Dead On Page 5

  “Cantu has family, safe houses across the country, and plenty of retard and frightened friends who are all too willing to harbor the bastard.”

  “You sound just like the detectives supposedly working the case—nothing but excuses.”

  He forged on, adding, “Not to mention the densest forests since Vietnam—the Georgia mountain country. The man’s got better cover than Osama Bin Laden.”

  “So why haven’t you gone after him? You once wanted revenge, justice. You vowed you’d have it, or have you forgotten?”

  He recalled the shouts into the cameras he’d made years before, ashamed of them now.

  “A lot of us said a lot of things back then.”

  “Lame answer, Rydell. How can you not have gone after the creep. You were once a marine, trained for guerrilla warfare same as Cantu, right?”

  One psychological profiler who felt she had Cantu’s “number” and nature down pat, had suggested that Cantu somehow knew that Marcus had been ex-marine, and that this figured in his allowing Rydell to live. Marcus had not wanted to believe it, and he could not accept it. How would Cantu have known? Then again, on previous cases, Marcus and Stan had been written up in the Atlanta Constitution. Cantu could have read about his military service. Even so, what kind of logic was that?

  He must focus on the here and now, however; must focus on the threat that Mrs. Terry Mallory represented not just to him but to those around them. He could tell that she still held the gun, but she’d relaxed her grip around the deadly part that made it go boom.

  Maybe he had talked some modicum of sense into her. Maybe.

  He wondered if she’d truly meant to use that thing; wondered if she’d taken lessons before coming after him, imagining his picture in her target practice.

  Tears now formed in her eyes. A good sign, he thought. Maybe.

  He gulped, expecting the explosion to hit.

  It didn’t come. Minutes ticked by.

  Marcus wondered how clumsy he’d become to let her get the drop on him this way. He again wondered what might happen if, right now, he up-ended the table. He thought better of it. Any sudden movement, the gun could go off. He most certainly did not wish to get anyone else in this life killed. Nor did he want to see her land in the slammer for life. Then again, doing nothing could also get him and others killed.

  “So what’ll we do now?” he finally asked.

  “Drink your damn beer. It’s going to be your last unless—”

  “Unless?” Had she said that before? “What unless?”

  “Unless you agree to locate Terry’s killer—this Cantu person.”

  “And if I do?”

  “Then you turn him over to me.”

  “To you? Not the authorities?”

  “To me, damn it.”

  He took a deep breath, believing she’d not wanted to kill him after all—that the gun under the table routine was primarily to gain his undivided attention. In that much, she had succeeded. “And what’ll you do if and when I hand this raving lunatic over?”

  “I’ve plans for Iden Cantu.”

  “Sister, you’re like a dog chasing a car.”

  “What?”

  “You catch it, it could kill you. This maniac is far too much for you to handle.”

  “I’ll handle the sonofabitch all right. I know how to use a scalpel, remember?”

  Rydell grimaced at this. “It’s been like four years. No one’s got a clue to his whereabouts. Theory is—”

  “He’s out there somewhere.” She indicated the general direction of the street. “He’s here…in the city.”

  “In Atlanta? No way. He’s not that stupid.”

  “I tell you he’s here, and he’s findable, and you’ve got as much reason to hate the bastard as I do.”

  “And this is how you negotiate my help? At the end of a gun? Pointed at me?”

  “Come on, Rydell. Got the old blood moving in your veins, didn’t it?”

  “You’re some piece of work, Doc Holley.”

  “Who’re you kidding? We both know it’s exactly how you negotiate with yourself.”

  Marcus winced at this. Not because it was true, and not because it touched a nerve, but because she knew. She knew his darkest, most shameful secret. But how did she know? “You think you’re some kind of psychic?”

  “Doesn’t take a psychic to figure you for a suicidal washout. It’s been four years and you haven’t burned yourself yet, so I figure you haven’t really given up on life either.”

