The Murderers (Badge of Honor 6)

“That could be turned against you. It could make him look like a cowboy,” Callis said.

“The dark and stormy night is what bothers me,” Hormel said. “We have to convince the jury that the package Denny Coughlin saw them take from the river was the same package Atchison tossed in there. That’s a tenuous connection.”

“The two South detectives saw the package being passed from Foley to Atchison,” Lowenstein said.

“No, they didn’t,” Hormel argued. “There’s room for reasonable doubt about that. And it was a dark and stormy night. ‘How can you testify under oath, Detective Payne, that the package taken from the river by police divers was the package you saw Mr. Atchison carry out of Yock’s Diner? How can you testify under oath that, if the night was as dark as you have testified it was, and you were as far from Mr. Atchison as you say you were, that what he threw, if indeed he threw anything, into the river was that package? You couldn’t really see him, could you? You’re testifying to what you may honestly believe happened, but, honestly, you didn’t really see anything, did you?’”

“Ah, come on, Harry!” Lowenstein protested.

“I’m inclined to go with Harry,” Callis said. “This is weak.”

Lowenstein stood up.

“Always a pleasure to see you, Tom,” he said. “And you, too, Harry.”

“Where are you going?”

“To carry out my orders,” Lowenstein said. “I was instructed to show you what we have. Then I was instructed to arrest the sonsofbitches. Come on, Peter.”

Wohl stood up and offered his hand to Harry Hormel.

“Now, wait a minute,” Callis said. “I didn’t say it was no good. I said it was weak.”

“It is,” Hormel agreed.

“Harry,” the Dist

rict Attorney said. “You’ve gone into court with less then this, and won. Peter made a good point. All you have to do is convince the jury that these two were pursued by one of the brightest detectives on the force. A certified hero. If you handle that angle right, you can go for the death penalty and get it.”

“It’s weak,” Harry Hormel repeated.

“Let Harry know when you have them, Matt,” Callis said. “I’m sure he would like to be there when you confront them with the guns.”

TWENTY-TWO

For Frankie Foley, there had been a certain satisfying finality about his meeting with Gerry Atchison in the Yock’s Diner the previous night. He had received his final payment for the hit, and he’d gotten rid of the guns. The job was done.

He presumed that Atchison would safely dispose of the weapons somewhere, probably throw them in the Delaware, or bury them in the woods when he was out playing weekend warrior with the National Guard. It didn’t matter.Frankie knew that once Atchison had taken the guns, and once he’d gotten out of the diner without anyone seeing them together, everything was going to be fine.

Frankie personally thought that the bullshit Atchison insisted on going through, making him leave the guns in the garbage can in the toilet of the Yock’s Diner, and coming out, and then Atchison going in to get them, was some really silly bullshit. Atchison must have been watching spy movies on the TV or something.

It would have made much more sense for them just to have met someplace, even in the parking lot of the Yock’s Diner, for Christ’s sake, swapped the dough for the guns, and gotten in their cars and driven away.

On the other hand, which was why Frankie had gone along with the swapping-in-the-crapper bullshit, doing it that way had been safer than meeting him in a dark parking lot someplace.

Frankie didn’t trust Atchison. He hadn’t trusted him in the Inferno when he’d done the job, and had taken steps to make sure that Atchison hadn’t hit him after he’d hit the wife and the partner, which would have been smart, which would have made it look like the dead guy on the floor had robbed the place and killed the partner and the wife, and Atchison was the fucking hero who had killed him.

That “dead men tell no tales” wasn’t no bullshit. He was the only guy who could pin the job on Atchison, and Atchison knew it. If he was dead, Atchison could relax. The cops would look for-fucking-ever—or at least until something else came along—for the two robbers Atchison had made up and told the cops about.

Frankie had considered that the reverse was also true, that if Atchison was dead, Atchison couldn’t get weak knees or something and tell the cops, “Frankie Foley is the guy who murdered my wife.” He considered hitting Atchison. It would be no trouble at all. He could have been waiting for him in the parking lot at the Yock’s Diner, put a couple of bullets into his head, and driven off and that would have been the end of it.

Except that maybe it wouldn’t have really been the end of it. The cops would look like even bigger assholes if Atchison got hit and they couldn’t catch who had done him, either. The Ledger was already giving the cops a hard time about that. The cops would get all excited all over again, and maybe they’d get lucky.

Frankie didn’t think Atchison would have the balls to try to kill him himself, otherwise he would have killed his wife and the partner by himself, right? And Atchison didn’t know no other professional hit men, or else he would have hired one of them to do the job, right?

So the smart thing to do—the professional thing—was just stop right where he was. He had been paid to do a job, and he had done it, and got paid for it, and that should be the end of it. Go on to other things, right?

If he did it that way, in a couple of weeks he could go to work in the Inferno, and tell Wanamaker’s what they could do with their fucking warehouse. The word would get out that he had done the job for Atchison, and sooner or later other jobs would come along.