THE FOURTH WATCH (33 page)

Sal stood there stupidly, watching it all. The
two killers stepped back behind their work. A third man came
rushing at him, his rifle and its flashing bayonet pointing at him.
Sal felt his bowels release. There was no time to fumble for his
side arm. He closed his eyes, expecting to be impaled.

But nothing happened.

After a moment he opened his eyes again. The
point of the bayonet was poised under his chin, an inch from his
neck. His heart was thundering in his chest. His legs were like
rubber, shuddering under his weight. The man menacing him had his
head cocked, his rifle held at shoulder height, his eyes black, his
mouth a tight line.

Behind him a fourth man was barking orders. The
two killers slung their weapons over their shoulders and helped one
another pick up the dead Hmong and sling them down the densely
grown banks of the trail. Sal could hear their corpses tumbling
heavily down through the thicket.

He started to breathe again. He noticed the red
epaulets and gray-green peasant coats that they all wore and
recognized the uniform of the Chinese army. They were soldiers. The
one in charge barked something else and the killers went past Sal.
He could hear them working behind him and soon they came back
carrying farmer Ka. They tossed him and his cargo of ants down the
hillside, and only after this did the man in charge look at Sal.
The one holding the bayonet to his neck reached down and took his
side arm from its holster, and backed away. The man in charge,
there was no way to tell his rank, grinned at Sal, his lips peeling
back off stained teeth. Then he began to laugh, shaking his head.
He put his hands on his knees and howled with merriment. He came
forward and made a sniffing sound and burst into another round of
laughter that the rest of the soldiers joined. When their laughter
died down the man in charge motioned with his hand and led the way
off the main trail to a path hidden in the trees. One man tossed a
noose of a rope over Sal's head and pulled it tight while another
put thick tape over his eyes and wrapped his wrists together. The
man with the rope pulled and Sal followed, stumbling and falling up
an uneven trail. He could hear the other soldiers following behind
him. He believed he was on his way to his own hanging.

22

ARTHUR "SKIDS" DONOVAN
lay on his bed in his underwear drinking
Naragansett beer from a half-quart can and listening to his police
scanner. He had the ball game on TV with the sound off and was
listening to police banter and watching the Red Sox thump Tampa
Bay. He scratched at his groin absently as he watched and
listened.

Skids fancied himself a Private Investigator,
but he was unaccomplished, and in fact had lost his license seven
years ago for his participation in a barroom fracas where it was
alleged that he sawed the ear off of a co-combatant with the jagged
edge of a broken beer bottle. Half of his sporadic income came from
a semi-lame bookie operation he ran under the radar of the local
wise guys. The other half came from doing under the table PI work,
predominantly for his friend, Walter DeMaris.

Skids heard the call go out about a shooting
outside The Copper Wok on Prince Street at 9:40 PM. His ears perked
up. That was right there in his neighborhood. Skids lived on the
third floor of a three family on Queen Street. The game sucked, his
wife was doing battle with his kid, a three-year old terror that
avoided the bathtub as if it were filled with piranha, and he was
on his last beer. He decided to head up and check out the scene. He
quickly pulled on a pair of pants and a Miami Hurricanes
sweatshirt, guzzled down the end of his 'Gansett, belched loudly
and went out into the kitchen. He called to his wife, who was
trying to pin and scrub the kid in the bathroom.

"Goin' out for a bit," he told her.

"Where you going?" She yelled back.

Skids slammed the door behind him without
answering and bounded down the stairs. He went up Queen with his
body bent against the slope as quick as he could. He was a big man,
six-foot four, 275 pounds, so he lumbered. He wanted to get there
before the cops put up the crime scene tape. Once they did that,
you couldn't see anything good. He turned onto Prince and
continued. He could hear the clamor of people freaked out and
running around saying "Oh My God!" over and over again and asking
each other if they could believe it - and he could hear the faint
sound of sirens below, growing louder - but he didn't see the
tell-tale blue lights piercing the night sky ahead, and he took
that as a good sign.

When he got to the Wok he could see a crowd
milling around in the middle of the street. He was always amazed at
the way people were drawn to gruesome sights. Horrified by what
they saw, and at the same time unable to look away. He shoved his
way through and inventoried what he saw in his mind. There were two
people down, almost to the curb across Prince Street. One male, one
female. There was plenty of blood around the female, jet-black in
the street lamps and pooling on either side of her. The male must
have taken the shots deep. There was some blood around his head,
but not much anywhere else. That was not necessarily good news
because it meant that either the shooter missed, which was unlikely
considering the guy was down, or the blood was pooling internally.
Behind him people were spilling out onto the street. The victims
were dressed casual in nice clothes. Both were white. They were on
the side of the street where the Wok's parking lot was. Considering
the time, and the direction the bodies had fallen, they were
probably just coming from dinner and heading to their
car.

The woman was on her back, the man on his
belly, his arm stretched out near her neck. His face was turned
sideways, pressed flat on one cheek. He looked familiar.

Skids walked across the street to get a closer
look. The noise subsided as the crowd watched him. They figured
something official was happening and hushed up. Skids ignored them.
He was careful not to step in the blood or anywhere else where he
could leave a false print. The sirens were loud now, coming fast.
He squatted on his haunches and looked at the woman first. Pretty
girl, well not now, but before. Her face was turned up, as if she
had been arching her back in death. Her eyes were lifeless, gray
and glazed over. She had taken at least two, maybe three hits, one
in the neck, one in the head and, possibly, one in the chest. They
must have hit big pipes because she had bled profusely. A lot of
the blood around the guy's head and arm was hers. He turned his
attention to the man and caught his breath. "Jesus," he said. He
knew this guy. It was Michael Knight, the lawyer. He had just been
talking to Walter about him. Something about some new work they
were getting from some case he was working on. Skid's looked at the
lay of his body and thought that he might be breathing. He thought
he detected a slight rise and fall of his chest. "Jesus," he said
again. He pressed the index and middle fingers of his right hand
onto Knight's neck. There was a faint throb there.

