Slow Burn (37 page)

He stopped
walking and turned sideways so he could see both ends of the lobby. I saw a
head pop up behind the reception desk and quickly disappear.

The way the old
guy on the right was waving his piece around, nobody was safe. I spoke to the
cops.

"Go
downstairs," I said. "Get some backup."

"Put the
gun down," yelled the cop on the right.

"Go get
some backup," I said again.

"Down!"
he screamed.

I stood still.
I could feel the skin on my face tingling from the tension, so I tried to
breathe deeply. "Go on. Do as he says."

It was Lawrence, standing just off my right shoulder.

She
didn't have
to tell them twice. One after another, still waving the guns around,
they
backed onto the down escalator and electronically slid from view.
Lawrence was now kneeling by Lobdell, telling him to stay down, that
there was nothing he
could do now except to relax and breathe. Help was on the way. I wasn't
so
sure.

Rickey Ray
dropped his hands. "You gonna shoot me, Leo?"

"Not
unless you come near me," I said.

Candace rushed
to his side. "Stop," she told him again.

Sharp voices
filtered up from below. I crossed the room, angling over to the north wall,
moving all the way past the pair to the top of the escalator. At the bottom,
black-clad SWAT cops checked me out through rifle scopes. I turned back to
Rickey.

"This is
it, man," I said. I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. "All the cops in
the world, partner." I began to ask Lawrence for help in keeping the cops
at bay, but it was too late. Two SWAT team members lay prone on the carpet
behind me, their rifles propped and ready. I glanced at Rickey. Candace was
whispering into his ruined ear while a red laser spot burned its way into his
forehead.

"Listen to
your sister," I said. "Don't be stupid."

The more she
talked, the more often he nodded.

Candace walked
over to me and looked down at the mass of cops in sniper position on the floor.
Three red laser spots danced about her chest. I tried not to think about how
many were trained on me. She leaned close and spoke very softly. "Richard
got that face from his first foster father, a Georgia Baptist farmer named
Zachary Clyde. He was ten. The Godfearing Mr. Clyde threw him through a glass
patio door for leaving the light on in the barn. You know what he did
then?" She didn't want an answer. "He used his boots to grind
Richard's face into the glass, that's what he did."

"I'm
sorry," was all I could think to say.

'Just so you
know about Jack Del Fuego."

"Okay."

She looked over
at her brother. "He says they'll kill him anyway."

"No way/'
I said. "He needs to lie down with his hands over his head. If he does
that, there won't be any problem."

I went over and
told Rickey what he needed to do. He was almost back to Rickey Ray the friendly
cowboy, but he didn't like it much.

"Fuckers'U
waste me anyway. They get crazy when you fuck up cops." The puckered area
beneath his eye looked angry and new.

"Then just
go running down the escalator, man. That's all you gotta do. They dragged all
that crap over from the station. They'd just as soon use it."

It took another
minute, but we got him down on the floor. I walked back to the escalator, moved
the safety to On and set Lobdell's gun on the angled piece of marble separating
the up escalator from the down. I let the allto go. It slid right into the hand
of the nearest SWAT cop. "He's ready to surrender," I said.

I held my hands
over my head and turned back toward the lobby, where two sharpshooters had
mutated into five. I moved toward them with my hands in the air. I kept
walking. Past the snipers, to where a couple of EMTs were inserting an airway
tube into the skinny cop's throat. When I Tooked back, Sheila Somers's kids
were already in custody and on their way downstairs.

"Bravo,
Waterman. Splendid, I say," Sir Geoffrey said from the mezzanine. At least
somebody was having a good time.

They'd
loaded
Lobdell facedown onto a gurney. I guessed they didn't want to move him.
Lawrence sat ashen-faced in a red velvet wing chair, her cell phone in
her lap. The hotel
was coming back to life around us. Hotel personnel peeked out from
their hiding
places and then scurried together to trade stories. Every cop in North
America was lumbering about the lobby. Somebody opened the Seneca
Street door and the
whine of sirens came storming in.

"That
thing still work?" I asked.

"What?"

"The
phone."

She nodded.

"Why don't
you use it?"

"For
what?"

"For my
crew," I said.

For a moment,
she didn't get it.

"Oh,"
she said. "Oh, yes," she said finally, and began to dial.

"And, Lawrence . . ." She looked up at me.

"You
probably better let Jack go while you're at it."

All twelve of
them were seated around a single, circular table. I'd have taken a seat, but
that would have made thirteen. Tonight, after what had happened with Candace
and Rickey Ray, I couldn't make up my mind whether I felt more like Jesus or
Judas, so I stood up instead.

