Busted (3 page)

“You might wanna get that looked at.”

“It’s all right.” Will winced as he tried to shrug his shoulder, which felt like it had slammed into the pavement going thirty miles an hour. He asked, “That cop gonna be all right?”

“Still in surgery.” The man tilted his head to the side like he had to consider the prognosis. “He’s young. In good shape. That goes a long way.” He glanced back at the Suburban. The driver had her hands on her hips. She wore sunglasses, but even a blind man could see the flames of fury burning in her eyes. “I bet they got some questions for
you.” He looked at Will. “You ask me, you’re some kind of hero taking out that guy with your bike. Probably saved that lady’s life.”

“It was a good bike,” Will said. “Closed loop, sequential, port injection with heated oxygen sensor.”

“Damn.” The man slowly shook his head, and they both shared a moment of silence for the fallen Dark Horse.

“Thanks again.” Reluctantly, Will headed toward the Suburban. There was an escort for him, a Clayton County cop who was shaped like a shepherd’s crook. In keeping with the theme, he herded Will toward the black SUV. Will pulled the cotton out of his nose as he walked. It hurt like a bitch, but this was not the kind of crowd you wanted to show weakness to.

Law enforcement officers were everywhere – Clayton County cops, Forest Park cops, Clayton County sheriff’s deputies, some officers from the Georgia Highway Patrol, and a smattering of GBI agents, who were trickling in from the Panthersville Road headquarters. The entrance to the parking lot was blocked by several cruisers. Crime scene tape crisscrossed the broken plate glass. A white sheet covered the dead body inside the store. Yellow cards marked spent shells, fibers, trace evidence.

And yet, no one was doing much of anything. They all knew that jurisdiction wasn’t something that had to be hashed out. Pro forma, the GBI was always asked to investigate officer-involved shootings. Even Will’s escort peeled off when they reached the Suburban’s gravitational field. The SUV was a G-ride, short for “government ride.” The vehicles the GBI used were easy to spot if you knew what you were looking for. The rear was lower to the ground than the front because of the heavy metal gun cabinets
bolted in back.

The GBI was to the state of Georgia what the FBI was to the country. Despite what Hollywood portrayed, neither agency could just waltz in and take over an investigation. Except in instances of child abduction or drug trafficking, the GBI had to be invited onto a case before they could work it.

Clayton County, by virtue of its squalor, offered another exception. After the county’s coroner was caught running a drug ring out of the back of his funeral parlor, it was decided by all involved that it would just be easier to pay the state to perform all of the county’s medical examiner duties. This included but was not limited to cases of murder. And in this particular case, a man had definitely been murdered. Sure, he’d been in the process of robbing a convenience store, but murder was murder.

Then there was the guy Will had plastered with his bike. Like the cop who’d been shot, the driver of the Chevy had been rushed to the hospital. Unlike the cop, he probably wouldn’t make it. Will didn’t know if that counted as an officer-involved death or vehicular homicide. The only thing he was certain of was that his boss was about to stick her foot as far up his ass as it would go.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Deputy Director Amanda Wagner snapped off her sunglasses. Will had been right about flames of fury in her eyes, though up close, they certainly burned a lot hotter. “You were supposed to be in Macon this morning. You should be checking in with your parole officer right now.”

Will looked to his partner for help. Faith Mitchell’s gaze settled on the giant sign in the window that advertised cold frozen drinks inside. She looked back at Will, offering an almost imperceptible shake of her head.

Amanda said, “Arrest him.”

Faith looked as surprised as Will felt.

“Bill Black is a material witness to a crime who is also on parole and who also has a history of armed robbery.” Amanda’s voice turned into a low hiss. “Seventy-five thousand dollars, Will. That’s how much it cost to put you undercover. And that doesn’t include the thirty grand we’re going to owe Fulton County for the motorcycle. You are officially costing me more than you’re worth.”

“I’m sorry,” Will said, trying hard not to make it sound like a question.

“You’d better just be damn glad no one was close enough to get your face in those videos.” She nodded to Faith. “Cuff him.”

Faith mumbled something that was just loud enough for Will to hear. Still, she took out her handcuffs. “Turn around.”

