Redemption (A Joe Burgess Mystery, Book 3) (45 page)

"Oh, sweet Jesus, Terry. I almost... I didn't even—"

"That's okay. Come on now." Kyle's firm hands pulled him away from the window. Very slowly, they stepped back until they were out of the light. He bent over, hands braced on his knees, remembering how to get air in and out of his lungs, coming back into the moment. Back into being a cop who couldn't let civilians have a gun party without intervening.

"Wonder what's up with Stan?" Kyle said. "He should be in there by now."

Burgess was still trying to push Reggie's dead face out of his head, cap his rage, and quell the desire to do unspeakable things to Claire and Dugan. Long, slow breaths in and out. If you can breathe, you can think. You can respond. He was swimming up from some deep pool, Kyle's words barely comprehensible. "Stan's going in?" Kyle nodded. "We'd better go find him."

"I'll go," Kyle said. "Someone has to stay here, in case they run this way. Just please, don't shoot anyone unless you have to. Writing the reports for tonight is gonna be enough of a bitch without having to include discharging our firearms. I am in no mood to spend the next month driving a desk. You don't get overtime driving a desk."

"If Claire had a gun, she'd have shot Dugan by now."

"Saving the taxpayers all kinds of bucks and leaving the world a better place. The real coup would be if Claire and Dugan shot each other. That would be justice."

"If Mary wasn't in the middle."

Kyle slipped away into the night. Silent and quick as a cat. One second he was there, the next he'd disappeared.

When Burgess stepped back out to a place where he could watch the living room, a new character had come onstage. A medium tall man, sandy-haired, in a rich man's barn jacket—the waxed, weatherproof kind with leather trim—and creased dark slacks. The small, shiny handgun he was pointing at Mary looked a lot like the gun from Claire's front hall.

Something in the man's appearance was familiar. Something about the jawline and shape of the mouth. This was Amanda Mercer's father. The Mercer of Mercer Metals. The Mercer who wanted Reggie dead as protection against a lawsuit. But why would a respectable businessman have a gun? And what the fuck was he doing here in the middle of the night?

As he watched, Mercer moved toward Mary Libby. She raised the rifle. A .22 was not a close-range weapon. Not the weapon of choice for going to a gunfight. Where were Kyle and Perry? He didn't want to see any more Libbys hurt tonight.

Drawing his gun, he moved toward the window, half surprised that his arm still worked. As he came into the light, Claire yelled, "Norman. Outside. There's someone outside."

Mercer stepped through the slider and came toward Burgess as Kyle and Perry burst into the room, Kyle screaming, "Police. Drop the guns. Drop the guns." Ignoring them, he pointed the shiny little gun at Burgess's chest and uttered the ultimate movie cliché. "If you'd just stayed out of this, Detective Burgess, everything would have been okay."

"Put the gun down, Mr. Mercer." Burgess kept his voice low and easy. Over Mercer's shoulder, he saw Perry take the gun from Mary. Saw Kyle make a sudden dive at Claire and realized she had a gun out, pointed at Dugan. The gun exploded. Dugan began to scream.

"I don't think I will." Mercer's face was working, little eye movements and muscle twitches that gave lie to the calm. It was eerily quiet during those last seconds.

Two men with drawn guns, less than ten feet apart. Conversing like they were facing each other over a desk. Too close for a gun fight. Too late for anything else.

They fired almost in unison.

Chapter 37

Burgess wasn't dead. That was why they wore vests—so they'd have bruises instead of holes in their bodies—but it was going to be a hell of a bruise. It felt like he'd been slammed in the chest with a two-by-four and it hurt like a bastard, bringing his body and soul into utter miserable, negative alignment.

It took several long minutes before he could drag himself over to check Mercer for life signs—knowing the futility even as he did so. Mercer hadn't been wearing a vest and Burgess's service weapon hadn't been a toy.

