Smoke Screen (31 page)

After a short silence, Raley said, “I knew your dad. Only slightly, but I knew he was a good and conscientious cop. Why did he place himself in such a dangerous situation that night, Pat? Why did he break the first rule of self-preservation by not waiting for backup?”

“To prove to himself that he was the hero everybody believed him to be.”

It sounded like a stock answer, something he might have heard a therapist say. Raley picked up on it just as Britt did. “That’s not what you really think, is it?”

Pat Jr. seemed ready to take issue, then slowly shook his head. “I’ve wondered if maybe he was just tired of it all and wanted it to be over. I know that feeling.” He looked at his reflection in the rearview mirror. “I know how it feels to just want out of your body, out of your life.”

He paused for several moments before continuing. “Maybe Dad went into that alley hoping that he wouldn’t come out, but knowing that, if he didn’t, Mom could still collect on his life insurance policy.”

Britt had never actually heard anyone admit to suicidal feelings, and it shook her. Apparently the confession subdued Raley, too. For at least a minute no one said anything, then Raley spoke.

“I have another theory, Pat. I think maybe the crying jag you heard was your father’s surrender. He’d reached his breaking point. He’d decided to unburden himself of the guilty secret he’d been keeping along with his buddies.” After a significant pause, he added, “Maybe one or both of them wanted that secret protected at all costs. Your dad could have been lured into that alley and killed to make certain he wouldn’t rat them out.”

Pat Jr.’s nervousness returned. He wet his lips. His eyes darted to Britt, then back to Raley. “You didn’t hear that from me. In fact, I don’t know anything about a secret. What secret?”

Raley frowned at his attempt to play dumb. “Jay had something important he wanted to tell Britt. He was killed before he could, but I’m dead certain that it related to Cleveland Jones, that interrogation room, and the fire.”

“You need to get off that track,” Pat Jr. said nervously.

“And let Britt go down for a murder she didn’t commit?”

“No. Of course not, but this talk…what you’re alleging…is dangerous.”

“I’ll take my chances to get to the truth,” Raley said.

“But in the meantime you’re placing me and my family in danger.” His face twisted with emotion again. “Look, I’m a lousy husband. I lie to my wife every hour of the day. But I do love her and my kids. They’re innocents. I don’t want anything bad to happen to them.”

“I don’t want anything bad to happen to them, either.” Raley leaned closer to the other man. “So tell me who you think killed your father and Jay.”

“You
think that, not me.”

“You’re lying, Pat. You know I’m right.”

“If you keep talking like this, you’re going to get us and yourself killed.” His voice was tearful, his eyes wild with fear.

“Who’s going to kill me? McGowan? Fordyce? Both of them? Which one? Who?”

Pat Jr. was shaking his head.

“Who is it?” Raley pressed.

“Please don’t ask.”

“But you know, don’t you?”

“I can’t say anything more.”

“Tell me why.”

“Because nobody knows about me!”

His face crumpled with misery. His cry was so loud, so raw, that for a moment Raley remained quiet.

Then he nodded, as though saying he got it now. “They didn’t betray your dad’s trust about your homosexuality, so you can’t betray theirs. Is that it?”

Pat Jr. nodded.

“Even if it kills you?”

“My life’s shit anyway.” He broke down into sobs again.

Raley regarded him closely, then looked at Britt. She indicated with a small shake of her head that she didn’t believe the weeping man would give up any more information. He was held in a grip of fear more threatening to him than Raley.

“Pat?” Choking back sobs, he responded to Raley’s softer tone and raised his head. “I think you’re a creep for doing what you’re doing to your family. It isn’t fair to them, and it isn’t even fair to you. You all deserve a happier life than the one you’re leading. If it’s true that you love your wife, tell her now. It will hurt, but it won’t hurt as much as it will if you let this pretense continue.

“But in the meantime, I don’t want to be responsible for your family’s safety or yours. Talking to Britt and me could prove dangerous, you’re right about that. I suggest you leave tonight.”

“Leave?”

