Life or Death (22 page)

Audie shakes his head.

‘How about a drink?’

Audie accepts a bottle of water. The cook is short and squat with an unkempt moustache and a soiled apron. He’s still talking as he splashes water on the hotplate and scrubs it with a wire brush. A TV is bracketed to the wall above his head. It’s showing Fox News – fair and balanced for those who like falling over. A woman reporter is doing a piece to camera, standing in front of crime-scene tape. In the background there are technicians in coveralls searching a Honda CRV.

‘Houston police are this morning hunting a dangerous fugitive following a double homicide at a city motel in the early hours. A mother and daughter were shot dead in an upstairs room at the Star City Inn on Airline Drive. Crime Scene Investigators are at the scene and the bodies are still inside.

The drama began just before five a.m. when guests heard several shots fired and police demanding that the gunman surrender…’

Vomit rises into Audie’s oesophagus and fills his mouth. He swallows, tasting whatever he ate yesterday. The bottle of water has dropped from his fingers and the contents are spilling into the gutter. Meanwhile, the footage switches to an eyewitness – a large white guy in a plaid shirt.

‘I heard these shots and someone shouting, “Stop or I’ll shoot!” and then more shots. There were bullets flying everywhere.’

‘Did you see the gunman?’

‘Nope, I kept my head down.’

‘Do you know anything about the victims?’

‘A woman and her little girl: I seen ’em having breakfast yesterday. The girl was eating waffles, a sweet little thing, missing her front tooth.’

Audie can’t look at the screen any more. Cassie and Scarlett are alive in his mind, breathing not bleeding, and he doesn’t want to believe differently. He wants to run. No, he wants to fight. He wants someone to explain.

‘The police have released the name and photograph of a man they wish to question…’

He glances up at the screen and sees his police mugshot, which is soon replaced by an image from his high school yearbook. It’s like he’s aging backwards, his skin growing smoother, hair longer, eyes brighter …

The camera shot changes again to the exterior of the motel. Audie recognises someone in the foreground – the short frizzy-haired FBI agent who once visited him in prison. She had wanted to talk about the money, but they had finished up chatting about books and writers like Steinbeck and Faulkner. She told him he should read Alice Walker and Toni Morrison to get a female perspective on poverty.

The cook has been scrubbing the hotplate, taking no notice of the TV. He wipes his hands and looks at Audie. ‘Are you crying?’

Audie blinks at him.

‘I’ll make you a breakfast burrito. Life is always better with food in your stomach.’ The cook is putting onions and peppers on the hotplate. ‘You doing drugs?’

Audie shakes his head.

‘You a drinker?’

‘No.’

‘I’m not judging you,’ says the cook. ‘Every man got his vices.’

The TV news has moved on to a tornado in Oklahoma and the third game of the World Series. Audie turns away, his face prickling, fever in his eyes. He can still feel Cassie’s body against his and hear her breath in his ear and smell her sex upon his fingertips. This is his madness. His fault. Einstein said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the outcome to be different. Audie’s life had been like that. Every day. Every relationship. Every tragedy.

Leaning into the gutter, his chest heaves and his nose runs and he hurts in places that he cannot name. Bereft and bewildered, he has lost control. Whatever plan he once had doesn’t seem important any more. It doesn’t seem possible.

Around him people carry on with their lives: commuters, shoppers, tourists, businessmen, boys in baseball caps, beggars in rags – people determined to be themselves, others trying to be someone else. Audie just wants to
be
.

32

Moss waits on the corner of Caroline and Bell streets watching vehicles being paused on red lights and shoved on by green. He looks at his cell phone. Nobody has called him yet. Maybe they were lying to him about the GPS tracking device. Glancing skyward, he looks into the blue white-welted sky and wonders if satellites are watching him now. He’s tempted to wave or flip them the bird.

A six-door Autocrat pulls up at the kerb and a black chauffeur gets out and tells Moss to spread his legs and brace himself against the car. The chauffeur runs a metal detector up and down Moss’s front and back, along his arms and between his legs. Moss left his .45 under the front seat of the pickup, wrapped in an oily rag, alongside a box of shells and a Bowie knife that Lester threw in for free.

