Killing Floor (23 page)

“You own both the houses?” Roscoe said.

“I don’t own a damn thing,” Judy said. “Sherman owned the houses. Yes, both of them.”

“So he was doing well for the first three years?” Roscoe asked her.

Judy gave her a look.

“Doing well?” she said. “Grow up, for God’s sake. He was a thief. He was ripping somebody off.”

“You sure?” I said.

Judy swung her gaze my way. Like an artillery piece traversing.

“It don’t need much brains to figure it out,” she said. “In three years he paid cash for two houses, two lots of furniture, cars, God knows what. And this place wasn’t cheap, either. We got lawyers and doctors and all sorts living here. And he had enough saved so he didn’t have to work at all since last September. If he did all that on the level, then I’m the First Lady, right?”

She was giving us a defiant stare. She’d known about it all along. She’d known what would happen when he was found out. She was challenging us to deny her the right to blame him.

“Who was his big contract with?” Roscoe asked her.

“Some outfit called Island Air-conditioning,” she said. “He spent three years hauling air conditioners. Taking them down to Florida. Maybe they went on to the islands, I don’t know. He used to steal them. There’s two old boxes in the garage right now. Want to see?”

She didn’t wait for a reply. Just jumped up and stalked out. We followed. We all went down some back stairs and through a basement door. Into a garage. It was empty except for a couple of old cartons dumped against a wall. Cardboard cartons, could have been a year or two old. Marked with a manufacturer’s logo. Island Air-conditioning, Inc. This End Up. The sealing tape was torn and hanging off. Each box had a long serial number written on by hand. Each box must have held a single unit. The sort you jam in your window frame, makes a hell of a noise. Judy glared at the boxes and glared at us. It was a glare which said: I gave him a gold watch and he gave me a shitload of worry.

I walked over and looked at the cartons. They were empty. I smelled a faint, sour odor in them. Then we went back upstairs. Judy got an album out of a cupboard. Sat and looked at a photograph of Sherman.

“What happened to him?” she asked.

It was a simple question. Deserved a simple answer.

“He was shot in the head,” I lied. “Died instantly.”

Judy nodded. Like she wasn’t surprised.

“When?” she asked.

“On Thursday night,” Roscoe told her. “At midnight. Did he say where he was going on Thursday night?”

Judy shook her head.

“He never told me much,” she said.

“Did he ever mention meeting an investigator?” Roscoe asked.

Judy shook her head again.

“What about Pluribus?” I asked her. “Did he ever use that word?”

She looked blank.

“Is that a disease?” she said. “Lungs or something?”

“What about Sunday?” I said. “This Sunday coming? Did he ever say anything about that?”

“No,” Judy said. “He never said much about anything.”

She sat and stared at the photographs in the album. The room was quiet.

“Did he know any lawyers in Florida?” Roscoe asked her.

“Lawyers?” Judy said. “In Florida? Why should he?”

“He was arrested in Jacksonville,” Roscoe said. “Two years ago. It was a traffic violation in his truck. A lawyer came to help him out.”

Judy shrugged, like two years ago was ancient history to her.

“There are lawyers sniffing everywhere, right?” she said. “No big deal.”

“This guy wasn’t an ambulance-chaser,” Roscoe said. “He was a partner in a big firm down there. Any idea how Sherman could have gotten hold of him?”

Judy shrugged again.

“Maybe his employer did it,” she said. “Island Air-conditioning. They gave us good medical insurance. Sherman let me go to the doctor, any old time I needed to.”

We all went quiet. Nothing more to say. Judy sat and gazed at the photographs in the album.

“Want to see his picture?” she said.

I walked around behind her chair and bent to look at the photograph. It showed a sandy, rat-faced man. Small, slight, with a grin. He was standing in front of a yellow panel van. Grinning and squinting at the camera. The grin gave it poignancy.

“That’s the truck he drove,” Judy said.

But I wasn’t looking at the truck or Sherman Stoller’s poignant grin. I was looking at a figure in the background of the picture. It was out of focus and turned half away from the camera, but I could make out who it was. It was Paul Hubble.

I waved Roscoe over and she bent beside me and looked at the photograph. I saw a wave of surprise pass over her face as she recognized Hubble. Then she bent closer. Looked harder. I saw a second wave of surprise. She had recognized something else.

“When was this picture taken?” she asked.

Judy shrugged.

“Summer last year, I guess,” she said.

Roscoe touched the blurred image of Hubble with her fingernail.

“Did Sherman say who this guy was?”

“The new boss,” Judy said. “He was there six months, then he fired Sherman’s ass.”

“Island Air-conditioning’s new boss?” Roscoe said. “Was there a reason he laid Sherman off?”