“Go home, pack up your wife and kids. Take them to the beach, to the mountains, just get lost for a while, a couple of days at least. Empty your ATM and don’t use your credit cards. Throw away your cell phone. Cover your tracks.”

Pat Jr. looked back at Britt as though asking,
Is he nuts?
“Take his advice, Pat,” she said. “I was drugged the night Jay was murdered. But on the outside chance I might recover my memory of what happened, someone tried to kill me. My car was run off the road. It’s submerged in the Combahee River. If Raley hadn’t been there to rescue me, I would have drowned. Anyone who would do that wouldn’t hesitate to harm your children, if only to punctuate their threat. Take your family and go tonight.”

“If you notify your boss at the PD, don’t tell him your destination,” Raley advised him. “It might get back to George McGowan or Cobb Fordyce.”

Pat Jr. looked at them, swallowing hard. “They’ve known me since I was a boy. I really don’t think they’d do anything to me.”

“That’s probably what your dad thought,” Raley said grimly. “Jay, too.”

He and Britt walked back to the gray sedan still parked down the street, got in, and watched as Pat Wickham, Jr., drove away from the nightclub he’d never seen from the inside.

“Do you think he’ll do what we advised?” Britt asked as they watched his car disappear around the corner at Meeting Street.

“Either he will or he’s already on his cell phone calling in the cavalry.”

“Which would mean he lied when he said he didn’t know what had happened to Cleveland Jones after his arrest.” She considered it a moment, then said, “I think he was telling the truth. He doesn’t want to know what happened in that interrogation room because of the implications to himself. Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

“He may not know specifically what happened, but I don’t think he believes Jones had two skull fractures when he was arrested. He knows that whatever did go down was consequential. He also knows who killed Jay. And he must be scared out of his wits of him.”

“Or them.”

“Or them. Because if he wasn’t, he’d have exposed them when Pat Senior was shot. He let them get away with murdering his own father, which is incomprehensible. He—” Suddenly he reached out and clamped his hand over her head, shoving her down. At the same time, he slouched low in his seat.

“What?” she asked.

“Our friends just came out of the club.”

“Butch and Sundance?”

“The very ones.” He’d seen them in the side mirror. Glancing over his shoulder to make sure his eyes weren’t deceiving him, he slid the pistol from his waistband.

Alarmed, she said, “You’re not going to shoot them, are you?”

“Not unless I have to.”

“Do you think Pat Junior called them?”

“Maybe, but I don’t think so. If he had told them we were right outside, they’d have torn out of there. They’re in no apparent hurry. See for yourself. They’re going the other direction, their backs are to us.”

He removed his hand from her head, and she raised it far enough to peer over the seat. The two men had set off down the sidewalk, walking toward King Street. They weren’t dawdling, they looked like they meant business, but she figured they always walked with a purposeful stride. But, as Raley had said, they didn’t seem to be in a huge hurry, either.

“They don’t look like a gay couple on an evening out,” she said.

“Nope.”

“Then funny they should show up here.”

“Hmm. The same way it was funny they showed up at The Wheelhouse the night you and Jay met there. At least the one did. This is the first time you’ve seen the second one. Look familiar?”

“No. But I haven’t seen his face yet. Do you think they were looking for Pat Junior tonight?”

“God, I hope not. He wouldn’t last ten seconds against these guys.”

Britt said, “It’s a small triumph, but it sort of does my heart good, knowing they were in there wasting time while we were within yards of them.”

The pair met three men on the sidewalk and moved aside to let them pass. Butch watched them over his shoulder until they entered the bar. He said something to his buddy, who took umbrage and gave him the finger, which caused him to chuckle. Then the two continued on their way.

“Did you get a better look at Sundance when he turned around?” Raley asked.

“Yes, but I don’t think I’ve seen him before. I didn’t have the reaction I did when I saw Butch through your cabin window.”

The two reached the end of the block and turned the corner, disappearing. Raley poked the pistol back into his waistband and started the sedan. “How ’bout a little role reversal?”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m gonna follow them.”

