Lethal Control, page 9
part #3 of The DuPage Parish Mysteries Series
It would come snapping and snarling, but its skin would be so soft—
I went back to my breathing. And by the time we reached the next line of trees, I was cold again. Frozen all the way through. Eli Martins, everyone. Ice queen.
Posey was waiting on the other side of the trees, and after a moment, I saw why. Ahead of us, a series of large, man-made ponds ran in two rows. A small pontoon boat was drydocked in a sun-bleached shed. At the far end of the ponds, a small brick house sat, a dirt road curling off from it like a tail. The sun had started to set, and it gave everything warm colors—red and orange and gold—but when I exhaled, I expected to see my breath.
“Reb?” Posey called. He put his hands to his mouth and tried again: “Reb!”
The shouts echoed back to us and faded to stillness.
“Come on,” Dag said, shouldering between us. “We’re going home after this, and we’ll pick up tomorrow.”
I caught up with Dag, walking at his side, but he didn’t look at me. The sun layered copper across the surface of the water. One time, I wanted to say, when I locked myself in the bathroom, you took the door off its hinges. That’s what I needed, and somehow you knew. All I heard was the sound of my tennis shoes flexing with each step, the rustle of dry grass, the skitter of a pebble.
“Why would somebody dig themselves eight ponds instead of one big one?” I asked in a low voice. “And what’s the point of a fucking boat? I could jump across these. Ok, I couldn’t, but you know what I mean.”
Twenty seconds of silence felt pretty damn long. Then Dag said, “They’re for crawfish. This is a crawfish farm. Well, these are rice paddies in the spring and summer. Then they harvest the rice, and they stock crawfish.” The coiled spring of his voice relaxed somewhat. “See? They leave the rice stalks after the harvest; that’s for the crawfish to eat. And you need the boat for when it’s time to harvest the crawfish.”
“I never thought about a crawfish farm,” I said. “I thought—I mean, don’t you just catch them in the river?”
Dag laughed, and I could hear more of the spring decompressing. “Sure, plenty of people do. But it’s like anything else—there’s a demand, and so people figure out ways to meet that demand. It’s a good business, I think. You get the rice crop and the crawfish. You can do it on land that’s no good for planting. Of course, you can’t mind getting wet.”
“I don’t mind getting wet.”
He mimed something on his head that, in an indignant flash, I realized was supposed to be my hair.
“Dagobert LeBlanc!”
He smiled and dropped his hand to his side
“I cannot believe you!”
He shrugged. “There aren’t enough hair dryers in the world.”
“You are—” I stared at him. “You are being savage! I love it!”
He shrugged again. The angle of the light was perfect to bring out the texture in that short, stiff gunmetal hair. From behind the tree line came the sound of an engine—surprisingly close, which meant we were near a road, although I hadn’t heard any other cars.
“Do you ever get tired of me?” I asked quietly.
“I could do without that time you cancelled cable to teach me a lesson.”
“It wasn’t to teach you a lesson. It was to teach the cable company a lesson. Or maybe you. I forget.” I swallowed. “Dag, I’m serious.”
“I love you,” he said. And because he was Dagobert LeBlanc, that was actually enough.
I opened my mouth to say something, and then I stopped. Over Dag’s shoulder, where the drydocked pontoon boat was stored, I thought I saw movement. I caught Dag’s sleeve and nodded toward the shed. Now, everything was completely still. I grimaced, and I started to shake my head, but Dag held up a finger. He waited until Posey was looking at us and waved and held a finger to his lips. Then he started toward the boatshed.
The pontoon boat wasn’t big, and it had a protective canvas cover in addition to the sun-bleached wood of the shed. I strained to hear, but all I got was my own heartbeat and the slight sounds of Posey shifting.
Then Dag said, “You can come out now.”
Still nothing.
“We’re all friends, Reb,” he said. It was his cop voice—firm, controlled, even. “Posey’s here. You might not know my name, but you remember me from the Stoplight, I bet. I’m Dag, and this is Eli.”
“Reb?” Posey asked. A tremor ran through the name. “Reb, baby, are you in there?”