“Sherman said they didn’t need him no more,” Judy said. “He never said much.”

“Is this where Island Air-conditioning is based?” Roscoe asked. “Where this picture was taken?”

Judy shrugged and nodded her head, tentatively.

“I guess so,” she said. “Sherman never told me much about it.”

“We need to keep this photograph,” Roscoe told her. “We’ll let you have it back later.”

Judy fished it out of the plastic. Handed it to her.

“Keep it,” she said. “I don’t want it.”

Roscoe took the picture and put it in her inside jacket pocket. She and I moved back to the middle of the room and stood there.

“Shot in the head,” Judy said. “That’s what happens when you mess around. I told him they’d catch up with him, sooner or later.”

Roscoe nodded sympathetically.

“We’ll keep in touch,” she said to her. “You know, the funeral arrangements, and we might want a statement.”

Judy glared at us again.

“Don’t bother,” she said. “I’m not going to his funeral. I wasn’t his wife, so I’m not his widow. I’m going to forget I ever knew him. That man was trouble from beginning to end.”

She stood there glaring at us. We shuffled out, down the hall, out through the door. Across the awkward path. We held hands as we walked back to the car.

“What?” I asked her. “What’s in the photograph?”

She was walking fast.

“Wait,” she said. “I’ll show you in the car.”

19

WE GOT IN THE CHEVY AND SHE SNAPPED ON THE DOME
light. Pulled the photograph out of her pocket. Leaned over and tilted the picture so the light caught the shiny surface. Checked it carefully. Handed it to me.

“Look at the edge,” she said. “On the left.”

The picture was of Sherman Stoller standing in front of a yellow truck. Paul Hubble was turned away, in the background. The two figures and the truck filled the whole frame apart from a wedge of blacktop at the bottom. And a thin margin of background to the left. The background slice was even more out of focus than Hubble was, but I could see the edge of a modern metal building, with silver siding. A tall tree beyond. The frame of a door. It was a big industrial door, rolled up. The frame was a dark red color. Some kind of baked-on industrial coating. Partly decorative, partly preservative. Some kind of a shed door. There was gloom inside the shed.

“That’s Kliner’s warehouse,” she said. “At the top of the county road.”

“Are you sure?” I said.

“I recognize the tree,” she said.

I looked again. It was a very distinctive tree. Dead on one side. Maybe split by lightning.

“That’s Kliner’s warehouse,” she said again. “No doubt about that.”

Then she clicked her car phone on and took the photograph back. Dialed DMV in Atlanta and called in the number from the front of Stoller’s truck. Waited a long moment, tapping her index finger on the steering wheel. I heard the crackle of the response in the earpiece. Then she clicked the phone off and turned to me.

“The truck is registered to Kliner Industries,” she said. “And the registered address is Zacarias Perez, Attorneys-at-Law, Jacksonville, Florida.”

I nodded. She nodded back. Sherman Stoller’s buddies. The ones who had got him out of Jacksonville Central in fifty-five minutes flat, two years ago.

“OK,” she said. “Put it all together. Hubble, Stoller, Joe’s investigation. They’re printing counterfeit money down in Kliner’s warehouse, right?”

I shook my head.

“Wrong,” I said. “There’s no printing going on inside the States. It all happens abroad. Molly Beth Gordon told me that, and she ought to know what she’s talking about. She said Joe had made it impossible. And whatever Stoller was doing, Judy said he stopped doing it a year ago. And Finlay said Joe only started this whole thing a year ago. Around the same time Hubble fired Stoller.”

Roscoe nodded. Shrugged.

“We need Molly’s help,” she said. “We need a copy of Joe’s file.”

“Or Picard’s help,” I said. “We might find Joe’s hotel room and get hold of the original. It’s a race to see who’s going to call us first, Molly or Picard.”

Roscoe clicked off the dome light. Started the car for the ride back to the airport hotel. I just sprawled out beside her, yawning. I could sense she was getting uptight. She had run out of things to do. Run out of distractions. Now she had to face the quiet vulnerable hours of the night. The first night after last night. The prospect was making her agitated.

“You got that gun, Reacher?” she asked.

I squirmed around in the seat to face her.

“It’s in the trunk,” I said. “In that box. You put it in there, remember?”

“Bring it inside, OK?” she said. “Makes me feel better.”

I grinned sleepily in the dark. Yawned.

“Makes me feel better too,” I said. “It’s a hell of a gun.”

Then we lapsed back into silence. Roscoe found the hotel lot. We got out of the car and stood stretching in the dark. I opened the trunk. Lifted the box out and slammed the lid. Went in through our lobby and up in the elevator.

In the room we just crashed out. Roscoe laid her shiny .38 on the carpet on her side of the bed. I reloaded my giant .44 and laid it on my side. Cocked and locked. We wedged a chair under the door handle. Roscoe felt safer that way.