T
HE MAROON CAR HAD BEEN LEFT IN A PUBLIC PARKING LOT
two blocks off King Street. Because of the traffic, Raley was able to go slow and keep well back until the pair retrieved their car. He followed them out of the historic district, and then several miles along a major boulevard to an older Holiday Inn.

“Assassins on a budget,” Britt said.

“No, they’re charging the client three times what the rooms cost.”

The hotel had two levels of rooms accessed by open-air corridors. The men parked their car steps away from rooms on the ground floor. Watching from a strip-center parking lot across the busy, divided thoroughfare, Raley and Britt saw the driver, the one they called Butch, open the trunk and remove a duffel bag.

She said, “That looks heavy.”

“Tools of their trade.”

Thoughtfully she asked, “That night on the road, why didn’t they just shoot me?”

“The risk of leaving evidence. The timing.”

“Two homicides so close together, mine and Jay’s, our being friends, that would have roused suspicion.”

“Your murder might not have passed as a random act of violence. Better that it take days, weeks maybe, for some poor fisherman to discover your car with you inside.”

“And then it would have appeared I’d killed myself.”

“Right. Then if you
had
remembered something Jay told you, and
had
passed it along to someone else, it could be discredited and dismissed.”

“The ramblings of a distraught woman about to take her own life.”

“Exactly.”

“They’re very clever, aren’t they?”

Her serious tone of voice brought his head around. “Very.”

The two men went into neighboring rooms. Butch kept the duffel bag with him. “He must be the senior partner,” Raley said. “Or maybe just the best shot.”

Britt asked, “Now what?”

After taking a glance around, he said, “Keep an eye on their rooms. Signal me if they come out.” He pushed open the car door.

“Where are you going?”

“To call Candy before it gets any later.” He pointed toward a telephone booth at the far end of the shopping center. “Since the booth is still there, I’m thinking the phone will be working.”

“Let’s drive over.”

He shook his head. “We couldn’t see their rooms as well. Stay put. Watch those rooms.”

“You’ll be exposed. They could see you.”

“They’re not looking. But just in case…” Holding the pistol by the barrel, he extended it to her. “You keep this.”

She recoiled. “Leave it on the seat.”

He got out and carefully set the pistol on the driver’s seat, then set off across the parking lot at a jog. Despite what he’d told Britt, he didn’t like being so exposed. He stepped into the phone booth but didn’t close the door, so the light wouldn’t come on. Fortunately the telephone was still there. Even more of a break, it was in working order. He’d come up with a pocketful of change.

Candy answered his call on the first ring. “Where have you been? I was beginning to think that you’d come to your senses and weren’t going to call back.”

He plugged his ear with his index finger to help filter out the swishing noise of traffic. “I got tied up. Sorry I kept you up late. What have you got for me?”

“An appointment with Fordyce.”

He was stunned. He hadn’t admitted, even to himself, that she might manage to pull it off. “No shit?”

“Oh he shit, all right. At least I’m fairly sure he did. He was having no part of it at first, but I eventually wore him down. I told him he was lucky you hadn’t accosted him at Jay’s funeral like you did George. I advised him as a former colleague that he should talk to you in private before you did something very public and probably crazy. He’s expecting you to be just shy of a complete mental case, so hopefully your reasonable state of mind will come as a pleasant surprise.” She hesitated, then said, “You aren’t a mental case, are you?”

“No. Just a man with a mission.”

“Same as,” she muttered.

“What time?”

“Eleven o’clock. His office. Check in with the guard. A page will escort you.”

“Candy, I don’t know what to say.”

“Say good night,” she said querulously. “I’ve got back-to-back interviews all day tomorrow and need to go to bed. I’m retaining fluid because I never have time to pee, so my eyes are already puffy. Don’t even get me started on my ankles.”

He smiled at the picture she painted. “I owe you. Huge.”

“Red
and
white.”

“What?”

“When you come to dinner next week, you have to bring both colors of wine. And no cheap stuff.”

“You’ve got it.”

“And, Raley.”

“Yeah?”

“Hold his feet to the fire. Pun intended.”

