Izzo scratched at his stubbled chin and took a drag on his cigarette. “I know, right? People breaking the law. Can you imagine?”
Jax cocked his head to one side, trying to figure the cop out. “You never answered my friend’s question.”
“Sorry, right,” Izzo replied, waving toward Opie with his cigarette. “One of the dealers from the gun show, an old friend of Temple’s, went up to the house to have coffee or something after he’d packed up. Found the bodies.”
“This gun dealer, does he have a name?” Thor asked.
“He’s an old dude. Older, anyway,” Izzo said. “Irish guy, I think. Last name is Carney.”
Thor stiffened. “John Carney?”
Izzo dropped his cigarette, crushing it under his shoe. “You know the guy?”
“Heard of him,” Thor admitted.
Jax watched Izzo’s eyes and realized the detective was thinking precisely what he’d been thinking—that if Thor knew the old man’s name, maybe John Carney hadn’t gone up to Oscar Temple’s house for coffee at all.
“I’ll keep you posted if I hear anything,” Izzo said, digging out his keys as he returned to his car. He paused just inside the open door. “You make sure you do the same. I could use a little career boost.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Thor told him.
None of them believed it, not even Izzo.
11
John Carney had slept poorly ever since the death of his wife. Over time he’d developed the habit of falling asleep in the recliner in the living room, bathed in the flickering blue light of the television. Living in Arizona required air-conditioning, but his backyard opened up to nothing but scrub and distant hills, and it could get awfully cold at night. He kept the windows of his little adobe house open and covered himself with a thick blanket, never taking his slippers off. Past the age of fifty, his feet had begun to feel cold pretty much all the time. And he’d left fifty in the rearview mirror quite a while back.
Tonight he moaned and shifted in the chair, rising up from the shadows of dreamtime, cobweb memories of a nightmare clinging to him. He frowned and rubbed his eyes, sleepily contemplating the possibility of leaving the chair and actually sleeping in his bed for once. Instead, he pulled the blanket up to his neck and nestled deeper into the chair. The ghost of his dead wife occupied that bed, and he figured it always would. Whenever he tried to sleep in there, he felt her presence. No, that ain’t it, he corrected himself. He felt her absence.
Drifting in that gray fog between sleeping and wakefulness, Carney thought he heard voices. He groaned softly and slitted his eyes open. One of his animal shows played on the TV. A baby gorilla clung to its mother, and the sight made him smile, still more than half-asleep. His animal shows could be grotesque at times, and even then they were fascinating, but there was something soothing about the programs concerning bears and monkeys and apes.
Knock knock.
Thump thump.
Carney jerked in the chair, adrenaline burning him awake. He threw the blanket aside and stood, barely noticing the arthritis pain in his knees. Turning slowly, he tried to locate the source of the noise, and it came again. Thump thump. He spun, staring at the short little corridor that led into the rest of the house.
A rapping came from the back of the house, a fist on glass, urgent but not angry. Not on the verge of shattering.
Carney twisted the little iron key, opened the body of the grandfather clock, and stopped the pendulum’s swing with his left hand. With his right he reached past it and grabbed the shotgun that always sat waiting there, just behind the tick of the clock.
The knock came again as he made his way down the little corridor, giving him a chance to zero in. The sound hadn’t come from his bedroom or the bathroom or the smaller second bedroom he used as an office. There wasn’t much house out here in the desert, but how much house did an aging widower need?
He ducked into the kitchen, stared at the blinds that hung over the sliding glass door that led onto his patio. A low adobe wall ringed the patio. On any ordinary night there’d have been nothing but snakes and coyotes beyond that wall, but snakes and coyotes didn’t knock on the wall or rap on the glass. The blinds were closed. The patio light was off.
“Who’s there?” he shouted at the closed blinds, leveling the shotgun at the slider. If they wanted to kill him, his voice gave them a location. They could start shooting right now. But did murderers knock?
“Friends, Mr. Carney,” came a reply, a raspy voice—not an old man’s rasp.
Carney slid to the side, toward the stove, and sidestepped past the kitchen island so he came at the blinds from an angle.
“In my experience,” he called back, “friends don’t bang on your back door after midnight.”
“Sorry if we woke you,” that voice rasped again. “The lateness couldn’t be helped. It’s pretty urgent I talk to you.”
I guess it must be, Carney thought.
“You armed?” he called.
“Yes, sir. But none of us have weapons drawn. If we wanted to do more than talk, there are open windows.” Carney reached out and opened the blinds. Through the slats he could make out five men silhouetted by moonlight. Shotgun leveled at them, he flicked on the patio light, and the men blinked at the sudden brightness. The one in front squinted but didn’t raise his hands to shield his eyes, too smart to want to spook Carney into pulling the trigger.
“Hands up, slowly,” Carney said.
The men complied. The guy in front, blond and bearded, was the first to do so, and the others followed suit. In the back of the group, a massive red-haired man was the last, and his reluctance was obvious.
Carney studied the faces. “I don’t know any of you.”
“I know how this must look,” said the blond, the owner of the raspy voice. “My name’s Jax. I think you may’ve met my sister, Trinity—”
A memory flashed through Carney’s mind. Gunshot and blood spatter in Oscar Temple’s kitchen. The woman’s face floated across his thoughts, and he saw the resemblance. Carney’s heart had been thundering in his chest, and now it skipped a beat as the copper stink of blood returned to him.
“Irish girl?” he asked, voice raised to be heard through the sliding glass door.
“That’s her.” Muffled. Quieter.
“You don’t have an accent.”
“Different moms.” The blond man put the palm of one rough hand against the glass and gazed calmly at him. “She’s not safe, Mr. Carney. I just want to get her the hell out of here and home to her mother.”
A fine sentiment. Carney had taken a shine to the girl from the moment she’d approached him at the gun show, and not just because her accent reminded him of home. She had a raw energy that he’d admired. But that wasn’t why he lowered the shotgun.
The rough men on his patio seemed surprised when he raised the blinds all the way and unlocked the slider. He stepped back and covered the door with his shotgun, but he kept his finger outside the trigger guard. John Carney had gotten old, and his hands trembled sometimes. If he shot somebody, it would damn well be on purpose.
“Just you,” he told Jax. “Your friends can make themselves comfortable on the patio.”
A goateed man with startling scars on his face looked disappointed. “Any chance of a cup of coffee?”
Carney heard the mix of burr and brogue in his voice and smiled. “You’re not a guest. You’re a stranger who woke me in the middle of the night.”
The man beside him, pale and bearded with his hair tied back in a small knot, nodded. “He does have a point.”
Jax slid the glass door open and entered the kitchen as the other four made themselves comfortable on the patio furniture, sprawling as if they hadn’t a care in the world. They weren’t worried about him killing them with his shotgun, which told him they had no intention of trying to kill him. But he hadn’t gone to Oscar Temple’s house thinking anyone was going to die, either.