Not Forgotten Page 4

  “Down on the ground!” he ordered.

  Chapter Five

  “You’re telling me Mr. Sosa was threatened by the Citizens for a Clean County, so he hired you to protect him?” Detective Milo Peterson, aka Tomahawk, thumbed through his notes, making a show of sounding skeptical. He had a wedge-shaped nose and a thin face topped by an unruly patch of bleached-blond hair that showed signs of gray in the roots. The skin around his eyes was pulled tight like he’d had some work done, and his forearm muscles were cut like he spent nights at the gym. From my awkward position, handcuffed in the back seat of a royal-blue Crown Vic, his silhouette looked like a tomahawk, the kind of authentic replica they sold in the Alamo gift shop. That distinctive look and a nasty reputation had earned him the nickname. We knew each other, but he was playing dumb. He was part of that law enforcement crowd who seemed to resent ex-military, and he had a particular axe to grind with me.

  “You catch on quick, Detective,” I said. It didn’t make sense to me either, but Peterson seemed more interested in giving me a hard time than doing any detective work. There was something Sosa hadn’t told me before I took the job. To find out what it was, I would have to wait until he woke up in the hospital. If he woke up. Another missed payday, and a step backward for my business venture.

  I’d been sitting for over an hour—the first thirty minutes in the squad car waiting for Peterson and his partner to arrive, then the last thirty minutes while the detective made notes and asked stupid questions. Meanwhile, the shooter was long gone.

  Peterson turned to his partner, Detective Diana Ochoa. She had dark skin and too much makeup. From the lines on her face, I guessed she was either in her early thirties, or late twenties and very worried about something. From the way she hung on Peterson’s every inane question, I put her fresh out of whatever detective training they provided. She carried a few extra pounds, mainly in her chest, but she looked like she could handle herself.

  “Detective Ochoa, doesn’t your grandmother belong to the Citizens for a Clean County?”

  She caught his sarcastic tone and played along. “Yeah, that’s right. She does, Detective Peterson.”

  “How old is she?” he asked.

  “She’s eighty-six tomorrow,” she said, barely containing a smile.

  “Well, wish Granny a happy birthday. Would you say she’s a violent person?” Detective Peterson was proud of his sense of humor.

  “Homicidal. She once slapped my primo for drinking milk out of the carton.” She couldn’t hold it any longer. Both laughed out loud.

  “You two practicing that routine for a YouTube video? Ask Granny if she knows where the CCC gets its funding.” The cuffs were getting tight, it was after midnight, and I’d had enough of these two clowns. “If your uniform unit hadn’t threatened to kill me, I’d have had the shooter’s car and this case would be over by now.”

  Detective Peterson dropped the smile and tried to sound tough. “A civilian skipping down the street wearing a bloody shirt and waving a .45 is a threat. My officers are trained to react to shots fired. You’re lucky I wasn’t there. I’d have put you down.”

  “All right,” I said, trying to sound conciliatory. “I get it, they were just doing their job. You’re just doing yours.”

  “Look, Fischer. I know who you are and your reputation,” Peterson said.

  “Thanks. Now, I’d like to check on my client.” I thought I was finally getting through to him.

  “That wasn’t a compliment,” he said. Obviously, he wanted to get something off his chest.

  Both detectives stared at me over the dark-blue vinyl seat. It wasn’t the kind of stare that’s followed by a French kiss and a warm hug. Peterson was part of the team that had taken down Skeeter Davis for setting fire to an apartment building that killed twenty people. The case that Allison brought up and the one that made me the St. Jude of private detectives, according to Skeeter’s mother.

  “You found one killer and put that big, one-armed jig back on the streets.” Peterson couldn’t stand it. He had to bring it up. I didn’t know which pissed him off more, the fact that Skeeter was innocent or the fact that he was a very large black man. When he leaned further over the seat, I couldn’t help imagining feathers dangling from his ears.

  “Skeeter didn’t do it,” I said.

  “Maybe, maybe not. He was there. He wasn’t innocent.”

