculously managed to avoid violence in a job where gunfire was an accepted hazard. Now, in a matter of a few moments, he had slaughtered three men in the parking lot, and Reever and at least four others were dead as well.

He nudged his way past the cops to stare at what was left of the corpse on the beach. It looked as though the man had tried to eat one of the shotguns. Jake turned quickly away,
striding out into the surf toward the oncoming cops and their grisly baggage.

One of them managed a macabre grin, lifting the last body out of the water by its arm. Again, there were bullet holes everywhere. “This all of ’em?”

Jake frowned, shrugging. “I don’t know how many were in the cars.”

The cop nodded, pointing down the beach. “There’s another puddle of blood there, bigger than the one by the car. Who the hell killed these guys?”

“I don’t know,” said Jake.

He shivered from the rain and wind and shock. Slipping his hands into his pants pockets, his fingers wrapped around the chain he’d ripped from José Torrio’s throat, and he lifted it to his face. A beveled stone the color of fresh blood was attached to the chain with a gold jeweler’s mount. Jake stared at it, wondering what impulse had caused him to safeguard the bauble through the murderous events of the past few minutes.

“You must have a real guardian angel,” said the cop, grinning sarcastically. He jerked on the corpse’s arm again, and it came away from the torso. The cop whistled under his breath as his partner caught hold of the corpse’s lapel and continued dragging the body toward the beach. “You ever seen anybody get fucked up this bad?”

“What’s that?” whispered Jake.

“I asked if you’d ever seen anybody this fucked up.”

“Not in a long time.”

He shoved the necklace into the pocket of his jacket and turned away, heading back toward the beach.

Run away, Jake. Run away.

HE STORM BLEW OVER BEFORE DARK
, leaving the smell of ozone in the air and brilliant stars dangling from a sheet of black crepe. It had taken the rest of the day and half the night before both the Galveston and Houston Police were done questioning Jake. Both departments wondered just what the hell he thought he was doing meeting with Reever alone, and how eight men ended up dead, four shot so many times they looked like sieves. Jake had no reasonable answer—which bothered him as much as it did anyone else. But what bothered him worse was the explosion of violence itself. He couldn’t get the thought out of his head that he was somehow responsible for it.

If he had planned the meeting better, at a more public location, then José wouldn’t have dared try the hit. If he had informed Cramer beforehand, his partner would never have okayed the meeting. If . . .

By three in the morning he was well into his third double Scotch when he heard the lock clicking on the front door. A bottle of pain pills rested unopened on the glass-topped
table beside him, and the liquor hadn’t yet dulled his senses, not nearly as much as he wanted it to. He could see the brightly lit interior of his apartment reflected in the liquor bottle so he didn’t turn, just glanced at the Glock, resting in a box beside the liquor.

“Hello, Cramer,” he said, as his partner sauntered out onto the balcony.

Jake could have bounced a baseball off Cramer’s frown as the man dropped into the other lawn chair like a giant cannonball. His face looked as though it had been carved out of black granite, then shot head-on with a bowlful of dry Grape-Nuts, and he was so dark people said the whites of his eyes blinded them. A tough, streetwise cop, he bore not one but three bullet scars from separate encounters with what he called “percolators.” Jake expected to hear some homespun Cajun platitudes, but tonight Cramer was in plain-speak mode.

“Nice,” said Cramer, staring at the bottle and the painkillers. “I could have been one of the Torrios for all you knew, and you’d be too messed up to do anything but smile while I blew your stupid head off.”

Jake shook his head. “I’m sticking to Scotch. And to my knowledge none of the Torrios’ men has a key.”

“New piece?” said Cramer, nudging the pistol with a finger the size of a hand-rolled cigar.

“Backup gun.”

“Goddamn it, Jake! That meeting was about the stupidest fucking stunt you’ve pulled since I’ve known you.”

Jake shrugged. “You still look a little peaked.”

“I’ll give you
peaked
, you sonofabitch. If you don’t want to be partners just say so.”

“I never said I didn’t want to be partners. You’re the only friend I’ve got,” admitted Jake, discovering that it was hard to mouth the words.

Cramer hesitated. “Then act like it. What the hell were you doing down there alone?”

Jake shook his head. “You were sick. I didn’t start feeling hinky about the meeting until after Reever was in the car.”

“After it was too fucking late, you mean.”

