Inheritance: A Novel Part 29

"Yeah, he was a piece of work. Of course, I don't really know too much about him. Just that his daddy was a preacher over the Baptist church on Farm Road Three-sixteen. I know they used to fight a lot. Then Paul's daddy went off to the Army, and when he came back here he stayed around for a few months before heading down to Mexico and lived there for a while. When he came back here he worked at the Morgan Rollins factory until it closed down, and after that he took over the family farm and hardly ever left it."

Anderson looked at Levy and shook his head. He said, "Paul's daddy worked at Morgan Rollins?"

"That's right. Worked there for three or four years, if I remember right. You guys didn't know that? I thought I mentioned that to you on the phone."

"No," Anderson said. "No, we didn't know that. Seems like we're learning all kinds of new things."

"So do you think Paul Henninger is part of some kind of cult?" Levy asked.

They were in the car again. It was almost noon, and the highway into town was filling up with lunch hour traffic.

"I suppose it's possible," Anderson said. "You saw those pictures. There's an obvious link between whatever Henninger's father was doing with those stick lattices and what happened at Morgan Rollins."

"Plus he used to work there."

"Yeah, there's that, too."

Levy said, "Of course, Martin Henninger is dead."

"Yep."

"So where does that leave us? The son picks up where the father left off. He's part of some sort of cult that's killing heroin junkies and stealing their bodies from the morgue."

"Yeah, maybe. I suppose. Of course, Paul Henninger has a pretty good alibi for the night of the Morgan Rollins killings. He was on duty, after all, with a partner."

Levy turned his wedding ring around his finger. It was a nervous gesture with him, one Anderson had seen him do a lot during long investigations.

He said, "So, where does that leave us? Do you think Henninger is involved with this or not?"

Anderson said, "Chuck, you should have seen him that night at the rail yard. He was really shaken up. Like he'd just had the scare of his life. You don't fake that kind of look."

"Okay, so he was shaken up. How does that fit in with all the other stuff we know about his family's link to this? I mean, he'd just had a gun pointed at him. He'd just been in his first car chase. Maybe he was just rattled from that."

Before Anderson could answer, his phone rang. He scooped it off his belt and checked the caller ID.

"It's Margie," he said, "let me take this." He flipped the phone open and said, "Hey, babe."

"Hi."

She sounded calmer. At least he couldn't hear any anger in her voice. Now she just sounded tired.

"What's going on?" he asked.

"I'm still here at Jenny's," she said. "She's been getting visitors all day from the a.s.sociation and the funeral home. G.o.d, Keith, there's so much to handle."

"Did Deputy Chief Allen come by?"

"Yeah, he was here."

"How did that go?"

"Well, not so good. He apologized for what happened, but what can you really say in a situation like that, you know? She's devastated, Keith."

"Yeah, I can imagine."

"She's come to a decision, though."

"Oh? About what?"

"She wants to go ahead with the funeral. She talked with Raul Herrera's wife earlier today. They both want to go ahead with it."

Anderson was stunned. Margie was silent, waiting for him to say something, but he didn't have any words for it.

"Keith?"

"Yeah, I'm here," he said.

"What do you think?"

"I don't know," he said. "I don't even know if you can do that. Can you bury an empty coffin?"

"Allen was here when she made up her mind. So was the guy from the funeral home. Allen said he would make it happen."

"He did. Huh. Well, I guess he will then."

Margie was quiet after that, and Anderson got the feeling that the call was over. He said, "Hey Margie."

"What is it, Keith?"

"Are we okay?"

"I don't know, Keith. I just don't know. I'll talk to you later."

"Okay," he said. "I love you."

"Love you, too," she said. "See you tonight."

"Okay," he said. But she had already hung up.

Chapter 13.

San Antonio's endless summer rolled on. The sun grew hotter each day, hanging in the sky like a swollen white eye, scorching all but the thinnest clouds from the upper atmosphere. The earth turned brittle from the heat, going from green to yellow to brown. Dust was everywhere, thick and depthless where the air was too dead to allow a breeze.

And the nights weren't much better. As Paul and Mike roved the streets, baking inside their body armor, soaking their uniforms with sweat before they even completed their first call, they watched the world around them wilting beneath the heat. The homeless and the junkies lounged on discarded couches in the ubiquitous vacant lots and watched them cruise by with rheumy, empty expressions, not even bothering with their usual routine of pretending to move along. Diseased dogs roamed the streets and alleyways of their district, rooting out their dinners from garbage that acc.u.mulated behind buildings and in the gutters. But even the scavengers were sluggish and lazy and disinterested to the point that they couldn't be bothered to get out of the way of pa.s.sing patrol cars. The heat that gripped San Antonio during the July days and nights of that summer was slow and constant and unrelenting, a prolonged smothering that sapped the will and dulled the mind.

In the pa.s.senger seat of the patrol car, the window open and the dry and dusty and sour garbage smell of San Antonio's east side drifting into his nose, Paul watched the landscape slip by and was surprised to realize that he had a pretty good idea of where they were.