The reason we
hadn't been able to find Harold and Ralph was because they were already back in
the can. Half an hour after George had let them go, they had gotten in a fight
at Steve's Broiler and had been summarily pinched for being drunk and
disorderly.

Sir Geoffrey
Miles had been adamant. "These people have been incarcerated on my behalf.
I insist. Would you send me home from your country feeling as if I were in
debt? Surely not."

We were at the
extreme top rear of the Washington State Convention Center, high above the
banquet floor, in a room which Sir Geoffrey said was generally used for staff
luncheons. Tonight, it was the crew's private banquet hall. They'd stood along
the rail, looking down into the vast banquet hall, listening attentively as Sir
Geoffrey Miles delivered his keynote address, and had been among the most
frenetic in their applause.

Following Sir
Geoffrey's third curtain call, a brigade of waiters marched in, carrying the
finest fare available on the planet. Not only were the twelve stuffing their
faces, but, early on, the gods had provided them with a snooty salad waiter.

When Earlene
complained of the sharp taste of the Belgian endive in her salad, the guy
looked down his nose at her and said, "Perhaps Madame is not accustomed to
the finer greens."

The minute he
turned his back, Mary reached up, pulled a long gray hair from her head and
stuffed it into her salad.

"What in
hell is this?" she demanded.

The waiter
squinted down at her plate and was horrified.

"Oh, I am
so sorry. Allow me to—"

"Ya
shoulda give her a comb instead of a fork," George said.

"What’s
the house dressing? Minoxidil?" They were rolling now, banging on the
table and each other.

"She said
romaine, not Rogaine," added Red Lopez.

This one
reduced them to jelly. The waiter ran for his life.

My night had
two highlights. The first was when Sir Geoffrey and Senor Alomar had insisted
on paying me the five-grand bonus for rescuing Bunky. I didn't see how I'd
earned it, but according to them, the conference had been adjudged to be such
an unqualified success that I somehow deserved the-cash. I protested briefly.

The other
highlight had been when Sir Geoffrey made his way around the table, shaking
hands and thanking the crew for their contribution. To Ralph he said, "My
warmest thanks, Mr. Batista. Your services have been invaluable."

"Don't
mention it, your kingship," Ralph slurred. "The pleasure was all
mine. I normally don't meet people unless I already know them."

We knew what he
meant and Sir Geoffrey did a good impression.

The case never
made it to trial, so we'll never know for sure whether the sob story Sandra and
Richard Somers told the grand jury was true or not. What had happened to
Richard's face was a matter of public record, so that part was at least
accurate. As to the story of the intrepid young woman searching for and finally
locating her long-lost brother and how, together again for the first time in
over twenty years, they had sought to reclaim their family legacy, I'm
reserving judgment on that part. They claimed that they'd gone to introduce
themselves to Reese and he'd pulled a gun on them. According to them, Reese had
been killed during a struggle for the gun. Self-defense.

I, for one,
have always been bothered by the fact that the cops didn't find fingerprint one
on Mason Reese's Best Steak House list. I've never been able to work up a clear
picture of how to type, fold and put something into an envelope without once
touching it, but maybe that's just me. It didn't seem to bother the cops a bit.

I think it's a
whole lot more likely that the siblings were afraid Reese was going to see
Candace with Jack sometime during the week and put two and two together. Or
maybe they were trying to get Reese on board, and he wasn't willing to go along
with screwing up Jack's life. And those are the good possibilities. A cynical
man might assume they killed Mason Reese and left a bogus list in his room,
solely for the purpose of pinning the murder on Jack Del Fuego. Who knows?
Maybe it doesn't matter.

Either way, a
busload of smart lawyers plea-bargained them both down to manslaughter two. It
was, after all, Reese's gun. Four to six. Sandra served nineteen months and was
released to a halfway house. Richard did the same nineteen for the killing,
and, last I heard, was serving the three-plus years he got for assault. Abby's
Angus is packed seven nights a week. The FeedLot is now a video arcade. Last I
heard, Bunky was at stud, somewhere back in Virginia. I think of him every time
I see the winking bull on the sign for Abby's Angus.

Whatever his
many faults, Jack Del Fuego made a lasting contribution to the urban folklore
of the Pacific Northwest. For a hundred miles around, every soul with any kind
of visible scar or birthmark will try to tell you he got it that day when it
rained fire and brimstone on Third Avenue, but don't you believe 'em.