  Marcus saw one of her hands rise above the table. “Maybe the hatred has kept us both here.” He grabbed for her one free hand, held up her wrist and for the first time examined the scar camouflaged below several bracelets.

  She pulled her hand away. “OK, no secrets between us now, heh, Detective?”

  “Whataya mean?”

  “We’re both refugees from life, so to speak.”

  “I admit, life’s been a bitch for me since, but I’m managing,” he lied.

  Terry could lie with just that same straight a face, Rydell.”

  “I’m managing.” He didn’t flinch.

  “Then take the case and my deal. With the money I’ve saved, you’ll be well paid.”

  Marcus did not know what to say. If he said no, he’d never see her again, and despite her having held him at gunpoint, or perhaps because of it, he didn’t want to believe he’d never see her again. But if he said yes, he didn’t believe he’d be able to live up to her expectations. He’d lived now for a long time without any expectations of himself. In fact, he could not recall the last time he’d had any.”

  “Will you take the case?”

  “I’m on the case. Have been for the last four years. I tell you, all the leads have dried up, and this guy has turned into the invisible man.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She must be holding the .38 between her knees, he thought as she rifled now through her bulging purse and plopped down several letters. He could get hold of the gun if he made an attempt now. Instead, he stared at the letters.

  “What’re these?” Rydell’s nose twitched.

  “Notes…notes from a stone cold killer.”

  “Iden Cantu?”

  “None other.”

  “Written to you?”

  “Says he wants to meet me. Says he’s admired me from afar too long now.”

  “Meet you?”

  “Personally apologize, he says. “Bastard.”

  “You can’t do it.”

  “With your help, I can and I will.”

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  “I’ve given it a helluva lotta thought, and you, Mr. Experienced Detective Rydell—you are going to help me pull it off.”

  The old, tried and true line that ran through his head as he stared across at her proved all too familiar: the best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray. But what’d he have to lose?

  S I X

  “I haven’t agreed to anything,” Rydell assured Katrina Holley-Mallory. Still he’d be intrigued by her and the letters purporting to be from Iden Cantu.

  After taking a deep breath and ordering another Guinness, Marcus began examining the letters. He muttered as he looked them over, “Could just be some sick sonofabitch getting his jollies off pretending to be Cantu, you know.”

  She didn’t answer this, as if she needn’t bother.

  It took some time for him to digest the enormity of this offering. No one wanted Cantu’s dead more than he. Handwriting sample she now slapped down—likely gotten from the case file on her husband—proved a close, close match to the script found in the letters. In fact, knowing as much as he did of handwriting analysis, Marcus determined this was no hoax. The only one taunting Mrs. Mallory was her husband’s killer.

  Cantu had indeed come out of hiding. Like an animal testing the waters, he was here in Atlanta, prowling…on the hunt for her?

  He could feel the long-suffering widow sizing h
im up as he read through the tight, forced, angry killer’s script. She had to know that he’d take this bait. She was smart, and the entire set up with the so-called .38 under the table had been to capture his attention and infuse him with some of the old feelings he’d once harbored, the notions of vengeance and retribution, the idea of righting a terrible wrong, and for that matter any feeling whatsoever. He now took a wild hair guess that there’d never been a gun beneath the table. That it’d all been a bluff.

  Then he saw the gun, like a snake, slip into her purse.

  Damn straight. She did have a .38 pointed at me.

  Not likely loaded, however. Maybe on safety as he’d earlier thought. Then again.

  He brushed it off for now and turned all his attention to the notes from Iden “Big Head” Cantu, who’d gained his nick name while in the marines as the man’s forehead and shaved cranium, from all his pictures, did look the part of an evil, insane Humpty Dumpty with lunatic eyes. God how he’d dreamed of one chance at cracking open that head, of shutting off the lights to those eyes. Now this. An unlikely series of events, and a highly unlikely partnership with the widow of a man Iden had killed while he, Marcus, lay helpless in Terry Mallory’s blood.

  The letters. Concentrate on the damn letters. Determine what they can tell me about the whereabouts of this fiend.

