Laura showed no emotion.
Diane looked at Gunnar again. “That surprises you, doesn’t it, Gunnar? Wouldn’t it be shocking to learn that Monty needed to protect himself from the law, maybe go on the run real fast? He didn’t just want to cut a deal with some D.A. and lose everything. He wanted to get his hands on a quick nest egg and then get out of town. He needed to get some quick cash and just had a hunch that Laura had secrets she would pay a lot to keep hidden. But he couldn’t just sit around and wait until you talked about the blackmail stash here in your office. What if you told me somewhere else? So he was looking for some new partners. He betrayed that old code of sleazeball fixers and listened in on some of the conversations he shouldn’t have. Incredible, isn’t it?”
“Certainly is.”
“So, here’s something else that’s incredible; Monty overheard you in here, talking about your stakeout in Lomita. Overheard a conversation in here between me and Eddie, actually. Remember when you left me in here alone? I got a phone call? You left, and I talked to Eddie. Monty’s little gadgets overheard the whole thing and overheard how sick to the stomach I was from your plodding, your foot-dragging. How you were incapable of hiding how much you hated Brad and how you didn’t trust me.”
Eddie stabbed his gun through the air and toward Gunnar. “Hey, Boy Scout, do you know what’s in the chamber of this gun? A .44 magnum award for the most ethical P. I. of the year.”
“So now we have common enemies, Monty and me. Miss Preston here…and you.”
“He contacted you to make a deal. He wanted to see you found the blackmail materials, so he could eventually have an upper hand over Laura.”
“Oh, yeah. He wanted to split the money with us.”
“What happened to him?”
“She killed him,” Laura spoke at last. She was still emotionless, still holding a steely control over her composure. “Made it look like a car accident.”
“Very good,” Diane said.
“And she was the one who tipped off Kelly’s hitmen to you, not Laura,” Erika spoke up. “It was Diane who tried to kill you.”
“No,” Diane protested, but way too lightly. The punchline was coming, Gunnar knew. Then she added, “Let’s keep everything fair here, please. I did not want those stupid, mindless sides of beef to kill you, Gunnar. I just wanted them to beat the crap out of you and threaten to kill Erika.”
“Of course,” Gunnar whispered. It was so clear how well he had been played by Diane. “They just got carried away, didn’t they?”
“Good help is hard to come by,” Diane quipped and smiled at Gunnar. He knew she wanted to use every word as a knife that would cut into his flesh, then slowly turn, making him suffer.
“Because you overheard some of the things I said in here, too,” Gunnar replied. “You were afraid I wouldn’t finish the investigation, weren’t you? I’d decide that your brother was a sadistic, psychopathic piece of garbage that deserved to die. Isn’t that right, Diane? You needed me pissed enough at Laura, needed me to go after her full force because I believed she tried to kill Erika. You needed me to find the blackmail things so you could take over where Brad left off, so you could go on squeezing Laura.”
As he spoke, Gunnar was surprised to see a change in Diane’s disposition. Her eyes hardened, filled with barely-controlled rage as he disparaged her brother. She might have been as venomously evil as Brad, but there was still some twisted form of affection she felt for him.
“By the way,” Gunnar added, “where were the listening devices transmitting?”
He thought Diane was about to lose her composure, but she actually held back. The loathing that radiated off her face was almost a palpable ninth presence in the room. However, she must have realized he was trying to push her buttons. She wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction.
“They’re not transmitting to an empty office in the building next door anymore,” Diane said. “Oh, and don’t try to bait me anymore, Gunnar. You will die painfully and slowly enough as is.”
Gunnar didn’t intend to. Until now, he just wasn’t able to contain himself. He, Erika, and Amy stood a superb chance of dying tonight, so a rebellious, vengeful part of his mind, something almost blind in its defiance, wanted to act out and aggravate Diane. If they were to be killed, this side of Gunnar seemed to reason, he wasn’t going to give these animals the satisfaction of seeing him carry out a futile bargain, seeing him beg, seeing him try to placate.
“And that pain’s a promise, buddy boy,” Eddie said and grinned.
“The bugs transmitted to Laura’s house,” Diane said. “Where she heard my phone call from the car tonight. On the drive back from the warehouse. A sentimentalist until the last moment, aren’t you, Gunnar? While you and your girlfriend tried to…what? Figure out who your sanctimonious, pathetic moral codes disliked the most—Brad or Laura?—I went ahead and did what you didn’t have the balls to do! I called here and had a talk with Eddie about how we were coming back and going over the clues and then calling the cops on her. And then…. Oh, I’m not going to tell you what happened then. Let your cute little assistant girl tell you what happened then.” She looked at Amy. “Go ahead, tell him.”
“Laura drove over here,” Amy said when the punk next to her prodded her side with his gun. “I decided to take some initiative and was watching her house. She drove here, and I followed her.”
“Go on,” Diane said, “tell him what happened then.”
“She parked in the lot here—” Amy said.
But Diane cut in and jumped to the punchline. “And she tried to wait for you to show up and kill you! Eddie, go ahead, show him the piece.”
Eddie pulled a small Smith and Wesson 9mm automatic from his waist behind his back. “This was gonna be your welcome back, hoss.”
“Good thing Eddie’s friends tailed both of them,” Diane gloated.
“They jumped us both,” Amy said.
“So that’s the story, Gunnar,” Diane said. “You know Laura needs to pay for what she did, don’t you? Poor Billy Webb.”
