Dust To Dust (3 page)

The chair pitched down the steps and spilled its occupant. Mike Fallon hit the floor like a sack of potatoes.

Kovac pushed the drunk aside and hustled down the steps. The crowd had cleared back in surprise.Wyatt stood frozen ten feet away, frowning as he stared down at Mike Fallon.

Kovac dropped down to one knee. "Hey, Mikey, let's get you off your face.You've got it confused with your ass again."

Someone righted the wheelchair. The old man rolled over onto his back and made a pathetic attempt to sit up, flopping on the floor like

D U S T

T 0

D U S T
13

a beached seal, tears pouring down the sides of his face. A guy Kovac knew from robbery took one side while Kovac took the other, and together they hoisted Fallon back into his chair.

The people standing nearby turned away, embarrassed for the old man. Fallon hung his head in abject humiliation-a sight Kovac had never wished to see.

He'd known Mike Fallon since day one on the job. Back then, every patrol cop in
Minneapolis had known Iron Mike. They had followed his example and his orders. And a good lot of them had cried like babies when Mike Fallon was gunned down. But to see him like this-broken in every waywas a heartbreak.

Kovac knelt beside the wheelchair and put a hand on Fallon's shoulder. "Come on, Mike. Let's call it a night, huh? I'll drive you home."

"You all right, Mike?"Ace Wyatt asked woodenly, stepping up at last. Fallon held a shaking hand out to him but couldn't bring himself to look up, even when Wyatt took hold. His voice was tight and raw. "I love you like a brother, Ace. Like a son. More.You know, I can't say"

"You don't have to say, Mike. Don't."

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry," the old man mumbled over and over, bringing his other hand up to cover his face. Snot ran in an elastic string from his nose to his lap. He had wet his pants.

In his peripheral vision, Kovac could see the newsies creeping in like vultures.

"I'll see he gets home," he said to Wyatt as he rose.

Wyatt stared down at Mike Fallon. "Thanks, Sam," he murmured. "You're a good man."

"I'm a fucking sap. But what else have I got to do with my time?" The blonde had vanished, but the brunette from TV sidled up to Wyatt again. "Is this Mike Fallon? Officer Fallon from the Thorne murder back in the seventies?"

The black-haired mimion appeared like the devil's farmiliar and pried the woman away with a serious something whispered in her ear. Wyatt collected himself and turned away, waving off the reporters

with a look of disapproval. "Just a little accident, folks. Let's move on." Kovac looked down at the man sobbing in the wheelchair.

Let's move on.

T A M

0 A 6

C H A P T E R

Y E A H , T H I S I S why I hired a sitter tonight," Liska said. "So I could cart a drunk home. I got enough of that when I was a uniform."

"Quit bitching," Kovac ordered. "You could have said no, partner." "Sure. And look bad in front of Mr. Community Service. I Just hope he took note of my selflessness and remembers when I hit him up for a job on his program," she said, teasing.

"Looked to me like you were trying to hit up the assistant for something else."

Liska reached across and slugged his arm, trying not to laugh. "I was not! What do you take me for?"

"What would he take you for? There's the real question." "He wouldn't."

"He didn't.There's a difference."

Liska pretended to pout. "He's obviously gay." "Obviously."

They drove in silence for a few blocks as the windshield wipers swiped at the snow corming down. Mike Fallon was propped up in a corner of the backseat, smelling of urine, snoring.

"You worked with him, huh?" Liska said, nodding to their passenger. "Everybody worked with Iron Mike when I came on. He was the

15

original warhorse. Always above and beyond the call. 'Cause it was right, he'd say. That's what being a cop is supposed to be about. And he's the one takes a slug in the spine. It's never some lazy shit just putting in his hours till the pension comes."

2here's no such thing as fair."

'There's a news flash. At least he nailed the mutt who shot him." :,That was the Thorne murder."

'You remember it?"

"I was a child at the time, Methuselah."

"Twenty years ago?" he scoffed. "You were probably busy making out with the captain of the football team."

"Wide receiver," she countered. "And let me tell you, they didn't call him Hands for nothing."

"Jeez"' Kovac grumbled, the corner of his mouth twitching against a chuckle. "Tinks, you're something else."

