Damage Control Read online

  “The earrings are trademarked. There’s not another pair like them in the world. If I can find the man who designed them, he might have billing records that can tell us who he designed them for.”

  He heard a voice in the background, advising passengers that the plane was boarding. “Dana, don’t get on the plane.”

  “I have to go. I have to do this.”

  “No. You don’t. Whatever guilt you’re feeling about your brother being killed, you can’t change what happened. This was a premeditated, well-thought-out murder.”

  “They’re closing the gate. I have to go.”

  “Whoever owns those earrings would also know who designed them.”

  “Which is why I can’t waste time. This is the only direct flight of the day.”

  “Then the person who killed King may be on it.”

  “I have to go.”

  “Tell me where you’re going?” He could call the local police. “Dana? Don’t get on that plane.” He persisted more urgently. “The killer is an excellent shot.” He looked at his watch. “Take a later flight. I’ll go with you.”

  “I can’t waste time. I’ll call you,” she said, and he heard the phone disconnect.

  “Dammit.” He slammed down the phone. When it immediately rang, he snatched it from the cradle. “Dana?”

  Patrick Murphy greeted him with a profanity. “Shit. I should have known I’d find you at your desk while I’m out here humping on one of your cases.”

  Logan wasn’t in the mood. “If you’re humping one of my cases, I’m in serious trouble.”

  “Shit. You should be so lucky. We got a lead on your friend Marshall Cole. Apparently, he’s got a girlfriend in Auburn who lives in a mobile home park. He visits when he needs to get his rocks off.”

  “You got an address?”

  “Do farts smell?”

  24

  MARSHALL COLE CHECKED the rearview mirror. He saw nothing out of the ordinary and hadn’t since they left the motel room. He would have known, too. He’d checked the mirror every ten seconds—seemed like it, anyway. He was driving southeast on Highway 82. Though he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been home, he hadn’t forgotten the way. He’d fill up the tank in Yakima, which was just about the last big city of consequence for a bazillion miles, then beeline it to Highway 84 through the northeast corner of Oregon. From there it was a straight shot across Idaho to the southeast corner of the state near the Wyoming and Utah borders. There he’d jump on Highway 30, and that two-lane road would take him all the way to Grace, a town that, when he’d left, didn’t warrant anything more than a four-foot-tall sign on a post stuck in the ground, and likely still didn’t. Cole had hoped he’d seen that sign for the last time in his rearview mirror. Now he wouldn’t relax until he was taking the same turnoff for home.

  At the moment, however, he had more pressing needs. The fuel tank was running low, and he needed to take a monster shit. Most mornings he was like clockwork—first thing out of bed. And he didn’t need any cup of coffee to get the machinery working. But the damn cleaning lady knocking at the door had thrown him off his rhythm, and he couldn’t go before they left the hotel. He grimaced and adjusted in his seat; the pain in his gut had become a cramp just above his belt buckle.

  Cole had wanted to leave Washington right after he saw the man’s face on the newscast, but he had already finished ten beers by then, and he didn’t see well at night. He had some type of psychosis, or stigmatism, or some damn thing that the optometrist at Costco had said made everything blurry. At night, headlights and streetlamps stretched like taffy, making it damn near impossible to focus on the road. And he didn’t want to risk getting pulled over. Once they logged him into the computer, he was a goner. They’d take his ass to jail, and the next thing he’d know, someone would be coming for him with official-looking paperwork, and he’d be on a bus to nowhere—gone without a trace. Never even existed. Never born.

  Andrea Bright slept with her head propped back against the headrest, eyes closed, mouth open. The interior of the car smelled like beer and feet. Her white pumps stank. He had half a mind to throw them out the window. He continued to turn the dial through the radio stations, stopping when he heard a disc jockey giving what sounded like the news, but it was just some jackass reporting again on the weather.

  “Rain, asshole. How much more do we need to know?”

  How the fuck was he going to follow the Mariners from Grace? None of his brothers had cable last time he was there, and he doubted the local paper had gotten much better since he left. High school sports were about all it covered, as if anyone really gave a shit how many touchdowns Johnny scored at the big homecoming game.