The sirens were on top of him now. He came out
of his trance when he heard car doors slam behind him like two
gunshots.

One of the cops yelled, "Hey, get the fuck out
of there!"

Skids stood up and turned around and saw a cop
he knew coming toward him in a rush. "Bob," he said.

The cop played a flashlight in his face for a
second and then turned it away. "Skids, what the hell are you doin'
here?"

Skids shrugged his shoulders. "I just live down
the street," he said pointing vaguely out toward Queen. "I heard it
on the scanner. Thought I'd see what was up."

"Well you know better than to approach a scene
like this ... "

"Yeah, well, I was careful and ... "

''I don't give a fuck if you were wearing a
body rubber, you can't be near this thing. I'm going to have brass
up the ass out here in ten minutes." Bob looked past Skids at the
scene. "Christ," he said. "What a mess."

"Listen," Skids said, "that's Mike Knight all
over the road over there."

"The lawyer?” Bob the cop said, his
tone changing. Not
really
sure how bad the news was that somebody shot a
lawyer. His eyes flicked away from Skids and back to the street
carnage.

Skids nodded. "Yeah. I can't tell for sure, but
I think he's still with us. I don't know who the broad is, but
she's dead. You better get a EMT wagon out here for
Knight."

"Ones already coming. Jesus," Bob the cop said,
walking slowly over to where his partner had already made it. Skids
started alongside him.

"Get the fuck out of here, Skids," the cop
said.

*****

WHILE THE COPS
taped off the area, Skids went into a pizza joint two doors
down from the Wok. He ordered a slice of cheese pizza and a draft
beer in a paper cup and leaned on the corner of the counter eating
and watching out the two big double windows that fronted the
street. More black and whites were pulling in. The EMT wagon came
and went with both bodies. He thought he saw photography flashes
happening before the meat wagon got there. There was no one at the
tables in front of the windows, but that didn't mean that no
one
had
been
there. If there
had
been someone there, they were probably outside now saying "Oh
My God!" The guy behind the counter knew nothing, and spoke less
English. What Skids got from him was that he was in back making
pie, heard the shots, and heard a car driving away in a rush as he
timidly made his way around the counter. Four or five shots he
thought, maybe six.

Skids wiped the pizza grease off his hands on
his pants and took his paper cup back outside. The cops were
questioning folks in the crowd to see what they knew. Skids
wandered along the periphery drinking his beer and trying to hone
in on the conversations.

The consensus story seemed to be that these two
had dinner at the Wok. All very pleasant, all kinds of smiling and
starry eyes. About 9:25 they settled up and left. Most people heard
gunshots - anywhere between three and six - and heard a car
screeching away. Most people thought the shots all sounded the
same. No one could say for sure. A pizza window guy said that a car
started up to his left and pulled away heading up the street just
before the fireworks started. He didn't know what kind, he thought
a long car, maybe blue, black or green in color, didn't see any
plate number. Another couple came out of the Wok as the car was
speeding away. They too thought it might have been black or green.
Their eyes were drawn to the blood-bath across the street, not to
the fleeing car, they couldn't say for sure whether the car had a
plate, let alone if there were numbers on it. They said they
remembered the man reaching out to the woman and saying something,
but they didn't know what.

Skids thought it was time to call
Walter.

*****

WALTER DEMARIS WAS GNOME-LIKE
in the glow of the blue-white light shining from
his computer monitor. His fingers rattled the keyboard as he probed
through the databases of the law enforcement networks he had hacked
into. He had a spray of Frito's crumbs on his lap and in the hair
on the knuckles of his hands. In the background his own police
scanner crackled and buzzed as it skipped from communication to
communication. He paused only briefly when he heard a report of a
shooting outside a Chinese restaurant on Prince Street. "Chinks,"
Walter said into the empty room and shook his head.

He was running the Whorley family members
through various databases. He knew he could get pretty complete
scans of Red and Carolyn and Ted. He had no reason to suspect that
they had ever gone by different names. The other two, Ellen and
Samantha, he knew would have at least one other name, their birth
names. He would have to ask Kato to get those. Maybe there were
others. Maybe one or both of them had been married
before.

In the Massachusetts CORl system, which was the
database that kept a persons probation history (in other words, his
or her rap sheet) he got one hit on Red Whorley. It was a 1972
assault and battery with a dangerous weapon (an A&B/DW). The
dangerous weapon, to-wit, a shod foot. Old Red had stomped somebody
pretty good. There was no conviction. The case had been continued
without a finding for six months and dismissed. Not much more than
a slap on the wrist. It was a long time ago, but who knows how long
a guy could hold a grudge. Walter made a mental note to find out
who the victim had been, and where he was now - and maybe where he
was the night Red floated off into oblivion. He also ran everyone
through the NCIC system. The National Crime Information Center is a
cooperative database used by law enforcement that includes all
states. You can search in individual states or nationally. He also
ran them through an international database (INTERPOL), the state
and federal prison systems and branched out into various other
agency databases like DOJ, INS, DEA and the FBI. If any of them had
a jacket anywhere it would bring it up. But there was
nothing.

Walter was chewing a thumbnail, thinking about
where to go next when the phone rang. He answered it on the second
ring. "DeMaris Investigations," he said.

"Walter, its Skids."