The Dinosaur Hunter(70)

“No, Mike, please. It’s OK. Really.”

“What do you mean?”

She stood up and walked to the edge of the deck. I came over and put my hand on her shoulder. She didn’t move. Instead, she said, “Once a whore, Mike, always a whore.”

I took my hand away and sat down in one of the deck chairs and just went kind of numb.





22




Well, what’s a cowboy to do when his gal who isn’t his gal bounces the old bedsprings with as nasty a creep who ever drew breath? I had beat up Ted which was nice but it seemed like I should do more. What that should be I wasn’t sure so I just sat there, feeling miserable and maybe a little unnerved because of Toby, not that I much cared he’d been murdered. I mostly hated that murder had come to the place where I’d retreated to get away from murder. It had taken ten years but now the ugly things people do to other people had finally caught up with me even in deepest Fillmore County.

Tanya had gone inside room number thirteen and closed the door. I continued to sit until Ted came around. His lip was split and he had a black eye. We’d been easy on him the night before, just cuffing him around the shoulders and such, but this time I had done a pretty good number on his face. It didn’t make me happy. It made me feel ashamed. So what I did was go to work like the homicide detective I used to be. That meant asking the suspect questions, not busting his chops.

Ted wasn’t interested in cooperating. When I asked him if he knew anything about Toby being murdered, he said, through swollen lips, “You’re gonna be sorry about this.”

“I already am,” I told the federal agent and asked him the same question again. This time, his answer consisted of a series of obscenities so it didn’t look like I was going to get far with Ted.

The only hard evidence I had was lying on one of the picnic tables so I walked back to it. Toby was still there although someone had wrapped him in a sheet. Only his big feet, clad in wingtip brown leather shoes, were sticking out. I sought out Earl who was in his store, selling bait to a trio of walleye fishermen who, if they noted there was a dead man on one of the tables just outside, thought less of it than getting advice on catching fish. “I thought I asked you to move that body to a cooler place,” I said.

“Just a sec, Mike.” Earl replied then calmly finished his sale, gave the fishermen an advisory on where to find walleye, and turned to me while his customers took their leave. I like a man who has his priorities straight and I guess Earl did. Walleye fisherman were his customers while cowboy detectives were pretty rare. “I had my boys wrap it in a sheet,” he said.

“I know. I need to get it unwrapped. Then we need to at least get it in the shade.”

Earl used a handheld radio to whistle up his sons who met me at Toby’s picnic table. I supervised by sitting down and holding my throbbing head while they unwrapped him. He was still dead, his head was still knocked in, and his throat was still cut. Yes, I know as a homicide cop veteran, I should have known better than to mess with the evidence but this was Fillmore County and who knew when a state trooper would show up to investigate? Anyway, what I wanted to see was beneath his shirt, which was a garish Hawaiian print. It wasn’t easy to strip him of it as Toby was one heavy dude but the Williams boys managed. As I expected, when I finally stood up, ol’ Toby was covered with tattoos. I studied them, recognizing them for what they were, symbols of the Russian mob, or bratva as it is called. The word meant “brotherhood” but I knew there was little of that in the loose confederation of gangs that had formed around the world after the disintegration of the Soviet union  . Rather than brotherhood, there was competition, i.e., killing each other at the slightest provocation or no provocation at all.

I was no expert on Russian mob tattoos but I knew enough to know Toby was a long-term member of these very bad guys because of the combination of blurred blue tats and some that were very fine and black. The blue ones were most likely done in prison where homemade inks and snips of guitar wire attached to an electric razor were used. The fine-line skin drawings looked fresher and were probably done professionally. The biggest tattoo on his back was the Kremlin with the silhouette of a wolf on the largest onion dome. As I recalled, a tat of the Russian capitol meant Toby was once a guest in a Communist prison. The wolf, I suspected, represented the bratva branch Toby was a soldier for. Below the wolf were Cyrillic letters, which I thought might be the name of the organization. Stars on Toby’s shoulders told me he was a high-ranking member of the mob. Russian churches, five on his left breast, four on the right, meant Toby had spent nine years in prison, all hard time because there is little else in Russia. Men who spent a lot of time in Russian prisons and came out sane were rare. Most of them would kill you over breakfast and then go on eating. All the other symbols continued the same theme. Russian mobster, a very bad guy, and a killer, our Toby. He was also Cade Morgan’s buddy.