P. Tracy - Live Bait

Langer looked at the conviction in Johnny McLaren’s face, remembering when things had been that clear for him. Murderers are bad, catching murderers is good. So simple. So black and white. It was examining the gray areas that got you in trouble. At that moment he realized that of the two of them, McLaren was the better cop.

‘Let’s get moving,’ Magozzi said, grabbing the most recent pictures and passing them out. His phone was ringing by the time he got to his desk.

Dave from Ballistics had a reedy voice so distinctive you could recognize it immediately, and right now it sounded tight and strained. ‘I’m backed up to my balls here, Leo, but you and Gino need to know this right away.’

Magozzi motioned for Gino to pick up the line. ‘Okay, Dave, we’re both on. Go.’

‘I just got a chance to run Jack Gilbert’s Smith & Wesson through the system, and got a hit. The same gun killed a resort owner in Brainerd last year. I’m pushing the fax button now.’

‘Okay, Dave, thanks.’

‘Hold on a second. There’s something else. Is Langer there? Or McLaren?’

‘Both here, both on the phone.’

‘Well pass this on, will you? Tell them I’m really sorry about this, I don’t know how it happened, it’s been a god-damned zoo down here this week, but that.45 in their Arlen Fischer case?’

‘Right. The one used in the Interpol hits.’

‘Yeah, well that wasn’t the whole of it. Another match came in a little later and somehow got lost in the paperwork. Just laid eyes on it about three minutes ago, and I faxed that up, too. Tell them their.45 killed Eddie Starr.’

Magozzi squinted, pulling the name up from his good memory. ‘The same Eddie Starr who killed Marty Pullman’s wife?’

At his desk a few feet away, Langer’s head jerked up and his face went cold.

‘That’s the one,’ Dave said. ‘Marty Pullman’s wife, Morey Gilbert’s daughter, Jesus, guys. What the hell is going on with that family?’

‘We’re going to have to get back to you on that.’

McLaren looked over, his phone hooked in his shoulder. ‘I got Muzak. What was that about?’

‘Ballistics Dave says the gun Wayzata took off Jack Gilbert this morning killed a guy in Brainerd last year.’

‘The Brainerd guy on the back of our picture?’

‘Don’t know yet,’ Gino said. ‘But your.45 just got even more interesting. The same gun brought down that Eddie Starr kid who killed Hannah Pullman.’

The phone slipped from McLaren’s shoulder into his lap. ‘You are shitting me.’ He looked over at Langer who was still on the phone, but staring at Gino with an intense expression.

‘I wonder if I could call you back, Sergeant?’ Langer said politely into the phone, and then hung up without waiting for an answer.

‘Looks like we just wiped another unsolved off the books,’ Gino said. ‘And the sad truth is it makes perfect sense. Morey Gilbert had been killing people for years with that gun. Why not the kid that killed his daughter?’

‘I wonder how the hell he found him before we did,’ McLaren said.

‘Are you kidding? Morey was finding Nazis missing for sixty years. Eddie Starr was probably a cakewalk for him. Besides, he was only an hour ahead of you. Starr was still pretty pink when you found him, right?’

McLaren nodded. ‘Real pink.’

‘So there you go. What do you think about Jack’s gun popping the guy in Brainerd, Leo?’

Magozzi shrugged. ‘He said he got the gun from his dad’s, and after getting a look at his dad’s history, I’m inclined to believe him.’

‘Me, too,’ Gino said. ‘I’m going to get on the horn to Brainerd since we’ve got a ballistics tie-up along with everything else. Besides, that one’s still fresh as a daisy. Langer, you get anything from the guys in L.A.?… Jesus, Langer, you don’t look so good.’

Langer gave Gino a sickly smile, then got up and quickly left the office.

‘What’s the matter with him?’

McLaren shrugged. ‘He had some kind of a flu yesterday. Must have relapsed.’ He pushed the disconnect button on his phone and hit redial. ‘I’m going to call these jokers back and tell them I’m FBI. Maybe they won’t put me on hold this time.’

‘Go for it,’ Magozzi said.

Marty hadn’t taken a relaxed breath since Gino and Magozzi had dropped Jack off that morning. The cops might have thought that Jack was shooting at phantoms in Wayzata, but Marty had that twist in his gut he used to get on the job when things were about to go bad. He’d handed most of his chores over to Tim and Jeff and spent all his time tailing Jack, his gun stuck in the back pocket of his jeans, his shirt hanging over it to keep from scaring the customers.

Lily, as usual, had complicated everything. She wasn’t about to talk to her son, but apparently she wasn’t going to let anyone kill him either. The minute Magozzi and Rolseth left, she’d planted herself within two feet of Jack, and there she had stayed ever since, mother on a tether. Also mother in the target zone.

Marty had caught himself balancing on the balls of his feet once, ready to dart in front of them both in case the lady in the straw sandals suddenly dropped her basket of flowers and morphed into a mad gunman. Two things about that moment had surprised him: first, that he was looking at everything with a cop’s eye again, seeing the potential for danger everywhere; and second, that he could still balance on the balls of his feet. As far as he could remember, he hadn’t been able to balance flat-footed for a year. He’d laughed out loud at that, and Lily and Jack had both looked up and stared at him with strange expressions, probably because he didn’t laugh very often these days, or more likely, because being followed by a laughing gunman might be a little disturbing. So he’d slipped back into his stone-faced demeanor by remembering how damn irritating this whole thing was, and the two people he was guarding so assiduously were the cause of it. Jack should be in protective custody, telling the cops everything he knew, and Lily should be making him do it. They should be taking care of each other instead of relying on him for everything. Christ, this was exhausting. Three days ago he’d been in a drunken stupor with a gun stuck in his mouth; now he was a pseudo-cop, a pseudo-bodyguard, and the hardest-working man in the nursery business.

And goddamnit, he’d thought then, nearly laughing aloud again, it almost felt good.

But those hours had been more like playing cop than the real thing. When Gino called shortly before 2 P.M. and told him that someone really had taken a shot at Jack that morning, pseudo-anything flew out the window, and Marty started thinking like the man he had once been, not so long ago.

He shouldn’t be trotting around the nursery after Lily and Jack like a guard dog on a leash. He should beating the truth out of Jack, finding out who killed Morey, doing the job he had been trained to do, and most important of all, he should be closing the goddamned nursery.

‘What do you mean, you’re closing the nursery?’ Lily and Jack demanded almost in unison.

They were all in the front of the greenhouse, unloading plants from a pallet onto an outside table. The place was packed in spite of the sweltering weather, and the plants disappeared almost as soon as they set them down. Jeff and Tim were manning the outside registers, and there was a long line at each counter.

Marty kept his voice low. ‘Ballistics came back on the slugs at Jack’s house this morning. The same person who killed Rose Kleber and Ben Schuler took a shot at him. So just in case this asshole decides to try again, we’re going to get these customers out of the line of fire, close this place down, and you two are going to do exactly what I say from this moment on.’