  “He didn’t start the fire. He didn’t kill those people. You nailed the wrong guy.”

  “You know how many cases we have to clear every month?” Ochoa jumped into the fray. Her new partner had obviously briefed her on his side of the story, probably as a cautionary tale to a new recruit. “You solved one little case and you’re a hero?”

  “You’re pissed ’cause I don’t work on volume?”

  She wasn’t going to see it my way no matter how much I argued, because she had to work with Tomahawk. I pitied her.

  “Let’s talk about recent history,” I said. “An hour ago, my client was shot in downtown San Antonio by a sniper using a high-powered rifle that sounded more like an air gun. Doesn’t that make you the least bit anxious to find a suspect?”

  “We found one,” he said, still staring at me.

  I met his gaze. “Unless you’re gonna charge me with the attempted murder of my own client, turn me loose. Mr. Sosa needs armed protection in the hospital, and the real shooter isn’t going to turn himself in.”

  “Your job ended when Sosa took a bullet,” Peterson snapped. “I don’t care if you’re a private dick. This case is ours. Stay the fuck out of it. And stay close to home. The DA may still want to press charges. Detective Ochoa will be in touch.”

  “For what?”

  “Incompetence for one.” He exposed his small sharp teeth, but he wasn’t smiling. He looked more like a guard dog showing his fangs.

  I didn’t say anything. They weren’t going to listen to me, and I didn’t want to listen to them any longer than it took to get out of the Crown Vic. I leaned forward in the seat and held my handcuffed hands up. Detective Ochoa reluctantly unlocked them.

  “My weapons?” I said.

  Peterson examined the Para-Ordnance .45 before he handed it over with the S&W .38. “Didn’t Remington buy Para-Ordnance?” he asked as if he thought my weapon was somehow out of date. It was true they weren’t making that model anymore, but I still trusted it.

  “It gets the job done,” I said. “You forget something?” Both weapons were unloaded.

  “I don’t remember them being loaded. You should be more careful. Don’t forget what I said. Keep your nose out of this case.”

  I stepped out of the car and strapped my empty pistols back in place. Tomahawk sneered through his open window. I should have kept my mouth shut, but I couldn’t resist.

  “Think of it this way, Detective. We’re on the same team. I only take the cases y’all can’t solve.”

  Ochoa shouted something, but Peterson rolled the window up and drove away.

  Chapter Six

  Ihiked east on Market Street looking for a cab. The River Walk bars were open for another hour. The tourist children were in their hotel rooms playing video games, and the adults were doing shots of tequila. I wished I was holding something with lime and salt or a cold beer to wash away the bad taste in my mouth and mitigate the smell of Sosa’s blood on my shirt. Despite Tomahawk’s warning, I couldn’t stay away from the Sosa case. I’d promised door to door service. He had never made it to his door. It wasn’t just the paycheck; my reputation was on the line.

  When I didn’t see a cab, I hit the Uber app on my cell phone and waited for the driver by the life-sized bronze sculpture of the famous cattleman Charles Goodnight that stood guard alongside Quanah Parker, the last Comanche war chief, in front of the Briscoe Western Art Museum. Both figures were so realistic that they seemed to come alive in the dim light of the streetlamp. Goodnight’s cowboy hat was pulled low on his stoic face, reminding me of Patrick Al
lison’s determined expression when he had been searching my soul. There was no other way to describe it. I wondered why he had focused on me. Men like Patrick Allison always had an agenda. Maybe it was my suspicious nature, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the events in the convention center were connected to Sosa’s shooting. Had Detective Peterson been interested in doing his job, he would have asked about Sosa’s contacts at the fundraiser. Sosa had told me that much and that the oil business was volatile. I didn’t think the real source of his concern was the CCC.

  The Uber driver didn’t bat an eye when he saw my bloodstained tux shirt. “Some party?”

  I wondered what kind of late-night fares he normally pulled in. “The usual,” I said, just to keep him guessing. I figured he’d have a good story to tell the other drivers at Starbucks after the bars closed. He dropped me off at the airport, where I’d left my pickup, then I swung by the hospital to check on Javier Sosa.

