by James A Ross
“Do you keep in touch?”
“No. He was close to Billy, though. They played GI Joe together.”
“How did he find out about the funeral?”
“He said the story about Billy’s death made the wire services and got picked up by his local newspaper. There’s only one funeral home in Coldwater. It would have been easy enough to get the number and information on the church services.”
“Did he say what he’s been doing all these years?”
She turned her head toward the window. “Teacher, somewhere. He never went home, I guess. I didn’t pay much attention. It was a rough day for me.”
Tom tried to watch her eyes, but she wouldn’t make contact. “I spoke with a friend of Billy’s who said that Billy was unusually happy the month before he died. That Billy claimed he was going to make a lot of money soon and settle a lot of old scores.”
Susan looked up. “He didn’t seem happy to me.”
“Any idea where he thought he was going to get his hands on a pile of cash?”
She hesitated. “Not really. Unless I agreed to sell this place, which he knew I wouldn’t.”
“His friend says Billy was pretty upset about that, too.”
“Yes, I know. And If I thought helping Billy get his hands on a chunk of money would turn his life around, I’d have done it in a heartbeat. But it doesn’t work that way, does it? Billy’s problem wasn’t money, it was his life. He didn’t have one… or the confidence or discipline to build one. Any money he got his hands on, he would have blown. Then he’d have come back to me for more.”
Tom stood.
“Is that it!? Is that all you came here for?”
“I’ve got a few more errands to run for my brother.” Her face tensed. He turned at the door. “Look, what would you say if I told you that I saw your friend Suliman, or maybe the guy in that photo, up at Frankie Heller’s the night of your brother’s funeral?”
Her voice went from peeved to petrified in a nanosecond. “I’d tell you to leave Frankie Heller alone. He’s dangerous.”
* * *
Tom left Susan in the sun room and made his way to the front of the house. Outside, a silver two-door Lexus idled at the throat of the circular driveway, its driver gripping the steering wheel with knuckles white from strain. Tom’s mind was on state prosecutors and Susan’s warning about Frankie Heller, and he didn’t see the Lexus until he was almost grille to grille with it. The driver stared straight ahead and made no move to lift his hands from the wheel or move his car from where it blocked Tom’s exit. Tom recognized the NeuroGene owner, Dave Willow.
Tom hopped out of the truck and moved toward the side of the idling car. “You okay, Willow?” The man behind the wheel turned his head so slowly it might have been under water. “Are you okay?” Tom repeated. Cool air wafted from the lake, bringing with it the smell of booze.
“You’re bothering her,” said Willow, his words petulant and slurred.
Tom suddenly remembered Susan’s allusion to a brief grad school marriage, and Sharp’s to a long ago relationship between his partner and his research assistant. Tom stepped away from the car, eyes probing the blotched face and bloodshot eyes. No way.
Willow opened the car door and stumbled out. “She doesn’t want you around,” he blurted.
Tom didn’t bother to look at the face of the man coming toward him. Instead he looked at the hands and pockets… empty and flat, respectively. It was a little catechism that the original Sheriff Morgan had drilled into his boys, though he was sure that Joe had made the most use of it over the years. “I was just coming to see you,” said Tom.
Willow stopped. Whatever he had expected in response to his Dutch courage challenge, it wasn’t that.
“You scammed your partner, didn’t you? Though I’m sure he still thinks it was the other way around. It depends on who hid the better card, I suppose. NeuroGene is worth more than he realized, or a lot less than you thought. Have you figured out which it is yet?”
Willow said nothing. Which was as good as holding up a sign.
“Did you have something brewing in the lab that Sharp was too dull to notice – pardon the pun? Something that’s going to make you and your new investor a lot of money? Is that what you’re celebrating tonight?”
“You’re not the detective in the family.” The voice was slurred and the cadence deliberate. “You’re just the boring over-achiever.”
“I’ve spoken with your pal, Dr. Hassad.”
Willow said nothing, but his face rippled.
“Sharp thinks he’s the only one who dealt with Hassad. But the professor told me that he dealt with you, too.” He wondered if Willow was in any condition to appreciate the significance of Hassad’s confirmation. “You keep some of the things he sends over, don’t you? And you sent him things too, for safe keeping. Things you didn’t want Sharp to know about.”