Then Burgess went inside to help deal with the living, pain surrounding him like a red cloud. He began with a call to Vince Melia while Mercer was still warm, barely able to hold his phone as he stabbed at the numbers. He snapped the lieutenant from sleep with the comment, "Knowing how you hate being left in the dark, I just wanted you to know we made some progress with the Reginald Libby case tonight. Got two stabbings and one gunshot wound hospitalized, two of those vics are bad guys. Nick Goodall and Claire Libby are in custody, and I got a suicide-by-cop victim here by my feet who didn't want to be the fifth arrest."

"Gimme a minute, Gina's sleeping," Melia said. Burgess heard him cross the room and a door opened and shut. "Okay, Joe. You wanna give me that again?" A few expletives later, Melia asked for directions and said he was on his way. "You call Cote about this?"

"I called you."

"Right. Of course you did."

"No worries," Burgess said. "He wouldn't touch this one with a barge pole. We've got a prominent businessman dead on the ground, one seriously wounded sociopathic hired killer, and a pillar of society in handcuffs, all in the service of some dead homeless guy. No photo ops here, unless he wants to poke at blood puddles with his shoe."

"Gotcha. I'm on my way."

"Bring coffee and some painkillers, would you? I'm a little bit shot."

* * *

Nobody talks about the aftermath—the paperwork, the interviews, the notifications, follow-up, mop-up. Those slick TV shows never show the thousands of hours cops spend at their desks doing paperwork. That's not exciting, it's exacting, and a case this messy and complicated tripled the load. Take any amount of normal report writing, add in actions outside the city in other agencies' jurisdictions, and you double it. Add in two attempted homicides, a prominent businessman's death in a shootout with a cop, a society matron arrested, and a career criminal wounded by said matron, combine it with three different crime scenes, and they'd be lucky if they got it done by Christmas.

Something else no one talks about—the endless hours finishing the crime scene, often while blood-soaked, filthy, and dead on their feet. Work that couldn't be put off to a better time, when they were fed, clean, and rested. When their feet didn't feel heavy as lead and their eyelids weren't lined with sandpaper.

They spent hours at the cottage, working with the state police and the ME's office, and having a fucking bloody territorial war over whether they could execute their search warrant or the state police now owned the scene. A three-way "discussion" between their chief, the AG's office, and the state police won them a partial victory. They collected Claire's cell phone, Dugan's cell phone, and Joey's, along with scores of other items that needed to be logged, tagged and bagged. Then Burgess spent more time on the phone with the prosecutors in the AG's office, a growling bear by that time, badly in need of rest, ice and oxy-something. More than half-past dead, though it was his phone that actually died.

Many hours in, the four of them grabbed food, so dazed they had no idea what they ate. A time-out between rounds that they all desperately needed. Kyle hunched over his plate, gaunt, hollow-eyed and cadaverous, his hand moving mechanically from plate to mouth. When he'd demolished an awe-inspiring pile of food, he raised his head and looked at Melia.

"Vince, can I get a transfer? I'm thinking meter maid, maybe. Kindergarten cop? I'm getting too old for this."

"Not a lot of overtime for meter maids," Melia said. "And everybody hates you. It's a pretty dangerous job."

"Oh, yeah. Not like this," Kyle said. "How many ladies you suppose jump out of their Suburbans, clutching their vintage eight-clip, pump-action twenty-twos, hide tiny guns in their bras, or try to commit suicide by cop 'cuz I'm giving 'em a ticket?"

"You'd hate it, Terry," Stan Perry said. "Such a waste of those cold eyes, fixing 'em on some young hotshot walking his pocket dog who failed to scoop the poop."

"Too old for this shit," Kyle muttered. "And I believe in scooping the poop. I'd be hell on wheels on the poop squad. I could be poop cop of the year."

"If you're too old," Melia said, "what about the fossil here?"