  In the distance, he saw a bright orange and blue Union 76 ball. It came not a minute too soon. The cramping in his stomach had become epidemic. “Thank the fucking Lord and praise Jesus,” he said.

  He took the exit, waited at a stop sign for traffic to clear, then punched the gas across the intersection. The orange ball must have triggered something inside him, like that Pavlov dog thing, because now that his mind was set on taking a dump, all systems were go, and there wasn’t going to be a long countdown to blastoff. He pulled up to the pumps beneath the overhang and backhanded Bright in the throat. “Wake up.”

  She choked as if she’d swallowed a fly and sat up coughing. “What?” she asked, annoyed.

  He pulled the wad of bills from the leather jacket on the seat and handed her a twenty. “Fill it up and buy us something to eat. I got to go.”

  Bright looked around. “I don’t want to eat at some fucking convenience store. Why don’t you spend some of that money you got wadded up in your pocket and get us a restaurant for once? How’d you get that much money, anyways?”

  “You don’t need to know none of that. This is just a snack. Get me a milk. My stomach is killing me.”

  “Yeah, that cleaning lady really scared the shit out of you, huh?”

  He shoved her into the door and dropped the bill in her lap. He didn’t have time to fuck around. “Just do it.”

  Bright crumpled the bill and pushed open the car door, then slammed it closed. “Asshole.”

  Cole followed her across the blacktop to the small grocery store. She flung open the glass door at him, and he swatted at the back of her head, missing. The clerk looked like a teenager going through puberty. The hair sticking out from beneath his blue uniform cap was as orange as the Union 76 sign, and his face was pocked with acne. A peach-fuzz mustache grew above his upper lip.

  “Bathroom?” Cole asked.

  “Around back on the side.” The kid reached under the counter and handed Cole a key attached to a huge piece of wood. “People forget to bring the key back,” he explained.

  Cole stepped around Bright and grabbed a newspaper from the rack as he hurried out the glass doors. “She’ll pay for it,” he said. “And get another six-pack of Bud.”

  Bright flipped Cole the bird, then leaned against the counter, feeling nauseated. The kid had his cap pulled low on his head, but it didn’t hide the fact that he was staring at her breasts, particularly at her nipples, which the air-conditioning had caused to protrude through her T-shirt. She busted him when he looked up at her, and he quickly diverted his eyes.

  “Uh, what pump?” he asked, his stare now fixed on the computerized keypad beneath his fingers. His cheeks had become damn near the color of his hair.

  “It’s the only car out there.”

  His eyes sneaked another peek. “There’s three pumps: regular, unleaded, and supreme. You want unleaded, regular, or supreme?”

  “That depends on who’s pumping.” Bright leaned across the counter. “I give nothing less than supreme, but I don’t always get it. Are you going to be doing the pumping, or am I?”

  The kid flashed red as a traffic light. Bright was enjoying this. “It’s self-serve.”

  “Too bad. You look like you could do some supreme pumping.” She did a hip thrust and handed him the twenty.
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br />   “How much do you want?”

  She stuck the tip of her finger to her mouth. “Fill it up,” she said, then inserted the finger to the last knuckle.

  The boy swallowed hard. “I’ll hold the money until you’re finished,” he stammered.

  She walked about the store grabbing a six-pack of beer, a box of doughnuts, a bag of potato chips, and a liter of Coke, and left them on the counter. “Fetch me a pack of Marlboros, too,” she said. She walked to the door, smiled at the thought, then turned back around and raised her shirt, exposing her breasts. “Nice and cool in here,” she said, fanning her chest. “Feels good.”

  COLE HURRIED INTO the bathroom stall. He didn’t bother taking the time to put down a seat cover. He sat flipping through the newspaper. “Bullshit, bullshit, and bullshit.”

