I caught Nix at the end of his shift, after he’d changed into street clothes and squirted on cologne. He was happy enough to check out an unmarked car and tag along, and now he’s keeping way back, just in case.
Coasting by the Wendy’s on the right, I spot my red bandanna. Five foot seven or eight, in wide black shorts with white stitching and a loose-fitting Rockets jersey, the bandanna cinched tight over his forehead, covering his eyebrows but leaving his scalp exposed. He sees me rolling up and snaps his phone shut, slipping it into a bottomless pants pocket.
He opens the passenger door, slips inside. “Keep driving, homes.”
“Yo, ese, you got a name or what?”
He brushes me forward, not looking too impressed by my mastery of the lingo. “Just move, okay? We can’t be talking right here.”
I let my foot off the brake and coast back onto Fondren. He smells of fast food and stale cigarettes. A hairline goatee rims his mouth, and he has an ominous teardrop tattoo under his eye. I get a strange vibe off the guy, but people who can name names in a murder are a different breed, and strange is the only vibe they give off. At Bellaire he motions for a left, and then another left onto Osage, into a shady residential block full of low-slung ranch houses, their backyards divided by pickets of sun-grayed fencing.
“Park under one of these trees,” he says, pointing to a row of oaks overhanging the street.
I slide the gearshift into park, then turn in my seat. “So what do you know about Octavio Morales?”
He answers with the flash of a hand, his half-formed fist snapping against my jaw, knocking me back against the driver’s side door. I wince, my teeth rattled. His other hand comes up, and I see a glint of metal. The notched round cylinder of a J-frame revolver. He punches forward with the muzzle at my belly.
I go for his wrist, seizing the bone just in time to push the muzzle wide. The hammer drops and the cabin fills with smoke, like a bomb’s gone off. All I can hear is silence, but my eardrums throb.
I jerk his gun hand forward, blading my body to get my right arm between him and the revolver. He buries his hand in my hair, ripping backward.
Another concussion and this time the driver’s window shatters. Glass everywhere, and I’m choking on the cordite-filled air.
I trap his gun hand against the steering wheel, setting the horn off. It blares, but I hear the sound as if it’s coming from over the horizon. I cock my right arm back, smashing my elbow into his face. His chin snaps back, so I pound him again. And again.
His fist tightens around my hair, pulling hard, but I barely feel the pain. My elbow rams back at him over and over, until I feel his grip on the revolver loosen. He shrinks back, letting the gun drop, then fumbles for the door handle.
I catch a handful of jersey as he goes, but he twists free and starts running down the sidewalk.
Then I’m outside, leaning into the crook of the open door, the front sight of my pistol lining up over his shrinking silhouette. I’m breathing too hard to take the shot.
My hearing fades back in with a distant screech of tires somewhere behind me. I turn, ready to unload on Nix, who should have rolled up with lights flashing at the first shot.
Instead, a massive red Ford pickup speeds down Osage, the tinted passenger window sliding down. I can’t make out the driver until he’s on top of me, at which point his face is hidden behind a sawn-off double-barrel shotgun.
I drop to the pavement. A hurricane of buckshot blasts through the half-open window, showering me with glass.
The truck screeches off, accelerating toward my would-be assassin, who crouches winded on the sidewalk. Looking down at my pistol, I find the hammer back and smoke rising from the muzzle. On the ground around me, a half-dozen silver shell casings, even though I don’t remember pulling the trigger.
When I try to stand, a knife-like burn runs through my left thigh. My pant leg is damp with blood, but I can’t find a hole, just black wetness and the smoky char of a contact wound. Up ahead, the truck’s passenger door opens and the man climbs in. I raise my pistol one-handed, take a breath, and almost pull the trigger. But I don’t, not wanting to miss and send a stray round flying.
As the truck moves away, laying down more rubber, I slump halfway into the driver’s seat, dropping the cocked hammer with the thumb release. On the floor beneath the brake, the shiny revolver lies smoking, flecks of blood on the metal.
Sergeant Nixon’s unmarked car pulls alongside.
“Did something just go down?” he calls out.
“Yeah,” I say, holding my sticky fingers up for inspection. “I just got shot in the leg. But don’t worry, the shooter got away.”
Nix looks at me like I haven’t answered him. Maybe I haven’t. All the sudden I have this incredible urge to lie down. I set my pistol on the floor mat and stretch out, staring up at the car’s ceiling. Somebody’s in the vehicle with me, making this high-pitched animal whimper. I glance between the seats, but there’s no one in back. It must be me.
In the back of the ambulance I inspect my new wool cutoffs, the left leg shorn to reveal a crisscross of white bandages. The paramedic, looking pleased with his work, gives my knee a slap. Thanks to the pain medication, I barely feel it.
“You’re lucky it caught the meaty part,” he says, talking loudly in deference to my temporary hearing loss.
“I feel lucky.” I lift my leg to inspect the underside. “Are you saying I have fat thighs?”
He chuckles, climbing out of the ambulance. Down on the pavement, Nix looks haggard under questioning from Captain Hedges, who, in spite of having farmed me out, responded with admirable speed when the news reached downtown. We don’t take an officer-related shooting lightly around here, even when it happens to an officer we’ve thought about shooting a couple of times ourselves. Mosser is out there, too, and so is Cavallo, who keeps sending told-you-so glares in my direction.
Bascombe hops up onto the fender, then slides alongside the stretcher for a look.
“You want to tell me what happened?”
“Come again?”
He repeats himself, dialing up the volume.
“What I really want,” I tell him, “is to eat. I’m starving.”
“You can eat at the hospital. But seriously, if this guy drew down on you without no warning, then – ”
“No hospitals,” I say, shaking my head. “Look, you’ve got his description and his prints will be all over that revolver. I didn’t get the license plate of the truck, but I’m thinking you’ll be able to recognize it from the bullet holes. When you catch the guy, you can ask him what he was thinking. Me, I don’t know.”
“We are gonna find him,” he says. “That’s a promise.”
“I know we are.”
He looks at the bandages awhile, shaking his head. “And that’s everything?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“All right,” he says, scooting his way back to the ground.
In fact, it’s almost everything. I left out only the part about my visit yesterday to Tony Salazar. That is one angle I intend to follow up personally.
Despite my protests, the paramedics insist on transporting me to Herman, where Charlotte turns up in an understandably apoplectic state. Cavallo, perhaps motivated by some instinctive revenge impulse, takes her aside, and instead of glossing over the details, fleshes them out one by one, making sure no aspect of the life-or-death struggle escapes Charlotte’s notice. From my bed I can hear them out in the hallway, and every so often one or the other will glance inside, Charlotte’s nose and mouth hidden behind her hands, Cavallo shaking her head at me.
The doctors troop in and out, displaying about as much sensitivity as homicide detectives hovering over a headless corpse. One of them, a youngish Indian with a posh English accent, assures me that in spite of the superficial nature of the wound, it’ll make for a nasty scar, as if he can already imagine me showing it off years from now, telling the story to my nonexistent grandkids.