Ridley Pearson - In Harm's Way

He slapped the phone shut and right back open. Hit a speed dial key. “It’s me, Tommy. Bonehead says our guy is at the Casino right now. A pal of his bartends there, called him. Suspect’s got a burger and beer in front of him-Yeah, five, seven minutes, max…” He moved quickly down the trailer’s narrow aisle and found the black windbreaker hanging on a peg by the door-SHERIFF, it read on the back in bold yellow letters. He returned to the small bedroom, his ear pinched to the phone, and wrapped his gun belt around his waist, buckling it. “Okay, I’ll call it in… I’ll wait. I promise.”

The phone went into his pocket. He kissed her on the top of her head as he swept past her. His hand was on the door.

“Later.”

“Your vest!” she said.

He kept it behind the front seat of the pickup. He paused there at the front door for a second, thinking that only the ex-wife of a cop would have been able to decipher what was going on based on one end of a phone call.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Be safe. Nothing stupid.”

As he ran to the truck, he was wondering if this was how she’d sent Walt out the door all those years, if she hadn’t simply traded him in for a newer model. It made him feel cheap. It made him relive a dozen conversations that the sheriff had started, some completed, some not. A Twilight Zone moment as he stepped into another life, a life different from the one he thought he’d been living.

“Jesus,” he muttered to himself as he yanked open the driver’s door and climbed behind the wheel. He pulled the door shut as he backed out. The tires yelped as he throttled down. He fished the Bluetooth device into his ear and got the phone dialing.

“Officer in need of assistance…” he said, running a stop sign and fishtailing out onto the two-lane highway.

He forgot all about the vest behind the seat.

“Just one?” Brandon mumbled to himself as a Ketchum Police Department cruiser pulled to the curb and parked across Main Street. Ketchum’s nightlife scene was confined to this two-block stretch of bars and restaurants bookended by traffic lights. Tourists milled outside the establishments and jaywalked to join friends on either side. The Casino’s A-frame, appropriately pushed a few yards back from the other buildings on Main Street, as if shunned by the mainstream population, was not for the faint of heart. Nor was it for the tourists. If Ketchum had bikers, this was where they’d go. It served as home for the hardcore drinkers, the barflies, and the locals who preferred tattoo-revealing T-shirts. The women wore their shirts tight and their lipstick red. Some nights you could bowl a frame down the center of the place, and then there were nights like this when it looked like a convention was under way. The Allman Brothers shook the exterior wall as Brandon approached the establishment’s doorway, which was open to the night air.

His backup was positioned at the Casino’s rear door in case the mountain man made a break, but he had no description to give the cop, no way for this guy to discern one person from the next. And when a cop-or in his case, a deputy sheriff-entered a place like the Casino, it would be like shining a flashlight under the fridge-the roaches were sure to scatter.

Brandon stepped through the door and pressed his back against a bulletin board covered in flyers for secondhand fishing boats and twelve-step groups. He kept the yellow lettering to the wall. Kept the windbreaker zipped to his navel, just high enough to hide the gun belt. At six-four, he had a clear view over the heads of the customers, five deep and crowding the bar, of the pool table in the back and the line of deuces to the right. Two guys sitting at separate tables had empty red plastic baskets in front of them, the deli paper stained with oil and catsup. Either could be the mountain man. Practically everyone in the place could qualify given the beards, the sweat stains, and the unkempt hair.

Brandon searched the three behind the bar-two guys and a girl-all moving calmly but at light speed, to address the needs of the customers. The beer taps remained on, a plastic cup or mug replacing the last and catching the next. Horse piss, Brandon thought.

He’d hoped for eye contact with one of the male bartenders, was surprised when the hard-faced woman connected with him and cocked her head just faintly to her left indicating the second of the two at the tables. Brandon didn’t acknowledge, knew better than to connect her with himself.

Just for an instant, he remembered his vest behind the seat in the truck. Heard her voice reminding him. Just for an instant he considered going back to get it.

“Howdy, Deputy!” a male voice called out loudly from Brandon’s left, offered as a warning to the clientele. It came from one of the bartenders, a guy named Stone whom Brandon had once arrested for breaking the windshield of his girlfriend’s car with her mailbox, uprooted with a forty-pound ball of concrete on the business end. While Stone’s warning didn’t cause a mass exodus, some of those in the room froze, and a few slinked away. Both the men sitting in front of the red food baskets stayed rooted in their seats. Neither so much as looked up.

Brandon didn’t move. He wasn’t going to have a bartender dictating how this went down. He checked his watch: the sheriff could arrive anytime in the next few minutes. Maybe another backup or two. He liked those odds much better than two-to-one. He adjusted the Bluetooth in his ear, hoping it might ring, hoping the sheriff was close.

Despite Stone’s broadcast, despite the wandering eyes, not many had landed upon him. Maybe no one cared; maybe those that did were now gone. What he didn’t like was the collective cool of his two suspects against the far wall. Not so much as a twitch from either.

His Bluetooth purred. He touched the device and connected the call. “Yeah?”

“I have a runner in custody,” the KPD cop announced.

“Lose him,” Brandon said softly.

“Say what? He’s cuffed and on the way to the cruiser.”

“No, no, no. Lose him. Return to post.” Brandon ended the call. Moron. The sin was not arresting the wrong guy, but leaving his post. He’d lost his backup.

He pulled the phone from his pocket and speed-dialed.

“Fleming,” came the sheriff’s voice in his ear.

“Your twenty?”

“Just passing the hospital. Five minutes.”

“I make my move and the front door goes unguarded.”

“Got it.”

“My backup vacated the back. I’m wide open here.”

“Do you see our boy?”

“Yeah. Could be one of two I’m looking at.”

“Does he see you?”

“It’s a work in progress, Sheriff.”

“Hold tight, Tommy. You hear me? For once, hold tight.”

“It’s about to go down. I’d love to be wrong about that.”

“Me, too. Two minutes away. I’ll take the front.”

“Out.”

He slipped the phone back into his pocket. Felt the bulge of his handgun in the holster. Remembered the vest behind the seat in the truck. Was that what was stopping him? he wondered. Had he allowed Gail’s warning to wedge into the cracks that held duty in place over the mortal fear that always existed? The noise of the place was getting to him. He found a mirror behind the bar that allowed him to monitor both men without facing them.

The man at the second table, the one farthest away, reached beneath the table, and Brandon’s right hand sought out his own gun up under the windbreaker. The guy held a wad of bills, not a weapon, and Brandon saw what appeared to be a neat stack of hundreds with smaller bills in the fold. The man peeled off a ten and a five and left them on the table, returning the money to his pocket.

The man stood, and Brandon saw it too late. The guy fired a single shot into the ceiling. Everyone in the room ducked at the same instant. All but Brandon, all but the one man trained not to duck. He was reaching for his own sidearm as the second bullet was fired.