Jonas shook his head. “She didn’t make it,” he said. “She’s dead. What the hell happened here?”
He reached down then. Putting a pen through the trigger guard of my .38, he carefully pulled the weapon out of my lap and laid it aside, just beyond my reach. I remember wondering: How the hell did my gun get there? But then I figured it out. The guy who shot Lulu must have put it there. A dead woman, my weapon, and my fingerprints. I was screwed.
“There were two guys,” I said, gasping around the awful pain in my chest. “They must have taken off. You’ve got to find them.”
“Were they on foot or in a car?”
“On foot, I think. Didn’t see a car.”
That’s the thing. The gun was there in my lap. The assailants were long gone. Jonas knew I hated Lulu’s guts, and yet he never doubted me, not for an instant.
“Okay,” he said. “Will do, but first I’ve got to talk to Bob Murray.”
A Medic 1 guy appeared over Jonas’s shoulder and bodily booted him out of the way. The last thing I remember, as the attendants loaded me onto a gurney, was Jonas striding purposefully back into the restaurant, notebook in hand.
I had other things to think about that night—like living or dying.
I STOPPED READING for a moment, thrown back into that terrible parking lot scene at the Doghouse.
As suddenly as if it were yesterday, it all came crashing back. As soon as Bob Murray told me shots had been fired, I charged out the restaurant’s back door, with him at my heels. Out in the parking lot the smell of burned cordite still lingered in the hot, still air. I found Lulu McCaffey’s bloody body lying sprawled on the pavement between cars. A green bit of paper that I recognized as the check from someone’s table was still clutched in her hand. I checked her pulse first. Finding none and thinking my partner had been shot, too, I turned to Pickles. By then, Bob Murray had raced back inside to call 911.
Pickles was a few feet away from Lulu, slouched against the building. Kneeling next to him, I looked for a wound of some kind, but there wasn’t any. Whatever had happened to Pickles, he hadn’t been shot. But I did find his gun and I could tell it had been recently fired. He kept trying to talk to me, but all I could make out from his mumble was that there had been two guys and they had taken off on foot.
I knew that if Pickles had taken a potshot at the two fleeing bad guys, there was going to be hell to pay, and I didn’t want my fingerprints anywhere on the gun. I used a pen to ease his Smith & Wesson out of his lap and set it down on the pavement. He kept trying to talk to me, but most of what he said was too garbled to understand. Eventually the Medic 1 guys showed up. At the time, Seattle had bragging rights because Medic 1’s still relatively new presence in the city had made Seattle the best place in the world to have a heart attack. By the time the ambulance showed up, I was pretty sure that’s what we were up against—a heart attack.
As soon as the EMTs took over, I heard the sounds of arriving patrol cars converging on the area. I grabbed an evidence bag from the back of our unmarked car, deposited the gun in that, pocketed both, and hurried back into the restaurant. From the way Pickles looked, I was convinced he was a goner. If his death occurred while he was interrupting someone in the process of committing a crime, that meant that whoever had gunned down Lulu McCaffey would be guilty of two counts of homicide—both his and hers—rather than just one.
Bob Murray was a smart guy. He had come to the same conclusions I had—that the two guys who had skipped out on paying their tab had committed cold-blooded murder in his parking lot. Using chairs from the dining room, he had cordoned off both Lulu’s station and the booth where the dine-and-dash bad guys had been sitting. Although the rest of the restaurant had somehow managed to return to some semblance of business as usual, Bob had made sure that none of the tables in Lulu’s section had been cleared. He was personally standing guard to see to it that no one ventured anywhere near them.
“Did you see the two guys?” I asked him. “Can you give me any kind of description to pass along to the guys on patrol?”
Bob shook his head. “I was in the kitchen when they came in. Lulu seated them and served them, so she’s really the only employee who saw them.” He handed me a piece of paper. On it were scribbled several names and phone numbers, written in several distinctly separate styles of handwriting.
“Who are these?” I asked.
“They’re the people who were seated at nearby tables,” he told me. “I had them write down their names and phone numbers in case you need to get back to them.”
“Any of them still here?”
Bob nodded, but his customary grin was missing in action. “All of them,” he answered. “I sent them to the bar and told them to have one on me while they wait.”
See there? I told you Bob Murray was a smart guy.
I glanced over at the booth. “Nobody’s touched it?”