The Last witness

Harry Ryman was the closest thing Mason had to a father. He and Mason's aunt Claire had been together for years, and had been unconventional surrogates for Mason's parents, who had been killed in a car accident when Mason was three years old. Blues had saved Mason's life and was the closest thing Mason had to a brother. Whatever was going down didn't just concern Mason. It threatened to turn his world inside out.

Harry said to Blues, "I'm gonna cuff you. Everybody gets cuffed, even if we have to shoot them first. You remember that much, don't you, Bluestone?"

Blues looked at Mason, silently asking the obvious with the same flat expression. Mason nodded, telling him to go along. Blues slowly turned his back on Harry, disguising his rage with a casual pivot, extending his arms behind him, managing a defiant posture even in surrender. Harry fastened the handcuffs around Blues's wrists and began reciting the cop's mantra.

"You're under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney-"

"I'm his attorney," Mason interrupted. "What's the charge?"

Harry looked at Mason for the first time, a tight smile cutting a thin line across his wide face. Mason saw the satisfaction in Harry's smile and the glow of long-sought vindication in his eyes. Harry had always warned Mason that Blues would cross the line one day and that he would be there to take him down; that the violent, self-styled justice Blues had employed when he was a cop, and since men, was as corrupt as being on the take. As much as Harry may have longed to make that speech again, instead he said it all with one word.

"Murder."

Harry held Mason's astonished gaze. "Murder in the first degree," he added. "You can talk to your client downtown after we book him."

Mason watched as they filed out, first the two uniformed cops, then Carl Zimmerman, then Blues. As Harry reached the door, Mason called to him.

"Who was it, Harry?"

Harry had had the steely satisfaction of the triumphant cop when he'd forced Blues to submit moments ago. Now his face sagged as he looked at Mason, seeing him for the first time as an adversary. Harry thought about the battle that lay ahead between them before responding.

"Jack Cullan. Couldn't have been some punk. It had to be Jack Fucking Cullan." Harry turned away, disappearing into the wind as the door closed behind him.

Chapter Two

Mason scraped the hard crystal snow off the windshield of his Jeep Cherokee. The cast-iron sky hung low enough that Mason half expected to scrape it off the glass as well. His car was parked behind the bar, reminding him that covered parking was the only perk he missed from his days as a downtown lawyer. The Jeep was strictly bad-weather transportation. His TR-6 was hibernating in his garage, waiting impatiently for a top-down day.

Mason drove north on Broadway, a signature street of rising and falling fortunes Kansas City wore like an asphalt ID bracelet. From the lip of the Missouri River on the north edge of downtown to the Country Club Plaza shopping district, forty-seven blocks south, Broadway was high-rise and low-rise, professionals and payday loans, insurance and uninsurable, homes and homeless. The Big Man and the Little Man elbowing each other for position.

As he drove, Mason wondered how Blues had been linked to Cullan's murder. As far as Mason knew, Blues and Cullan had never even met. Mason wondered whether something had happened between them when Blues was a cop, something that led to Cullan's murder years later. Mason dismissed that as unlikely. Blues didn't carry grudges for years. He settled them or expunged them.

It was possible, Mason thought, that Cullan had surfaced in one of the cases Blues had handled as a private investigator, as either a target or a client. Blues had talked little with Mason about his cases, unless he needed Mason's help.

Before he bought the bar, Blues had taught piano at the Conservatory of Music. Cullan hadn't seemed the type to take up music late in life, and teaching someone the difference between bass clef and treble clef wasn't likely to drive Blues to murder. At his worst, Blues would tell a student to play the radio instead of the piano.

Mason knew that Harry Ryman was right about one thing: Blues had his own system of justice and he didn't hesitate to use violence to enforce it. Violence, Blues had told Mason, was a great equalizer. It leveled the playing field against long odds. Few people would use it, even those who threatened it. The threat without follow-through was weak, a shortcoming Blues couldn't abide. Though Blues wasn't casual about violence. He wielded it with the precision and purpose of a surgeon using a scalpel.