Moving Targets Read online

  Also by William J. Reynolds

  The Nebraska Quotient

  Moving Targets

  Money Trouble

  Things Invisible

  The Naked Eye

  Drive-By

  MOVING TARGETS

  WILLIAM J. REYNOLDS

  Copyright © 1986 by William J. Reynolds

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by

  Brash Books

  PO Box 8212

  Calabasas, CA 91372

  www.brash-books.com

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  A hard, gritty, sandy snow filled in the wrinkles and depressions of his clothing, half-hid one booted foot, and collected in his right ear. He didn’t mind. He wouldn’t mind anything, ever again. People get that way when they’re dead.

  And Jack Castelar was dead, all right. No question. Even from twenty, thirty feet away, even in the gray predawn, I could see he had that look, the look the dead take on almost immediately when life leaves them. Something—some indefinable something—abandons them. They change. It’s a subtle thing. I can’t describe it, but I can recognize it.

  Less subtle was the black and evil-looking wound in Castelar’s right temple, about an inch north-northwest of his eye, and the reddened snow in which he lay, face-down, his left ear pressed to the cold country backroad as if he were listening for the Wells Fargo wagon. You don’t have to have read as many detective novels as I have to figure out the story.

  I stood near the body, shivering, trying to burrow deeper into the fur lining of my coat. A parka, I’m afraid, not a trenchcoat. The latter is in keeping with the image of the private eye, but the former was better suited to the weather. It was going to be a cold one. Hell, it already was. The skies had cleared overnight and the wind was steady and the cold behind it was that dry, brittle cold that makes your fillings ache and cuts right through you like a scythe, no matter how warmly you dress. It was bad in the city; it was worse out here in the open, among these few lonely farm buildings scattered like forgotten toys on the outskirts of Omaha. It was, I reflected, the kind of weather that paralyzes cars, overtaxes furnaces, and kills people.

  Jack Castelar wasn’t among those people, though. He was dead before he dropped, in the middle of the road at the end of his own driveway, six or eight hundred feet from the privacy of his own home. He never knew what hit him.

  I could empathize. There was a lot here I didn’t get, either. Who killed Castelar, sure; but also more basic stuff like why I was there, why Mike Kennerly had called me out of a nice, warm bed and into the cold, dark world, saying only that something terrible had happened and that he wanted me there—here—in the middle of nowhere, ASAP.

  Kennerly was right; something terrible had happened. But he didn’t need me to tell him that. What he did need me for remained to be seen.

  Some boys from the county came to remove the decedent. Since they had jobs to do and were probably no happier than I was to have been called out at that ridiculous hour, I moved away to let them work. But I moved slowly; the stuff underfoot was treacherous. The grainy snow that had fallen intermittently since midnight, whisked around by winds gusting to sixty miles an hour, acted like jeweler’s rouge on the existing hard-pack, polishing it to a perilous sheen. On it I walked, we all walked, with the uncertain, jerky stiff-leggedness of a newborn colt.

  Fortunately, once I had moved to the side of the narrow and unpaved road I had plenty of things to hang on to; the road was well lined with various county, state, and Omaha city vehicles—police, sheriff, medical—as well as several unmarked sedans, some with tax-exempt plates, some without. I understood then why the OPD uniform had made me leave my car at the intersection of the main road and hoof it the quarter-mile or so to what we trained detectives and late-night TV enthusiasts call the scene of the crime.

  It takes a lot of people to investigate a homicide—more than you might think—but not, usually, this many. The number of cars plus the number of people, garishly colored by the flashing and blinking emergency lights as they moved in their various activities, added up to one answer: Jack Castelar had been a pretty important man, even if I had never heard of him until the previous afternoon. Having heard of him, I knew that he was—had been—the president of the West Omaha State Bank and Trust, a small but lucrative family-owned bank somewhere out in these parts, so far on the edge of town that it was in fact out of town, despite the name. If the pond was on the small side, Castelar was still a big enough frog. Now a big dead frog, and all the other frogs, small, medium, and large-economy-size, would want to know why.

  And that, as they say, plus ten cents …

  I spotted Mike Kennerly in a small knot of people perhaps twenty feet from where I stood casually clinging for dear life to a conveniently parked van. He was engaged in animated conversation with three other men and a woman. I couldn’t hear them, but I didn’t need to in order to get the gist of the discussion. I left the slight wind break afforded by the van and carefully slid toward the group. Barely three steps later a cop stopped me.

  He was county, not OPD. The uniform was styled differently, the trousers were gray instead of blue, and the badge was a star, not a shield. If that wasn’t enough, he wore a big patch on his shoulder that said deputy sheriff in gold letters. Guys in my line of work know how to spot vital clues like that.

  The deputy was big—tall—but kind of bony and angular. He wore a small blond mustache (frosting over), a thick down-filled jacket (regulation), and a cap with the visor pulled low over his eyes (even though the sun hadn’t yet put in an appearance). The eyes beneath the visor were expressionless. His rectangular plastic name tag read G. knut. G. Knut carried a fourteen-inch Kel-Lite—one of those long black aluminum flashlights that traffic cops always tote—which came down in front of me like a barricade at a toll booth, and with much the same effect.