The chauffeur nods to the car and the rear door opens. Eddie Barefoot is dressed in a dark suit with a flower in his lapel as though he’s going to a wedding or a funeral. He could be anything from twenty-five to fifty, but his yellow curls and spindly legs give him an antique look, like someone who has stepped from a sepia photograph.

A former Miami wiseguy who came to Houston in the late eighties when the Bonanno crime family was expanding its interests away from southern Florida, Eddie built up his own crew, making a fortune from bank and mail fraud, drugs, prostitution and money-laundering. Since then he’d diversified into legitimate businesses, but there was still no serious action in eastern Texas that didn’t get pieced to Eddie Barefoot. You paid your respects or you paid a percentage or you paid with broken bones.

The limousine is moving.

‘I was surprised to hear from you,’ says Eddie, adjusting the lapel flower. ‘According to my sources, you are still in the big house.’

‘You might want to change your sources,’ says Moss, trying to appear relaxed, but scared that his voice might betray him. His eyes are drawn to the depression in Eddie’s forehead. According to the story, a ball-socket hammer did the damage. And the man who delivered the blow, a business rival, was later buried up to his neck in sand and forced to swallow a live grenade. This could be a myth, of course, but Eddie had done nothing to correct the record.

‘I also heard you went squeaky. The brothers thought you might have found God.’

‘I went looking, but he’d left early.’

‘Maybe he heard you were coming.’

‘Maybe.’

Eddie smiles, appreciating the banter. His voice is steeped in the deep South. ‘So how did you get out?’

‘State let me go.’

‘That’s very magnanimous of the state. What did you give them in return?’

‘Nothing.’

Eddie removes something from the back of his teeth with his little finger.

‘So they just let you walk?’

‘Maybe it was a case of mistaken identity.’

Eddie laughs. Moss decides he should join in. The car is speeding along a freeway.

‘You know what’s really funny,’ says Eddie, wiping his eyes. ‘You think I’m buying this bullshit. You have precisely fifteen seconds to tell me why you’re here before I throw you out of this car. And just to be clear – we won’t be slowing down.’

The smiles have gone.

‘Two days ago, they dragged me out of my cell, put me on a bus and dumped me on the side of the road south of Houston.’

‘They?’

‘I don’t know their names. I had a sack over my head.’

‘Why?’

‘I guess they didn’t want me recognising them.’

‘No, moron, why did they let you go?’

‘Oh, they want me to find Audie Palmer. He broke out of prison three days ago.’

‘I heard.’ Eddie flicks a finger against his hollowed cheek, making a popping sound. ‘You’re looking for the money.’

‘That’s the idea.’

‘Have you any idea how many people have tried?’

‘Yeah, but I know Audie Palmer. I kept him alive inside.’

‘So he owes you.’

‘Yeah.’

Eddie’s face breaks into a smile and he looks like he should be on TV playing a pimp or a drug lord on
Law & Order
or
The Wire
. The limousine is heading towards Galveston Bay, passing freight terminals and railway yards and acres of containers stacked like children’s building blocks.

‘What’s supposed to happen when you find Palmer?’ asks Eddie.

‘They gave me a phone.’

‘And then what?’

‘My sentence is commuted.’

Eddie laughs again, slapping his thigh, hoedown style. ‘You just take the fucking cake, boy. Nobody is going to give you a get-out-jail-free card with a record like yours.’

Despite the disparaging abuse, Moss can sense that Eddie is trying to work out who would run an operation like this without his knowledge. Who had the juice to get a convicted killer out of prison? It had to be someone with serious connections – a government employee in the Justice Department, or the FBI or the state legislature. A contact like that could be valuable.

‘If you find Palmer, I want you to call me first, understand?’

Moss nods, in no position to argue. ‘What do you know about the Armaguard truck robbery in Dreyfus County?’

‘It was a clusterfuck. Four people died.’

‘What about the gang?’

‘Vernon and Billy Caine were part of a crew out of New Orleans. Brothers. They knocked over a dozen banks in California and then came east to Arizona and Missouri. Vernon was in charge. They had another regular, Rabbit Burroughs, who was supposed to be part of the armoured truck job but he got picked up for a DUI the weekend before the robbery. They had a warrant out for him in Louisiana.’

