Chapter twenty five
They all heard the bullhorn at the same time including the neighbors. Next door Rick, Sarah and John came out on the front porch to watch, as did the people across the street and a few other curious neighbors. Lights came on in quite a few windows where the occupants chose to stay inside. Although the three in Rick and Sarah’s house were extremely hung over, the bullhorn got their attention. The girl woke up, looked at Sean and said, “What the hell is that!”
Sean said, “Shit!”
When Proudfoot came in to the living room pulling on his shirt Weasel was peeking through living room drapes. With the brightness of the lights, he couldn’t see a thing.
“Come out with your hands on your heads, we have the house surrounded.”
Weasel said, “I’m going out. They got nothing on me but some B an E and maybe breakin parole. I’ll be back out in a year.”
“Go ahead asshole. They sure as hell ain’t taking me.”
The girl came out of the bedroom screaming and crying at the same time. She ran to the front door and opened it as Proudfoot jumped back against the wall. When the door swung open, one of the officers fired his gun. The bullet hit the porch light peppering the girl with flying glass. She fell to the porch on her knees, holding her hands over her head and screaming. The bullhorn blared, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”
Weasel yelled, “Don’t shoot, I’m coming out. I’m unarmed. Hold your fire.”
He laid Rick’s gun on the entryway table and went out the front door. Totally blinded by the lights he tripped over the girl kneeling on the porch, fell on his face, split his lip open and bloodied his nose. The girl started screaming all over again as if she had been shot.
Sean figured that if they knew he was here they knew that he killed John and maybe knew about the cop. He thought if they take me I’ll spend the rest of my life inside, probably on death row. He didn’t know how they executed people in Michigan, but had no desire to find out and he would much rather be dead than spend his life in prison.
While Weasel was going out the front door, Sean grabbed the keys to the Lincoln and headed for the garage. He got in the Lincoln, laid his gun on his lap and started the car. He hit the garage door opener and ducked down below the seat. When the door was about four feet up he threw the car in reverse and pushed the accelerator to the floor. The car caught the bottom of the door on the way out and took it off its tracks. He scraped the side of the garage door on the way out, taking a side mirror off the Lincoln. By the time he reached the gate, he was doing thirty miles an hour.
The gate was only about a third of the way open when the Lincoln hit it. The hinges of the gate were mounted to the concrete and stucco wall with six-inch bolts, but they may as well have been toothpicks. The gate flew into a Crystal River police cruiser that was parked across the end of the drive. As the chief and the detectives leaped out of the way both the gate and cruiser were driven across the street into a shallow ditch. Sean slammed on the brakes, dropped the shift into drive and put the gas pedal to the floor.
At least twenty bullets had struck the car but Sean was only vaguely aware of the gunfire. He was doing fifty by the time he reached the first corner. He slammed on the brakes and glanced in the rear view mirror. The rear window was a spider web of cracks that made it impossible to see out, but as he slid sideways around the corner, he could see at least three squad cars starting after him. By the next corner, he was doing eighty and there was no way he could make the turn. The car hit an above ground water line over a culvert and went airborne. It landed upside down in a canal in about ten feet of water and sunk quickly while a twenty-foot geyser spewed from the ruptured water line.
The cruisers pulled over to the side of the canal and one of them got on the radio and called for a wrecker and a diver. No one thought there was a possibility that Sean was alive. The Chief pulled up, got out and asked, “Has anyone called Ozello water?”
“They’ve got leak meters Chief, they’re probably already on the way.”
“Call them anyway.”
Three hours later Williams was sitting in the police station questioning Weasel. The girl was in another room being interrogated by a Crystal River detective with a female cop present.
“What were you doing in that house?”
“I met them at Curly’s bar and they invited me over for a drink. That nigger raped me. I want to file charges.”
“Fine, but first we need you to answer some questions.”
The detective questioned her for an hour without getting the slightest bit of useful information. Meanwhile detectives Williams and Brown were interrogating Weasel.
“What were you and Proudfoot after from The Moore’s?”
“I don’t know. Comin here was Proudfoot’s idea. I aint never heard of Crystal River.”
“You trying to tell me that you came all the way to Florida and you don’t know why.”
“Proudfoot wouldn’t talk about it. I asked him a bunch of times. He just said that this guy had somethin he wanted. Somethin that was worth a lotta money.”
