Riker stared at his own tired image in the mirror behind the bar, then quickly looked away, saying, ‘Thanks anyway, but I’m taking a cab tonight. So pull up a glass. I hate to drink alone.’ Of course, this was a polite lie, for the detective did his best binge-drinking all by himself.
Charles obliged him and ordered two rounds of Chivas Regal. ‘So Sparrow is dying. And you’re not going to the hospital?’
‘No.’ He prayed that Sparrow would be long dead before an old enemy turned up.
Awe, Mallory, what a gift you have for payback.
It made her the ultimate cop. She was the paladin everyone wanted, a perfect instrument of vengeance. In Riker’s view, people should be more careful about what they wished for. Absent all humanity, its bias and fragility, the law was a sociopath.
Their drinks had appeared on the bar in front of them, and Charles had been left hanging again, awaiting some explanation for this failure to visit the deathbed of a whore. Riker cut the man off before he could ask one more time. ‘So tell me, how did Sheriff Peety outdraw the Wichita Kid?’
‘The usual way. The other man drew his gun too late.’
‘Impossible,’ said Riker. ‘Drunk or sober – even with the damn sun in his eyes – that gunslinger was the best man.’
‘Yes, if you mean faster. And that day – ’ Charles’s eyes were in soft focus now, and Riker knew he was projecting book pages on his cocktail napkin and quoting verbatim when he said, ‘ „That day, the gunslinger was a young god, walking out of the whirlwind of dust, growing larger, step by step. His birthright was dominion over all other men.“‘ He shuddered, then tipped back his shot glass, as if to kill a bad taste. ‘Terrible prose. You’re right – Wichita was fast with a gun, but Sheriff Peety was bigger.’
‘What?’ And now Riker was left to dangle while his barstool companion sipped his drink, taking his sweet time. Charles’s expression worried him. It was almost a Mallory smile.
‘A hero bigger than life. Your words, Riker. Well, he was Wichita’s hero, too – always had been. The boy loved the man. So you might wonder – did Wichita deliberately draw too slow? Or did he lose that gunfight in his own mind before he drew his weapon? Perhaps, at the end, he still believed that Sheriff Peety was a great man, the better man. Maybe that’s how the sheriff won… Or maybe it was a suicide.’
‘Thanks, Charles. That might drive me nuts for another fifteen years.’
‘Happy to return the favor.’
Riker recognized his own twisted signature in this exchange, and he smiled with the grace of a good loser. ‘Okay, you get one free question. Anything you want. Shoot.’
‘You said Kathy was posthumously charged with arson and murder.’
‘Right.’
‘Though she didn’t die, and she didn’t kill anybody. But I’ve still got a corpse and a fire. Does this have anything to do with why Mallory hates Sparrow?’
‘Yeah.’
Charles waited for the rest of the explanation. And he waited. Now the two men engaged in a contest to see who could outcreep whom with the most insipid smile.
Riker broke down first. ‘Okay, this is the deal. It took me a long time to piece this story together. You can’t repeat it to anyone. And when I’m done, you’ll wish I never started. Kathy Mallory’s death is gonna drive you crazy till the day you die.’
‘Word of honor, I’ll never tell.’
‘Charles, are you sure you understand? When you know the truth, you have to eat it.’
‘Agreed.’
‘Some of it’s guesswork.’ Only two people knew the real story. One was a gifted liar, and the other was a dying whore with a scrambled brain. ‘Fifteen years ago, Sparrow did a drug deal with a really scurvy character. She was trading stolen VCRs for heroin.’
‘The VCRs that Kathy stole?’
‘Yeah. So the hookers told you about the great truck robbery? Well, I’m guessing the drug dealer picked the location for the meet, a place with boarded-up windows and no back door. No neighbors either. The buildings on both sides were torn down, and this one was due for a midnight demolition.’
‘Pardon?’
‘The owner was planning to torch the place for the insurance money. He had accelerants stashed on every floor, kerosene, paint thinner. But that came out later – after the fire.’
‘The fire that killed Kathy?’
‘That’s the one. I figure this dealer – ’
‘Frankie Delight?’
‘Yeah.’ Riker wondered what else Charles had pieced together with the help of the Hooker Book Salon. ‘Frankie was gonna double-cross Sparrow. So he would’ve been the first one to draw a knife.’
‘The one that made that huge scar in Sparrow’s side?’
Riker nodded. ‘And she won that fight, but she left her knife behind. I’ve got a witness who saw it buried in Frankie Delight’s dead body. An ambulance picked up Sparrow three blocks away.’
‘And Kathy?’
‘She saw the whole thing. Another whore can place the kid in Sparrow’s hospital room the next day – one real tired little girl. And that’s when Kathy was sent back to the crime scene to get the murder weapon.’ This was the picture Riker wanted out of his head – that child pulling a knife from a corpse.
‘Lou and me, we’re in the car when we hear a call on the radio. A dispatcher’s sending all available units to investigate a puddle of blood on Avenue B. We would’ve blown it off, but then another call placed a little blond girl at the same address – following a blood trail into an empty building. We got there just in time to see the flames. That’s when Kathy came out the front door. One look at us and she runs back inside – back into the fire.’
‘But that’s not – ’
‘Not normal? No, you wouldn’t expect a kid to do that. But she was carrying a knife with Sparrow’s initial on the hilt and probably a good set of prints. If the kid was caught near Frankie’s body with the murder weapon, her favorite whore would go to jail.’
‘So she ran into a burning building, knowing she could die?’
‘Naw, we never figured that – not for a second. This kid had a world-class survival instinct. Lou figured she was heading for the roof, maybe counting on a fire escape.’
‘Could Kathy have staged her own death?’
‘That was one theory, and she was that smart. But there was no fire escape. That morning, the owner sold the iron for scrap. We tried to follow her into the building. Then the first explosion blew out the boards on the downstairs windows. Cans of kerosene and paint thinner were goin’ off like bombs. And now, there’s no way in, no way out.’ He recalled the open doorway as a wall of fire. Flames had boiled out of the ground-floor windows like the tail burners of a rocket. ‘I thought the building was gonna take off and fly away. The back door was boarded up. The firemen didn’t even try to break it down. All they could do was contain the blaze to one building.’
Riker slapped his hand on the bar. ‘Bang, bang, bang! All the accelerants were blowing up in sympathetic explosions – all the way up to the top of the building. Then the roof went up in a ball of fire, and we knew the kid was dead… Well, I did.’ It had taken more than Armageddon to convince Lou Markowitz.
‘The fire marshal showed us the kid’s shoes – proof that she made it up to the roof. They were still laced, blown off her feet in the final blast. One shoe was clean, thrown clear. The other one burnt black. The arson team figured she was at the center of the last explosion, and they didn’t expect to find her in one piece.’
‘So Kathy was presumed dead?’
‘Well, they didn’t know her name. All they had was one of her books, half fried… and her shoes. Later, a snitch tied the western and the kid to Sparrow. Two cops showed up in Sparrow’s hospital room and told her that Kathy was dead.’