The Devil's Right Hand - J. D. Rhoades [78]
They rode to the station in silence, Keller slumped in the back seat of the unmarked car, Barnes and Marie in the front. Stacy followed with DeWayne Puryear still in the trunk of Keller’s borrowed car. As they pulled into the parking lot, Barnes muttered, “Oh, shit.” Keller straightened up.
A white van was parked in front of the station. A long metal pole stuck up from the roof of the van, with a dish resembling a radar antenna atop the pole. The words “ACTION NEWS LIVE” were blazoned across the side of the van. Keller could see the camera crew and the brunette news reporter from Eddie Wesson’s funeral poised and waiting.
“Stacy, you asshole,” Barnes snarled. “Only you would think to call the newsies in at a time like this.”
The next few minutes were a chaotic whirl. Barnes stepped to the back and pulled Keller from the car. Marie ran interference, placing herself between Barnes and Keller and the news team. It was a mistake. She was the one they had come to interview. “Officer Jones,” the brunette reporter yelped, “can you tell us how you lured the suspects into custody?” The implication was unmistakable. Marie didn’t answer, just gritted her teeth and bulled straight past them, with only a “no comment” escaping between her gritted teeth. Behind them, Keller caught a glimpse of Stacy with his hand on the back of DeWayne’s shirt. Puryear’s head was bowed as if he was trying to avoid the view of the camera, but with his hands bound, there was no way to shield his face from its blank, pitiless glass eye. Keller didn’t even try; he looked straight ahead, refusing to acknowledge the presence of the camera or the reporter. The frustrated reporter tried to shove past Marie to point her microphone into Keller’s face. Marie straight-armed her, almost knocking her back into the cameraman who directly behind her left shoulder. Then they were through the heavy metal doors and into the building.
“Hey, Raymond,” Billy Ray said. “take at look at this.”
There were five men in the room: Raymond, Billy Ray, Geronimo, and the two soldiers that had come with Suarez. Geronimo had left with Suarez and returned without him, but with the back cargo area of the Suburban filled with long wooden crates. They had unloaded the crates, stacked them in the living room, and pried them open with a crowbar from the garage. Now, the two gunmen were removing several short, ugly submachine guns from the crates and cleaning them of packing grease. Billy Ray had been watching the operation, his attention wandering between the efficient, assembly-line operation before him and the big-screen TV.
Raymond came into the room, followed by Geronimo. Billy Ray picked up the remote and turned the sound up. A male anchorman with the high cheekbones and perfect hair of a male model was speaking.
“...News at Noon Reporter Carmen Reyes is on the scene,” he said. “Carmen?”
The face of a strikingly attractive brunette replaced that of the male anchor. “John,” she said in a deeply concerned voice, “I’m at the Cumberland County Detention center, where at this moment, detectives are bringing in Jackson Keller and DeWayne Puryear, the two men implicated in last week’s gun battle in a Fayetteville neighborhood that left three men dead, including a Fayetteville police officer. News at Noon has learned that a Fayetteville policewoman who was the partner of the murdered officer conducted her own investigation into the killing and brought the two men into custody.”
As she spoke, the camera pulled back to reveal the two cars pulling into view. The cars stopped and there was a confusing flurry of activity, made even more incomprehensible by the shaking and jiggling of the camera as the reporter and cameraman moved to the curb. Raymond recognized the older cop who had interrogated him in the hospital, the one who had called