“My shoulder kind of hurts.”

Faith gave a heavy sigh. “Hands out front.”

Will held out his hands, mindful that cops from at least five agencies were watching his arrest. Amanda probably had a point about his cover. He still had an undercover case to work in Macon, which was about an hour from where they stood. Cops talked to each other all the time. They would share the story of the con who ran his bike into a guy standing in the middle of the interstate.

Will wondered if it looked as cool as he remembered.

Amanda said, “Read him his rights before you bring him into the store.” She slid her sunglasses back on. Her high heels made a snapping sound as she walked across the parking lot. Probably from her cloven hooves rubbing together.

Faith ratcheted down the handcuffs. “You stopped for an Icee, didn’t you?”

Will exercised his right to remain silent.

“Did you lose consciousness?”

“No,” he lied.

“Are you going to tell Sara about this?”

“Of course,” he lied again. In order to tell Sara what had happened, he would have to tell her why he was on his way to Macon.

“So,” Will said. “There’s video?”

“Amanda’s right. From what we’ve seen, nobody got a good shot of your face.”

He tried, “How about that motorcycle trick? Cool, right?”

“It reminds me of Evel Kneivel.” She made sure the handcuffs were tight. “You know, when he tried to jump over the Snake River Canyon on his bike.”

He gently corrected, “The X-2 Skycycle was a steam-powered rocket, not a motorbike.”

“Whatever, Will. How’d it go for him?”

Will didn’t answer her. There was a reason Knievel still held the world record for most broken bones in a lifetime. “You look nice today.”

Faith jerked him toward the store. Will wasn’t certain whether it was kindness or forgetfulness that made her drag him by his uninjured arm.

They found Amanda standing in front of an old tube television set behind the counter. She was surrounded by beefy, tall cops, but her presence was such that the men seemed reduced around her. Amanda had spent her life in law enforcement. Her father had been a cop. She’d come up when the only thing the Atlanta Police Department could
agree on was that women didn’t belong in uniform. To say there was a chip on her shoulder was to say that Chuck Norris was kind of a badass.

She didn’t look up when Faith dragged Will inside, but obviously she knew he was there. “Mr. Black, would that be you hiding behind the Yodels?”

Will leaned in, squinting at the paused image. The camera was mounted over the front counter, but instead of capturing the front doors, the lens was pointed toward the back of the convenience store. There Will was – curled into a ball, hands over his head.

He said, “I believe those are Little Debbies.”

The laughter died down as quickly as it started. A pointed look from Amanda cleared the front of the building. She waited until just Will and Faith were left in the store with her.

“Run it down for me,” she told Will, though history told him that she likely had more information than he did.

Still, he gave her the highlights, substituting the Icee quest for a gas run. “I guess he got scared when he heard the sirens,” Will said, meaning the driver of the Chevy. “He ran out of the store, jumped into his truck. I pursued. You know what happened next.”

“Everyone does. It’s all over Hooter.”

Will hoped she meant Twitter.

Amanda supplied, “The driver of the truck has been identified as Wayne Michael Walker. He’s at the hospital now. It doesn’t look good. The cop got off a shot before your little chase. Nicked the femoral artery. Of course, that pales in comparison to taking a full-body slam from a ten-thousand-pound motorcycle.”

Will said, “It’s probably closer to seven hundred.”

She pressed together her lips before continuing, “Walker’s fifty-three years old. He’s a high school counselor, recently fired from the Clayton County school system.”

Faith gave a low whistle. It took a lot to get fired from Clayton County. “What’d he do, slap a kid?”

“Yes.”

Faith seemed a little shocked.

“At any rate,” Amanda continued, doling out the information she’d obviously gleaned on the drive down, “Walker’s accomplice worked at the same school – Spivey Senior High. Math teacher.”

“He didn’t look like a teacher,” Will said. “He looked like a homeless man.”

Amanda picked her way across the debris littering the floor. Will stepped in to help her when she knelt in front of the dead body, then he remembered he was in handcuffs and that people in handcuffs didn’t tend to help the police.

She pulled back the sheet. “Douglas Raymond Pierce. Doug-Ray to his friends. Coached girls’ softball. School-wide teacher of the year last year.”