  He was out of surgery but still in critical condition. No chance to ask him any questions. I talked to the head of hospital security and told her what had happened. She said Detective Peterson had briefed her and left two uniforms on the ICU floor. I hadn’t expected that. Tomahawk was doing his job. I also talked to Sosa’s head of security, the man who should have been waiting outside the hotel. His English was limited, but he seemed confident that his team could protect his boss in the hospital. He couldn’t explain why he wasn’t outside the hotel.

  On the drive home, I tried to sort out what had happened. Some details about the shooting seemed out of place. The location was good. The street was quiet. The parking garage provided cover and easy access with multiple exits. Sosa had a regular security team that was going to take over for the rest of his Texas trip. That meant higher security and less opportunity after he left my service. The timing was perfect. The part that bugged me was that the shooter had stayed in position after his initial shot. He would have seen Sosa was hit and assumed it was a kill. The distance wasn’t that great. The buildings were close together. If his target was Sosa, why did he keep shooting at me? The thought caused the hair to stand up on the back of my neck. The shooter used a high-powered rifle that was Hollywood quiet—that impossibly quiet whisper that can only be reproduced in the movies. My first thought was that the weapon had to be a military-grade system, but I’d served three tours of duty and had never heard anything that silent. The constant ringing in my ears was proof of that.

  I tried to come up with a list of people who wanted me pushing up daisies. I had made a few enemies in my short career as a private eye, but none were the kind to hire a sniper. If the gangster involved in Skeeter’s case wanted me dead, his thugs would have already come after me. Their style was to roll up next to you on the street corner and open fire with a Glock 19 pistol—the gangster weapon of choice. The scumbag that burned down the apartment building and framed Skeeter was in prison, and his thug friends were too busy cooking and selling more meth to care about me. I crossed him off the list.

  Before that, a number of wives had hired me to catch their husbands with their pants down, but I figured the husbands were too embarrassed or too busy remodeling the kitchen to come after me. The two women I’d caught in compromising positions were happily suing the husbands that hired me. I couldn’t see them spending any money to have me killed.

  The only other work I’d done was for an insurance company, documenting fraud. The guy was getting four grand a month for a claim against a trucking company that he and his high-profile lawyer said put him in a wheelchair. I found him playing golf at the north side country club. The guy was doing time, and his lawyer was counter-suing. I crossed them off the list too. I didn’t think I’d been in business long enough to be on anyone’s hit list.

  I turned right on St. Mary’s Street in front of the neighborhood Mennonite church. A busload of recent immigrants was unloading in the parking lot, fresh from one of the detention centers in Dilley or Karnes City. The Mennonites always had their doors open.

  I lived south of downtown on the border of one of the older neighborhoods of San Antonio called King William, named after Kaiser Wilhelm I of Prussia. So many Germans moved to that area along the San Antonio River in the late 1800s, it became known as Sauerkraut Bend. They built majestic Victorian and Greek Revival homes and enjoyed fishing in the nearby river. Like all neighborhoods, it had gone through a period of decline, but now many of the old homes had been renovated, giving the neighborhood a gentrified feel. When I bought the house, I was hoping to cash in on that feeling by buying a fixer-upper on the edge of the main district. I was also trying to impress Sylvia by being a homeowner. When I got around to the fix and repair part, it might work.

  The street was lined with similar houses in different stages of renovation. Some had been turned into rental properties, others were falling down. Mine wasn’t the worst.

  I pulled into my driveway and checked for lights in my neighbor’s window. Her name was Rose Gustafson, and she was a retired university biology professor who was born in the neighborhood in 1939. I tried to always check up on her when I got home late. In return, she liked to remind me what day the city collected trash.

  I came in through the front door and let Sam, my four-year-old chocolate Lab, examine the holes in my ruined tuxedo and sniff Sosa’s dried blood. He was named after Sam Houston, a hero of the Texas Revolution. He occasionally took himself too seriously, and I wasn’t entirely sure whether it was because of his namesake or his breed.