  She thought she wanted vengeance. In his head, Marcus Rydell said, Vengeance is mine.

  “So when do we start after him?” she asked now, breaking into his thoughts.

  “Whoa up there, Doc. No way. When I work a case, I work solo.”

  “That way you don’t get anybody else hurt, huh?”

  “That’s right. Damn right, and damn you for saying so.”

  “I know about your black outs, Marcus.”

  This silenced him.

  “I know about the mood swings, the depression, everything. Look, should you have one of those black outs at a crucial moment, Cantu will kill you, and I’ll never get what I want.”

  “You’ve really gone to school on me, haven’t you? Thought this all through, huh?”

  “I think of nothing else, night and day, and as for you, I know what cereal you eat, the brand of toothpaste you use.”

  “What precisely do you want in the end, aside from catching Terry’s killer?”

  “To see him die an agonizing, slow death.”

  “Like me? You made the same statement about me dying a painful death like Terry’s?”

  “I’d like to see worse for Cantu. Far worse if I can make it so.”

  He regarded her with a new deference. Was she this determined, this cold? “I suppose you wanna see him strapped to an operating table someplace?”

  “Preferably a table, but a stout oak tree in an isolated place will do.”

  “Where no one can hear the screams?”

  “Exactly.”

  “You going to bring the rope, too?””

  “If it takes rope.”

  “You’ve got a lot of pent up rage, Doc. Doesn’t quite jive with the whole Hippocratic oath thing.”

  “Never mind that.”

  “Are you even a doctor?” he asked again.

  “I had a year left on my residency when I lost Terry. Just taking it slow now, but once this is behind me…ahhh, it’s really none of your business.”

  “Then you’re not with Memorial?”

  “No.”

  He thought of her act in Quinn’s apartment. She was good, deceptive.

  “Why in hell aren’t you working on your medical degree instead of—”

  “I don’t have any choice!”

  Others glared anew at the noise coming from their table. “Best tone it down,” he suggested.

  “I took another year off. Promised Terry ahhh…promised myself I’d give this a year. It’s taken me two months just to find your sorry ass.”

  “That’s no way to talk to a man you want to hire.”

  “You have no idea the frustration.”

  “Which brings me to business. How much’re you willing to pay?”

  “Everything I have and in the bargain perhaps, just perhaps you’ll regain some semblance of the man you used to be.”

  “I didn’t throw myself away, Doc. Others were all too willing to heave me over the side. My boss, my friends, my wife. And what the hell do you know of the man I used to be?”

  “Don’t be a fool. I know everything about you. Everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “Down to your shorts…down to your habit of sucking on your gun instead of your thumb.”

  How could she know about that, he wondered. Then he guessed that she was fishing, and that given his blank response, she’d caught her intended game.

  “If I take it on,” he said, his hands still rummaging through the intriguing letters, “I have firm rules about how I work.”

  “I know that too.”

  “Then you know I don’t work with a woman hanging on my arm.”

  “I’m not a woman. I’m a determined woman with a lethal goal in mind.”

  He reached from the letters to her down-turned hand. “Maybe you should get on with your life.”

  She snatched her hand away.

  “Wouldn’t Terry want that?” he persisted. “Move to Tacoma, Boise, or—”

  “Don’t pretend to know what Terry would want.”

  “He can’t have wanted you on this manhunt business.”

  “Like I said, I’m determined.”

  “You realize, we could both be thrown in jail for conspiracy to commit murder?”

  “Is it murder to put down a rabid dog?”

  “Yeah, it is if that rabid dog happens to be an American citizen.”

  “Legal bullshit and pig swallop!”

  “You kill him, he becomes the victim, so now he’s got victim’s rights.”

  “I don’t care!”

  “And you have effectively swapped places with Cantu. He is in your victim’s shoes, you are a killer, and the system will treat you as such.”

  “I can’t believe you’re talking legal technical—”

  “Ever hear of the American Civil Liberties Union? The AF of L-CIO, the US Constitution, anything on the Bill of Rights, the Magna Charta and Mr. Rodgers’s Neighborhood coda come at all to mind, Doctor?”

