J Bertrand - Back on Murder

A gouge opens up in the hood of the car as I’m pushing Cavallo down behind the tire. I hit the pavement in a slide, skinning my elbows and knees. My pistol’s slide is locked back, meaning I’ve burned through thirteen rounds already. Three in Cropper and ten downrange at Salazar. As I reload, Cavallo returns fire. I’d rather she stayed behind cover. I grab her arm again and pull her back.

“Don’t give him a target.”

She shrugs free. “If somebody shoots at me, I’m shooting back.”

“You won’t hit anything at this range,” I say, but she’s not listening. As she fires I try to pinpoint Salazar’s position. He’s tucked alongside the truck bed, using the vehicle for cover. All I can see is the muzzle flash from around the enclosure.

It’s hard to think clearly when you’re taking fire. Either you go to ground or you keep pulling the trigger. It says something about Cavallo that she chooses the latter, but that kind of bravery won’t turn her side arm into a rifle. I open the passenger door and crawl over the seats, fumbling for the button that pops the trunk. When I hear the dull thunk, I slide out, grabbing the keys from Cavallo and moving around back. Inside a locked box in the truck, there’s a shotgun and an ar-15. With the latter, I can reach out and touch him, something I’ve been itching to do.

“March!” she yells, her voice shrill. “He’s starting the truck.”

I raise myself into a crouching position in time to see the reverse lights illuminate. It took him a while, but he’s done the arithmetic. All we have to do is keep him pinned. Backup is on the way. But he has to fight his way out, which means the sooner he moves the better.

“Keep shooting!” I say, grabbing for the rifle. I fumble with the charging handle, chambering a round of 5.56 nato. I’ve manipulated the controls a thousand times on the range, but now it’s like my fingers are disarticulated, one clumsy mass of flesh.

I hear the squeal of tires, smell the rubber burning, and when I look up again the Ford is out in the sunlight. Salazar accelerates backward, cuts the wheel, then rocks to a stop. I lift the rifle, hunting for his silhouette with the iron sights. The truck accelerates, picking up speed, heading straight for us. He would have been better off going the other way.

The front post lines up over his head. I take a deep breath and squeeze off a round. The windshield shatters into a spider web of glass, but the truck bears down on us.

“Move, move, move!”

I jump clear just as the Ford hits, smashing the front of the car, dragging its crumpled shell into the street before slinging it aside. My sights come up again, but before I can fire, the truck hauls across the road, rumbling over the curb, heading straight into the curtain of trees separating us from the houses on the other side. It crunches into a thick oak, sending up a cloud of smoke and steam.

Cavallo limps up beside me, clutching her elbow.

“Are you okay?”

She nods quietly, advancing across the street. I follow, ready to fire. We reach the far curb just as the backup units roll up.

“Stop.” I put a hand on her arm. “Let them take it from here.”

I toss the AR-15 to the ground and pull my badge out, just so we’re clear on who’s who. Cavallo holsters her Beretta and sits down on the curb, burying her head in her hands. The uniforms rush up to us, then creep steadily across the grass toward Salazar’s mushroomed truck, weapons drawn. They haul him out of the cab. I hear him screaming as they push him to the ground, twisting his wrists back for cuffing. I slump down beside Cavallo and try to catch my breath.

I tell the story a dozen times, first to strangers and then to friends. Amazingly, when they haul Salazar to the road on a backboard, he’s still breathing in spite of the hole in his upper chest. Wendell Cropper isn’t so fortunate. His body, covered by a tarp, lies where he fell. Numbered markers sit next to my shell casings and his unfired Glock. Inside the box Salazar dropped, Lieutenant Bascombe, one of the first detectives on the scene, discovers the cocaine and the printed photos described by Balinski. The bed of Salazar’s Ford is full of more boxes, some stacked to the brim with coke, some with dog-eared bundles of cash.

Mitch Geiger, the narcotics intel guru, arrives in time to catalog everything, speculating that the truck’s contents represent the haul from at least five stash-house heists.

“They couldn’t move this much,” he says, “so they just sat on it for the time being. If you hadn’t shown up, he’d have disappeared with it all.”

When he finishes with me, Bascombe turns to Cavallo for her account of the action. As she’s speaking, he stops her with an exclamation of surprise, then bends over, scratching at her chest. She swats his hand away.

“Just look,” he says, laughing incredulously.

She glances down. There’s a pancaked bullet lodged in her vest. She panics as soon as she sees it, flailing with the Velcro straps. I help her take the Kevlar off, then inspect the damage.

“You didn’t feel that?” I ask.

She presses a hand to her sternum. “I didn’t realize – ”

Bascombe puts an arm over her shoulder, bares his gleaming teeth. “The boss told me March got his luck back. Looks like it rubbed off on you.”

Instead of basking in the sense of relief, Cavallo sits down again, the reality of the situation crashing down on her. “I could’ve been killed.”

“But you weren’t.”

She doesn’t look reassured.

Before we’re released from the scene, I get a call from Wilcox, who’s been camped out at the hospital since the ambulance transported Salazar.

“He’s still in surgery,” he says, “but they’re telling me he’s going to pull through.”

“Good for him.”

“Good for us, March. I was right about what I said before. On the ride over, he kept taking the oxygen mask off and saying one word. Want to take a guess? Immunity. I’ve got a lawyer coming now. I’m pretty sure he’s going to talk.”

When I hang up, part of me wishes I’d aimed better, putting the round through his head instead of his chest. But then I remember Cropper lying dead on the pavement, and figure I’ve got enough blood on my hands for one day. There’s a burden that goes along with killing, even when you’re justified in taking a life. So being spared that is something, even if it means a deal for Salazar, the man who tried to get me killed.

Donna Mayhew reaches her hands out, one toward Cavallo and the other toward me. Without thinking, I clasp the hand, cool and small. She seems smaller since the funeral, diminished, a wan light in her eyes.

“We’re here to talk to Mr. Robb,” I say.

She nods, as if she’d known this already. “He’s upstairs, doing the high school Bible study.”

The double doors leading through to the stairwell are at the end of the hall, but we don’t move. The three of us stand in the office corridor, exchanging no words, no eye contact. After a moment, Hannah’s mother sighs.

“Evey, too,” she says. “And in that terrible place.”

So Robb told her. Of course he did.

“I tried calling her mom, but I couldn’t bring myself to…” She blinks at me, smiles weakly, and folds her arms tight around her frame. “I don’t know this world. I don’t recognize it anymore.”

Cavallo’s arm goes to her shoulder.

“It’s all right. I just, there’s a connection, isn’t there? The two of them, what happened to them. Something was happening and I didn’t see it.”

“You couldn’t have,” Cavallo says.