“What time?” Britt asked when Raley returned to the car with the good news.

“Eleven o’clock. His office.”

“I’m surprised. I hoped he would agree to see you, but I doubted he would.”

“Frankly, so did I. Maybe he’s got bigger cojones than I give him credit for.”

“It’s easy to be brave when you’re inside a guarded government office.” She gazed thoughtfully at the maroon sedan parked outside the rooms at the Holiday Inn. “Or when you have someone fighting your battles for you.”

She repeated the statement to herself and realized how accurately it applied to her. Acting on impulse and before she could change her mind, she opened her car door and stepped out.

“What are you doing?”

“I’ll be right back.”

“Britt?”

Ignoring him, she ran toward the busy boulevard, calling to him over her shoulder. “If something happens, drive away and call Detective Clark.”

“Britt!”

“Drive away.”

Her timing couldn’t have been better. Just as she reached the curb, there was a break in the traffic. She sprinted across two lanes, the dividing median, and then the other two lanes, and came out on the sidewalk bordering the parking lot of the Holiday Inn.

She didn’t dare look back at Raley, fearing that he would be in hot pursuit. Instead she continued moving purposefully across the parking lot toward the two rooms with the familiar car parked in front of them.

She couldn’t positively identify it as the car that had forced hers off the road and into the river. But she couldn’t eliminate it, either. She also knew that at least one of these men had been at The Wheelhouse, where she had been drugged. All circumstantial, but awfully suspicious.

What she knew with certainty was that they had searched Raley’s cabin and truck yesterday, and that they had doggedly followed him from Jay’s funeral, indicating that they were men whose purpose was shady, and possibly deadly. Nor did she believe for a moment that their being at the notable gay bar tonight was happenstance. Whether they were allies or enemies of Pat Wickham’s, their intentions were contradictory to hers and Raley’s.

The bastards had this coming.

Keeping her eyes trained on the windows and doors of the two rooms, she cautiously approached the car. She glanced around to make certain that no other guests or hotel employees were in sight or looking out the windows.

Seeing no one, she crouched down behind the sedan. The lights were still on inside both rooms. She didn’t dare take her eyes off the windows. At any second the door of either room could have burst open. The occupants might even have been able to hear her heart pounding.

She crept to the left rear tire and ran her fingers along the rim until she located the air valve stem and hastily twisted off the cap. Clutching it in her hand, she duckwalked to the front tire.

She could hear the sound track of a TV sitcom coming from one of the rooms. Had the curtain moved, or was that her imagination? Was the air-conditioning unit beneath the window causing the curtain to flutter?

Her nervous fingers found the valve of the front tire and removed the cap. Her thighs were burning by the time she duckwalked the length of the car and around the back of it, then up to the right front tire. She twisted off that cap. The fourth and last one was more stubborn than the others. She was sweating and the pads of her fingers were rubbed raw from the effort by the time she got it off.

Then, holding all four in a tight fist, she stood up.

In the same instant, the door of one of the rooms was pulled open.

Instinctually she whipped her head around.

Sundance was framed in the open doorway. He was barefoot, still wearing his trousers, but he had replaced the dress shirt he’d worn into the nightclub with a white T-shirt. The tail of it was neatly tucked into his waistband. It was a ridiculous thing to note at a time like this, but irrationally it flashed through her mind how silly and uncomfortable that looked.

He was holding a plastic ice bucket, which he dropped the instant he spotted her, and reached for a shoulder holster that wasn’t there, shouting, “Hold it!”

She did the opposite. She turned and ran for her life. She expected to see Raley waiting anxiously inside the gray sedan across the boulevard. But neither he nor the car was where she’d left them.

Behind her, she heard pounding, and figured Sundance was beating on his partner’s door. He yelled, “Get out here!”

She didn’t stop to look back but ran headlong toward the street, not even knowing in which direction to go.
Where was Raley?
She had told him to drive away if anything happened, but she really hadn’t expected him to desert her.

