For hundreds of square miles around the L.A. basin, the word was flashing from police agency to police agency: the license plate, the description of the car, the description of the driver. A thousand cops were being called into the search for Danny Summervale. Strictly by the odds, any one of them had as much chance as I did of nailing the kid, but I wasn’t going by the odds just then. I was riding on a gut instinct. One that was telling me to go back to the last place a sixteen-year-old boy had been happy.
The picnic ground was empty at this hour of the morning. There were no obvious signs of Danny or his coupe. I didn’t expect there to be. He’d be looking for someplace quiet and out of sight for what he had to do.
I circled the ’57 slowly around the drive-through loop of the picnic ground, telling myself to stay cool and look for tracks. I knew he had to be with the car. That was the one ace I held.
And then, there they were, fresh tread marks in the dust of a two-rut service road that lead off into the brush. The ’57 and I followed, and man, I’ll tell the world I was prayin’.
A second later and we were pulling in behind the primer-black Ford in its hiding place.
The coupe’s engine was idling and the other half of that cut garden hose led from one of the exhaust pipes to the driver’s-side window.
I bailed out of Car and raced to the coupe, tearing the hose out of the shop-rag gasket packed around it in the open wind wing. Danny lay sprawled across the front seat, unmoving, his lips already taking on that vivid scarlet hue of carbon-monoxide poisoning. The penciled note I didn’t need to read rested on the dashboard.
The coupe’s doors were locked and I thrust my arm in through the wind wing to flip the door handle. A choking petroleum haze billowed around me as I hauled Danny out of the car and carried him to clean air. Dumping the boy on the grass, I rolled him facedown and started artificial respiration, lifting his arms and shoving on his back to squeeze the poison out of his lungs.
As I labored, I found myself swearing at the kid as if he were a cranky engine.
“Breathe, dammit!... Joe wouldn’t want this!... Breathe!... Your folks just lost one son, they’re not going to lose two!... Come on! Light off, you stupid little son of a bitch! Breathe!”
The dual exhausts on Danny’s rod saved his life. He’d only been catching the output from one bank of cylinders. I felt his ribs heave as he sucked in that first load of real oxygen and then the coughing spasm started, clearing his pipes. He was going to make it. Physically, anyway. For the rest, we weren’t going to know for a while.
I sat him up and gradually the coughing segued into a series of shuddering sobs and broken words. He could say it now. There wasn’t anything left to hide anymore.
“It was... supposed to be a joke! God, Kevin... it was just supposed... to be a joke!”
“It’s okay. I know it was, man.” I rested my hand on his shoulder, helping him to stay upright. “Somebody told you about the acetylene gimmick and you rigged Joe’s headlights on the morning of the rod run.”
“Yeah... yeah. This guy told me that if you tapped and drilled a set of sealed beams... and filled them... with acetylene and oxygen, the lights would pop when you turned them on... like firecrackers... Oh Jesus God, Kevin! I swear it was just supposed to be a joke! I didn’t know! I... didn’t... know!”
“I know you didn’t, Danny. The jerk that told you about that gag didn’t mention that if you got the gas mixture wrong, a sealed beam could blow more like a stick of dynamite than a firecracker. It wasn’t your fault. You’ve got to remember that, Danny. This wasn’t your fault.”
The kid looked up at me with wet and swollen eyes. “How did you find out?”
I shrugged. “From looking over what was left of Joe’s car. Our lab guys were real good about picking up all of the pieces at the crash site. Every last little bit. But they didn’t recover any glass fragments from the headlights. Not one. Both of the ’vette’s sealed beams must have been blown completely to powder. There was nothing left to recover. The headlights themselves must have been the explosion point. I worked it out from there.
“When I found out that you weren’t at your folks’ place, and that you’d found out about Linda dying, well, I had a hunch that you might come back up here to do something really dumb.”
Danny started to break up again, crumpling under a load that could destroy a grown man much less a kid just getting a hand on adulthood. “I killed them, Kevin. I killed Linda... and I killed my brother...”
The boy collapsed against me. “I need to die, too,” he bawled, his face buried against my chest. “I shouldn’t live! I don’t want to...”
I locked my arms around him, holding him up, trying to give him something to hang on to. “Bullshit, Danny! You think Joe would want that? Hell no! He loved you and he was proud of you. He wouldn’t want you to quit on him. He’d want you to keep going and get past this.”
I felt the wetness of the boy’s tears soaking into my T-shirt. “How?” Danny asked brokenly. “How do you get past something this bad, Kevin? How can I?”
I felt a few tears coming myself about then. Jesus! I didn’t have anything going for this kind of action. This was a job for the big brothers of the world, for the Joe Summervales. But then Joe wasn’t going to be around anymore.
“Well, you start by living, man,” I found myself saying. “You start by living.”
The Ferryman
by Paul Bishop
Paul Bishop is the author of nine novels, five featuring LAPD detective Fey Croaker. He has also written for feature film and for such TV shows as Law & Order, Diagnosis Murder, The New Detectives, Navy SEALs: The Untold Stories, and many others. But writing is not Mr. Bishop’s day job: He is a 25-year veteran of the LAPD, where he currently supervises the West L.A. Area Robbery Unit.
Why are the walls of every interrogation room in the city painted urine yellow? After twenty-five years of asking questions in these rooms, I have yet to uncover the truth of that. Was the color chosen as an appropriate accent by the interior-design genius from House and Jail, who also picked the interchangeable, yet dramatically scarred, wooden table and rickety chairs to round out the ambiance? Were the walls originally canary yellow, and had they soured as the thousands of lies and half-answers told within their cramped confines splattered over them?
I didn’t know the truth of it, and it bothered me.
The bigger truth, however, was what Michael Thomas Horner was going to tell me — whether he wanted to or not — about the murder of Alexis Walker.
As he slumped in the chair next to me, the stench of fear coming off Horner was strong and ripe. He reeked. This was a good thing. He sat with his arms wrapped around himself, his skinny legs twisted so they crossed at the knees and again at the ankles. I think I hated him at that moment. No reason, just an accumulation of loathing I suddenly felt like divesting.
“Michael, my name is Detective Ferryman.” I extended my hand. Horner reluctantly unwound an arm and presented his own hand to me like a limp fish. I enveloped it, gave it a firm shake, and held on to it as he tried weakly to pull it away. His fingernails were long, jagged, and dirty, all sharp edges. “I appreciate you voluntarily coming to the station with the uniformed officers. You do understand you are not under arrest and are free to leave at any time?”
“Yes.”
I was between Horner and the door to the interrogation room. The only way he was leaving was in handcuffs after I’d wrung a confession out of him. But he didn’t know that, and my statements would sound good when the audiotape of the interrogation was played back in court. Legally, it only mattered what Horner believed — and he’d just admitted he believed he was free to leave. It would be the first admission of many. That belief was also important, because if he believed he wasn’t under arrest, then I didn’t have to provide him with the Miranda admonition. Miranda only applies when two specific factors come together: A suspect has to know he is under arrest, and a detective has to be asking him questions about the crime for which he was arrested. Any other situation, the suspect is fair game.