  “I’m willing to take the risk of offending Mr. Rodgers and anyone else on your list.”

  “You really think this is what Terry would want for you?” he repeated.

  “Get one thing straight, Detective, you don’t have the right to question me or to speak Terry’s name, understood?”

  “Why? Is it sacred?”

  She looked as if he’d slapped her.

  Marcus pushed on. “You think I’m using his name like-like in vain? Like they say using God’s name or Jesus’ name in vain?”

  “Take it as one of my commandments. Humor me.”

  “Commandments were initially deep stuff. I personally have always believed that the commandment about taking the Lord’s name in vain had a lot more to do with using it to justify harming others, going to war, and that sort of evil than mere thoughtless speech habits. Using his name for evil ends, now that’s truly in vain and in villainy.”

  “I’m not here for a sermon, Detective.”

  “No, you’re here for protection and a hired assassin.”

  “I want the mark taken alive, not assassinated.”

  “The mark?” He frowned at her use of the term. “Want him alive? So you can carve him up in the best tradition of medical surgery?”

  “Call it what you will.”

  “First do no harm,” he muttered. “Look, this maniac’s not some Joe Blow off the street and off his nut; he’s a trained assassin—a sniper, one with the best training money and the military can provide.”

  “So…so what! He’s still human.”

  “Barely. His training makes him deadly, and you can get yourself killed unless you go for the jugular—a clean kill.”

  �
�You’ll be paid well. Just capture him, restrain him is all I ask.”

  He leaned in over the table toward her. “Do you hear what I’m saying?”

  “ You can then walk away, fully paid, and I’ll do the rest.”

  “You don’t get it. Cantu’s more fox than human, and if he is captured, it’s part of his game-plan to get close enough to tear out your throat.” He hoped this image might dissuade her.

  “I know he’s dangerous and cunning. I get that.”

  “I’m not sure you do.”

  A long silence prevailed between them.

  He shook his head.

  Knowing nothing else he could say to dissuade her, Marcus again began examining the letters.

  *

  The music of a live Irish band that’d begun to play inside now spilled out into the street. The foot-stomping Irish rock music, so like Cajun in many respects, was at odds with their conspiratorial conversation. “You don’t get to make the decisions in this partnership, Rydell.” Again with the glare. “When you go after Iden Cantu, I’m beside you, every step of the way.”

  “I don’t work that way,” he reiterated.

  “You do now.”

  “All right, I can’t work that way!”

  “You can now.”

  God but she’s annoying and ballsy like a Kate Hepburn, like a bull terrier. God but it feels good to have a reason to be annoyed. And it was true. Marcus felt alive. Excited about the prospect of tracking the mad dog they spoke of, cornering him, and squaring off against Cantu, and putting him down. Whatever had happened in the past, whatever was going to happen in the future surrounding this maniac, Marcus meant to stop the fevered brain of this creature pretending to be human. This monster sick-o now writing letters to Terry Mallory’s widow. Sick love letters.

  The ghosts and scars of Marcus’s past demanded it, and fate had taken him in hand, and fate had a beautiful face indeed, one full of rage, yes, but also full of life. Young Dr. Mallory and her letters might well be the key to Marcus Rydell’s sticking around this old world a little longer.

  “Do we or do we not have a deal?” she asked.

  *

  The night wore on in tatters and shreds as dry lightning and rolling thunder acted as counterpoint to a thousand questions playing out in Marcus’s head, while he and Terry Mallory’s wife continued to drink and talk over the Irish rock band, the speakers carrying their music as far as a block away. Anyone looking at Rydell and Dr. Mallory at this juncture who didn’t take them for a father-daughter reunion, might mistake them for a couple. On a stretch of the imagination highway, he thought. Two people out to enjoy the evening and one another anyone might guess. Anyone save one, the one who might well be watching from a distance—Iden Cantu.