“Yeah. Well, I didn’t think Reever’d feel quite so chatty around you.”

Cramer huffed. “Because he charged me with police brutality?”

“Twice.”

Cramer shrugged. “I’m okay, by the way. Thanks for asking. I been puking my guts out all day long, I have to
run
to shit, and my head feels like I got the fucking Budweiser Clydesdales line dancing in there.”

“Memere can’t fix you up?” asked Jake, grinning.

“Don’t go ragging on Memere. People laugh at her cures, but they still pay out the nose for her
paket kongos
and
pot’et.”

Jake had only seen one
pot’et
—a strange white china pot filled with hair and nail clippings and a banana leaf wrapping leaking the burned and powdered remains of something Jake hadn’t wanted to know about. It rested in a place of honor in Memere’s living room. But Cramer had forced a
paket kongo
on him the first month they’d met.

“It don’t mean nothing,” Cramer had assured him, as Jake gingerly took the onion-shaped contraption—constructed of bright red cloth and what he guessed were chicken feathers—and placed it on a bookshelf, where Cramer had insisted it remain. “If it don’t work, fine. If it does, fine. What do you lose?”

Jake glanced in the bottle’s reflection. The
paket
was still on the shelf.

“You should have stayed in bed,” he said, staring into Cramer’s bleary eyes.

“And miss sitting up drinking with you in the middle of the night?” said Cramer, wiping the mouth of the bottle with his sleeve and taking a long drag. “Why don’t you answer your fucking phone?”

“Didn’t feel like talking,” said Jake, recalling the message he’d found on his answering machine from Pam. She must have called his apartment before reaching his cell phone. “Jake, I wish you’d come home. Please call.” She’d recited her number and hung up.

“I talked to Doc Miller,” said Cramer.

Jake’s eyebrows rose. Miller was the best pathologist in Houston. But Galveston had their own medical examiner. “Why Miller?”

“They called him down to look at the bodies.”

“He can’t have found out much so fast.”

“Enough.”

“What?”

“He said he couldn’t be sure just yet, but it
looked
like at least some of the wounds were self-inflicted. And the boys on the beach found most of the hardware those guys were carrying. They emptied their weapons. Probably at each other.”

Jake frowned, waiting.

“He also said they weren’t just shot. There were multiple contusions, abrasions, broken bones. They were run through a blender. You want to tell me your side of the story?”

Jake told him. When Cramer blinked twice he knew his friend didn’t believe everything he was hearing.

“That’s the way it happened,” insisted Jake.

Cramer’s eyes narrowed, but he just nodded, and they sat in silence for a while. When Cramer finally spoke again his normally raspy voice was soft as a whisper.

“Sometimes questions are better left unanswered.”

Jake chuckled mirthlessly. “You are such a closet philosopher.”

“That’s not to say that this is one of them. The department will eventually want to just forget the whole thing if you stick to your guns and they can’t close the case—not like they give a rat’s ass about a bunch of dead Torrio boys. But our friends in the media are going to be on you like stink on shit.”

Jake frowned, nodding. “I have nothing to tell them.”

“They won’t believe that.”

“Do you?”

Cramer leaned way back—making the chair groan ominously—and took another long swig from the bottle before resting it on the table again. He stared up at the black bowl of sky and frowned. “I have to believe what you tell me, I guess.”

“Thank you.”

“You wouldn’t lie to me.”

Jake tried to meet his eye but couldn’t.

“Don’t end up like me, Jake.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I’ve been watching you for years. You’re a good cop. Hell, you may be a great cop.”

“Bullshit.”

Cramer never gave out compliments. The statement sounded more like a deathbed confession, and it gave Jake the creeps.

“It’s not bullshit, and don’t interrupt me. You care about people. Maybe too much. And you get hunches that are downright spooky, even for me. But I’ve watched you in a lot of tight situations. You think too long before you get rough or go for your gun, like you want to make doubly or triply sure before reacting. I’ve never once seen you bust a cap, and you know damned well there have been situations that called for it.”

“I didn’t hesitate out there today,” said Jake miserably. “And I’d never let you down.”

“No. At least I’m still in one piece, and I never got shot because of you. But you scare me sometimes, Jake. I worry that I’m gonna get killed because you’re not up to pulling the trigger when you really need to.”

“Do
you
want another partner?”

