Based on true events:
The inside of the car smelled like cigarettes and sweat, aged air freshener, possibly cheap booze, she couldn’t be sure. Claudia noticed the seat was sticky when she shifted her weight.
“I should check in with Dan,” she said
O”Neil steered the car with two thick fleshy fingers on the wheel while lighting one cigarette with the butt of another, sneering as he sucked smoke between his thick lips.
“He said meet up around this paint store they got,” he said through the smoke. “We’ll call him once we get down there.”
They turned onto Folsom and Claudia couldn’t help but wonder how a man of O’Neil’s size could pass the annual physical. He was enormous, rolls of flesh and cloth all slouched in the seat. Any good years were far behind him. She rolled her window all the way down and could still hear his breath come rough and hoarse from the driver side as he sucked menthol.
“Why would they have grabbed Oscar Rayne?” she said aloud.
O”Neil glance over at her.
“Maybe he owed somebody money?”
Claudia watched the street pass outside the car. She tried to piece together the moments from the bar, tried to put them in an order that made sense.
“Let’s say they had no idea about the surveillance,” she said. “Let’s say someone just happened to grab the purse. That would mean they shut down the party because of Rayne. They grabbed him while they were kicking everybody else out.”
“Are you sure you got the right read on what was happening Detective? How you do you know they weren’t just joking around?”
O’Neil was putting emphasis in the word Detective, it was hard not to sense the condescension.
“It was no joke,” Claudia muttered. “They wouldn’t have stopped the whole party over some joke. You said you had been in on an investigation. What do you know about these guys?”
O’Neil scowled.
“I been in this department twenty three years. These sort of operations gotta be air tight. You can't just go in there-"
"I didn't ask you about that. What do you know about Leo McCarthy?"
O'Neil peered over at her again, his wide nose twitching as the smoke came out the nostrils.
"There's not much. We were on a couple of the guys due to some business down at the airport. We dug a little deeper and Leo McCarthy’s name come up. All we could ascertain was that he was a businessman who hired a couple’a shady assholes- couple’a jerks with records. We didn’t have anywhere to take it.”
Claudia watched the fat face as he spoke. There were bags under the eyes, stretched by the weight of the cheeks. She had tried to call up from memory what she knew about the robbery division but there wasn’t much. She understood it was mostly over the hill guys, cops that had earned their stripes but were too broken to carry much weight anymore. O’Neil fit the description. Yet here he was on the job, helping his comrades when things went south.
“I appreciate you coming in for me. I don’t think I said that already,” she said.
O’Neil nodded.
“You do what you gotta do,” he muttered. “We’re all in it together -way I see it. There’s so much bullshit out here in this city with the fucking yuppies and the god damn crack heads all smashed together. We gotta make sure -”
He was cut off by the theme song from Hawai 50, coming from his phone. He dug it up from the inside of his sports coat and put it up to his ear: “Yeah. You're kidding me? Not far, a few minutes. We’ll get up there. If you think that’s best, then we’ll head over that way. That’s right. Yes. I’ll take care of it.”
Claudia strained to hear if it was Dan or Alex on the line. O”Neil dropped the phone in his lap and threw the cigarette out the window. He reached down under the seat to yank up the police light attached to its thick cord that plugged into the the power.
“Was that them?” Claudia asked, irritated that she had to speak before O’Neil did. He peered over at her, stretched up in his seat as he tried to stick the light to the roof of the car.
“Yeah, yeah, it was them. They said this Rayne guy got spotted up at some bar near Columbus.”
“Gold Duck?” she asked.
O”Neil seemed to go pale for a moment, swallowing. Claudia assumed it was the exertion of trying to put the light on the roof.
“That’s right. Gold Duck.”
“Was he all alone? Was McCarthy spotted too?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “They had a tail on him and that’s where he ended up. I figure we try to apprehend him and go from there.”
Claudia was irritated he hadn’t thought to pass the phone over to her. She needed her partner’s take on what they had right away, she wanted to discuss, to compare everything they had picked up before things had gone black.
She imagined bringing Rayne into custody. She thought of his picture from the McCarthy file, the eyes staring back at her from his rap sheet, the scar along the forehead.
“I don’t want someone going in and fucking this up. Was it a black and white that spotted him?” she said.
“He just said Rayne got spotted. They’re gonna send back up but we’re pretty close already.”
O’Neil hit the switch, the siren screaming. The people outside the bars looked up as the car tore passed them and Claudia sat up straighter in her seat, smoothing out the dress that still tightly cradled her body. If they were going to make a collar she would have preferred to be in jeans and a sweatshirt.
****
White Charlie hung up the phone and looked over at Leo, who sat on the top of the desk, staring back, not blinking. Pat sat in the metal chair against the wall and stayed silent like everybody else. He was still sobering up and was starting to feel the cold of the chair through his pants.
“He said he’ll take care of it,” Charlie said. “He’ll bring ‘em both over here.”
“Try Dick again. I want to know what happened.”
Pat watched Charlie punch numbers into the phone and then glanced over at the other men who were gathered there in the paint store office- Vlad, Ken, the Flores brothers, Cabbagepatch, they were all trying to look stoic, ready for anything, but Pat could see the worry in the corners of their mouths, the blinking of their eyes.