It was nearly two in the morning now, and they had spent much of that night drifting through the southern part of their district-an area Mike lovingly referred to as Heroin Town-looking for junkies to shake down for information about the Morgan Rollins killings. But now they were headed north along Lee Hall Boulevard, leaving their district. A few minutes earlier they had received a message from Wes and Collins on their MDT that read simply: Ready. And Mike had turned the car north and sped away.

Paul didn't ask questions. He read the message, looked at Mike, who had a wicked smile on his face, and waited to be told what was up.

He was still waiting when they entered the warehouse-lined streets in the middle of Barris and Seles' district. Paul watched the buildings slip by. Their corrugated metal roofs and tubular construction reminded him of airplane hangers. The street was quiet and dark. Large oak trees filled up the s.p.a.ces between the warehouses. A black dog trotted into the street and watched them as they drove around it.

"What are we doing here?" Paul finally said.

Mike's smile got bigger, but he didn't speak. He slowed the car to a crawl, blacked out the lights, and turned into a driveway that led up a steep incline and then curved around the back of one of the warehouses.

Wes and Collins were already there. Their car was blacked out and idling smoothly beneath the eaves of a large Spanish oak.

Mike parked the car a short distance from Wes and Collins and opened his door. But before he could get out, Paul stopped him. They usually parked driver's side window to driver's side window, 69ing, as it was commonly called.

"What are we doing here?" Paul asked.

"Just get out. There's some things you need to know in order to become a well-rounded policeman."

"A well-rounded policeman?"

"Just get out," Mike said.

Mike popped the trunk, reached inside, and came up with a handful of rubber surgical tubing. He handed it to Paul and said, "Hold this."

Paul looked at it. "What's this for?"

Mike kept digging through the trunk. Without looking up he said, "Show him, Collins."

Collins laughed. He gave Paul a good-natured slap on the shoulder and said, "Come on."

They crossed the parking lot to the back edge. Wes was already standing there, waiting for them.

From where they stood, they could see over a sea of oak trees. The metal roofs of the surrounding warehouses looked like rafts floating in the midst of a gently undulating green sea.

"What am I looking at?" Paul asked.

Collins pointed at a parking lot some two hundred feet away. "There they are-right there," he said. "See 'em?"

It was dark, and the cars were blacked out, but once Paul knew what he was looking at, he could see plainly enough two SAPD patrol cars parked next to a three story building made entirely of corrugated tin.

"I see 'em," Paul said. "Who is that?"

Collins laughed. But it sounded like a mean laugh. "Barris and Seles. The other car is their daddy, Garwin."

Oh no, Paul thought.

"You almost ready, Mike?" Wes said.

"Got it," Mike said.

Paul turned back to him and saw Mike holding a blue plastic cup with a handle on each side and a faded picture of SpongeBob Squarepants on the front. In his other hand, he had a small Igloo cooler.

"Is that a baby cup?" Paul asked.

"That depends on how it's used," Mike answered.

He took the surgical tubing from Paul and cut it into two equal pieces with his pocket knife. As Paul watched, recognition gradually sinking in, Mike tied off one piece of tubing to each handle. Then he opened the cooler, revealing a dozen or so baseball-sized water balloons, and Paul's suspicions were confirmed.

As a freshman member of the UTSA football squad, and before he had met Rachel, he went to Corpus Christi with a busload of guys from the team for spring break. They stayed in a weathered little three bedroom house about a block from the beach. The house was surrounded on three sides by high rise hotels, and the balconies were crammed with college students all shouting out at each other, everybody ready to party. Some of the guys took a homemade water balloon launcher a lot like the one Mike had just made and shot balloons at the people on the hotel balconies.

At the time, Paul had had no idea that water balloon slingshots were so popular. But within moments, the people on the balconies began to shoot back with their own water balloon slingshots, and because the house was in such a poor tactical position, it only took a few minutes for nearly every window in the house to get broken out by flying balloons. It was Paul's first practical lesson on the tactical virtues of the high ground.

Paul said, "That's a slingshot."

"Well what do you know?" Mike said. "It can learn."

"Nice to know he's got more than muscles," Wes said.

Collins gave his partner a dirty look. "Dude, shut up. You really gross me out with that gay s.h.i.+t, you know that?"

Wes rolled his eyes.

But then Paul's smile wavered as a stray thought crossed his mind. "But Garwin's down there," he said.

"Your daddy will be just fine," Collins said.

Mike led the others to the edge of the lot. Paul looked across the tops of the trees and had a perfect view of their targets. The planning that went into this was impressive, he realized. A lot of pieces had to fall into place to make it work.

He stood off to one side as Wes and Collins each grabbed an end of one of the tubes. Mike stood between them, the cup in his hands. He pulled it back so that the ropes were taut and the slingshot ready to fire.

"Hand me a balloon," he said to Paul.

"We're not gonna get in trouble for this, are we?" Paul asked.

"Just hand me a balloon, Paul."

Paul handed him a yellow one.

"Now stand over there," Mike said, pointing to the left of Wes with his chin. "You're gonna be the spotter. Tell me where it lands."

Mike let the slingshot go, and the balloon went into a high arc over the trees. It landed somewhere off in the trees to the right of the target.