  He still didn’t know if the Mariners had won or lost. After the blond man’s face flashed on the television screen, he’d been too unnerved to do anything but pace the room. It had taken four more beers just to settle down. He might have only finished the tenth grade, but Cole had known something wasn’t right about the guy from the start. He had a sense about those kinds of things that made the hairs on his neck tingle. Not that King would ever listen to him. King had said Cole was a dumb shit and that he was the brains of the operation. Yeah? Well, who was the dumb shit now, Larry? King had been a bad influence from the get-go. Bad luck was all the luck King ever had. Everything he touched went wrong. A big talker and a born loser. Well, the son of a bitch was dead, and Cole was still alive. King was going into a hole in the ground, and Cole was going home. Who’s the brains now, Larry? Who was the loser now?

  “Fuckhead,” Cole said out loud.

  King had refused to believe that he and Cole had been a couple of pigeons. Cole had known it. He’d told King that’s exactly what they were. Pigeons. The man wasn’t supposed to be home. Bull-fucking-shit. When Cole heard the front door open, he’d been standing in the bedroom and dropped the shit he’d been told to get. He had hoped the man would just go up the stairs. But he hadn’t. He’d walked right down the hall, right past where Cole was hiding behind the bedroom door, and right into the room where Larry had been—the one with all the fucking masks on the wall staring at them. Cole was going to just hit the guy in the head and knock him out from behind, but then the fucking guy turned around and looked right at him. Fuck. He looked right at him, like his eyes were memorizing Cole’s face. Cole had no choice but to kill him, and now he was convinced that was exactly what the guy who’d hired them had wanted. He’d wanted James Hill dead, whoever he was, and now he wanted King and Cole dead, too.

  Cole’s only chance now was to get far away, to a place where most people knew him and his family and would let him know if the man came looking for him. In the meantime, he’d have his dad get him work at one of the phosphate companies in Soda Springs, and he’d race dirt bikes on the weekends, which was what he should have done in the first place. If the police ever did catch up to him, he could pin the blame on King, say he had nothing to do with no robbery and didn’t know nothing about killing nobody. He’d say King had boasted about a robbery and about killing a guy, and that was that. But that was for later. The police weren’t his concern at the moment. His concern was the fucking ghost.

  He found the sports section, dropped the rest of the paper on the tile floor, and read the headlines. The Mariners had lost. The Angels had won. They were four back. “Fuck it,” he said. Things weren’t looking good.

  BRIGHT PUMPED UNLEADED into the Nova, watching the meter spin faster than a slot machine at one of the tribal casinos. She knew her car would take more than fifteen dollars in gas, especially with the Arabs bumping up the price for the summer, like they always did. And the food on the counter cost more than five. Hell, the beer alone was at least that much. Shithead Cole would just have to fork over more money. He could afford it. She’d seen the wad of bills he kept tucked in his jacket pocket. Cole thought she was a dumb shit and a good lay, and not in that order, but she was smarter than he knew. She had a lot of Marshall Coles, and she got what she could from each. Besides, she needed a good lay every once in a while, too, and Cole wasn’t bad in that department, and she liked it a hell of a lot better when he had cash.

  She heard the bells ring, tires crossing the rubber hoses stretched across the concrete. floor. She looked over her shoulder at a navy blue Ford continuing to the far end of the station and stopping near a telephone booth. A man stepped out, dressed in a brown leather jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots. He paused and gave Bright a look and smile. Damn, he was cute. Bright stood straight and brushed a strand of hair from her face, smiling back at him. Then she turned her back and bent over to remove the nozzle from the gas tank, moving her hips forward and back to give him a good look at what was still her finest attribute. But when she straightened and turned to put the nozzle back in the pump, the man was gone. She looked across the parking lot but did not see him walking to the convenience store. He’d probably gone to use the bathroom. Too bad for him. In the morning it smelled like something had crawled up Cole’s ass and died.

