Blackbird - Tom Wright

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he still carried as a duty weapon, they with their nine-millimetre automatics. They took their shots, he took his. One of their thirty-three cut a clean hole through the crown of his grey Resistol and another ended up in the heel of his left boot, but OZ, ignoring their fire and working left to right, took out all four of the shooters with consecutive heart shots. The people who’d known him longest said he could tell you the names of these guys and every other man he’d killed, except for the two he referred to as Mal Tiro Uno and Mal Tiro Dos, who’d floated away on the Rio Grande by the dark of the moon without having told anybody who they were.

      OZ operated without organisational charts or middle management. There were no file trays, staplers, pencil cups or tape dispensers on his desk, just his phone, a computer monitor, a picture of his late wife Martha, and the calendar blotter in front of him. He kept his files in his head, and to him ‘accessories’ meant his Colt, his saddle and his hat.

      I found him sipping coffee from a plain white mug as he watched me from across his desk – pink, clean-shaven jowls, what was left of his silver hair standing out in leprechaun tufts above his jughandle ears, sky-blue eyes as hard as tungsten. Behind him the walnut panelling was covered with photos of famous fellow Texas Rangers and other old-time lawmen, Hall of Fame Dallas Cowboys stars and big-game guides.

      I walked over to the nook where his coffee machine stood and sniffed what was in the carafe. It smelled better than dishwater, so I poured some into a plastic cup from the tray next to the machine, settled back in the black leather chair in front of OZ’s desk and took a sip.

      OZ said, ‘You done anything to get sideways with our city fathers that I don’t know about?’

      ‘Don’t think so, why?’

      ‘Got a call from Dwight Hazen this morning.’

      ‘The city manager? What did he want?’

      ‘Could be something, could be nothing,’ OZ said. ‘He’s jawin’ about a civilian review board, for one thing. Which is a piss-poor idea on a good day, and there ain’t no good days.’

      I shook my head, imagining a dozen petty bureaucrats micromanaging the department and fighting over the microphones at press conferences as they tried to position themselves in terms of sound bites, headlines and voting blocs. Calls to abolish the use of Tasers, demands for budget increases to buy more Tasers, new automatic weapons and sniper rifles to go with them, pleas for a return to God, detailed suggestions for rewriting the Constitution.

      ‘Then the cabrón got goin’ about you and that old graveyard collar,’ he said. ‘Wanted to know how I thought you were dealin’ with your “issues”, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean.’

      I heard three quick taps behind me, recognising them because they were the same three I routinely got at my own office door. Like OZ, I usually kept all of my phone’s mechanical and musical noises disabled, admittedly a hardship for Bertie, the head secretary, who was constantly having to huff her way back by shank’s mare to tell me to pick up.

      At OZ’s grunted invitation, Bertie stuck her head in the door. ‘Line four,’ she said testily. ‘For Lieutenant Bonham.’

      She glanced at my right hand, frowned at the square of grey sky showing through OZ’s window, then returned her gaze to me. I looked down at the hand myself as I stood to reach for the phone, made myself stop clenching and unclenching it, and raised the handset to my ear.

      It was Wayne Gaston with the Crime Scene unit. It sounded like he was out in the rain, meaning he must be at a scene somewhere. He said, ‘How about lookin’ at some evidence with me, Lou?’

      ‘What have you got?’ I asked.

      There was a silence, then, ‘Uh, that’s kinda what I’m askin’ myself right now – ’

      ‘Can’t you send me a shot with your phone?’

      ‘Sure would like to have you take a look in person.’

      ‘Not to jump to any conclusions here, Wayne,’ I said, biting back the unexpected impatience I felt edging into my voice, ‘but can I at least figure on somebody being dead?’

      ‘Eyes-on, boss,’ was all he’d say.

      TWO

      I loosened my tie and unbuttoned my collar, trying not to limp as I crossed the squad room to grab my gun and get a car. No new business on my desk, just the twenty-tens on a grill-fork stabbing at a family reunion out on the white end of Burnsville Road, and the potshot a one-legged combat vet on Maple Hill may or may not have taken at his neighbour’s cat last night with his AR-15.

      I checked the Glock’s chamber and magazine, slid the weapon onto my belt and went looking for Mouncey. I never drove when I went out on a call if I could help it because I wanted to see everything I’d otherwise miss by rolling up on the scene and parking the vehicle myself. There was general agreement at Three that Mouncey operating a motor vehicle was at least a metaphorical felony in itself, something along the lines of criminal assault against time and space, but she was always my first choice as a driver because she never had to ask where anything was, got us there fast, and up until now had always given the other traffic enough time to get out of her way. I found her at her desk picking through the old maids at the bottom of the bowl for the last few kernels of popcorn, and asked her to get us a car.

      She made the call, checked her own .40 and pulled on her tan leather jacket. ‘Where we goin’, Lou?’

      ‘Wayne’s at a scene.’

      ‘What he got?’

      ‘He wants to surprise us.’

      Ten minutes later we were out of the garage and headed north in the rain, which had lightened a little for the moment but was still falling steadily from a sky that now had taken on the look of heavy oilsmoke. Mouncey was decked out in tight pressed jeans and a lavender turtleneck under the leather jacket, with rings on every finger and what looked like a quarter of a pound of gold hanging from each earlobe. Her hair was piled up in ringlets that flashed with opal-coloured highlights. I knew that if we were out chasing leads or doing interviews there’d be nothing grabbable attached to her ears and nothing at all on the fingers of her gun hand, but on this call she was dressed for working inside the tape.

      The plastic ID she’d just used a corner of to winkle out a popcorn hull stuck between her incisors said Mouncey, Jacquanda S., Detective II-CID, but everybody called her M. She didn’t look much like police, but she had been a major-crimes detective for almost ten years and earned three commendations for things she’d done while being shot at, two of the shooters having had to settle for obituaries.

      Looking over her outfit, I said, ‘You put me in mind of a fleeing felon.’

      ‘The job just a day gig,’ she said. ‘Nights, I out perpetrating.’

      The passing landscape of miscellaneous storefront businesses started phasing into classier re-zoned conversions, upscale shops and finally older homes set back on spacious lots under mature oaks, sweetgums and longleaf pines, surrounded by acres of tailored, unseasonably green lawns with automatic sprinkler systems. Maybe money didn’t buy happiness, but it bought lots of grass.

      M said, ‘How the single life treating you, Lou?’

      Listening to the dull cardiac thumping of the wind-shield wipers for a minute, I took in a deep breath and blew it out along with the half-dozen bullshit answers that had occurred to me. I wasn’t much good at casual social lies and hardly ever wasted time or energy on them any more.

      ‘I don’t seem to be very good at solitude, M.’

      ‘Like to see the man that is,’ she said. ‘Y’all just be layin’ around suckin’ Bud Lite till you stufficate under all them dirty socks and pizza boxes.’ She looked at me with some expression or other for a couple of seconds before deciding to go directly for the throat. ‘Seen them two girls of yours waiting for they ride after school yesterday,’ she said. ‘Both of

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