“Look George, you might want to help yourself out here. If your buddy Proudfoot dies you’re up for a murder charge.”
“What? I didn’t tell that fool to take off in that Lincoln.”
“It don’t matter George. When someone’s killed in the commission of a felony, its murder and the fact that it’s one of the felons don’t change it. Now you give us something we can use and we might be able to lower it to manslaughter. You give us something real good, and we might just decide it wasn’t your fault that dumb Indian killed himself.”
“One time he said somethin about some ball but that’s it.”
“What about a ball?”
“I don’t know. He just mentioned it. When I asked about it he just clamed up.”
“This guy that had something Sean wanted, how well did he know him?”
“How the fuck should I know. Proudfoot’s real close mouthed.”
“You’re not helping yourself very much Weasel. If we don’t start getting some answers you’re going back in for life, if not the needle.”
“Okay. He seemed to know them. I mean everyone that lived there. I also think he didn’t like them much. It was like he had score.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s all I got. I’m being straight with you guys. You gotta help me out here. I didn’t do nothin but a little B&E.”
The interrogation went on for another hour without the detectives getting no more than they had in the first half hour. Williams and Brown went to the other interrogation room to talk to the girl.
“That nigger raped me. I want to file charges.”
Brown said, “Fine, but were taking that nigger back to Michigan to stand trial. You’ll have to come back there to testify against him.”
“You know I can’t do that. I should have known that you niggers would stick together.”
“Little girl, what we got here is a murder investigation and you’re starting to piss me off. If I hear the word nigger out of that toilette you call a mouth one more time, in fact if I hear anything other than Sir, Mister, or Detective I’m going to have your lily white ass thrown in jail.”
“I ain’t done nothing. You can’t put me in jail.”
“Wouldn’t bet on it. I can put you in jail for failure to cooperate in a murder investigation. I can put you in jail for pissing off a police officer. I can put you in jail for consorting with known criminals. I can put you in jail for possession of that dope we found in the house. In addition, let us not forget abetting. You were riding in a stolen car so I might add grand theft auto. You might get out of jail by the time you’re sixty.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Of course I can. I’m the law. Now about that rape, I don’t believe you were raped. I think you would fuck a beagle if you thought there was something in it for you.”
“You can’t talk to me like that you ni… I want a lawyer.”
“Good luck.”
When they walked out of the interrogation room, the chief who had been watching though the two-way mirror said with a smile, “For pissing off a police officer?”
“Why not?”
Detective Williams looked at his partner and said, “You okay Brown?”
“Yeah, she just pissed me off. I don’t like being talked to like that.”
“Hell brown, I’ve heard lot’s of perps talk to you worse than that, I recollect I may have said a few nasty things to you myself.”
“The difference is you didn’t mean it, and even those perps knew in their heart that I was at least their equal. That miscreant piece of white trash in there truly thinks she’s better than me.”
Chief said, “I’m afraid you will find quite a bit of that down here. If it is any consolation, most of it comes from uneducated scum like your friend Gill in there. Well I’ll hold her over night and turn her loose. The only thing we really have on her is being stupid.”
“Yeah. What did Flint say about our friend Weasel?”
“They wanted to know if we had a gun. They said he is a person of interest for a murder in his apartment house. The idiot left his prints all over the crime scene.”
“That’s interesting. We have ballistics from his buddy Proudfoot’s shootings. I think when we get back we may do a little comparing. We can’t put them together for the Ann Arbor shootings, but we may be able to for the Flint one.” I think I’ll call the Flint PD back and get extradition papers on George.
The Chief said, “I wonder what kind of parent would name a half-breed Indian son George Armstrong Custer. His Momma must have had a real warped sense of humor.”
“There’s no accounting for people. Mind if I use your phone Chief?”
“Not at all, in the meantime I’ll get an officer to put that cutie in a cell. I’ll be right back.”
The car had been empty when they pulled it out of the canal. The divers were still looking for the body with no luck. Williams was starting to think there wasn’t going to be a body. The water was clear as glass and he figured that if they hadn’t found him by now, they weren’t going to find him. Hell they could just row up and down the canal looking for him, fuck the divers. However, the divers did find one thing in which Williams was very interested. That thing was a nine-millimeter Smith and Wesson.