  “Going somewhere?” Knut asked.

  “Over there.” Okay, not a brilliant riposte, but it was very early and I was very cold and, you have to admit, the question wasn’t too bright either.

  “I don’t think so, pal,” Knut drawled in the sort of voice you pick up watching too many cop shows. “No sightseers. If you’re press, you wait up there with the rest of them.” He used his long, wedge-shaped chin to point up the road, the way I’d just come. “If you’re not, you just head back that way anyhow and keep going, okay?”

  “Look, it’s all right. I’m supposed to be here. Mike Kennerly sent fo
r me—”

  “Well, that’s between you and him. What’s between you and me is me telling you to take off—so take off!”

  With that he gave me a shove. Not even a shove. A prod, just a little prod of his left hand against my right shoulder. Nothing to it. Except I was trying to catch Kennerly’s eye, to get him to come explain to this bullet-head who I was and that I belonged there, so I didn’t see it coming. I wasn’t prepared for it. My boots slipped on the waxy surface. I grabbed for something to break my fall, and the nearest something was Knut’s outstretched flashlight.

  We took a quick turn on the dance floor and when the music stopped, one of us lay flat on his back gazing uncomprehendingly at the slowly lightening sky. And it wasn’t me.

  Knut was making some completely baseless speculations on my lineage as Kennerly and the woman he had been in conference with came over as quickly as they could. The woman was saying, “Jesus, Knut, we’ve already got one corpse,” and Kennerly was saying, “Nebraska, where in hell have you been?” and the cop was saying, “Shit, lady, I thought your people were supposed to secure the scene,” and I was saying, “Frozen battery, Mike, you know it is about 273 degrees below,” and so on. We eventually decided that Knut wasn’t permanently damaged and hauled him to his feet. He fixed me with a long, hard, Charles Bronson-type stare that I guess was supposed to set me to shivering in my boots—I was shivering, but I’m afraid it was because of the temperature, not his steely squint—turned, and stalked angrily, bruisedly away.

  I said, “He should cut out that daredevil stuff before he winds up in traction.”

  “No sense, no feeling,” Kennerly’s friend said. Then, turning to me: “Okay, show’s over; what are you doing here? Who are you?”

  Kennerly answered. “This is the private investigator I was telling you about, Detective. Nebraska, this is Detective Kim Banner, OPD Homicide.”

  “Oh, yeah, wonderful,” said Banner cynically. “That’s just what I need—Philip Marlowe come to crack the case for me.” Banner was a compact woman, perhaps thirty-five, thirty-six years old. Her voice had a hoarseness to it, and when she spoke I caught the heavy, sweet scent of throat lozenges on the cloud of her breath. She looked up at me speculatively. “Somehow, with a name like Nebraska, I expected you to gallop up on a white stallion.”

  “He’s too hard to find in the snow,” I said pleasantly. I could have told her the endlessly entertaining story of the origin of the surname: How my dad’s old man, in patriotic fervor, named himself after the place fate and an empty wallet deposited him when he came over from the Old Country; how I, personally, was forever grateful that he hadn’t ended up in Tallahassee; how—well, you get the idea. But I had discovered back in the sixth grade, which is so far the last time I punched somebody out for cracking wise about the name, that if people want to hear the story, they’ll ask. If they don’t, it’s only wasted on them. Banner didn’t ask, so I didn’t volunteer it. Instead I kept quiet and studied her studying me.

  There wasn’t much of her to study, though there was plenty of knee-length black leather coat, long gray scarf and matching gloves, and black Russian-looking hat with pull-down earflaps. But I liked what little of her I could see—mainly, about three square inches of frostbite-courting face; a narrow, pointed nose; small, dark eyes; and a few stray wisps of dark blond or light brown hair. Kim Banner was small but seemed strong and projected an aura of easy competence like competence was something she possessed, not something she had read about in a self-help article.

  She quickly worked her way from my Irish walking hat to my L. L. Bean Sub-Zero Pacs and back up to my face, taking it all in, filing it all away. I’d’ve bet she was damn good on the witness stand.

  “You don’t look like much of a Philip Marlowe to me, Nebraska.” The throat disk clicked against her teeth.

  “Pleased to meet you, too.”

  “Wow, what a sharp wit. Am I bleeding, Kennerly?” She snatched off the black hat and scrubbed a hand through her hair a couple of times. Blond. The hair was blond, but that deep shade we used to call dishwater-blond before, I guess, everyone got dishwashers and forgot what color dishwater was. Her hair was of medium length and she wore it in a nondescript noncut that I imagined was easy to take care of. She slapped the hat back over it, tugged down the earflaps, and said, “Okay, look, Nebraska, I’ll give it to you the way I already gave it to Kennerly. I don’t want to be a bitch, but I do have a homicide to investigate here. Jack Castelar was a pretty important guy with some pretty important friends, so that means I’m going to be dinking around with the media and my lieutenant and the brass downtown and Castelar’s pin-striped Rotarian buddies and for all I know Mike Wallace, too. ‘Why isn’t the investigation proceeding faster?’ ‘Why haven’t you made any arrests?’ ‘Why aren’t there any new leads?’ That’s the sort of stuff they’ll want to know, and it won’t do me any good to tell them it’s because I’ve been spending my time answering idiot questions from dildos like them.

