Spectre Black (10 page)

Chapter
9

By the time Landry got back to the motel, it was going on three in the afternoon.

Someone had targeted him for death. As if whoever had jailed him went under the theory that Landry posed some kind of threat and should be eliminated, and that person had acted on that theory.

But it hadn’t panned out, so they let him go. Whoever wanted him dead had to have his hooks deep into the sheriff’s office, or at least the county jail.

He cut diagonally across the empty lot toward his room. It might be wise to move to another motel; leave the white car there and take the blue van. He needed to clean up first.

As he took the steps up to the second story, he glanced back at the white rental Nissan, still parked in the same place, nose to nose with a car in the next row. It was in the same place he’d left it. He approached the room from the back and from the right. The shades were drawn. He’d left the TV on to fool people into thinking he was still inside.

The room was clear, as he’d expected.

They—the sheriff’s department—knew where he was. They had searched his room, but he knew they had found nothing—everything but a change of clothes and a few traveler’s basics had been left in a storage unit two blocks over.

Probable cause these days, in certain towns, in certain counties, in certain states, in certain regions, could be stretched beyond recognition. Stretched, wrung out, hung on the line, ironed, folded, spindled, and hung up in a closet. If they’d been playing by the rule of law, they would have had no probable cause to arrest him. And they certainly had no basis to let him go, after he dispatched Earl.

Police in this town were a law unto themselves.

He wondered how Jolie had fit into this brave new world in Tobosa County.

The police had become paramilitary. Police and sheriff’s departments across the country were getting more and more hardware that they didn’t know what to do with. They had everything they needed to fight a ground war. Army surplus was king. SWAT gear, tactical vests, armor-plated vehicles called MRAPs (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles), tear gas, M-14s, grenade launchers.

Considering the fact that municipalities liked to get their money’s worth, he was lucky to be alive at all.

He checked the door for anything unusual. Saw nothing that would raise the alarm. Peered in through the tiny gap in the drapes. Unlocked the door, stood at the side, and kicked it open.

Nothing.

He made a quick search of the room. No one hiding in the shower stall, no one in the closet. No bogeyman under the bed. He checked for bugs, too—was quite thorough about it. Stood on the bed and unscrewed the light fixture. Nothing he could see stood out.

It was good to luxuriate under a hot shower.

It was going on five p.m. when he changed into the blue work shirt, jeans, and work boots, drove the blue van to Jolie’s neighborhood, and parked it out front.

He waited for Jolie’s fellow detective to come by. It didn’t take long. The woman drove up in a late-model car, on the inexpensive side but immaculate. She parked in the driveway and followed the stepping-stones to the front door, unlocked the iron door and the inner door, and went inside.

He looked around. No one was out and about. Going on dusk. The blinds to the house were closed.

Then he walked to the door and rang the bell.

She opened the front door but left the iron door locked. Peered out at him, her face betraying nothing.

“Is Jolie here?” he asked. “She said to come by and we’d settle up.” He motioned to his truck with the landscaping logo on the side.

The detective was no pushover. “You’ll have to come back later. Jolie’s out at the moment.”

Landry let his disappointment show. “Do you know when she’ll be back? I have a job in Deming tomorrow that’s gonna take several days, and to be honest . . .” He slouched a little, swiveled to glance at his van. “I usually get paid up front—she’s really good about that—and I kind of need the money.”

She wasn’t buying it. “Tell you what,” she said. “If you give me your number, I can have her call you.”

“That would be great.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a burner phone, and texted her the number. No more tearing off slips of paper to scrawl on, or asking her to go pull off a sheet from the pad by the phone. No muss, no fuss. She looked down at her own phone, then slipped it into the pocket of her jeans—

And started to close the door. Landry said, “If you talk to her, tell her Cyril came by.”

“Who?”

“Cyril. She’ll know.”

“Cyril. Like the saint? Saint Cyril?”

“That’s the one.”

He waited on the street parallel to Jolie’s. Fifteen minutes passed, then twenty. A few minutes after that he saw the headlights of the detective’s car pulling onto the road. He stayed at least two lights behind—there were three traffic lights before she turned into a newer neighborhood. The streets were quiet, with tall palm trees and pueblo-style condominiums, most of them pale yellow. Brown poles stuck out of the top of the stucco near the roofline like the pegs on Frankenstein’s forehead. Typical New Mexico fare. Landry stayed way back and out of sight with the van, training binocs on her. She pulled into a condominium’s driveway, the automatic garage door opened, and she drove inside. The garage door rattled back down.

He parked around the corner and walked past. It was getting dark. He wished he’d been closer and at an angle where he could see if there was another car parked inside.