Will accepted that he really was some kind of idiot. The John Deere baseball cap was tilted back on Doug-Ray Pierce’s head, giving Will a clear view of where dreadlocks had been sewn into the rim. Likewise, the bushy porn mustache was a fake. The spotty goatee was all Doug-Ray. Take off the disguise, and he looked like every math teacher/coach Will had ever had.

“What about their next of kin?” Faith asked. She was scrolling through the closed-circuit footage. Will looked at the set. He saw himself dive behind the Little Debbies. And then the film reversed and he ran backward. And then the film played out and he
went down again.

Amanda supplied, “The driver, Wayne Walker, was born and raised in Forest Park. He got his degree from Clayton State College. He’s twice divorced, currently single. Both exes live outside the state – one in Idaho, the other in Massachusetts. He has a twenty-year-old daughter who’s stationed in Afghanistan. We’re trying to track them all down, but it’s rough going.” She paused, and Will could tell she was exasperated for other reasons now. “Walker has no history of violence except for slapping that student. He’s as financially stable as you’d think a high school counselor would be, usually pays his bills late, but he always pays them. He hasn’t been issued a speeding ticket in the last seven years. He has a master’s in social work, for what that’s worth. And I should add that universally, one word came up in all the interviews we’ve conducted so far: ‘asshole.’”

“And Pierce?” Faith asked, not looking up from the TV. Will saw himself diving again.

“On paper, Doug-Ray Pierce is more of the same. We found nothing on his record but a speeding ticket in Florida three years ago,” Amanda told them. “Personal details are still being filled out. He’s new to the area – been here less than two years. Before that, he taught in west Georgia. We’ve got people heading over to Spivey High to conduct interviews. Preliminarily, no one seems to know much about Pierce. His emergency contact is his father, who died three months ago. Pierce was a loner by all accounts, never talked about his private life. Except for Wayne Walker, he didn’t seem to have any friends.”

“Gay?” Faith asked.

“Not if you take off the mustache,” Amanda quipped. “What exactly are you doing?”

Faith paused the footage again. She pointed to the screen. “Look here.”

Amanda normally kept her reading glasses on a chain around her neck. Will guessed she’d left them in the car. She leaned forward, her nose almost touching the screen. “What am I looking at?”

“Here.” Faith pointed to the fish-eye mirror. “This is the only camera in the store, but you can see some of the front entrance in the fish-eye mirror. Watch the truck.”

Will leaned in, too. The footage was the kind you normally found in convenience stores. The equipment was old. The VCR tapes were reused. The average cell phone camera had a hundred times better resolution. Still, he could clearly make out a man crawling out of the back of the truck. He kept low, knees bent, back curved, as he shuffled away. Instead of going into the store, he headed toward the back.

Three robbers, not two. One in the truck. One in the store. One securing the exit.

Faith asked, “No known associates on either man?”

Amanda had her phone out. She dialed a number as she told Faith, “We’ve got data processing running their backgrounds. It could be an hour or more before the computers spit anything out.” She held up her finger for silence as she put the phone to her ear. It was answered on the first ring. She said, “Nick, we’ve got a third suspect, possibly on foot. He was hiding in the back of the truck. Close down the perimeter for five miles. Pull all recently reported stolen vehicles. I want door knocks on every house within a two-mile radius. Send me a tracking team and start a fingertip search of the woods behind the store.”

She nodded as Nick obviously relayed some new information to her.

Will looked down at his cuffed wrists. His back had been to the window when the guy jumped out of the truck, but he still felt bad for missing what was obviously an important clue. And that wasn’t all he’d missed.

Will asked, “Where’s the bag of money?”

Faith said, “Is that what you had?”

“What are you two talking about?” Amanda had finished her call. “What money?”

Faith fast-forwarded the tape, and Will saw his mad scramble down the aisle, the plastic bag full of cash gripped tightly in his hand. Faith paused the image. The bag was on the floor. They all turned in unison and looked at the same spot on the floor.

The money was gone.

“Well.” Amanda paused dramatically before continuing, “If only we had a way to know what happened to that bag.”