He got into the truck, rolled down the window. I called out to him. "So which story is true?"
"None, both," he said. "You're the writer. You figure it out. And Erica… go far and don't come back. The detectives still have a lot of questions about what happened last night. Don't be around. You're a cold one, and you might get by, but don't tempt it."
I started walking to the driver's side of the Camry. "We won't."
Inside the Camry I started up the car. Peter put his hand on my arm. "Had to make a payoff?"
"Yep."
"Things okay?"
"So far, so good."
I backed us out onto the street, thinking, Less than a week. We'll be in California in less than a week.
And I thought again about last night.
So about fifteen hours earlier, after Officer Roland Piper fell to the ground with a moan, I put my shoes back on and continued to work. I slid the collapsed police baton back into my purse and then sprinted across the street to the entrance of the Gold Club. I ducked in a brick alcove near some construction supplies, knowing what was going to happen in a few seconds.
There was a creaking sound.
The door to the Gold Club opened up.
A head poked out. Took a quick scan. Missed me. Ducked back inside.
Hurry up, I thought, hurry up. The cops are coming.
The head poked out again. A whisper.
My unzipped purse was in my hand. I put my free hand inside, curved it around a familiar and comfortable object.
Movement. Two men ducked out, carrying small black knapsacks in their hands, and they started sprinting up the sidewalk, away from me, and-
I stepped out, dropped the purse, hands now cradling a Smith & Wesson 9 mm pistol, and I shot them both in the back.
They dropped to the ground, the knapsacks tumbling next to them, and I stepped up and fired again, finishing the one on the left. The one on the right was moaning, curled over on his side, and I kicked him over onto his back so that he was looking up at me.
"Tsk, tsk, Tommy. Did you think I'd let this go? After my hubby planned it, scoped it, and brought you and your brother in? It would have been fine-but you were too greedy, you twit."
He grimaced. "Sonny… should have listened to Sonny… he wanted to whack your Peter… and I just wanted him out… by tuning him up…"
"Yes, Tommy, you should have listened to your brother." And then I shot him again, finishing him off.
I looked around. Still no sign of the police. No wonder crime was rampant in this part of town. I picked up both knapsacks and ran back to the cruiser, emptied the contents into my large purse and threw the purse onto the passenger seat and dumped the empty knapsacks into the nearby Dumpster. Went back to the construction gear, pulled out some prepositioned cinder blocks, and in a few minutes, my baton and pistol were dumped into the canal.
Then I ran back to the cruiser, made a desperate radio call, and waited, shivering on the cruiser's floor, doing my best to ignore the still figure of Officer Roland Piper on the ground.
As I drove Peter rubbed my leg and said, "Perfect. You were perfect."
I shook my head and my sweet hubby said, "What's wrong?"
"Something's not right," I said.
"What's that?"
I stopped at a traffic light, noted the exit sign for the interstate just a block ahead.
"Officer Piper, he said I was cold. Can you believe that? He said I was cold."
"Wow."
I turned to Peter. "You don't think I'm cold, do you?"
He laughed. "Erica… no way. Not cold at all."
I smiled. "Thanks, hon. I appreciate that."
My hubby laughed again. "Of course, if I said anything else, you'd probably kill me."
I turned, smiled sweetly, and blew him a kiss.
Sometimes a Hyena by Loren D. Estleman
FROM Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection
WHY I TOLD THE JOKE AT ALL I can't say. It wasn't that good, but then neither was the bar I told it in nor the bartender I told it to. I was drenched through with the sweat of a long day, with nothing else to show for it but the thought of an unpleasant telephone conversation with the client the next morning. Sometimes you stick with the subject like his own bad taste in aftershave, sometimes he drops you like a weak signal; but the guy paying your freight is never a philosopher.
I'd driven past the place a hundred times without noticing. I hadn't been thirsty the first hundred times. A long way back it had been someone's idea of home, a square frame eight-hundred-square-foot house with a shingle roof and tile siding that reminded you you'd missed three appointments to have your teeth cleaned. It didn't identify itself: the owner had just bought an orange LED sign that said OPEN and stuck it in the front window. But in that neighborhood a bar was all it could be. I still think of it, when I think of it at all, as the Open.
Inside was permanent dusk, two piles of protoplasm dumped on stools at the end of the bar, and a tabletop shuffleboard game whose pine boards had been slapped with a varnish that went tacky in high humidity so that one of the shuttles had stopped halfway down its length one day and decided that was where it would stay. A paint-can opener would be needed to pry it loose.
I don't remember what the bartender looked like. He would be a middle-aged guy running to flab who had seen Cocktail once, pictured himself in some swanky joint juggling shakers and stem glasses, and like the shuttle had come to everlasting rest in that spot. Normally I wouldn't have spoken to him beyond ordering a double scotch, but while he was siphoning it out my gaze lit upon a sepia picture in a frame on the wall above the beer taps. Someone had cut a photo of zebras grazing in the veldt from National Geographic and put it behind glass to make the place seem exotic.
"Guy walks into a bar," I said.
"Guys do, pleased to say." He slapped a paper napkin in front of me and set my drink on it. "This a joke?"
"That's the punch line from another 'Guy walks into a bar' joke; but you tell me. There's a kangaroo mixing the drinks. Kangaroo looks at the guy and says, 'I see you're surprised to find a kangaroo behind the bar.' Guy says, 'I'll say. Did the zebra sell the place?'"
He grunted, which told me all I needed to know about how he'd wound up in a dump like the Open. A really first-class barman laughs when the joke isn't funny and shakes his head when the story isn't that sad. Now that I think of it, his face belonged on the other side of the bar, tie-dyed with red gin blossoms and yellowed lost opportunities. But then that might just have been my face in the peel-and-stick mirrors in back of the bottles with recycled premium labels. An unexpected glimpse of one's reflection on that sort of day is no treat.
I'd thought of leaving him change from my ten, but I put it away. His kid could scrub pots and pans for his tuition, just like all the other self-made millionaires. I was in what the poets call a dark humor. I looked around for someone to kick sand in my face.
"Fucking cops," the bartender said.
He'd flicked on the TV on the corner shelf under the ceiling, in case my opening routine might lead to a set.
I wasn't the least bit curious. That state of mind is the first off-duty casualty in the life of a detective. I couldn't care less about what the cops were up to that put him out of his sunny mood. So of course I looked up at the screen.
A female reporter stood on a street crosshatched with yellow caution tape, pretending to read from a notepad while red and blue strobes pulsed in the background. An Early Response Team-downtown Detroit jargon for SWAT-had charged a house on the northwest side where an armed man was said to be barricaded with his wife. The husband was in custody, but the wife was dead with a slug in her heart. An unidentified source swore that no firearms were found in the house. An investigation was under way to determine whether a stray police round had killed the woman.