The answer was the stutter of a zipper on the canvas cover. It moved slowly. Posey drew in a sharp breath, and then he wiped his eyes and dried his hands on his jeans. A pale hand parted the canvas flaps, and then Reb slipped out from his hiding spot aboard the pontoon.
He was as beautiful as I remembered: shorter than the rest of us, built lithe and muscular, his white-blond hair matted and snarled with broken pieces of leaves. He was wearing a too-large Red Man Chewing Tobacco t-shirt, along with the cut-offs and the Timberlands from before. He looked like the summer catalogue model for pretty peckerwood boys, and if the cold bothered him, he gave no sign of it. He looked at me and Dag and bared his teeth.
“Don’t worry about them,” Posey said, sliding in front of us. He held his arms out—somewhere between an embrace and a way to hold Reb’s attention. “Hey, baby. Hey, sweetheart. Are you ok? I missed you. I’ve been so worried about you.”
Reb offered Dag and me another warning glance before slipping into Posey’s arms. He buried his face in Posey’s chest. Posey held him tight, whispering to him. It might have been my imagination, but after a moment, I thought Reb relaxed slightly. I thought maybe I even saw him start to shake.
“We can bring the truck down that road,” Dag said to me in a low voice, “and then we’ve got to decide where we can take him.”
Before I could answer, an Explorer with dark windows—the one I remembered from the causeway—drove out down the road, appearing from behind a windbreak of brush and trees. It came to a stop near the old brick house, and the doors opened, and men got out, drawing their weapons, making a big show of it.
And Joey Jaws was one of them.
DAG (4)
“Posey,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady—what Eli called my cop voice. “Trouble.”
Reb made a noise that, from an animal, I would have called a growl. He spun around, his back to Posey, and a little knife flashed in his hand. Little—it was three inches of steel, and I figured that was enough to do plenty of damage. Posey had a hand on Reb’s shoulder, and he was still whispering to him, calming him, but he flicked a look at me, and the look had a question.
“We can go back the way we came,” Eli said. He was clutching my arm. “They can’t follow us as easily, and we might be able to lose them.”
“Call the police,” I said.
Eli took out his phone and placed the call. I tried to keep my face neutral. We wouldn’t be able to lose Joey and his thugs. The tree lines and windbreaks weren’t thick enough for that, and we’d be running across miles of open ground. Besides, I was starting to suspect Joey Jaws—or someone on his team—was smarter than I’d given them credit for. After all, they’d had a pretty good idea to follow us with that drone.
Reb stretched up on tiptoe to whisper something in Posey’s ear.
Posey shook his head. “No. No fucking way.”
Reb’s brow tightened.
“I said no.”
“Dag,” Eli said, plucking at my sleeve again, “we have to go—”
The gunshot blew away the rest of the words. Part of the shed’s roof exploded out; dust and splinters and the light of sunset rained down on us, and the sound of the wood being torn away overlapped with the distant clap of the shot.
“I just want to talk to the boy,” Joey Jaws said. I hadn’t spent much time going to gay bars—I never got how you were supposed to hit it off with someone while you had Cher screaming in your ear, and the badge bucks were out of control—but I’d learned, after a few visits, to recognize the guys who thought they were entitled to whatever they wanted. You heard it in straight guys too, of course. It was a way of talking. Like everything was ok, everything was easy. Or it would be, as long as you gave them what they wanted. “How about that? How about you let me talk to him?”
“Fuck off!” Posey shouted back. He had a hand clamped around Reb’s shoulder.
Joey laughed. “Kid, you listening?”
“I said fuck off!”
“Kid, I’m trying to do right by you. Your own place, a good doctor, money—whatever you want. I’ve seen you fight. Hell, I’m not even asking you to do anything you don’t want to do. That’s why I want you—you’ve got it in you. You love it. You can bring your boyfriend if you want. You can bring the whole gang and get stuffed from hole to hole, if that’s your thing. Hey, I’m an open-minded guy.”
“You’re a loudmouth, that’s what you are,” I said under my breath. I was trying to think. I hadn’t been a good deputy—never mind what Eli thought—but I’d been decent at tactics, and right then, I was trying to think tactically. If I’d been Joey Jaws, I would have worried that we’d try to cut towards the closest road. If we got to a road, and if we could flag down a vehicle, if we could get to Bragg, we’d have a chance.