The fossil had just spotted a reddish smear on his shoe that was probably Mercer's blood and was working on it with a napkin with the arm and hand that still moved. He felt like someone had put a plastic bag over his head and tied it at the neck. Too dizzy and exhausted to think straight. No triumph in tonight's work.

"That's no fossil." Perry waggled a warning finger. "That's a superhero. Don't be fooled by the filthy clothes and grouchy demeanor. Guy can leap small buildings in a single bound and is more powerful than a speeding Smart Car. And bullets bounce right off him."

"I thank you for your kind remarks," Burgess said, giving up on the shoe and crumbling the napkin into a tight ball. His chest was a bright blaze of pain, and there was almost no part of him that didn't hurt, something that was true for all of them. They'd put in the night from hell and this was just intermission. They should all go home and shower and sleep, but hitting the suspects hard and fast now was important. They wanted to get the freshest, most unprepared versions of the stories that they could, and hours of valuable time had already passed.

He set down his fork, surprised by his empty plate. He didn't remember eating. "Let's go talk to some bad guys and find someone who can think straight to write us warrants. I want Star Goodall, search and arrest. I want to search Claire Libby's house and Nick Goodall's apartment. I want that Mercer Metals truck."

"I'll put Sage on it," Melia said. "And I'll do the note to Mercer's family. No sense even talking to Cote until that's done properly.

"If Sage goes to arrest that freakin' witch," Perry said, "tell him take an army and be careful."

"Roger that," Melia said. "Army. Careful. Usually I tell my people to be careless—more exciting that way, but today I'll make an exception."

"Oh, life is always exciting around our superhero," Kyle said. "We go out to execute a search warrant and what do we get? We get gun parties. We get stabbings. We get shootings. We get exploding windows. We get good gals shooting at bad guys and bad gals really shooting bad guys. The pleasant company of poker-assed staties who cling to our coattails, step on our coattails, and then steal our coats. We get sick, twisted shit in the name of mother love, which, by the way, I know something about."

The carbs were clicking in. His eyes were brighter and he was grinning. "We got stone-cold sociopaths and we got stone-cold mamas and we got monumental sacrifice to greed. Man, we get so used to everyday ugly we forget what serious ugly looks like, 'til it rears its head like it did last night and we remember how crazy this business can get." He stood. "Let's go get 'em."

Burgess half-expected Kyle to stick his hand out for a team handshake before they dropped some bills on the table and filed out of the restaurant. He was glad it hadn't happened. He could barely lift one arm and the other felt heavy as lead.

It was an enormous job to do all the interviews—trying to get admissions documenting the multiple offenses committed by all the defendants. Even unproductive interviews with snarling, uncooperative witnesses like Claire and her pitbull lawyer took time. But she'd shot Dugan in front of two cops, so she wasn't wiggling off any hooks no matter what stunts her lawyer pulled.

He was just sorry he didn't get to go at Kevin Dugan, but Dugan was in the ICU and the docs said it was iffy. He'd get much of that story from Joey—the little shit would give up plenty to explain away the incendiary materials in his trunk, and from Nick Goodall, the man who said he wasn't there.

Goodall, shaking with the DTs and looking hellishly sick, was ready for confession, and Burgess, feeling pretty shaky himself, was there to hear it. The details of how Reggie had died, even though he'd gotten much of it listening outside Claire's cottage, jerked the knife around in his gut until his insides felt like confetti. He sat sweating, trying not to jerk when the pains stabbed him, here as Reggie's witness, not about his personal pain. To speak for the dead and strive for justice.

The effort to control his anger made him dizzy as Goodall described getting Reggie into that room to meet with someone Star had found who'd developed a new treatment for PTSD. It had taken two of them, two big men, to get Reggie into that bathroom and force his head into the water. Teamwork, Dugan had called it. He'd put his knee into Reggie's back, forcing him up against the edge of the tub, while Goodall forced Reggie's head under water and held it there as Reggie thrashed and fought.