Willow stood silent.
“How many companies have you started, Willow? A dozen? I’ll bet you’ve got it down to a formula by now. Run it on a shoestring until your partners give up and sell out to you cheap. If you’ve got something tucked away with your pal Hassad, you bring it out then. If not, you bring in new investors and start the scam all over again. You’re not in the research business, Willow. You’re in the investor fleecing business.”
Somewhere in the stand of pines at the far end of the lawn, an owl hooted twice and broke into flight. The NeuroGene owner swayed grandly but said nothing.
Tom laughed. “You shouldn’t drink, Willow. It slows your thinking. Right now you’re desperate to say something clever. But you’re afraid to open your mouth.” He watched the color return to NeuroGene owner’s face. He checked the man’s hands and pockets again.
“All you were to her was a stud,” Willow blurted. “She told me so.”
“Does she know about you and Hassad?” Tom asked quietly. “Or about Hassad and Billy?”
“Stud!” blubbered Willow, as if it were an insult and not the Morgan brothers’ favorite four-letter word.
“Go in there and make your peace,” said Tom. “If she’ll let you. I’ll be at your office tomorrow when you’re sober. We can skip the fairy tale about Billy breaking into your mail room. He couldn’t have gotten in without a security card. Someone gave him one, either you or Sharp, so he could do his deliveries and pick-ups after hours. We’re going to talk about who and what, and whether that’s what got him killed.”
CHAPTER 21
Tom turned off the engine, doused the headlights and allowed the truck to roll over the crest of the hill. A full moon winked behind a broken bank of clouds revealing a shallow ditch where the shoulder of the road should have been. He held the truck to the center of the road while the question he’d been unable to answer in Susan’s driveway repeated itself now against the back beat of his staccato heart. Why am I here? To prove something? Or to help Joe?
The truck dipped a sharp thirty degrees as he turned off the road into the driveway of Heller’s Junkyard. Yellow light oozed from under a pair of roll-up garage doors. The clang of metal on metal echoed behind it. Susan claimed to have heard Frankie Heller screaming at Billy that he was too stupid to live. Hours later, that prediction apparently came true. So you’re going to go down there to strike up a conversation about funny coincidences? Is that the plan? Tom opened the glove compartment, felt inside and remembered that Joe had returned his cop toys to the patrol car. He remembered, too, his brother’s rhetorical question about whether any local ever brought his car to Heller’s garage for repairs and why the answer was no. But from the sound of it, one was being disemboweled down there right now.
Sliding from behind the wheel, Tom stepped quietly away from the truck. He tried to minimize the crunch of shoes on the gravel and to ignore the angry inner voice that hissed, “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” in a shrill crescendo that accompanied each hesitant step. “Little brother’s not going to save your ass this time!” As he reached the garage, the Susan-like voice wa
s a full-throttle scream, “You’re going to get yourself killed, Tommy Morgan!”
Marching his kettledrum heart to the back of the garage, Tom took a position beside a door that opened onto the junkyard. The top of the door was quarter pane glass. Through it he could see Frankie Heller standing beneath a hydraulic lift doing something with a blowtorch to the floor of an old Ford Fairlane.
Frankie had gotten big, like his father. Though he was no taller than he had been in high school, maybe five foot nine, he’d acquired a substantial girth since then. Tom estimated him to be at least two hundred forty pounds. His hair was dark and greasy still, though it had gotten long, which struck Tom as ironic, since Frankie used to enjoy beating the crap out of boys with long hair.
A rolling metal tool chest with a Styrofoam cup on top and a pack of Marlboros beside it obscured the view. But from what Tom could see, Frankie Heller had been living hard these past years, a poster boy for multiple medical implosions a decade down the road. But he looked just as mean as Tom remembered, and a whole lot larger now.
As Tom eased closer to the window, a strip of fluorescent light from inside the garage brushed the side of his face.
“ARHG! ARHG! ARHG! ARHG! ARHG! ARHG!”
