“I said, put your hands up!”
Pender hit the kill switch on his flip phone, then turned slowly. The young Carmel cop was in a textbook two-handed firing crouch, his feet spread shoulder-width apart, his knees slightly bent.
“And I said FBI,” replied Pender in his best command tone. “Which letter didn’t you understand?”
But the kid was starting to tremble from the strain of the position, so Pender adjusted his approach from authoritarian to folksy.
“Listen, son, we both know you’re not gonna shoot me,” he said in the possum-eatin’ drawl he’d learned in Arkansas as a rookie agent working out of the Little Rock field office. “The paperwork alone’d take you a month to complete, not to mention the hearings. Then, assumin’ you get to keep your job, the counselin’ starts; you’re gonna be tellin’ some shrink all about how you shot that friendly ol’ FBI man because Daddy didn’t give you that red wagon for Christmas when you were five. So why don’t you just back them sights offa my chest, I’ll show you my tin, we’ll whistle in the fire, piss on the dogs, and get back to shootin’ the bad guys ’stead a each other.”
A bit much? Maybe, but it worked-to a degree. “Okay, nice and slow,” said the cop. “Open your coat, let’s see your badge.” He still had his sights centered in on Pender’s chest-the kill grid, on the firing range-but they both knew it was more to save face than because he seriously believed Pender was a threat.
Pender played out the scene for all he was worth anyway, slowly opening his plaid jacket, lifting his wallet out of his inside pocket gingerly, with two fingers, and letting it fall open to reveal the old DOJ shield that only two days ago, he’d have bet he’d never be using again. “Okay?”
“Yeah, sorry.” The kid flipped the safety back on and slid the Glock into its holster. “You know how it is.”
“Sure I do,” said Pender soothingly. “What’s your name, son?”
“Mackey. Wynn Mackey.” Clean-cut, soft-spoken, nicely trimmed ’stash, well-tailored uni-just shaking hands with him made Pender feel old and tired.
“Ed Pender. Pleased to meet you.”
“Pender! Sure, sure-you were down here in July, that serial killer who broke out of County. I thought I recognized you from someplace-I just figured it was a wanted poster or a BOLO.”
“Yeah, I guess I have that kind of face.” Pender nodded toward Mackey’s holster. “Now, don’t forget you have a round chambered there.” Then something occurred to him. “Hey, what happened to Sid?”
“Who’s Sid?”
“The old guy, sitting in the car?”
“There wasn’t any old guy in the-”
He stopped-they’d both heard the studio door slam. A moment later, Sid appeared in the kitchen doorway.
“Where the hell were you?” snapped Pender.
“I had to take a leak.”
“I nearly got my ass blown off.”
“It’d take at least a shotgun to cover that spread,” said Dolitz, glancing pointedly from the holstered gun to Pender’s rear.
Mackey checked out the new arrival from the ground up: white bucks, beige slacks, white Ralph Lauren Polo with the collar turned up in back, jaunty toupee. “Don’t tell me you’re FBI, too.”
“Retired. Very retired. What’s going on?”
“I was just about to ask Agent Pender here the same question.”
“Ms. Bell contacted us a few weeks ago,” said Pender, then paused. The idea was to get as much information as possible, while releasing as little as possible. But Mackey waited him out. He was young and he was local, but apparently he wasn’t stupid, so rather than waste any more time, Pender gave him the rundown-everything up to, but not including, the fact that he, too, was retired, at least technically. It would only have muddied the water, Pender told himself, especially since he’d already tinned Mackey.
And to Pender’s surprise, before he’d even finished explaining the significance of the vomit stain on the parquet floor, how extremely unlikely it was that Dorie would have simply left it there and gone off for the day, Mackey was talking into the two-way radio clipped to the front of his uniform, near his left collarbone.
“This is Mackey. Patch me over to Smitty…. Al, it’s Wynn. You know that Buick wagon you tagged down on Ocean…? Yeah, well, don’t tow it. Don’t even touch it; it might be a crime scene…. No, I’m not shitting you.…Look, just tape it off, I’ll get right back to you.”
He thumbed off the walkie-talkie and turned back to Pender. “Dorie Bell’s car has been parked in a metered space collecting tickets since sometime last night. I’ve known her since I was a kid-she used to baby-sit me. I figured maybe the old heap broke down, thought I’d come up here, give her a shout before it was towed. There was a strange car in the driveway, the side door was open…”
“It was open when we got here,” said Pender. “I almost walked into it.”
“Did you touch anything else?”
“I didn’t even touch the door.”
“How about you?” Mackey asked Sid.
“Took a whiz over in the bushes.”
Mackey looked disgusted. “You FBI guys usually go around pissing on crime scenes?”
Dolitz shrugged. “At my age, I’m lucky to be able to piss at all.”