  THE DAMN PITCHING was killing them. The bullpen had given up eight runs in two games. They already had a team earned-run average of more than five runs a game and had fallen way behind the Angels. Shit, the Athletics were breathing down their necks for second place, and the Mariners sure as shit didn’t have the offensive firepower to hold them off. Play-offs already looked like a long shot. And they could forget the damn wild card, which Cole thought was for losers anyway. With Boston just trying to keep pace with the Y-ankees, one of them would get the wild card. Cole had seen it coming. He’d said it in the off-season, when the Mariners were busy signing a bunch of free-agent hitters. Pitching. Where the fuck is the pitching? Good pitching beat good hitting every time. The Yankees, Red Sox, and Angels had it. The Mariners didn’t. They never learned.

  “Dumb shits.”

  Cole heard the door to the bathroom swing open. He shook the newspaper to let the person know the stall on the left was occupied. Last thing he needed was some guy yanking open the door and getting a glimpse of his johnson. He heard water running in the sink, then the towel roll thumped twice. Cole went back to the article, but he’d lost his place. He heard the sound of a fly unzipping and looked underneath the stall. The toes of the two cowboy boots faced toward the wall where the urinal was mounted. Cole snorted a laugh. The guy was probably some neat freak, washing his hands first. The world had all kinds.

  The urinal flushed. Cole watched the cowboy boots disappear. A moment later, he heard the water in the sink again, followed by two more whumps of the towel rack. Unbelievable. He waited a beat, not wanting to be interrupted again, but didn’t see light stream in, as it had when the man opened the door. The guy was starting to annoy him. Cole looked at the box scores. The Red Sox had won for the third night in a row and were now only two back of the Yankees. The Mariners were going to have another lousy sesaon, and all because they’d forgotten the number one rule of the game. Pitching.

  Cole lowered the paper when he still hadn’t heard the door to the bathroom open or seen any light. This was getting fucking weird. He looked up, thinking the guy might be some pervert trying to sneak a peek over the top of the stall, but no one peered down at him. Then he saw the cowboy boots outside his stall.

  “It’s taken,” he said loudly, not trying to hide his annoyance. The door to the stall next to him opened and closed, the lock sliding shut. “Jesus,” he said loud enough to be heard, no longer caring. “Make up your damn mind.”

  He looked under the stall to satisfy himself that the cowboy boots were on the tile and facing forward. The man had seriously thrown off Cole’s rhythm. He knew he wasn’t finished. He needed a good uninterrupted fifteen minutes in the morning to give his bowels a full opportunity to purge. He focused again on the article, reading about how the Mariners had blown an opportunity in the fifth inning, getting nothing after loading the bases with no outs. He lifted h
is head at a noise coming from the other stall, one he couldn’t identify. It sounded almost like mice eating wood chips, or the sound that a tiny blade might make sawing through a piece of wood. He put his ear against the metal stall. The industrial-sized toilet paper dispenser fell from the wall and crashed to the tile, leaving a baseball-sized hole in the metal frame separating the stalls.

  Cole nearly fell off the toilet getting out of the way. “Hey, asshole. I’m about to kick your fucking ass.” He leaned forward and peered through the hole. “Did you hear me?” he shouted. Then, “Oh shit.”

  BRIGHT STOOD WITH her back to the counter, staring out at the gas pumps. She was no longer interested in being the young boy’s wet dream. The gas pump had shut off at $16.68, and she’d topped it off at $16.75.

  She turned to the boy. “What time is it?”

  “What time do you want it to be?”

  She shook her head and looked at him with revulsion. “Time?”

  “Eleven-forty-five.”

  Cole was such a jerk. She had another six minutes to wait and he would make her wait every one of them. He could never cut it short. He always had to take fifteen minutes, just to give himself enough time to read about the damn Mariners. He was an asshole, and he drank too much and treated her like shit whether he was drunk or sober. He had no job except for occasional laborer’s work on a construction site, which was why he bothered hanging out with that loser Laurence King. Then he stayed out all night drinking and spending what money he made, showing up at her house whenever he felt like a blow job. Now he was paranoid, convinced of some government conspiracy fantasy King had probably dreamed up. She wasn’t surprised someone had shot King. He was an even bigger asshole than Cole. But she sure as shit knew the government wouldn’t go to the trouble of doing it. It was probably some lowlife King had pissed off or who he owed money.