“And that was the River Hogs?”
“That was my River Hogs,” Davidson said. “The bunch of guys who went drinking down in the riverbed off duty, they might get a piece of the action if they could be trusted. If they got it.”
“Like Matson and Bullock got it,” I said.
“They were idiots,” Davidson said. “Nixon let ’em in. Not me. But I had to come in and clean it up in the end.” He waved the semiautomatic at me. “Nixon was nuts. He was high half the time. He was off playing stud at that rich doctor’s sex parties.”
“What about Peralta? How’d you buy him off?”
Davidson laughed like an executioner who liked his work. “Peralta wouldn’t be bought. The son-of-a-bitch. I offered him a stake. He threw it in my face. So I made sure we recorded his badge number when we were handing out the bonuses, just in case he decided to take it to Internal Affairs.”
“He didn’t?”
“How the hell should I know? After the shooting, everything changed. We stopped the parties. Nixon and I kept running a few scams, just for pocket change. But I shut up those two kids. Peralta was off climbing the ladder. Everything would have been fine if that fuck Dick Nixon hadn’t decided, twenty years later, to grow a conscience.”
“It’s a bitch when that happens,” I said quietly. “And if you have to ruin the lives o
f two kids…”
“I can’t solve all the problems in the world,” he said. “I have to look after me and my own. You expect me to do it on a deputy’s paycheck?” He waved one of the guns at the lights of the mansions on the mountainside. “Look at these fuckers, living this way. They do it because we protect their asses from the bad guys. Protect and serve.”
“Davidson, you’re one of the bad guys.”
“Goodbye, Sheriff,” he said. “You understand why I’ve got to end this here.”
“Don’t move!” A shout from below.
They looked like mutant fireflies, those little red laser beams on Davidson’s chest. He looked down at them calmly.
“Don’t move a fucking muscle!” Kimbrough shouted, easing himself up the ridge, his gun drawn. “We’ve got SWAT snipers who will take you out before you even inhale!” The red lightning bugs wiggled on Davidson’s chest. It was the distraction I needed to pull out my big Colt.
Davidson’s handsome, lined face broke into a crazy smile. “Shit,” he said, waving his arms dreamily, holding out the pistols. “I captured an escaped convict! That’s Leo O’Keefe, right there. He shot Peralta. He was going to shoot the sheriff here. I stopped him.”
Kimbrough was at my side, his dark Glock leveled at Davidson’s chest. Davidson started toward us, then stopped. We held our ground. Davidson seemed suddenly disoriented. He looked at the lasers on his chest, then glanced out at the city.
“I’m going to be the chief deputy,” he said, tears running down his rugged face. “Shit.”
Suddenly a low roar came over the mountain and descended toward us, then it turned into a bone-rattling windstorm and we were lit up like judgment day. Davidson stared at the helicopter, fifty feet above us. I stepped forward and hammered him under his chin, dropping him to the ground. I grabbed the revolver and Kimbrough wrestled away the semiautomatic. He looked at us as if he were awakening from a dream.
“You’ve got to kill me, Mapstone,” he yelled, his face death-white in the spotlight of the chopper. “You can’t send a cop to prison.” He reached for my gun. “Goddamn it! You owe me that!”
I pushed him back down and stepped back. Then I felt the dark shapes of the SWAT officers swarming around us. One of them roughly handcuffed Davidson and hauled him to his feet.
“Take him to jail,” I said.
A long convoy of emergency vehicles trickled back down the mountain. The chopper sailed off toward downtown. I sat off to myself and watched, a solitary figure on a cold, dark boulder. Behind me, the house was dark. The ghosts of Jonathan Ledger and Dean Nixon watched us in worldly silence. When I felt a hand on my shoulder, I was shivering from the cold.
“History Shamus, I’m here to take you home.”
I just sat and shook my head. Lindsey came down close and wrapped her arms around me.
“We have ‘Protect and Serve’ written on our cars,” I said. “We didn’t do that with Leo, now did we?”
“You did the best you could, Dave,” she said.
“Not good enough.”
She whispered, “Oh, baby. Come home now.”