  “Then there’s this doofus Knut, a real hot dog. He thinks he should have the case because he got here first, which I guess gives him dibs on it or something. Never mind that the sheriff doesn’t have the manpower or the facilities to handle this kind of investigation—and, being a pretty smart fellow, wouldn’t want the hassle of it even if he did. Knut, he doesn’t care. He can smell the headlines from here. He thinks.”

  She paused, finally, for air. “So the upshot is,” she resumed, “I don’t have time to mess around with Castelar’s lawyer and a small-time private eye on top of it. The law says you’re entitled to poke around. Personally, I think you should wait and see if just maybe we can do the job before you go spending your time and money playing Holmes and Watson or Starsky and Hutch or Batman and Robin or whoever you are. But the law says you’re entitled, and my boss says cooperate with Mr. Kennerly here. Fine. I don’t have any trouble with that—as long as you stay out of my hair. If you don’t, the law says I’m entitled to shut you down. And I will, gentlemen, believe me, in a minute. Do you follow me?”

  “Like a trail of bread crumbs.”

  Banner looked bleakly at Kennerly, then back at me. “You know,” she said, “I don’t think I like your attitude.”

  “‘Yeah, I’ve had complaints about it, but it just keeps getting worse.’ Dick Powell to Douglas Walton in Murder, My Sweet.”

  “What?”

  “Hey, you wanted Philip Marlowe.”

  She started to say something, stopped, frowned, then, finally, said quietly, “Nebraska, you really don’t want to fuck with me.”

  I try to exercise my self-restraint once a day, just to keep it from getting fat. This looked like a good time for it. So I simply said, “Sorry.”

  Banner made a vague gesture with one gloved hand as she half walked, half skated to where Castelar had reposed only a couple of minutes ago, where warm blood leaking from the exit wound in his head had eroded a deep cavity in the soiled snow.

  Kennerly, at my elbow, said, “Making friends wherever you go.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe if I just understood what I was doing here …”

  “Hey, Sam Spade,” Banner called. “The counselor asked me if I would fill you in, so if you could spare a minute …” Kennerly poked me and motioned me forward, but I stood my ground.

  “Forget about it,” I said stubbornly. “You wake me up at four in the morning—a bloody damn cold January morning, for Crissake—you don’t tell me what in hell for, but that I should get dressed, get in my car, and get out here, about eight hundred million miles from civilization.”

  “Gentlemen,” Banner called.

  “Nebraska,” said Kennerly.

  I ignored them both. “So I get downstairs—haven’t even had a crummy cup of coffee—and find I’ve got a battery-flavored Popsicle under the hood. Luckily I have a neighbor who starts work at six, and she was already up. I got her to drop me at an all-night truck stop, bought a new battery, conned a guy into giving me a lift back, installed the
battery in the dark, and beat ass out here.”

  “Guys,” Banner said.

  “Nebraska,” Kennerly repeated.

  “And for what?” I said obstinately. “To freeze my tail off, get pushed around by crazy cops, and learn about cases that don’t have anything to do with me? No, thanks, amigo. I’m not taking another step, except back to my car, unless I find out just what the hell I’m doing here.”

  “Well, if you’d shut up I’d be delighted to tell you,” Kennerly said with quiet venom. “Just one minute, please, Detective,” he called to Banner, who I swear had steam rising off her. Then he grabbed me by the elbow in a surprisingly strong grip—Kennerly’s a pretty small and slight guy—spun me in the direction away from Banner, and said in low tones, “All right, listen closely. The man they just took away was not only my client, he was my friend. Okay? Know that up front. Now: Jack’s flight back from Denver last night was delayed by bad weather. It didn’t get in until after midnight. He cabbed it from the airport, probably because it was late and the weather was lousy and he didn’t want to drag anyone out to come get him.

  “As you can see, the driveway is blocked with snow, so the driver let him out here in the road and, presumably, drove off. The killer must have stood in those trees on the other side of the road”—I turned to look but he pulled me back—“and he must have called Jack’s name or made some sort of noise, because the forensics people say Jack was turning in that direction when … when the bullet caught him in the temple and spun him back toward the house.”

  Kennerly paused, composing himself a minute, then plunged in again in the same hurried, breathless way. “The police estimate this must have been between one and one-thirty. The body was discovered at around four, when the family dog had to be let out. The family called me then. I called the sheriff—but first I called you. I wanted you here before the police. I waited as long as I dared, then I simply had to call them; I was running too great a risk.”

  “I guess I should be flattered, Mike, but like the woman said, we could let the cops have a couple hours on the job before we decided they aren’t up to it.”