Bill Pronzini - Spook

“There’s another thing to consider, too. The man who murdered Spook also murdered Big Dog. Double homicide isn’t any less heinous than triple homicide... he’s no better than Anthony Colton. Worse in the eyes of the law because his crimes were premeditated.”

“Big Dog,” Taradash said. “You think he’d still be dead if I hadn’t hired you?”

“No question. He signed his own death warrant before we got involved.”

Taradash shook out another cigarette, began the ritual once more. “How’d he know who to blackmail? How’d Spook get recognized in the first place, after seventeen years?”

“No answers to those questions yet. We’ll get the rest of the story when the police make an arrest.”

“If they make an arrest.”

“They will. I don t think it’ll be long.”

Meg Lawton had been staring past her boss, through the window at activity on the warehouse floor — employees readying equipment for another indy film being shot in the city, I’d been told. Abruptly she said, as if a thought had just struck her, “Steve, what about... you know, a burial plot for Spook, some kind of marker?”

“You don’t expect me to go through with that now?”

“It’s not that I expect it...”

“We found out who he was, isn’t that enough?”

“I don’t know. If you think so.”

“Well, I don’t know either.” Taradash jabbed his penknife into the cigarette; tobacco spurted like flecks of dry brown blood. He asked me, “What do you think? Should I go ahead, arrange to bury the poor bastard?”

“Not my call. I didn’t know Spook.”

“No opinion either way?”

“Sorry, no.”

“And where would we put him? Here? Mono County?”

I didn’t say anything.

“He was so sad,” Meg Lawton said, “so... damaged. It’s horrible, what he did, but he wasn’t really free all those years, was he? Didn’t really escape punishment? It just seems to me he ought to have a final resting place.”

“Maybe,” Taradash said, “maybe you’re right, I wish I could make up my mind.” He jabbed the knife blade again into the corpse of the cigarette. “I wish it wasn’t the Christmas season,” he said.

Meg Lawton said, “I’m glad it is.”

So was I. For a lot of reasons.

The one thing he’d never liked about investigative work was surprises. When you knew what was going down, or at least had some advance warning, you could make preparations, plan for contingencies. But when you walked cold into an unexpected situation, it was like being hamstrung — you couldn’t act quickly, you needed time to regroup and by then it might be too late. More than anything else he hated being helpless.

This surprise was a bad one, the worst kind. Tamara Corbin sitting slumped at her desk, one hand cradling her head, smears and streaks of blood all down the left side of her face and neck and across the front of her blouse. Hot-eyed stranger standing spraddle-legged in the middle of the office — big, rangy, early forties; beard-stubbled, brown hair jutting wild from a blotchy scalp, big mole on the left side of his nose; wearing a flak jacket and camouflage fatigues and high-lace boots. Paper files and desktop items strewn all over the floor.

And guns everywhere — on the surface of Bill’s desk, on the floor, spilling out of an open duffel bag next to the desk. At least three handguns, an assembled assault rifle, a couple of big, rapid-fire machine pistols. The piece held steady in the man’s hand was a Micro Uzi SMG, which meant a magazine capacity of twenty rounds minimum of 9 mm parabellum ammo. Bad enough if it was semiautomatic, worse if it was automatic. Deadly as hell in any case. There was ammunition spread around, too, boxes of it for all the weapons.

Runyon took it all in, the details and implications, in the few frozen seconds after his entry. Hostage situation, suicide mission, planned slaughter. It shut him down inside, put him on cold alert. Emotion, any kind, was a liability in this type of situation. The only possible survival mechanisms were intelligence, training, instinct. And they were damned puny against a heavily armed man with death on his mind.

The stranger broke the tableau with a sharp motion of the Uzi and raspy words that seemed to come from deeper within him than his diaphragm. “Which one’re you? What’s your name?”

“Runyon.”

“Yeah. Shut the door, Runyon. Lock it again.”

He did that, turned around. “Who’re you?”

“Three guesses, first two don’t count. Who am I?”

“Tom Valjean.”

“Right the first time, you people are so fucking smart.” Valjean used his free hand to drag the chair away from Bill’s desk, then gave it a kick that sent it rattling across the floor. It banged into a corner of Tamara’s desk, caromed off; the noise made her jerk, raise her head in an unfocused stare. “Go on over there, smart guy, sit down and keep your hands where I can see them.”

Runyon obeyed, moving slow. He asked Tamara, “You okay?”

“Head hurts. Still kind of woozy.” Her eyes were on him now, trying to hold him in focus. He saw pain, fear, disorientation — and anger. The anger was good, as long as she kept it under control. Tough kid. If she hadn’t come unglued by now, she probably wouldn’t. “Cut my face when he smacked me. Won’t stop bleeding.”

“Doesn’t look too bad. Just keep putting pressure on it.”

“Shut up,” Valjean said. “Don’t talk to her, you want to talk you talk to me, understand?”

“Why the arsenal, Tom?”

“Don’t call me Tom, all you bastards think you know me, you don’t know anything about me.”

“What’re you planning to do?”

A sly look reshaped Valjean’s long, slab-cheeked face. “You’re a hotshot detective, you figured out about Colton, all about me and Bob Lightfoot, ought to be easy to figure out about this. Go on, smart guy, figure it out, tell me what I’m gonna do.”

Spook had murdered three people in cold blood, lived for seventeen years with their ghosts in his head, but Thomas Valjean was more unbalanced and far more lethal — the real spook in this business. Runyon said, “Colton deserved to die,” making the lie sound as convincing as he could. “If he’d destroyed my family, I’d’ve killed him too. Same goes for Big Dog.”

“Drunken blackmailing bastard. Bob and me, we shouldn’t’ve paid him the first time, should’ve known he’d be back for more. Should’ve just blown him right out of the picture then.”

“Sure. You were justified with both of them.”

“Damn right I was.”

“But not this time.”

“This time, too. Damn right. Dogging me, siccing the cops on me, you’re no better than Colton or Big Dog or the rest.”

“Cops would’ve figured out about you and Lightfoot, even if we hadn’t.”

“Hell they would. Stupid bastards. You people, you’re the smart ones, Bob told me it was you. You deserve what you’re gonna get, same as the others.”

“All right. But why not just kill me? I tracked you down, I put the law on you, I’m the one you want. Let the woman go.”

“No. She’s part of it, you’re all part of it.”

“Let her go, Tom.”

“Nobody leaves, everybody pays.” Valjean began to pace the width of the office in short, agitated strides, like an ungainly animal. For part of each crossing, the Uzi was pointing away from where Runyon sat; but there was too much distance between them to try to rush him. He and Tamara would both be dead before he got halfway.

“Bastards who hired you,” Valjean said, pacing, “they’re gonna pay too. Who are they, who sent you after me?”

Tamara said, “I wouldn’t tell him.”