Riders on the Storm
- Автор: Горман Эд
- Серия: Sam McCain #10
- Год: 2014
- Язык: английский
- Год: Pegasus
- ISBN: 978-1-60598-625-8
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «Riders on the Storm». Краткое содержание книги:
He sighed like a diva, then handed it over.
“You too, dipshit. Bring it here.”
She was proving my suspicion that she was a one-woman liberation movement.
I walked over and handed it to her. She went to my car and opened the door and dropped them on the front seat.
“What the hell’re you doing?” Anders snapped.
“I’m riding back with him.”
“What the hell’re you talking about?”
“You may’ve had Byrnes kill a man.”
“He isn’t dead. He’s just hurt.”
“My God, listen to yourself, Lon. ‘He’s not dead. He’s just hurt.’ And that’s supposed to make me feel better? Maybe you had him kill Steve, too.” The idea that she might have been sleeping with the man who would go on to murder her husband — hiring it or doing it himself — broke her. She put both of her hands over her face and began weeping.
I reached out to touch her arm but Anders snarled at me.
“Don’t you ever touch that woman. She’s going to be my wife.”
Her weeping became cackling. “Did you hear him?” she said to me, her mascara running slivers of black down her cheeks. “He thinks I’m going to marry him after all this?”
Then came my marching orders, albeit teary ones. “C’mon. I want you to hide me someplace where this pig can’t ever find me.”
“I don’t believe this!” Anders was walking around in circles, throwing his hands up to the sky. “He parks in front of us and damn near kills us and you’re going off with him? And he has my gun! He has my gun! This is insane! Insane!”
He was still yelling at the innocent sky when she seated herself regally in my very unregal car, the handguns in her lap.
“I can’t believe I had an affair with him. I’m not stupid, am I?”
“No, you’re hardly stupid.”
“And I’m not a whore, am I?”
“No, I don’t think you’re a whore.”
“Then what am I?”
“You’re a woman who made a mistake is all.”
“I slept with the man who may have murdered my husband. That’s one hell of a big mistake.”
“Well,” I said, “I guess I’d have to agree with you there.”
Three minutes later:
“Are you going to turn him in?”
“I can’t prove he hired Byrnes to beat up Niven.”
“I heard him admit it. And so did you.”
“I don’t know if it’s enough.”
“And he also may have killed Steve.”
“That one he didn’t admit to.”
“I think he did it.”
“I think so, too. But there’s something I need to check out before I can be sure.” Then, “No offense, but Steve could be a jerk. Beating up Will and all.”
“I hate to say that with him gone and everything.”
“But he could be a jerk.”
“Yes; I guess I’d have to go along with that. But only sometimes. Sometimes he was the most loving man I ever knew. But then he started cheating on me — and it took its toll. It’s almost as if he’d forgotten how to woo me and love me. He must’ve been thinking of his girlfriend all the time. And it broke my heart.”
“But even though he was a jerk sometimes he was sort of a Boy Scout at the same time. John Wayne and all that stuff.”
“I never told him how stupid I thought the war was. But he was an Eagle Scout when he was in high school. And at the top of his ROTC class in college. So this war — he was all my country right or wrong. What Cullen did infuriated him.” Then, “Where are you going to hide me?”
“I have some friends I was thinking about. They’d be happy to make you comfortable and keep you safe.”
“That sounds perfect.”
But as we rolled closer to town...
“Do you mind if I ask where your friends live?”
“Over on Fourteenth Street and B Avenue.”
“On the southwest side, then?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm.”
“Hmm” being her last word for at least two minutes....
“I really hate imposing on people.”
“Of course you do.”
“And on that side of town the houses are pretty small.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you.”
“Why thank you. I was thinking maybe it would be easier to take a suite at the Royale.”
“Register under a false name.”
“I didn’t even think of that. Perfect.” Then, “Could I hire you to stand guard?”
“I’m not sure what that means.”
“You know, like a bodyguard.”
“I don’t think you need a bodyguard.”
“He could always bring in Teddy Byrnes.”
She was quite a female. So lost in herself she could insult you without even knowing it. But I admired her for mourning her husband. There I’d been wrong about her. And so I might be wrong about her fear of Anders. He really had looked insane back there at the bottom of his driveway.
“I know a couple of cops who’d sit in your room and keep you safe when they’re off-duty. You’d have to pay them of course.”
“But they’re police officers. Why would I have to pay them?”
“Off-duty, I said.”
“Well how much would it be?”
“Say five bucks an hour.”
“That could turn into a lot of money.”
“That’s what supermarkets pay them to direct traffic on weekends.”
“When you have money people are always trying to take advantage of you.”
“Those bastards,” I said. “Those dirty bastards.”
I guess my humor wasn’t to her taste. She didn’t laugh.
17
They wouldn’t let me talk to Will, so since Gordon Niven was in the same hospital I visited him.
He looked like most of the cartoons I’ve seen depicting some badly injured person in the hospital. Bandaged enough to make a passing reference to Boris Karloff as “The Mummy.”
“Remember now,” the nurse said as she left, “he can’t talk. The doctor put him in a coma.”
I pulled up a chair and sat next to him. I had a brief fantasy of taking a machete and dividing Byrnes into five slices.
The room was a single and even for a single a small one. Someone had placed a black rosary on his bandaged white hand. He was so gauze-wrapped it was hard to see any breaks or bruises. He slept. He was a mummy.
“I’m going to get that bastard for doing this to you.”
I looked around the room. Painting of Jesus on the west wall. For once he wasn’t pretty. Niven’s travel bag sat under the elevated TV set. He mumbled something and I instantly snapped my head around. Was he waking up?
I sat very still and listened. More mumbling but I had no idea if he was trying to say something or these were just noises inspired by things going on in his mind. I sat there for maybe ten minutes, then I decided to check out his travel bag.
Socks, underwear, shaving supplies, two folded golf shirts yellow and green, two small photo albums of Niven and a woman who was presumably his wife and their kids and grandkids, a paperback edition of The High Window by Chandler (I smiled when I remembered the discussion we’d had about Chandler), and then — the surprise — the same kind of back-pocket notebooks I used. Four of them lay on top of a tape recorder not much larger than the paperback.
I lifted the notebooks out and started reading them.
Like most of us in the business he datelined everything. 8/11/71. And then writing that was largely in code. Since the words were meant only for him, he didn’t care if anybody else could read them. Hell, he didn’t want anybody else to read them.
One day he had trailed Anders for nine hours. There was one sentence that made me wonder if Anders was cheating on Valerie. He’d gone into a new “Singles Only” apartment house and stayed for three hours.