A bucket-mouthed mastiff crashed against the glass and two lethal paws hammered the door beneath it. Tom fell backwards, scrambled to his feet and ran into the junkyard. He made it as far as the first row of wrecked cars before the garage door burst open and the howl of moist, hot pursuit surged after him. He leaped to the hood of the nearest junker and from there to its roof, inches ahead of snapping jaws, fanged, slavering and maniacal.
The massive canine reared on its hind limbs, pressed paws the size of toasters on top of the doorjamb and opened his snarling maw to within a hot breath of Tom’s ankles. Frankie Heller’s voice followed at a more leisurely pace. Wafting through the darkness, it was almost musical. “What we got here tonight, boy?” The snarling canine rose another inch, lips pulled back from dripping, yellowed teeth. Tom heard a sharp click and then a powerful flashlight blasted a tunnel of light through the darkness. He pressed a forearm above his eyes and tried to peer below the glare.
“Ho! Ho! Ho!” The sound of his old adversary’s voice, its self-satisfied intonation and malevolent intention, made Tom want to throw up. “You done good, boy!”
There was nothing for Tom to do but wait and try not to pee. The cone of light fell from his eyes to just below his belt, where it began a slow, steady circle.
Frankie laughed. “That’s where Soldier goes for, don’t you boy?” The slavering Mastiff answered in a low, Pavlovian growl. “You’re in a shit-load of trouble, Tommy Morgan. A shit-load of trouble.”
“Get that stupid dog out of here.” His voice trembled and his hands shook.
“Hear that Soldier? Why don’t we just pull this sorry trespasser off there and see who’s stupid? Whatdaya say?”
The dog growled low and long.
“I think Soldier here’s wantin’ a nice juicy taste of your privates.” Heller addressed the dog, softly, “Just be patient, boy.”
Tom’s knees and hamstrings began to vibrate. He tried to control them, but the smooth, sheet-metal roof of his car-top perch cantered sharply to one side, moist with evening dew.
“Now why don’t you just start to explain yourself,” Heller commanded.
Tom thought that might be a good idea, but could think of nothing helpful to say. After a long enough pause, Frankie grunted, “Have it your way.” He dropped the light to Tom’s foot and murmured something to the dog. Instantly, the animal sprang forward, snapped a row of teeth around Tom’s ankle and wrenched him off the car roof and onto the ground. Tom landed hard and lay stunned and panting.
“Release!” The dog stepped back and looked Tom in the eye, daring him to move. “Here’s the deal,” said Frankie, almost conversationally, “I shine this light on some soft, juicy part. Say ‘sic. ’ Then Soldier there takes a hold of it. I don’t call him off right away, he yanks it a bit. I still don’t call him off, he rips out a chunk.”
Tom tried to sit. The giant canine leaped forward and roared in his face, backing him down. “You getting the idea, yet?” Frankie asked.
Tom lay with his face toward the stars, his chest heaving and his torso basting in dog drool.
“Now let’s start again. What are you doing here?”
“I have a message for you,” Tom gasped. “From Dr. Hassad.”
“Heel!” The Mastiff took a reluctant step backward and Tom propped himself on an elbow. “That’s far enough,” said Frankie. “Say that again?”
“I have a message for you,” he repeated, this time with a bit more breath. “From Dr. Hassad.”
“I don’t know a Dr. Hassad,” said Frankie, cautiously. “What’s the message?”
“It’s a question. Can you replace the delivery boy?”
Frankie shone the light directly on Tom’s face and then began to circle it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Tommy Morgan. And my gut tells me you don’t know what you’re talking about, either.”
“Think about it,” Tom answered, gulping air. “What else would I be doing here?”
Frankie circled the torchlight across the top of Tom’s thigh. “That’s sort of the question, isn’t it?”
A sound escaped from the back of the dog’s throat like an opening of a blast furnace.
“Be patient, Soldier,” soothed Heller. “I think he’s full of it, too. But we got to be sure now, don’t we?” The furnace noise subsided but did not disappear. “Hush!”