“Nothing,” Charlie said and hung up the phone.
“How did he fucking get away?” Ken said.
The other men in the room glanced over at the bartender and Ken seemed to act like he didn’t notice. He really had no business being there, he wasn’t on the inside.
It was Pat’s fault that Ken was there in the first place. Pat was still off guard when Dick and Murph had dragged Oscar off, he hadn’t reacted like he should. He was too drunk to drive and the last thing he wanted was to get caught up on the way to the roudeveux, letting his friend down again.
Ken was the only one still on the sidewalk, everyone rushing off in different directions, leaving O’Neil at the bar to deal with the cop situation. Pat had hollered at Ken to drive his car. The bartender had jumped at the chance, driving too fast and asking a million questions that Pat had no answer for. Pat had yelled for him to shut his stupid fucking mouth, there was no point on going on and on about it. Pat was as confused as anybody else.
He couldn’t get the picture of Oscar being dragged from the bar from his head. He had just stood there, watching like an idiot. He should have done something. Now they had gotten word that his friend had somehow escaped Dick and Murph and was robbing the Duck. Robbing the Duck? Pat brought his gaze over to his uncle, who still sat perfectly still on top of the desk.
“Fran, you and your brother head up there too,” Leo growled. “Our boy is a sneaky bastard. I don’t want any more of this bullshit, I want whatever the hell is going down here to be contained. You should go heavy.”
He got up from the desk and started turning the knob on the large wall safe. Pat lit a cigarette and watched his uncle and White Charlie pull guns out: a glock .45, two extra clips, a .32, another clip; they laid the whole arsenal out on the desk. Bobby got up and picked up the .45, testing the weight in his hand.
Pat took a deep breath. Things seemed be moving so fast, like a wave had come down and whipped him and everybody else up into a fearful panic, and he could feel that it was only going to get worse. He knew his uncle could be capable of anything when the old man felt backed into a corner. Leo had his men all on edge as well, liable to do something stupid.
Pat stood up from the chair, knowing this would probably be the only moment he would have. He dropped the cigarette onto the floor and rubbed it into the rug. Before Fran Flores could reach the table, Pat had stepped forward and picked up the .32 himself.
“I’m going,” he said.
His uncle turned towards him with the cold hard stare that Pat had seen so many times in his life. The big green eyes went from Pat’s face to the gun in his hand.
“Put that gun down boy,” White Charlie warned.
“He’s like a brother Leo. Let me go and take care of this thing.”
His uncle squinted. “He’s no one’s brother Patty. He’s a rat orphan. Now sit back down and let us take care of this thing.”
“Do you hear yourself? Do you hear what you're saying?!”
“We took him in Patty. We gave him everything he’s got. We gave him his only chance and he turned on us.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s turned. He did Vaughn. I sent the two of them to do a job and only one of them shows back up. He’s god damned turned!”
“Says who? O’Neil?”
Leo swallowed hard, forcing the rage back. Pat watched his uncle’s face go a deep crimson.
“We don’t have time to debate right now lad. We got a call from the Duck saying our boy is down there robbing the place. Who knows where Murph and Dick are. We don’t have the time to spend ironing out the finer points of it. All we know is the boy’s gone rogue.”
Pat was nearly sober now, he could feel the blood in his veins pushing out to all his limbs, out to the pressure points in his body. It was dark in the little office, just the desk lamp was lit. The only face he could see clearly was his uncle’s, wide and red before him.
“Give me a moment to talk to him,” Pat said.
“We’re going to bring him back here to talk to him. That’s all now.”
“You're going to kill him.”
“Of course I’m gonna kill him!”
Pat heard Cabbagepatch mutter something behind him and Pat realized he had raised the gun he was holding, pointing it directly at his uncle.
“Jesus,” White Charlie said.
It was too late, Pat knew it. Things were out of control, they were always out of control, always beyond his reach. He could feel his uncle's full attention upon him. Pat looked into Leo’s face knowing he had no choice but to continue on, the pistol steady in his grip.
“I want you to let me go over there Leo. I want you to tell everybody else to stand down and let me talk to him. I’ll be God damned if I’m going to let you go in there and wack out my boy over some fucking assumptions.”
“Put the gun down Pat.”
“You need to listen to me Leo. Let me go.”
“Put the gun down.”
“He’s just as fucked up as we are, and if you would let me-”
The shot Pat heard wasn’t from his own gun, it was like a bomb went off in his back. He went against the desk and then was down on the floor of the office, a terrible burn through his back and his chest but only for a moment before everything felt thick and full and all he could hear was the blood pulsing through his head.
He was on his back, trying to take a breath, looking up the ceiling fan and then stretching his neck, trying to figure it out, looking over at Ken, the bartender, with the .44 in his hand. A flash filled the room and Ken flew back, disappearing from view. Everything became much foggier, dimmer.
His vision cleared for a moment -he saw Cabbagepatch staring down at him, the eyes big and white, that wide black face shiny with sweat. Then the black face went fuzzy and it was just a shape with other shapes around it. All Pat could hear was the blood in his ears and it was starting to get softer.
The last thing he saw was his uncle’s face, looking down at him.