"Someone has to break your moods.You're too content to wallow in them."

"Look who's talking-"

"So what was the story with Thorne?"

"Bill Thorne was a cop. Rode patrol for years. I didn't know him. I was new on the job at the time. He lived in a neighborhood over by the old
West
High School
, where a bunch of cops lived back then. So Mike's patrolling the neighborhood, sees something doesn't look right at Thorne's place. He calls it in, then goes up to the house himself."

"He should have waited for backup."

"Yeah, he should have. Major mistake. But Thorne's car was there. It was a neighborhood full of cops. Anyway, there was a handyman who'd been workina in the neighborhood.A drifter.Thorne had tried to run him off a couple of times, but the wife felt sorry for him and paid him to wash windows. Turned out Thorne was right-the guy was bad news. He broke into the house and raped the wife.

"Thorne had been scheddled to work that night, but he stopped back at the house for something. The mutt had found a gun and he used it on Thorne. Killed him.

"Then Mike showed up and went in. The bad guy shot. Mike shot back. Nailed the guy, but he went down. Ace Wyatt lived across the street at the time. At some point Thorne's wife called him, hysterical. He kept Mike alive until the ambulance got there."

"That explains tonight."

16
T A M

0 A G

"Yeah," Kovac said, pensive again. "Part of it, anyway."

There was a lot of story between Iron Mike Fallon, fallen hero, and old Mike Fallon, pathetic alcoholic. The profession was too full of sad stories and sadder drunks.

The one in the backseat tipped over and puked on the floor as Kovac pulled up in front of Fallon's house.

Kovac groaned and hit his forehead on the steering wheel.

Liska opened her door and looked at him. "No good deed goes unpunished. I'm not cleaning that up, partner."

FROM THE OUTSIDE, the house was small and tidy in a neighborhood of small, tidy houses. Inside was a different story. Fallon's wife had died years before. Cancer. He lived here alone. The place smelled of old man and fried onions.

The rooms were spare, the furnishings kept to a minimum to make way for Mike's wheelchair. An odd mix of worn junk and state-ofthe-art. A high-end massage recliner sat front and center in the living room, pointed at a thirty-one-inch color television. The couch was a relic from the seventies.The dining room looked as if it hadn't been used in two decades, and was probably exactly as Mrs. Fallon had left it, with the exception of the booze bottles on the table.

Twin beds nearly filled the little bedroom-one stacked with pil-es of clothes, the other a tangle of sheets. Dirty laundry had been thrown in the general vicinity of an overflowing hamper. A bottle of Maker's Mark bourbon sat on the nightstand beside a jelly-jar glass sporting the likeness of Barney the Dinosaur. On the other end of the room, the dead wife's dresser was lined with family photos, half a dozen of them turned facedown.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," Mike muttered as Kovac went about the job of putting him in bed.

Liska found a laundry basket and to6k the discarded clothes away, nose wrinkled, but not complaining.

"Forget it, Mike. It's nothing we all haven't done once in a while," Kovac said.

"Christ, I pissed myself." "Don't worry about it."

"I'm sorry.Where ya workin', Sam?" "Homicide."

0 U S T

T 0

D U S T
17

Fallon gave a weak, derisive, drunken laugh. "Fuckin'big shot.Too good for a uniform."

Kovac heaved a sigh and straightened, his gaze landing on the photographs across the room. Fallon had two sons. The younger-Andywas a cop. He'd worked robbery for a while. His were the photos turned down on the dresser, Kovac discovered as he turned them up.

Good-looking kid. Athletic, handsome. There was a shot of him in a baseball uniform. He was built like a shortstop: compact, catlike. Another photo showed him in his police uniform, graduating from the academy. Mike Fallon's pride and joy, carrying on the family tradition.

"How's Andy doing?"

"He's dead," Fallon mumbled. Kovac turned abruptly. "What?"

Fallon turned his face away. He looked frail in the lamplight, his skin as pale and wrinkled as old parchment. "He's dead to me:'he said softly. Then he closed his eyes and passed out.

T H E S A D N E S S A N D finality of Mike Fallon's words haunted Kovac all the way back to Patrick's, where he left Liska to catch the last of the party. He dropped her at the curb and drove on through .empty side streets filling with snow, away from downtown to his own slightly shabby neighborhood.