Cramer sighed. “Did I say that? I’m forty-two, and I look fifty. Sometimes I feel sixty, and I probably won’t live to see it with you or without you, because I’ll keep doing this until I’m too damned old, too goddamned slow. But I won’t die because I was worried about hurting someone.”

“What about your
paket kongo
?” said Jake, smirking.

“The spirits don’t help the stupid,” said Cramer. “And doing what we do past our time is stupid. Happens to cops all the time. We lose our edge and then
Gede
comes to pass us on. He don’t care much whether we think it’s time or not.”

“Max Hartley’s sixty-one, and he’s one of the best detectives on the force.”

Cramer nodded. “Max has enough seniority to take only the cases he knows he can clear, the ones that won’t cost him any grief or blood. I can’t do that. Now shut the fuck up.”

Suddenly Cramer wasn’t talking like an old, eccentric uncle anymore. His voice was harsh again, and Jake heard real pain in it.

“I’ve never wanted to be anything but a big-city detective,” said Cramer, leaning even farther back in his chair and kicking his feet up on the balcony’s rail. “It’s the only thing in the world I’m good at. I tried having a wife. It didn’t work out.” He glanced at Jake. “I never mentioned her because there was nothing to tell. I had the job, and it meant more than the marriage. I think a good writer would say that I was a two-dimensional character. You’re not. You just want to be.”

“What exactly are you rattling on about?”

“You’re carrying a lot of baggage, and you need to fix it or forget it. In this business you make way too many
enemies to be thinking about your past all the time or twitching when you should be shooting.”

“I never had any enemies that made me really nervous until the Torrios,” said Jake, stretching the truth to the breaking point.

“At the very least you’re going to get yourself killed. And I don’t want to watch it happen. I’m your friend, Jake. I don’t want to see you die.”

“Have I ever unloaded on you?”

Cramer shook his head. “That’s just it, you don’t
have
a past. So that tells me you have a
lot
of past. Eight people are dead on that beach, and apparently—instead of shooting you—half of them just decided to kill each other. The way I see it, you got a golden opportunity here. That
graze
you got on your shoulder and the investigation into the shooting will buy you a few days off if you want to take them instead of sitting behind a desk. You can spend the time putting whatever’s behind you behind you and turning yourself into a cardboard character like me, in which case you’ll make one hell of detective. Or you can find out what the hell is wrong with you and maybe figure out you don’t
want
to be a cop after all.”

“That’s the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard. I worked my ass off to get where I am.”

Cramer nodded. “I know you did. But were you working toward something or away from something?”

Jake felt as though Cramer had opened up a drawer filled with his most private thoughts. The only thing he hadn’t discovered was the box in the back, under the socks, the one labeled

“Can we cut to the chase here? I’d like to go to bed now.” “I read all the reports, and I spoke to every officer on the
scene today. Every cop that was on that call thinks you know more than you’re saying.”

“I was in the fucking water! I couldn’t see a thing. Just what is it I’m supposed to know?”

Cramer shrugged. “I’ve got to be honest with you. You’re stretching your credibility with me, too. I’ll buy that
you
didn’t kill all those people. Hell, I don’t think anyone, including the medical examiner, would have any idea how you
could
have. But someone did, and you need to tell me who, and how . . . and why.”

“It happened like I said.”

“You have to admit that’s kind of hard to fathom. You claim you were in the water maybe five minutes max, and at least some of those guys were shooting at you most of that time.”

“I told the cops that they started shooting up and down the beach.”

“At each other.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Cramer, I know it sounds unbelievable. Maybe there was a mutiny in Torrio’s organization. Maybe some of them were Zino’s boys. But the story I told you, the story I told the Galveston boys, is gospel.”

Cramer sighed loudly. “But you definitely killed José Torrio?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, Jimmy isn’t going to be pleased. The brothers are very tight. Or they were.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“It might be a good idea to take that vacation just to let things cool off.”

For a while silence reigned. Jake poured himself another dollop of liquor, but it tasted raw and unsavory. When
Cramer finally spoke again his voice sounded hollow, airy and distant, and the pain in it was undeniably heartfelt.

“You going back to take care of business at home or not?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Jake.

Starlight reflected off the whites of Cramer’s eyes.

“You ought to answer your messages. Then people wouldn’t bother your sick partner. I think Sergeant McCallister would give out the pope’s number if a woman with a sweet-sounding voice asked for it.”