Dust to Dust Read online

  “The man of the hour,” Elwood said, as recognition rippled through the crowd and a cheer went up. “Come to hobnob with the unwashed masses before his ascension.”

  Kovac said nothing. Ace Wyatt stood in the doorway in a double-breasted camel-hair topcoat, looking like Captain America, master of all he surveyed. Square jaw, white smile, groomed like a fucking game-show host. He probably tipped his hairstylist ten bucks and got a complimentary blowjob from the shampoo girl.

  “Is he wearing makeup?” Tippen asked under his breath. “I heard he gets his eyelashes dyed.”

  “That’s what happens when you go Hollywood,” Elwood said.

  “I’d be willing to suffer the indignity,” Liska said sarcastically. “Did you hear the kind of money he’s getting for that show?”

  Tippen took a long pull on his cigarette and exhaled. Kovac looked at Captain Ace Wyatt through the cloud. They’d worked on the same squad for a time. It seemed a hundred years ago. He’d just made the move from robbery to homicide. Wyatt was the top dog, already a legend, and angling to become a star on the brass side of things. He’d succeeded handsomely within the department, then branched out into television—maintaining his office as a CID captain and starring in a Minneapolis cross between America’s Most Wanted and a motivational infomercial. The show, Crime Time, was going national.

  “I hate that guy.”

  He reached for the Jack he wasn’t supposed to mix with his painkillers and tossed back what was left of it.

  “Jealous?” Liska needled.

  “Of what? Being a prick?”

  “Don’t sell yourself short, Kojak. You’re as big a prick as any man here.”

  Kovac made a growl at the back of his throat, suddenly wanting to be anywhere but here. Why in hell had he come? He had three parts of a concussion, and a perfect excuse to beg off and go home. So there was nothing to go home to—an empty house with an empty aquarium in the living room. The fish had all died of neglect while he’d pulled nearly seventy-two hours straight on the Cremator case. He hadn’t bothered to replace them.

  Sitting at a party for Ace Wyatt, he was as big a masochist as any woman Tippen had ever dated. He’d finished his drink. As soon as Wyatt’s posse cleared the door, he could make his way through the crowd and slip out. Maybe go down to the bar where the Fifth Precinct cops hung out. They could give a shit about Ace Wyatt.

  In the instant he made the decision, Wyatt spotted him and zeroed in with a blinding grin, a quartet of minions trailing after him. He wove through the crowd, touching hands and shoulders like the Pope giving cursory blessings.

  “Kojak, you old warhorse!” he shouted above the din. He took hold of Sam’s hand in a powerful grasp.

  Kovac came up out of his chair, the floor seeming to shift beneath his feet. The aftereffects of his close encounter with the board, or the mix of drugs and booze. It sure as hell wasn’t his thrill at Wyatt’s attention. The asshole, calling him Kojak. He hated the nickname. People who knew him well mostly used it to grind him.

  One of the minions came in close with a Polaroid and the flash damn near blinded him.

  “One for the scrapbook,” the minion said, a thirty-something cover-boy type with shiny black hair and cobalt-blue eyes. He had the looks for a part in a low-end prime-time drama.

  “I heard you took another one for the cause!” Wyatt bellowed, grinning. “Jesus, quit while you’re ahead. Quit while you still have a head!”

  “Seven to go, Slick,” Kovac said. “Hollywood’s not beating my door down. Congratulations, by the way.”

  “Thanks. Taking the show national is a chance to make a big difference.”

  To the Ace Wyatt bank account, Kovac thought, but he didn’t say it. What the hell. He’d never had a taste for designer suits or a weekly manicure. He was just a cop. That was all he’d ever wanted to be. Ace Wyatt had always set his sights on bigger, better, brighter, faster; reaching for the brass rings of life—and catching every goddamn one of them.

  “Glad you could make it to the party, Sam.”

  “Hey, I’m a cop. Free food, free booze—I’m there.”

  Wyatt’s gaze was already roaming for a more important hand to shake. The pretty-boy minion caught his attention and directed it toward the television camera. The Wyatt grin brightened by a couple hundred watts.

