Shadows Reel (Joe Pickett #22)(66)

* * *



—

After Deputy Schuster got his breath back, he answered the question. “I was just trying to be friendly.”

“Look where it got you,” Viktór said.

“Yeah. My mom always tells me I need to work on my interpersonal communication skills.”

Viktór had no response to that. The cop’s hat had been knocked off his head in the scuffle and it sat upside down next to the foot of the bed. With his hat off, he looked even younger than Viktór had originally thought.

“Is he really your brother?” Schuster asked.

“Yes.”

Schuster nodded. Then: “Are you the two we’re supposed to be looking for?”

“No.” It was an easy lie.

“I’ll tell you what,” Schuster said. “How about you let me go before your brother gets back? I’ll pretend this never happened and you two can go on your way. It’s a big deal for a cop to get jumped and have his weapons taken away from him. You’ll be in big, big trouble for assaulting a police officer.”

Schuster didn’t want to add that he was a rookie and he’d never live it down. He needed the job after being laid off at the coal mines the year before.

Viktór didn’t encourage him to go on.

“Look,” the deputy said, “my shift ends at six. Here’s what we can do. I’ll get my car back and I’ll drive to the department like normal at the end of my shift. I’ll pull in to the department, clock out, go home, and no one will be the wiser. But if you detain me here, they’ll know something is wrong. They’ll come looking for me. And they’ll find you.”

Viktór didn’t know how much of that to believe. He said, “You were giving me advice. Now I want to give you some advice. Stop talking. I can’t control László when he gets angry.”

“László?” the cop said. “I thought you said his name was Greg.”

“Shut up.”

Schuster shifted himself on the floor so that his back was against the footboard of the bed. As he did so, he winced. It obviously hurt him to move.

“What are you two wanted for, anyway?” he asked. “What are you running from?”

“You should listen to your mother,” Viktór said.

“I’m guessing you’re the two they’re looking for over in Twelve Sleep County. Am I right? You did something over there and they’re after you. I heard some back-and-forth on the radio about the homicide of an old man and the possible homicide of an old woman. Please tell me you weren’t involved in that.”

“Of course not. Shut up.”

“And maybe they got the plate wrong on your car. Or you switched plates?”

“No one is after us,” Viktór said. “We’re here for a different reason.”

Viktór thought: Deputy Schuster was a dead man. Viktór knew it. The cop probably knew it, too. The only question was how and where it would happen.

“So what’s the reason?” the cop asked.

Viktór said, “It’s a different reason. Now shut up.”

As he said it, Viktór heard his brother swipe the keycard in the outside lock.

“What are you two talking about?” he asked suspiciously as he entered the room.



* * *



—

Viktór didn’t fill him in. The cop wisely didn’t, either.

László’s phone trilled and he drew it out of his coat pocket and looked at the screen. Before punching it up, he said, “It’s Hanna.”

Their older sister. Viktór felt dread. Hanna scared him even more than László.

In the quiet room, he could hear the high-pitched tone of her shrill, rapid-fire voice without getting all the words. She was obviously very angry about something.

László responded in Hungarian: “Hanna, we’ve located it, but we don’t have it in our possession. We’ve had some difficulties we didn’t expect. No one could have expected them. But we think we’ll have it tomorrow and we can come home . . .”

Then László froze at something Hanna told him. His eyes bulged and his face flushed red.

“What?” he shouted. “When? How is that possible?”

Hanna went on for another minute and then terminated the call. László stood there, locked in place. Something was terribly wrong.

László missed his pocket when he tried to put the phone back. It bounced off the floor near his feet.

He slowly looked up at Viktór and said, “Pack up. We’ve got to move out of here now.”

“Why?”

“I’ll explain in the car.”

“What do we do with him?” Viktór asked, gesturing to the cop with the muzzle of the shotgun.

Viktór could see László’s mind work and he was horrified by what would likely happen next. But László said, “Bring him with us.”

Then, in Hungarian so the cop couldn’t understand, he said, “I have an idea how we can use him.”

“Okay, we use him,” Viktór replied. “But we don’t kill him. We can’t kill a cop. If we do that, everyone will be looking for us. Everyone. We’ll never get home.”