I WOKE EARLY AND LAY IN BED, THINKING ABOUT JOE
. Wednesday morning. He’d been dead five days. Roscoe was already up. She was standing in the middle of the floor, stretching. Some kind of a yoga thing. She’d taken a shower and she was only half dressed. She had no trousers on. Just a shirt. She had her back to me. As she stretched, the shirt was riding way up. Suddenly I wasn’t thinking about Joe anymore.

“Roscoe?” I said.

“What?” she said.

“You’ve got the most wonderful ass on the planet,” I said.

She giggled. I jumped on her. Couldn’t help it. Couldn’t do anything else. She drove me crazy. It was the giggle that did it to me. It made me crazy. I hauled her back into the big hotel bed. The building could have fallen down and we wouldn’t have noticed it. We finished in an exhausted tangle. Lay there for a while. Then Roscoe got up again and showered for the second time that morning. Got dressed again. Trousers and everything. Grinned at me as if to say she was sparing me from any further temptation.

“So did you mean it?” she said.

“Mean what?” I said, with a smile.

“You know what.” She smiled back. “When you told me I had a cute ass.”

“I didn’t say you had a cute ass,” I said. “I’ve seen plenty of cute asses. I said yours was the most wonderful ass on the whole damn planet.”

“But did you mean it?” she said.

“You bet I meant it,” I said. “Don’t underestimate the attraction of your ass, Roscoe, whatever you do.”

I called room service for breakfast. Removed the chair from under the door handle ready for the little cart. Pulled the heavy drapes. It was a glorious morning. A bright blue sky, no clouds at all, brilliant fall sunshine. The room was flooded with light. We cracked the window and let in the air and the smells and the sounds of the day. The view was spectacular. Right over the airport and to the city beyond. The cars in the lots caught the sun and looked like jewels on beige velvet. The planes clawed their way into the air and wheeled slowly away like fat, important birds. The buildings downtown grew tall and straight in the sun. A glorious morning. But it was the sixth straight morning my brother wasn’t alive to see.

ROSCOE USED THE PHONE TO CALL FINLAY DOWN IN MARGRAVE
. She told him about the photograph of Hubble and Stoller standing in the sun on the warehouse forecourt. Then she gave him our room number and told him to call us if Molly got back to us from Washington. Or if Picard got back to us with information from the car rental people about the burned Pontiac. I figured we should stay in Atlanta in case Picard beat Molly and we got a hotel trace on Joe. Chances were he stayed in the city, maybe near the airport. No point in us driving all the way back down to Margrave and then having to drive all the way back up to Atlanta again. So we waited. I fiddled with the radio built into the nightstand thing. Came up with a station playing something halfway decent. Sounded like they were playing through an early Canned Heat album. Bouncy and sunny and just right for a bright empty morning.

Breakfast came and we ate it. The whole bit. Pancakes, syrup, bacon. Lots of coffee in a thick china jug. Afterward, I lay back on the bed. Pretty soon started feeling restless. Started feeling like it had been a mistake to wait around. It felt like we weren’t doing anything. I could see Roscoe was feeling the same way. She propped the photograph of Hubble and Stoller and the yellow van on the nightstand and glared at it. I glared at the telephone. It wasn’t ringing. We wandered around the room, waiting. Then I stooped to pick up the Desert Eagle off the floor by the bed. Hefted it in my hand. Traced the engraved name on the grip with my finger. Looked across at Roscoe. I was curious about the guy who’d bought that massive automatic.

“What was Gray like?” I asked.

“Gray?” she said. “He was so thorough. You want to get Joe’s files? You should see Gray’s paperwork. There are twenty-five years of his files in the station house. All meticulous, all comprehensive. Gray was a good detective.”

“Why did he hang himself?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I never understood it.”

“Was he depressed?” I said.

“Not really,” she said. “I mean, he was always sort of depressed. Lugubrious, you know? A very dour sort of guy. And bored. He was a good detective, and he was wasted in Margrave. But no worse in February than any other time. It was a total surprise to me. I was very upset.”

“Were you close?” I asked her.

She shrugged.

“Yes, we were,” she said. “In a way, we were pretty close. He was a dour guy, you know, not really that close to anybody. Never married, always lived alone, no relatives. He was a teetotaler, so he would never come out for a beer or anything. He was quiet, messy, a little overweight. No hair and a big straggly beard. A very self-contained, comfortable type of a guy. A loner, really. But he was as close to me as he was ever going to get to anybody. We liked each other, in a quiet sort of a way.”

“And he never said anything?” I asked her. “Just hanged himself one day?”