Jolie had chosen the right person to look after her place while she was gone. But she didn’t know the danger. Landry did.

He punched in a number he knew by heart. His neighbor, Louise, the sixty-seven-year-old transplant from Washington, DC, where she’d worked in the State Department.

She answered immediately.

“How’s Barkley?” he asked. “Is he still with us?”

“He died two days ago.”

“I’m sorry,” Landry said. The wolfhound was old and sick, and even though it had been coming for a long time, he knew Louise was heartbroken.

But it did clear the path for him. “Will you do me a favor?”

Landry made the arrangements. It would entail another break-in at Jolie’s, but he knew she’d thank him later.

If she was still alive.

He firmed it up with Tom, the pilot who’d flown him out here. Gave him instructions where to go and when would be the best time.

“I’ve done extractions before,” Tom said.

“Just do it soon. I have a bad feeling.”

He sat alone in a booth in Dina’s Diner with his own image beside him in the mirror. Wondering if Jolie was still in communication with her fellow detective and pet-sitter. Maybe she’d left for parts unknown. If Jolie was alive, if the detective passed on his message, she would text him—unless she thought it was a trap.

If Jolie was on the run, she’d confided in this woman. Or at least, trusted her fellow detective to take care of her animals.

Landry felt good about that—but he knew that the enemy was much more dangerous than Jolie’s pal could imagine.

He felt it—felt it in his jaw. An electric feeling:
By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes
.

Back at the motel, he turned on the television.

The evening news came on—local, not national. Canned music blared like trumpets at a medieval fair. It was the same canned music he’d heard on several local news shows throughout the west. He thought they must all go to the same canned-news-music provider.

Behind the boyish-looking anchor and the female anchor in the blue suit, words flashed large on the screen: “Midtown Shooting.”

Ted Landigran, the boyish anchor, adopted a grave expression. “We now bring you live to the scene of a shooting in midtown where three people are dead. We have a reporter on the scene. Gary, tell me what you know.”

They went live to Gary, who looked a lot like Ted Landigran, except his hair was brown and Landigran’s was blond. He gripped the microphone hard, his voice strained. Still, he did a decent job.

There had been shots fired and a man screaming.

A jogger who lived in the neighborhood heard shots around three thirty in the afternoon and called the police.

The door to what looked like a duplex was open and in the garish light of the camera Landry saw what might or might not be a small section of a blue-jeaned leg. According to the news report, there were two bodies in the front room, and one in the back bedroom.

Back to Ted Landigran. He looked deadly serious. His handsome face had been transformed into a full frown, his eyes large and sad. When he spoke, he didn’t have the bantering tone he’d used for the Street Fair story. His voice was now measured and sad.

Footage ran of a police officer unspooling crime scene tape from a wheel, walking carefully around the edge of the house. The duplex was probably built in the seventies—fired-brick adobe painted over with white. The camera panned to a car in the driveway, then to a couple of people inside the doorway, barely visible, wearing what looked to be hazmat suits. One big guy stood there, his latex-gloved arms hanging out from his side, ignoring the camera.

Ted Landigran did not give the names of the three people in the duplex. But Landry could guess who they were.

He would know soon enough if he was right.

A knot of people stood nearby. One of them was being interviewed by the reporter. They’d all heard shots fired. They’d all heard a car drive away at a high rate of speed.

Ten minutes later, the victims were identified. Landry didn’t recognize the names: Gary Short, James Berk, and Amy Diehl. But he recognized the photos that flashed on the screen not long after.

Two of them—one of the men and the woman—had manned the checkpoint the day Landry had driven through, right before the third member of the group was shot to death.

More information came in. One witness described the car, a late-model white subcompact. The car had sideswiped a pole with the right front fender.

Landry got up, turned the TV off and the light out and stood back five feet
from the window. He could see his rental car from here, the white Nissan Versa.

It was still nose-in to the other car. But now he could see that there was a difference to the shape of the hood. Now that he looked. The hood looked bent up just a little on the right side.

Something had changed. He didn’t know what, but he trusted his instincts. The dull electric feeling in his jaw was back.

He grabbed the few things he’d left out in the room, once again glad he’d taken the time to leave the run bag and its contents in the storage facility. He left the TV on, and the bathroom light, and pocketed the key. He’d throw it in the nearest Dumpster he could find. He wiped down everything with a towel from the bathroom just to be on the safe side. Made sure no one saw him before walking around the end of the top floor and down the steps past the pool. It was full dark now, but there were plenty of lights. He kept to the shadows and started walking.

Sure enough, two city police cars swooped by—no sirens but they had their flashers going and the light bars on. They slowed and turned into The Satellite INN parking lot, and gunned around the back.