  Once Sam decided the holes in my clothes weren’t from another dog, he waited by the back door for me to change into my running shorts. He didn’t seem to care that it was pushing two a.m. or that I had been shot at and interrogated. We ran every night when I got home. It wasn’t his fault I was late. You can’t argue with a Labrador retriever.

  We jogged to the San Antonio River trail south of the popular tourist loop. It was well lit and paved for most of the fifteen or so miles extending south to the four lesser known Spanish missions. A welcome breeze ruffled the mesquite tree leaves and Johnson grass lining the trail. A rare summer shower had dumped an inch of rain the week before and turned everything green and added to the humidity. Streetlamps illuminated patches of wild sunflowers that the moisture had revived.

  We skipped our usual route and ran north for twenty-five minutes. Although I couldn’t come up with anyone who wanted me dead, experience taught me to err on the side of caution. We passed the old US Arsenal that now housed the headquarters of a local grocery chain, and the backsides of a dozen historic buildings. Farther north, the buildings got newer and closer to the channel. One of the few remaining older structures was the landmark VFW. The building was a white Victorian house nestled in an ever-expanding condo jungle. The trail had a European vibe without the graffiti. When I was released from the hospital in Germany after my last deployment, I took a week to travel the countryside. Every building and outdoor fixture was covered with graffiti that the locals seemed to ignore. The tagging that did show up in the tourist sections of San Antonio was quickly washed off and painted over.

  The north part of the trail reeked of urban renewal, which translated into housing I couldn’t afford. We took the steps to the street level and came face-to-face with Sylvia’s engaging smile adorning a bus stop ad for her father’s furniture store. He called himself the Furniture King and had made a fortune selling overpriced household furnishings using his daughter’s alluring features. Her life from birth through college was catalogued on benches all over the city. I was thinking about her encounter with Marcus at the convention center. I should have gotten over being jealous, but it was hard when every man in town could admire her picture at the bus stop. I decided to let it go. Why provoke her into a fight when the encounter probably meant nothing? I was turning over a new leaf.

  We stopped at the base of a newer complex. The ground floor units all had private patios surrounded by six-foot wooden fences that faced the river. Sam sniffed out the last gate i
n a row of twelve then proudly looked back at me.

  I looked at my watch. It was two thirty a.m. I probably should have called her earlier, but I had a lot on my mind. Sam pawed at the gate impatiently. I tested the handle. “It’s locked,” I told him. He didn’t seem to think it was a problem. “Fine,” I said. He was right. We both wanted to see her. I lifted myself over the gate and onto Sylvia’s small patio.

  I let Sam in, and he went straight for the bowl of water and food. She didn’t forget, and neither did he. The sliding glass door was open, and I let myself into a dark living room and left Sam to finish his late-night snack.

  Sylvia met me in the dark and wrapped her warm arms around my sweat-soaked T-shirt. “Are you all right?” she asked. I could hear the concern in her voice.

  “Just a little out of breath from the run.”

  She pushed me away and put her hands on her hips. Her white robe fell open to her waist. “Don’t play games,” she said.

  “How did you find out?”

  “The police questioned Marcus.” She pulled her robe closed and secured it with the belt.

  I grabbed a beer and flopped down on the couch. Sylvia threw me a hand towel from the kitchen and flipped on the lamp. I explained the evening’s events while she stood examining me for holes in my skin or my story.

  “Someone shot at you, and you go for a jog? No tears? No shouting? You make a sarcastic joke and move on,” she said.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t know. Yell at the wall? Shed a tear? Something to show you’re human.”

  “Yell at the wall?”

  “You know what I mean. I’m glad they stopped you before you could chase down an armed suspect in the dark.” Her robe fell open again. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath.

  This time I couldn’t resist. I reached inside the robe and pulled her closer to me. “You forget my background, counselor. My specialty is chasing down armed suspects in the dark.”