Old trees dorru*nated the boulevard, their roots buckling the sidewalks like an LA freeway after an earthquake. The houses were crammed shoulder to shoulder, some big and square and cut up into apartments, some smaller. One side of the street was lined with a motley assortment of cars, the other side clear for snow removal.

The house just east of Kovac's was decorated for Christmas to within an inch of its life. It appeared to sag beneath the burden of colored lights. A plastic Santa and reindeer were mounted on the roof Another Santa was crawling down the chimney. A third stood on the lawn, contemplating the others, while two feet away the wise men were about to visit the Christ child in a manger.The entire yard was spotlit.

Kovac trudged up the sidewalk to his house and went inside, not bothering to turn on lights. Plenty spilled in from next door. His

18
T A M

home was not so different from Mike Fallon's in that it was short on furniture.The last divorce had left him with the castoffs, which he had never bothered to replace or add to. He was himself a castoff, so it seemed only fitting. His biggest indulgence in the last five years had been the aquarium. A sorry attempt to bring other living creatures into his home.

There were no photographs of children or famidy. Two failed marriages seemed nothing to brag about. He had a lot of bad memories and a daughter he hadn't seen since her infancy. She was dead to him in a way, he supposed. But it was more as if she had never existed. After the divorce, her mother had remarried with embarrassing haste, and the new family had moved to
Seattle. Kovac hadn't watched his daughter grow up or play sports or follow him into law enforcement. He had trained himself not to think about the lost opportunities ... most of the time.

He went upstairs to his bedroom, but the bed didn't interest him. His head was throbbing. He sat down in the chair by the window and looked out at the garish light show next door.

He's dead to me, Mike Fallon had said about his son.

What would prompt a man to'say such a thing about a child who had clearly been the pride of his life? Why would he cut that tie when he had so little else?

Kovac dug his Nicorette gum out of his pocket and tossed it in the wastebasket, reached into the nightstand drawer for a half-empty pack of Salems, and lit one up.

Who was gonna tell him not to?

D U S T

T 0

D U S T
19

C H A P T E

T H E P H 0 T 0 G R A P H H A S a fake quality to it. Most people would have glanced at it, felt an immediate burst of horror, then quickly decided it was some kind of sick j oke.

The photographer is not most people.

As the artist considers the portrait, there is an initial sense of shock, but what follows immediately on its heels is a strange,.complicated mix of emotions: horror, fascination, relief, guilt. And beneath that layer, another darker dimension of feeling: a certain sense of excitement ... a sense of control ... a sense of power. Feelings that are frightening, sickening.

There is tremendous power in taking a life. To take a life: the phrase implies to take the energy of another living creature and add it to

1
Addict'

one s own life force. The idea * s seductive in a sinister way.
ive to a certain type of individual: the kind who kills for sport.

I'm not that. I could never be that.

Even as the pledge is made, memories of another death flash frame by frame through the memory: violence, movement, blood, white noise roaring in the ears, a deafening internal scream that can't be heard. Then silence and the stillness, and the terrible realization: I did that.

20

And the sense of excitement ... and power ...

The dark feelings move through the soul like a snake, sinuous and shiny.The conscience shudders in its wake. Fear rises like a flood tide. The photographer stares at the captured image of a corpse dancing on the end of a rope, the image reflected in a mirror, the

scrawled with the single word. Sorry. So sorry.

D U S T
T 0
D U S T
21

C

"A N DY FA L L 0 N is dead."

Liska met Kovac with the news at the door into the CID offices. The breath went out of him. "What?"

44

1.
Andy Fallon is dead. A friend found him this morning. It looks ike suicide."

"Jesus '"Kovac muttered, feeling as disoriented as he had this morning when he'd rolled out of bed too fast for his throbbing head. In the back of his mind he saw Mike Fallon, frail and white; heard him say the words. He's dead to me. "Jesus."

Liska stared up at him, expectant.

He shook himself mentally. "Who's up?" I

Springer and Copeland," she said, glancing sideways for eavesdroppers." Were up. Past tense. I figured you'd wa
.nt it, so I grabbed it." "Iidon't know if I should thank you or wish your parents had