  Liska popped up out of her chair like a jack-in-the-box and stuck her hand out before Wyatt could move on. “Captain Wyatt. Nikki Liska, homicide. It’s a pleasure. I enjoy your show.”

  Kovac cocked a brow at her. “My partner. Blond ambition.”

  “You lucky old dog,” Wyatt said with good-natured chauvinism.

  The muscles flexed in Liska’s jaws as if she was swallowing something unpleasant. “I think your idea of strengthening the link between communities and their police forces through the show and the Internet is a brilliant innovation.”

  Wyatt soaked up the praise. “America is a multimedia culture,” he said loudly, as the TV reporter—a brunette in a bright red blazer—edged in close with a microphone. Wyatt turned fully toward the camera, bending down to hear the woman’s question.

  Kovac looked to Liska with disapproval.

  “Hey, maybe he’ll give me a job as a technical consultant. I could be a technical consultant,” she said with a mischievous quirk to her lips. “That could be my stepping-stone to working on Mel Gibson movies.”

  “I’ll be in the john.”

  Kovac made his way through the mob that had come in to drink Ace Wyatt’s booze and chow down on spicy chicken wings and deep-fried cheese. Half the people here had never met Wyatt, let alone worked with him, but they would gladly celebrate his retirement. They would have celebrated the devil’s birthday for an open bar.

  He stood at the back of the main room and surveyed the scene, made all the more surreal by the Christmas decorations reflecting the glare of the television lights. A sea of people—a lot of the faces familiar—yet he felt acutely alone. Empty. Time to get seriously hammered or leave.

  Liska was hovering around Wyatt’s people, trying to make nice with the main minion. Wyatt had moved to shake the hand of an attractive, serious-looking blonde who seemed vaguely familiar. He put his left hand on her shoulder and bent to say something in her ear. Elwood was cutting a swath through the buffet. Tippen was trying to flirt with a waitress who was looking at him as if she’d just stepped in something.

  It’d be last call before they missed him. And then missing him would be just a fleeting thought.

  Where’s Kovac? Gone? Pass the beer nuts.

  He started for the door.

  “You were the best fuckin’ badge on the job!” a drunken voice bellowed. “The man who don’t think so can talk to me! Come on! Come on! I’d give Ace Wyatt my goddamn legs!” he shouted.

  The drunk sat in a wheelchair that teetered on the top of three shallow steps leading down to the main bar, where Wyatt stood. The drunk had no legs to give. His had been useless for twenty years. There was nothing left of them but spindly bone and atrophied muscle. In contrast, his face was full and red, his upper body a barrel.

  Kovac shook his head and took a step toward the wheelchair, trying to catch the old man’s attention.

  “Hey, Mikey! No one’s arguing,” he said.

  Mike Fallon looked at him without recognition, his eyes glassy with tears. “He’s a fucking hero! Don’t try to say different!” he said angrily. He swung an arm in Wyatt’s direction. “I love that man! I love that man like a son!”

  The old man’s voice broke on the last word, his face contorting with an inner pain that had nothing to do with the amount of Old Crow he’d put away in the past few hours.

  Wyatt lost his glamour grin and started toward Mike Fallon just as Fallon’s left hand landed on the wheel of his chair. Kovac leapt forward, crashing into another drunk.

  The chair pitched down the steps and spilled its occupant. Mike Fallon hit the floor like a sack of potatoes.

  Kovac pushed the d
runk aside and hustled down the steps. The crowd had cleared back in surprise. Wyatt stood frozen ten feet away, frowning as he stared down at Mike Fallon.

  Kovac dropped down to one knee. “Hey, Mikey, let’s get you off your face. You’ve got it confused with your ass again.”

  Someone righted the wheelchair. The old man rolled over onto his back and made a pathetic attempt to sit up, flopping on the floor like a beached seal, tears pouring down the sides of his face. A guy Kovac knew from robbery took one side while Kovac took the other, and together they hoisted Fallon back into his chair.

  The people standing nearby turned away, embarrassed for the old man. Fallon hung his head in abject humiliation—a sight Kovac had never wished to see.

