“I didn’t shoot anyone!” Victor said again. He stood up. His cap fell off his head. He brushed his wiry hair back with two hands and leaned against the wall, palms flat, shaking his head. Tears glistened in his eyes.
Hauck stepped over to him. He placed his hand on the frightened teenager’s shoulder. “Victor, listen to me. You’re not being smart today, son. And I know you’re smart. I know you’re in school and that you do well and I promised your mother I’d watch out for you here, and that’s what I’m trying to do. I swear.
“But Detective Munoz here is right…There’s gonna be a witch hunt for whoever killed that man, Victor, and right now we’re the only thing in between you and being handed over to the Feds. And if that happens, son, there’s no one who can watch out for you then. Wherever you were, whatever it is you’re protecting, you have to tell us now,’ cause there ain’t nothing, nothing you could possibly be protecting in this world that’s more important. Your mother’s already been through hell, Victor. You don’t want to put her through all that pain all over again…”
Victor turned around. He was on the edge of sobbing.
Hauck pulled the boy against him. He let the kid cry. When he was done, Victor pulled away, wiped his nose, and took a breath that made his whole body shudder. “I didn’t shoot anyone, I swear. Whatever I may have said back then— that wasn’t me. I tell you where I was, you have to involve anyone else in it? You can keep someone out?”
“We’re trying to solve a murder here, son.” Hauck looked the boy in the face. “Nothing else.”
“Okay…” Victor nodded, drew in a deep breath. “I was with someone. All night. A girl. Her folks were away. She’s only fifteen. Her father finds out, she’s dead as that lawyer at the station you’re talking about…”
Munoz glanced at Hauck. “You can prove this, Victor?”
“Yeah, I can prove it. People saw me. People knew I was there.”
Munoz pushed a pad of paper across the table. “Start writing, hombre.”
It was after ten when Hauck finally made it home to the two-level renovated cape he rented near Hope Cove in Stamford.
The raucous press conference set up on the station’s front steps had been a mob scene. Reporters shouting about the “person of interest” being held in their cell. Hauck urging them not to jump to any conclusions. Everyone demanding to know if this was indeed some kind of twisted act of revenge.
As Hauck climbed up the outside stairs and put the key in the lock, he realized he was still wearing the same blood-soiled clothes from the shooting twelve hours before.
Tobey, Karen’s Westie, whom he’d been taking care of while she was in Atlanta, scratched at the door when he heard Hauck’s footsteps on the landing. Hauck opened and knelt down as the excited dog jumped against his chest. “Hey, bud…”
It seemed like days ago that he and Jessie were supposed to pick him up before heading onto the boat. But it was only hours. “You must be starved, guy.”
He went into the bedroom, pulled off the soiled fleece pullover, and flung it into the hamper. He took a long look at himself in the mirror.
His short, dark hair was matted from sweat, his clear blue eyes dulled and drawn from the day. Hauck’s body, still fit and athletic at forty-three, ached like it did after he’d been pounded by two-hundred-and-fifty-pound linemen back in college. He was exhausted. The bandaged gash on his neck had begun to throb. He couldn’t remember his last meal.
He trudged back to the kitchen and opened a can of dog food and a Yuengling beer. He clicked on the TV, still standing there bare-chested in his jeans.
“Brazen gunfire erupts in one of the area’s poshest suburbs…” the newscaster announced, “and a rising young attorney is dead.”
Hauck listened as the pretty reporter recounted the details of the drive-by shooting, set up in front of the darkened, blocked-off Exxon station on Putnam. She went through the details of how David Sanger was killed, the suspicion that he had stepped into a hail of gunfire intended for someone else. “A tragic act of revenge gone wrong,” she called it. He saw a shot of himself on the screen, a quick sound bite of him trying to urge calm and not sounding very effective.
His cell phone rang.
Hauck reached for it, pleased to see Karen’s name on the caller ID.
“So, how the hell was your day?” He exhaled, throwing himself on the couch in front of the TV.
“Ty…” Karen exclaimed. “I just heard. I can’t believe what I just saw on the news down here…”
“See what happens,” he sniffed, “when you bail out on me.”
“Ty, don’t joke about this, please. I just saw you being interviewed. You were there?”
“Jess and I were getting ready to take the boat out one last time. We were waiting in line to pay.”
“Jessie was with you?”
“Don’t worry, Karen, she’s okay. They took her to Greenwich Hospital, just for precautions. She’s back in Brooklyn with Beth now.”
“My God, Ty, that must have been awful! What about you? Are you okay?”
For a moment he thought about telling her. His horror as he turned at the register and saw the red pickup’s window roll down. The feeling of hugging his daughter with everything he had, flashes of orange death all around. Seeing her body lying there, covered with blood.
Instead, he just took in a breath and shut his eyes. “Yeah, I’m doing okay, Karen.”
“I saw that someone was killed,” Karen said. “A lawyer.”
“Not just a lawyer, a United States attorney. Based in Hartford. He lived here in town. We were all just sort of standing at the cooler a minute before picking out drinks.”
“They’re saying revenge?”
“Not on him. Just the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Oh, God, that’s so horrible, Ty.”
“Yeah. The guy’s cell phone started to ring. The body’s just lying there on the floor, eyes wide, whatever he’d been carrying, cans of soda, off to the side…And his phone starts chiming. His wife calling in. It goes into his voice mail. What the hell do you do then, Karen?”
“I don’t know, Ty. I don’t know what you do.”
Hauck paused, lowering the volume on the TV. “You just let it ring; what the hell else is there? You just stand there and suddenly you realize—she’s just wondering where he is, why’s he taking so long. He just went to fill up the fucking car. Like any day…Except her whole world is about to implode on the other end of that line. It’s already imploded—she just doesn’t know it yet.”
“I do know what that feels like, Ty. Having someone walk out the door and never come back.”
“Yeah.” He caught himself. “I know you do, Karen.”
For a moment, they didn’t say anything. Then Karen asked, “Ty, are you alright?”
“Am I alright?” He gritted his teeth and shook his head. “I don’t know if I’m alright. I tried to go after the truck, to get a read on the plates, and when I looked back around I—” He chugged a swallow of beer, cooling the dryness in his throat. “I saw Jess. Curled on the floor, this little mound, not moving, blood…”
“Blood?