“That’s how it was,” she said. “A total shock. I’ll never understand it.”

“Why did you have his gun in your desk?” I said.

“He asked if he could keep it in there,” she said. “He had no space in his own desk. He generated a lot of paper-work. He just asked if I could keep a box for him with the gun hidden in it. It was his private weapon. He said he couldn’t get it approved by the department because the caliber was too big. He made it feel like some kind of a big secret.”

I put the dead man’s secret gun down on the carpet again and the silence was shattered by the phone ringing. I sprinted for the nightstand and answered it. Heard Finlay’s voice. I gripped the phone and held my breath.

“Reacher?” Finlay said. “Picard got what we need. He traced the car.”

I breathed out and nodded to Roscoe.

“Great, Finlay,” I said. “So what’s the story?”

“Go to his office,” he said. “He’ll give you the spread, face to face. I didn’t want too much conversation on the phones down here.”

I closed my eyes for a second and felt a surge of energy.

“Thanks, Finlay,” I said. “Speak to you later.”

“OK,” he said. “Take care, right?”

Then he hung up and left me sitting there holding the phone, smiling.

“I thought he’d never call,” Roscoe laughed. “But I guess eighteen hours isn’t too bad, even for the Bureau, right?”

THE ATLANTA FBI WAS HOUSED IN A NEW FEDERAL BUILDING
downtown. Roscoe parked at the curb outside. The Bureau reception called upstairs and told us Special Agent Picard would come right down to meet with us. We waited for him in the lobby. It was a big hall, with a brave stab at decoration, but it still had the glum atmosphere government buildings have. Picard came out of an elevator within three minutes. He loped over. He seemed to fill the whole hall. He nodded to me and took Roscoe’s hand.

“Heard a lot about you from Finlay,” he said to her.

His bear’s voice rumbled. Roscoe nodded and smiled.

“The car Finlay found?” he said. “Rental Pontiac. Booked out to Joe Reacher, Atlanta airport, Thursday night at eight.”

“Great, Picard,” I said. “Any guess about where he was holed up?”

“Better than a guess, my friend,” Picard said. “They had the exact location. It was a prebooked car. They delivered it right to his hotel.”

He mentioned a place a mile the other way from the hotel we were using.

“Thanks, Picard,” I said. “I owe you.”

“No problem, my friend,” he said. “You take care now, OK?”

He loped off back to the elevator and we raced back south to the airport. Roscoe swung onto the perimeter road and accelerated into the flow. Across the divider, a black pickup flashed by. Brand-new. I spun around and caught a glimpse of it disappearing behind a raft of trucks. Black. Brand-new. Probably nothing. They sell more pickups down here than anything else.

ROSCOE PULLED HER BADGE AT THE DESK WHERE PICARD
said Joe had checked in on Thursday. The clerk did some keyboard work and told us he had been in 621, sixth floor, far end of the corridor. She said a manager would meet us up there. So we went up in the elevator and walked the length of a dark corridor. Stood waiting outside the door to Joe’s room.

The manager came by more or less straight away and opened the room up with his passkey. We stepped in. The room was empty. It had been cleaned and tidied. It looked like it was ready for new occupants.

“What about his stuff?” I said. “Where is it all?”

“We cleared it out Saturday,” the manager said. “The guy was booked in Thursday night, supposed to vacate by eleven Friday morning. What we do is we give them an extra day, then if they don’t show, we clear them out, down to housekeeping.”

“So his stuff is in a closet somewhere?” I asked.

“Downstairs,” the manager said. “You should see the stuff we got down there. People leave things all the time.”

“So can we go take a look?” I said.

“Basement,” he said. “Use the stairs from the lobby. You’ll find it.”

The manager strolled off. Roscoe and I walked the length of the corridor again and rode back down in the elevator. We found the service staircase and went down to the basement. Housekeeping was a giant hall stacked with linens and towels. There were hampers and baskets full of soap and those free sachets you find in the showers. Maids were pulling in and out with the trolleys they use for servicing the rooms. There was a glassed-in office cubicle in the near corner with a woman at a small desk. We walked over and rapped on the glass. She looked up. Roscoe held out her badge.

“Help you?” the woman said.

“Room six-two-one,” Roscoe said. “You cleared out some belongings, Saturday morning. You got them down here?”

I was holding my breath again.

“Six-two-one?” the woman said. “He came by for them already. They’re gone.”

I breathed out. We were too late. I went numb with disappointment.

“Who came by?” I asked. “When?”

“The guest,” the woman said. “This morning, maybe nine, nine thirty.”

“Who was he?” I asked her.

She pulled a small book off a shelf and thumbed it open. Licked a stubby finger and pointed to a line.

“Joe Reacher,” she said. “He signed the book and took the stuff.”