  He’d known Mike Fallon since day one on the job. Back then, every patrol cop in Minneapolis had known Iron Mike. They had followed his example and his orders. And a good lot of them had cried like babies when Mike Fallon was gunned down. But to see him like this—broken in every way—was a heartbreak.

  Kovac knelt beside the wheelchair and put a hand on Fallon’s shoulder. “Come on, Mike. Let’s call it a night, huh? I’ll drive you home.”

  “You all right, Mike?” Ace Wyatt asked woodenly, stepping up at last.

  Fallon held a shaking hand out to him but couldn’t bring himself to look up, even when Wyatt took hold. His voice was tight and raw. “I love you like a brother, Ace. Like a son. More. You know, I can’t say—”

  “You don’t have to say, Mike. Don’t.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” the old man mumbled over and over, bringing his other hand up to cover his face. Snot ran in an elastic string from his nose to his lap. He had wet his pants.

  In his peripheral vision, Kovac could see the newsies creeping in like vultures.

  “I’ll see he gets home,” he said to Wyatt as he rose.

  Wyatt stared down at Mike Fallon. “Thanks, Sam,” he murmured. “You’re a good man.”

  “I’m a fucking sap. But what else have I got to do with my time?”

  The blonde had vanished, but the brunette from TV sidled up to Wyatt again. “Is this Mike Fallon? Officer Fallon from the Thorne murder back in the seventies?”

  The black-haired minion appeared like the devil’s familiar and pried the woman away with a serious something whispered in her ear.

  Wyatt collected himself and turned away, waving off the reporters with a look of disapproval. “Just a little accident, folks. Let’s move on.”

  Kovac looked down at the man sobbing in the wheelchair.

  Let’s move on.

  2

  CHAPTER

  “YEAH, THIS IS why I hired a sitter tonight,” Liska said. “So I could cart a drunk home. I got enough of that when I was a uniform.”

  “Quit bitching,” Kovac ordered. “You could have said no, partner.”

  “Sure. And look bad in front of Mr. Community Service. I just hope he took note of my selflessness and remembers when I hit him up for a job on his program,” she said, teasing.

  “Looked to me like you were trying to hit up the assistant for something else.”

  Liska reached across and slugged his arm, trying not to laugh. “I was not! What do you take me for?”

  “What would he take you for? There’s the real question.”

  “He wouldn’t.”

  “He didn’t. There’s a difference.”

  Liska pretended to pout. “He’s obviously gay.”

  “Obviously.”

  They drove in silence for a few blocks as the windshield wipers swiped at the snow coming down. Mike Fallon was propped up in a corner of the backseat, smelling of urine, snoring.

  “You worked with him, huh?” Liska said, nodding to their passenger.

  “Everybody worked with Iron Mike when I came on. He was the original warhorse. Always above and beyond the call. ’Cause it was right, he’d say. That’s what being a cop is supposed to be about. And he’s the one takes a slug in the spine. It’s never some lazy shit just putting in his hours till the pension comes.”

  “There’s no such thing as fair.”

  “There’s a news flash. At least he nailed the mutt who shot him.”

  “That was the Thorne murder.”

  “You remember it?”

  “I was a child at the time, Methuselah.”

  “Twenty years ago?” he scoffed. “You were probably busy making out with the captain of the football team.”

  “Wide receiver,” she countered. “And let me tell you, they didn’t call him Hands for nothing.”

  “Jeez,” Kovac grumbled, the corner of his mouth twitching against a chuckle. “Tinks, you’re something else.”

  “Someone has to break your moods. You’re too content to wallow in them.”

  “Look who’s talking—”

  “So what was the story with Thorne?”

  “Bill Thorne was a cop. Rode patrol for years. I didn’t know him. I was new on the job at the time. He lived in a neighborhood over by the old West High School, where a bunch of cops lived back then. So Mike’s patrolling the neighborhood, sees something doesn’t look right at Thorne’s place. He calls it in, then goes up to the house himself.”

  “He should have waited for backup.”

  “Yeah, he should have. Major mistake. But Thorne’s car was there. It was a neighborhood full of cops. Anyway, there was a handyman who’d been working in the neighborhood. A drifter. Thorne had tried to run him off a couple of times, but the wife felt sorry for him and paid him to wash windows. Turned out Thorne was right—the guy was bad news. He broke into the house and raped the wife.