“How about this?” Joey shouted. He was twirling the pistol like he was a gunslinger, a huge smile on his face as he strutted up and down a stretch of dirt road. “How about you tell me what you want, kid? Whatever you want, you got it. You want a car? How about that? Kids love cars. You want somebody who will cook and clean? I got a cousin, you wouldn’t fucking believe her ziti. You want somebody to scratch your back? Kid, you’re looking at him; I’m a hell of a back scratcher.”
“Asshole,” Posey said and shook his head.
“Let Reb talk to him,” I said.
Posey, Reb, and Eli stared at me.
“We need to buy time until the police can get here,” I said. “Reb can—”
“Reb isn’t going anywhere near that prick,” Posey said, drawing Reb against him.
“Maybe you missed it, but that prick took a shot at us. We’re lucky he hit the roof; at that distance, with a pistol, he’s practically shooting blind.”
“It’s like I told you.” Posey was breathing hard, a ruddy glow under the dark skin of his cheeks. “You’re not the type, so you don’t understand. You can pussy out if you want, but I’m not going to let anything happen to Reb.”
“Come on,” Eli muttered. “Why aren’t they answering?”
I tried to tune them all out; five seconds of silence would have been nice, five seconds when I didn’t have Posey reminding me that I’d been a shit deputy and now I was a shit boyfriend, five seconds when Joey Jaws wasn’t yammering nonstop like—
Like he wanted to keep our attention.
Several things happened at once.
I spun around.
Reb growled and twisted out from under Posey’s hand to follow my gaze.
“Yes, there are men holding us at gunpoint,” Eli glanced at me as he spoke into the phone.
If he said more, I didn’t hear it. Three men had come up behind us; their trail was a dark break in the overgrown weeds, and it snaked back toward—I guessed—the road. All three were white. Two of them in their thirties. One had sandy hair and a round face, with a beard that was doing nothing to hide his bad complexion. The second had his head shaved, and he was heavyset in a blue polo and khakis and loafers, like he had to go to an all-dads meeting right after this. I heard that thought, heard how much like Eli it sounded, and realized a hysterical laugh was trying to escape. The third one was younger, with olive skin and his dark hair moussed, and he obviously thought he was pretty. You could tell because he wore his windbreaker too tight, to show off all that beef, and the outline of the holster was visible under the nylon. All three of them had guns pointed at us.
“Don’t,” the one with the shaved head said when I reached for the Sig.
I stopped and eased my hand away from the weapon.
“Everybody be smart,” Shaved Head said. “Joey just wants to talk to the kid.”
“You’d better get lost,” Posey said. He was touching his prosthesis again. For a moment, I thought I saw something else—twisting, braided shadows.
The pretty one laughed. “Yeah? Or what?”
It was Eli who answered: “Fuck around and find out.”
The pretty one started to laugh again. That was when Reb pounced. There was something different about the boy—something my eyes couldn’t quite keep up with—but I had the impression of bristling fur and huge teeth. The pretty one screamed, and he and Reb hit the ground and rolled across the packed dirt.
Shaved Head and Bad Beard turned, following Reb and Pretty Boy, and both raised their guns. But they didn’t shoot. Reb and Pretty Boy were tangled together, and they couldn’t shoot Reb without shooting their friend too. Or maybe he wasn’t their friend, and they were just worried about damaging Joey Jaws’s new pet. Either way, they hesitated. Pretty Boy’s screams rose, getting higher and louder, and Reb snarled and snapped and growled.
In that moment of hesitation, Posey launched himself at Shaved Head. He landed a punch on the side of that gleaming dome, and it rocked the man sideways. The man staggered in a quarter circle, bringing his pistol around, and Posey grabbed his arm.
I was still drawing my Sig when Eli threw himself on Bad Beard’s back.
For a moment, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Eli clung to him like a spider monkey, raining blows down with his fists, screaming at the top of his lungs. Bad Beard staggered under his weight, lurching into the boatshed as he tried to shake Eli off. Then my body rebooted, and I drew the Sig, but I had the same problem as Pretty Boy’s friends—I couldn’t shoot any of the men without endangering Eli, Posey, or Reb.