‘Who else was in the crew?’

‘They had someone on the inside.’

‘A security guard?’

‘Maybe.’

‘What about Audie Palmer?’

‘Nobody had ever heard of him. His brother Carl had a reputation for being a screw-up. He was dealing rock in the projects at seventeen – Mexican brown and crank, you name it – a finger in every pie. Later he ran with a crew in West Dallas, mainly cash-machine scams and mail fraud. Served five years in Brownsville. Came out with a bigger drug habit than when he went in. A year later he shot an off-duty dick in a liquor store. Vanished.’

‘So where is he?’

‘That, my black friend, is the seven-million-dollar question.’

Eddie seems philosophical rather than aggrieved. Usually he’d know about a robbery of this size in advance, but Vernon and Billy Caine were out-of-towners and Carl and Audie were small fry who probably scoped out the job.

Eddie pinches his nose as if clearing his ears. ‘You want my opinion? The money has long gone. Carl Palmer is either a mound in the desert or he’s spent the millions trying to stay hidden. Either way he’s been picked cleaner ’n a wishbone on Thanksgiving Day.’

‘Where can I find Rabbit Burroughs?’

‘Mostly he’s operating on the straight, but he still has a couple of girls hooking out of a laundromat in Cloverleaf. He also works part-time mopping floors at a school in Harris County.’

A button is pressed. The limousine pulls over to the kerb. Massed water looms on three sides. They’re on the edge of Morgan’s Point, next to a container terminal with an industrial corsetry of cranes and derricks.

‘This is where you get out,’ says Eddie.

‘How do I get back to my pickup?’

‘Fifteen years inside, I thought you’d appreciate the walk.’

33

Desiree has been awake most of the night, going over the details of the shootings, hoping an answer might emerge from the static and white noise. She closes her eyes and has to force them open again. Someone is hovering behind her, leaning on a partition.

Eric Warner chews on a matchstick. ‘I got a call from the Assistant Attorney General’s office. Someone has filed a complaint about you.’

‘Really? Let me guess – they say I’m too short for the rollercoaster?’

‘It’s not a joke.’

‘Who?’

‘Sheriff Ryan Valdez.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He claims you were abusive, heavy-handed and crude. He said you cast wild aspersions.’

‘Did he actually use the word aspersions?’

‘He did.’

‘I called him a liar and he went and swallowed a thesaurus.’

Warner leans one buttock on the edge of her desk and folds his arms. ‘That sarcastic streak is going to get you into trouble.’

‘If I gave up sarcasm that would leave interpretive dance as my only way of communicating.’

This time Warner smiles. ‘You don’t normally harass law enforcement officers.’

‘The man had no right to be where he was. He should have called for backup. He should have notified the FBI.’

‘You think that would have made a difference?’

‘A mother and daughter might still be alive.’

‘You don’t know that.’

Desiree sniffs and scratches her nose. ‘Maybe not, but I believe there’s a thin line between cowboy cops and criminals and I think Valdez is dancing on that high wire, laughing at us.’

Warner tosses the chewed matchstick into a bin. He’s got something else to say but takes no pleasure in the news.

‘Frank Senogles is taking over the case.’

‘What?’

‘Seniority. It’s now a double homicide.’

‘But I’m still on the task force, right?’

‘You’ll have to ask him.’

There are many things Desiree wants to say, but she bites her tongue and stares at Warner, feeling disappointed and betrayed.

‘You’ll get your chance,’ he says.

‘I have no doubt about that,’ she replies, glancing at the paperwork on her desk.

When she looks up, Warner has gone. At least she didn’t embarrass herself by getting upset or pleading. She’ll have to talk to Senogles … be nice to him. The two of them have a history, or what an independent observer might call a love–hate relationship: Senogles would
love
to get into Desiree’s pants and Desiree
hates
his smugness and bullying ways. A lot of field agents are aggressive in their dealings with people, revelling in the power the badge gives them. They prod, cajole, lie and intimidate to get results, bragging about these things afterwards, as though they’re in competition with each other. Who can clear up the most cases? Who can piss highest up the wall?