  “Thorne had been scheduled to work that night, but he stopped back at the house for something. The mutt had found a gun and he used it on Thorne. Killed him.

  “Then Mike showed up and went in. The bad guy shot. Mike shot back. Nailed the guy, but he went down. Ace Wyatt lived across the street at the time. At some point Thorne’s wife called him, hysterical. He kept Mike alive until the ambulance got there.”

  “That explains tonight.”

  “Yeah,” Kovac said, pensive again. “Part of it, anyway.”

  There was a lot of story between Iron Mike Fallon, fallen hero, and old Mike Fallon, pathetic alcoholic. The profession was too full of sad stories and sadder drunks.

  The one in the backseat tipped over and puked on the floor as Kovac pulled up in front of Fallon’s house.

  Kovac groaned and hit his forehead on the steering wheel.

  Liska opened her door and looked at him. “No good deed goes unpunished. I’m not cleaning that up, partner.”

  FROM THE OUTSIDE, the house was small and tidy in a neighborhood of small, tidy houses. Inside was a different story. Fallon’s wife had died years before. Cancer. He lived here alone. The place smelled of old man and fried onions.

  The rooms were spare, the furnishings kept to a minimum to make way for Mike’s wheelchair. An odd mix of worn junk and state-of-the-art. A high-end massage recliner sat front and center in the living room, pointed at a thirty-one-inch color television. The couch was a relic from the seventies. The dining room looked as if it hadn’t been used in two decades, and was probably exactly as Mrs. Fallon had left it, with the exception of the booze bottles on the table.

  Twin beds nearly filled the little bedroom—one stacked with piles of clothes, the other a tangle of sheets. Dirty laundry had been thrown in the general vicinity of an overflowing hamper. A bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon sat on the nightstand beside a jelly-jar glass sporting the likeness of Barney the Dinosaur. On the other end of the room, the dead wife’s dresser was lined with family photos, half a dozen of them turned facedown.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Mike muttered as Kovac went about the job of putting him in bed.

  Liska found a laundry basket and took the discarded clothes away, nose wrinkled, but not complaining.

  “Forget it, Mike. It’s nothing we all haven’t done once in a while,” Kovac said.

&n
bsp; “Christ, I pissed myself.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I’m sorry. Where ya workin’, Sam?”

  “Homicide.”

  Fallon gave a weak, derisive, drunken laugh. “Fuckin’ big shot. Too good for a uniform.”

  Kovac heaved a sigh and straightened, his gaze landing on the photographs across the room. Fallon had two sons. The younger—Andy—was a cop. He’d worked robbery for a while. His were the photos turned down on the dresser, Kovac discovered as he turned them up.

  Good-looking kid. Athletic, handsome. There was a shot of him in a baseball uniform. He was built like a shortstop: compact, catlike. Another photo showed him in his police uniform, graduating from the academy. Mike Fallon’s pride and joy, carrying on the family tradition.

  “How’s Andy doing?”

  “He’s dead,” Fallon mumbled.

  Kovac turned abruptly. “What?”

  Fallon turned his face away. He looked frail in the lamplight, his skin as pale and wrinkled as old parchment. “He’s dead to me,” he said softly. Then he closed his eyes and passed out.

  THE SADNESS AND finality of Mike Fallon’s words haunted Kovac all the way back to Patrick’s, where he left Liska to catch the last of the party. He dropped her at the curb and drove on through empty side streets filling with snow, away from downtown to his own slightly shabby neighborhood.

  Old trees dominated the boulevard, their roots buckling the sidewalks like an LA freeway after an earthquake. The houses were crammed shoulder to shoulder, some big and square and cut up into apartments, some smaller. One side of the street was lined with a motley assortment of cars, the other side clear for snow removal.

  The house just east of Kovac’s was decorated for Christmas to within an inch of its life. It appeared to sag beneath the burden of colored lights. A plastic Santa and reindeer were mounted on the roof. Another Santa was crawling down the chimney. A third stood on the lawn, contemplating the others, while two feet away the wise men were about to visit the Christ child in a manger. The entire yard was spotlit.