Then Bad Beard screamed. I looked over to see Eli gripping the man’s ears and pulling. Blood streamed down Bad Beard’s neck, and he had the blind, terrified look of a man pushed beyond reason. He crashed into the pontoon boat, cracking Eli’s head against the frame of the canvas covering. Eli sagged, and then he and Bad Beard tumbled further into the shed—behind the boat, and out of sight.
Vaguely aware of Reb’s snaps and snarls and of Posey’s labored breathing, I went after Eli. I heard a shot behind me—distant, my brain registered, and I guessed Joey or one of his buddies had fired, probably out of sheer frustration. Then another shot came, and this one had to have been from either Shaved Head or Pretty Boy. Pretty Boy’s screams continued to escalate, and the sounds from Reb made me think of documentaries, the tearing of flesh, the grunts and growls—all the noises of a predator savaging prey.
Then I cleared the boat and got a line of sight on Eli, and I forgot about what was happening behind me.
One of Bad Beard’s ears hung from a thread of cartilage, and blood soaked his neck and t-shirt. His gun lay on the ground where he must have dropped it while struggling with Eli. Eli was in a strange, half-kneeling position, like he’d been caught in the act of getting up from the ground. His legs were bent, and his feet scraped the dirt. He had one hand planted on the pontoon like he was using it to brace himself. Bad Beard had a docking line wrapped around Eli’s neck, the muscles in his forearms popping as he yanked the improvised noose tighter.
They trained us to shoot to kill. That was the whole point of having a gun. And I’d killed before. But those had been supernatural things, things that there had been no other way to deal with.
Bad Beard drew the line tighter and grinned as Eli clawed at the rope biting into his neck.
For a moment, Eli’s eyes weren’t darkly hazel, bloodshot and slightly protruding from the blood trapped by the noose. For a moment—only a moment—I was sure they flashed blue.
I fired. The shot caught Bad Beard in the shoulder, and he moved like I’d shoved him. He bent to reach for his fallen gun. This was when he would be the most dangerous, my brain told me, before the pain had caught up to him, while he still thought he was invincible.
In reaching for the gun, though, he dropped the dock line. Eli hit the ground on his ass and then, faster than I could believe, scrambled onto his knees. He grabbed the gun first, pivoted at the waist, and shot Bad Beard in the gut.
Bad Beard let out a shocked breath.
Eli shot him again.
Bad Beard reached for the pontoon boat. His hand brushed a long crimson streak down the canvas cover as his knees buckled.
Eli began firing rapidly, squeezing off shot after shot. Bad Beard fell halfway through the volley of shots, and Eli rose up on his knees and kept firing into the dead man’s body until the slide locked back.
My ears echoed with the thunder of gunfire as I holstered the Sig. Distantly, the sounds of Reb and Posey struggling reached me, but the world felt strangely silent as I crouched next to Eli. I put one hand around his, around the gun. He started. Then he twisted, trying to hit me. With my other hand, I grabbed his jaw and held his head, forcing him to meet my eyes. In that first instant, I thought I saw cold blue fire. And then they were Eli’s eyes—wide and hazel and brimming with tears. He started to shake. Then he started to cry.
“Come on,” I said, although I could barely hear my own words. “We need to go.”
I got an arm around Eli and helped him up, and I walked him toward the mouth of the shed. Then I stopped.
Posey lay on the ground, trapped under the dad-bod bulk of Shaved Head. He was trying to protect himself as Shaved Head rained down blows, but his face was a bloody mess, and it was obvious that Posey was starting to slow down.
Reb and Pretty Boy were nowhere to be seen, but then I heard Pretty Boy’s scream, and it sounded like it was coming from behind the shed. It rose in pitch to a squeal, and then there was a shot. Reb yelped, the noise full of surprise and pain.
Posey’s eyes flashed open. They were totally dark, without any white to them. He sat up, batting aside the blows from Shaved Head, and reached. I thought I saw something that wasn’t his prosthesis, something like smoke curling, indistinct in the dusk. Eli cried out, his eyes huge like he’d seen something too. And then, without even seeming to try, Posey ripped the head off the man straddling him.