She thought she heard one of the men call her name, but she didn’t need to look back to know that they were hotfooting it and closing in fast. She could hear the slaps of bare feet on pavement, their huffing breaths, cursing.

She leaped off the sidewalk directly into the path of an oncoming car and managed to jump back only a nanosecond away from being struck. The driver blasted his horn. It deafened her to the approach of the car that screeched to a stop within inches behind her, nearly shaving the jeans off her butt.

“Britt!”

She whirled around. Raley had pulled the car between her and the two men. Seeing the pistol aimed at them through the open driver’s window, they skidded to a stop.
“Back up or you’re dead!”
Raley shouted. They started yelling at him, but he was gunning the motor of the sedan to a roar while keeping his foot on the brake.

Britt scrambled into the passenger seat. Before she had even closed the door, Raley lifted his foot from the brake pedal and the car shot forward like a racehorse bounding out of the gate. He bumped over the curb and sped across the opposing lanes. Her teeth slammed together when he hit the median at about eighty miles an hour, then they were speeding away in the outside lane, their rear end fishtailing for several yards before Raley could bring the car under full control.

She glanced back. The men were running across the parking lot toward their now disabled car. Butch had been caught with his pants down. She got a fleeting glimpse of boxer shorts and well-toned legs before Raley took a sharp right turn that put the Holiday Inn out of sight. He turned left at the next opportunity, then another right.

He was cussing a blue streak.

Adrenaline pumped through her. His erratic driving was pitching her from one side of the seat to the other. She managed to fasten her seat belt, saying, “You can slow down. They can’t come after us. Even if they try, their tires will go flat before they can catch us.” She opened her fist. Her fingernails had gouged four half-moons out of her palm, but on it lay the four valve caps.

“What in the
hell
were you
thinking
?”

“I was thinking of slowing them down, preventing them from coming after us.”

“They didn’t know we were there! You could have got shot!”

“But I didn’t!”

“Shit!”
He hit the steering wheel hard.

In his present mood, arguing was futile, so she said nothing more.

For anyone who may have wanted to follow them, it would have been hopeless. Even she had lost all sense of direction by the time they crossed the Ravenel Bridge. A few miles later, they arrived at the RV park.

Raley wheeled their car behind the cabin, got out, and stormed toward the door, but he held it open for her, keeping an angry bead on her as she walked toward him. Once she had cleared the door, he slammed it shut behind her and bolted it.

Coming around, he bore down on her. “That was a dumb, reckless stunt, Britt.”

“It’ll slow them down.”

“Granted.”

“So it wasn’t dumb at all, was it?”

“It wasn’t worth the risk.”

“I think it was. Anyway, it felt good to get back at them.”

“Felt good?
They could have killed you!”

He looked ready to do that himself. A vein in his forehead was pulsing. His hands were clenched at his sides. In her defense, she said, “I needed to do something for myself, Raley. I feel dependent and useless, and I hate that. I needed to
act.
I’m tired of relying on—”

“Me?”

“Yes! On anybody. I’m not used to it. I’ve always taken care of myself.”

“Then be my guest.” He unlocked the door and yanked it open.

She stared into the rectangle of darkness, broken only by the flashing red neon arrow with
Vacancy
spelled out along its shaft that hovered above the park’s office. He’d called her bluff, and now she felt rather foolish. If she left, where would she go and how would she get there? She was without resources.

Her gaze moved from the flickering sign back to Raley’s face. His lips were white with anger. They barely moved when he said, “Already one woman died on account of me. I’d rather avoid that happening again.”

“You should have thought of that before kidnapping me.”

With an expletive, he slammed the door closed, bolted it, then plowed his fingers through his hair.

“That’s right,” she said, “don’t forget that it was you who dragged me into this mess.”

He lowered his hands from his head. Looking at her hard, he said in a soft, measured tone, “Wrong. You got into this mess by falling for Jay Burgess’s charm.”

She held his stare for several beats, then strode past him and snatched up the plastic bag that contained the clothes he’d bought her. Which was particularly galling at the moment. She carried the package with her into the bathroom and closed the door, making sure he heard the click of the lock.