Jon Talton - Cactus Heart

His face relaxed a notch. He shook his head. “You have to think about your future. You’re probably sick of shits like me living an easy life while you live paycheck-to-paycheck. You didn’t make any money as a historian, and now you can’t make any as a cop.”

I didn’t answer.

Yarnell rubbed his shoulders. “And what if I don’t go along?”

“You go down for your brother’s murder.”

“That’s bunk,” he said. “I didn’t kill Max.”

He started up the ladder and I let him go.

I heard his voice from the top. “You’re just a dirty cop who made a big mistake.” Then I heard his footsteps echo through the big room and the heavy door clanged shut.

I waited five minutes, then climbed up the ladder. The place was empty as a looted tomb. A layer of dust hung in the air at eye level. I reached down in my shirt, pulled up the little microphone and spoke into it.

“He’s gone. I don’t know if he went for it or not. I’ll meet you over at Madison Street in a few minutes.”

I unbuttoned my shirt and pulled the rig off, a little strand of fiber optic held by surgical tape and a battery down by my belt. I wrapped it up and slid it into my pocket. Then I shut down the lights, listened for a moment to the silence of the awful place, and quickly stepped outside.

The two men rounded the corner from the street as I stepped out the door. For just a nanosecond, I stood and stared in disorientation. But the guns they were carrying got my attention. I slipped back in the building just as they saw me and started running after me.

The door wouldn’t lock from the inside. I moved as quickly as I dared through the dark room, panic starting to jelly the muscles in my legs. I dropped to the floor at the far end of the building just as sunlight spilled into the passageway and footsteps pounded toward me. Then the door closed and the world was utterly black again. I could hear footsteps scuttling across the concrete. I connected where I had seen those two bulked-up goons before: in the reception area of Yarneco, wearing oversized suits.

I called out: “I’m a deputy sheriff and I’m armed!”

Suddenly the whole room seemed to shatter into fragments. I realized someone was shooting, an automatic weapon with a silencer and a muzzle flash suppresser. Pieces of masonry rained down as I slid the Python out of its nylon holster. Its heaviness filled my hand. There was a little spark across the room, and some wooden pallets came apart behind me. His flash suppresser wasn’t perfect. I took aim and squeezed the smooth Colt action. Fire and a deep boom ! erupted at the end of my arm. Across the room somebody gasped and fell into something glass. Then he moaned and stopped making any noise.

I rolled to the left just in time before another gun fired in the direction of my muzzle flash. These boys were pros. Rolled and found the edge of the ladder. There was nothing to do but go down. I hit the bottom and frantically pulled out the metal hooks on the ladder. It crashed down into the shaft beside me. I retreated back into the tunnel, down the steps, into the next passage. Only the rough, century-old bricks of the wall guided me through the blackness.

I holstered the Python and fumbled in my pocket for the surveillance wire. Switched the battery on and whispered frantically into it.

“Mike, Mike! Officer needs assistance! Shots fired. At the Triple A Storage Warehouse. Yarnell’s goons have me pinned down. I’m in the tunnels. They are heavily armed.” I left the channel open and set it aside. I didn’t really believe they were still monitoring me. I crouched down in the darkness and waited, the fear all over me. I felt the sweet ache in my abdominal muscles from Gretchen, and wondered why the hell I was doing any of this.

“There’s no way out, Mapstone.” It was James Yarnell. “You miscalculated your little blackmail scheme.”

I pulled the Python out again and nestled it against my face, the coldness of the steel and the acrid smell of the four-and-a-half-inch barrel somehow helping keep down my fear.

“I went to see Max that night he was killed, but I didn’t kill him,” Yarnell said. “I told him he had to give up the Superior project. The banks were going to shut us down. We were leveraged to our eyeballs. We were going to lose everything. I was going to lose everything. Goddamned Hector. I hired his Mexican gang kids to make phone threats, set the fires, be my environmental terrorists-that way we could walk away from the project.

“But Max wouldn’t play along!” he shouted from the edge of the elevator shaft. “So I went out there that night, to try to reason with him. But he was already dead. I found him with that damned petrified wood driven into his heart. For all I know, somebody else was squeezing Max. Maybe you, Mapstone. Maybe you hired somebody to shoot me!”

He paused. “Any questions?”

I had a lot of questions, but I didn’t say a word. I moved carefully back into the tunnels, navigating by memory, going in the opposite direction of the place where Andy and Woodrow had been entombed. I shuffled, trying not to kick anything and make a sound. The heavy mesh of a spider web caught on my arm and made me shudder.

Just then the lights came on and I was blinded just long enough. One of the goons dropped down into the shaft. He strafed the tunnel and something heavy tore into my left foot. My entire left leg was instantly consumed with a bone-deep, searing pain. I fell backward, firing in his direction. The heavy magnum rounds ricocheted viciously off the walls. The goon drew back, dropped to the floor. The Python clicked as it revolved around to a spent cartridge. In my panic, my fire discipline had turned to shit. Too many years away from the academy.

I had retreated to the big chamber, with its garbage and old citrus cases. I hobbled backward painfully, crashing into some wooden boxes, falling flat on my ass. There was no cover. No way out. I reached to my belt and brought out a Speedloader. Opened the cylinder. Steadied my shaking hand. Emptied the spent rounds. They fell like little bells onto the filthy floor. Steadied my hand. I dropped the Speedloader into the cylinder, turned the metal shaft and dropped six fresh rounds into the Colt. I swung the cylinder heavily into place just as the goon stormed into the room and leveled his machine gun at my head.

“Give me your fucking gun!” he huffed.

I was splayed out on the floor, surrounded by the debris of a half-century ago, a steady ooze of blood coming out of the top of my foot. I just stared at the Python and knew I was at the end. “You’re not getting my gun,” I forced out in a hoarse whisper.

James Yarnell stepped in behind him and shone a flashlight in my eyes. I could see a little chrome semi-automatic pistol in his other hand.

“The dentist’s grandson.” He shook his head, playing the light over my bloody left foot. “How much bad luck have you had this month, young man? You find things that were never intended to be found. And now you’re dead.” His expression was something between contempt and pity. “I never did like history classes. What’s the point in looking back?”

I spoke to the barrel of the gun. “Sometimes you find unfinished business.” They were lousy last words.

In the next ten seconds, the silence became just complete enough that we were all startled by a man clearing his throat.

Then the goon’s right knee buckled in a way nature never intended. In the same instant, the room was overtaken by a huge explosion. The goon collapsed, screaming, holding a bloody mass where his knee used to be. James Yarnell retreated, weakly holding out his pistol. Out of the gunsmoke stepped Bobby Hamid.

He walked to the goon, kicked away his machine gun, and shot him again in the other knee.