As Frankie stroked his stubbled face, a pair of headlights cleared the hill above the garage and slid fast down the gravel drive into the junkyard. The car came to a halt about twenty yards away from the men and dog, its high beams freezing them like deer on a roadside. Only the dog did not put a forearm to his eyes.
Tom heard the squeal of un-oiled door hinge and the crunch of steps on gravel. He could only guess what lay beyond the glare; and he muttered a prayer that it was Joe, risen from his sick bed to save his brother’s ass one more time.
“Looks like you got here at a good time,” said Frankie in the direction of the new arrival. Then an explosion split the air behind the headlights and Frankie’s torso jerked backward as if yanked by a rope. Blood splashed across his sweat-stained beater shirt and wicked outward in a fast spreading arc. The dog whirled, first toward Frankie and then toward the glare of headlight. Another explosion concussed Tom’s ears, followed by a yelp, and then a third explosion.
Tom leaped from the ground and dodged behind a row of wrecked cars. CRACK! Ping! Shots ricocheted from car to car, the sound of metal on metal like some giant pinball machine. Tom ran between rows of junked cars, around and behind them, through ones with missing doors and under a pair that were propped together on end like a tepee. He tried to circle behind the lights, banging time and again into sharp, unseen protrusions. But the clap of gunfire and ping of punctured metal kept herding him in unhelpful directions. It seemed the shooter preferred to keep him in silhouette.
Diving into a wrecked Lincoln Town Car filled with cobwebs and mouse droppings, Tom lay on sodden upholstery trying to catch his breath, and felt something slither from beneath the seat and disappear beneath the one in front. His bladder rippled. Through the broken windshield, he watched a cone of light work its way from side to side along the row of junked cars. He slid through the door-less side of the wreck and crawled away from the light.
He tried to remember the layout of the junkyard from his visit with Joe a few days earlier. A chain link fence surrounded the yard, open at the front by the garage and somewhere in the rear a gate that the shooter’s car had driven through. Heller must have left it open, expecting company.
The spotlight reached the end of the row and went out. For a moment, Tom saw only moonlight and heard only crickets. He moved cautiously through wet weeds, broken glass and assorted metal debris, trying not to crash or curse out loud.
Then the headlights started to move, turning slowly away from the garage and stopping in the narrow row between the first two lines of junk cars. The spotlight came on again and began to wand between the rows of wrecks, moving methodically from side to side and car to car.
Tom crawled toward the fence. After a few minutes the headlights moved again, lighting up the alley between the next rows of cars with the spotlight moving back and forth between them like a metronome. He reached the fence and began to crawl along its perimeter, feeling as if he were in one of those WWII submarine movies where the destroyer lays out a grid and slowly closes in on the helpless submarine crew trapped on the bottom. Bits of broken glass and plastic junk punctured his knees and palms. He tried to remember the last time he had a tetanus shot, and then grimaced at the foolish optimism behind the thought. Part of him must think he was going to survive the next few minutes.
The headlights moved again. From the angle of the fence he could tell that the car must be near the final row. He had no idea how far he might be from the gate, or if it was open. Up ahead, facing the yard, he could see the silhouette of an owl sitting motionless on top of the fence. Another hunter out for its evening prey. The flat-faced head swiveled slowly in its socket and focused an appraising eye in Tom’s direction. The headlights moved again, a row away now.
Then a loud metal squeal made Tom’s neck go rigid. The spotlight passed through the door of an old yellow school bus, where from inside burst a sound like a million tiny flags snapping in a hard wind.
THUT! THUT! THUT! THUT! THUT! THUT! THUT!
The owl swooped from the chain link fence and dove toward the light. Suddenly, the air was thick with small, mouse-like creatures zooming in dense, dark clouds. Tom crouched low and sprinted through the cloud of frenzied bats, found the gate and disappeared into the darkness.
CHAPTER 22
Cold, aching and hurt, Tom hid in the woods until he saw headlights pull away from the junkyard and disappear over the hill beyond it. When he tried to stand, his hamburger-ed knees refused to bend and punished him for trying. Stumbling onto the dirt road and goose-stepping up the hill to his brother’s truck, he held his clawed hands to his chest like a battered Frankenstein. He wondered later why he had not anticipated what came next.