Gunnar could sense that that, indeed, was the story. His heart pounded ferociously. These bastards wanted to kill them all. They wanted to kill Erika.
Diane looked at Laura. “And you are going to pay. Or the cops are getting every bit of information Gunnar worked so hard to find.”
Diane stepped back now, looking as if she was trying to move behind the desk. “Laura, come here, please,” she commanded. But she was actually looking at Eddie and his two hoods now. “Kill them all.”
CHAPTER 71
The gunman behind Amy seemed to be the most eager to get to work. He grabbed her with his left hand, fastening his grip between her left shoulder and neck, taking a handful of her lean, yet hard and well-defined, trapezius muscle. “This way, baby,” he taunted and tried to pull her backward. Gunnar saw that he was trying to move her toward the door to the reception room. Perhaps they had already decided the murders would take place down in the gym.
Something had to be done this second, this moment, Gunnar’s mind screamed, while his reflexes reminded him that Eddie was only a few feet away, his pistol held at the ready. His heart pounded savagely now, fueled by adrenaline, shaking his entire body, priming him to take action, to do something immediately while avoiding instant death from Eddie’s massive handgun.
In a flash instant, Amy’s reaction to her captor’s manhandling provided the only slim chance to escape this standoff alive. Gunnar was witness to how perfectly she had worked on those martial arts fitness pageant moves. She had gotten real training, real self-defense moves. As the punk yanked her backward, her left hand shot up and grabbed hold of the grip around her trapezius. She found the punk’s thumb, the weakest part of his grip, and she twisted and squeezed the thumb in toward the fleshy part of his palm.
It was a basic self-defense move, but Gunnar knew how much it h
urt. Just as he expected the moment he saw Amy going for the maneuver, the hood screamed out in pain. His gun hand flailed about in reflex. He was hurting too much to be able to concentrate on aiming and firing.
The punk’s scream provided enough of a distraction for everyone in the room to give Gunnar the chance to make his move, too. Most importantly, Eddie’s attention snapped toward Amy and the commotion. But as Diane’s second in command looked away, Gunnar lunged forward, snaking his right arm around Eddie’s neck, tightening his grip into an incapacitating chokehold while his left hand went in for the kill.
Out of the corner of his eye, Gunnar saw Amy follow up her thumb attack by driving an elbow backward and into her captor’s throat. As the gunman stumbled back, Eddie got his neck broken. With his left hand, Gunnar found Eddie’s jaw and used it as a handle to twist his head so far around as to snap his neck. Even though he was fighting off his would-be murderer, Gunnar was repulsed by the sickening crunch Eddie’s neck made. The punk’s body then started spasming, his death throes so violent, so sudden, that Gunnar was almost unable to hold on to him.
And hold on, he had to, Gunnar knew, because Diane was now swinging her gun upward, flash aiming at him. Her hand was flexing, index finger squeezing on the Smith and Wesson revolver’s hair-trigger.
“Get down!” Gunnar screamed, hoping Erika would hear him in time and react without hesitation.
And then the gun in Diane’s hand went off.
Gunnar felt Eddie jerking one last time. He knew this was no death spasm, though. Diane’s shot had struck her accomplice. But Gunnar also knew that a gun as powerful as the Smith and Wesson .38 could send a bullet through the human body from this distance.
Although there was a lot inside a body that could just as well change the trajectory of a bullet in all kinds of unexpected ways. There were bones, tight groups of muscles, tendons….
Gunnar felt Eddie turn into a lifeless sack in his arms. He felt nothing else. No pain, no shock of metal piercing flesh. Diane’s shot had not hit him after perforating Eddie.
Gunnar, however, had every intention of perforating Diane as soon as possible. He went to wrench the Desert Eagle .44 magnum from Eddie’s hand with the express plan of turning it on Diane immediately and taking her out.
As the big magnum slipped from Eddie’s hand and into Gunnar’s, he also registered all the other movements in the room. Laura was trying to duck for cover, apparently hoping the gunman behind her would ignore her in favor of attempting to avenge his comrade’s killing. Amy was on the floor, trying to wrestle the gun from her wheezing, coughing former captor’s hand. Erika had dropped to the floor just like Gunnar had ordered.
As Diane attempted to aim again, Gunnar, too, swung the big, triangular barrel of the Desert Eagle and hoped to blow her away first. He, in fact, pulled the trigger first but almost immediately sensed that his shot was woefully off target.
Glass shattered across the room. The .44 magnum slug must have shattered the window overlooking the gym floor. Diane, however, didn’t try to follow up her first shot. Instead, she dove behind Gunnar’s desk.
A shot rang out somewhere on Gunnar’s right. Since he didn’t feel a bullet striking him, he knew he should have ignored it. Diane was still up ahead, concealed now, but intending to do grievous harm to him. Likewise, Laura’s captor was probably taking aim right now and—
A second shot went off in the same general direction.
Gunnar’s gaze darted that way, just for a split, brief instant. The office door right behind Amy was sprayed by an enormous starburst of blood and chunks of severed brain matter. Thankfully, Amy held a gun, squirmed around on the floor, and her former assailant was completely motionless.
A few feet away from Amy, Laura was also flat against the ground. Was she shot? Did she just duck and tried to lie still to avoid an errant pistol round? Gunnar couldn’t concentrate on any of those possibilities, only on the gunman standing above Laura’s form.
Letting Eddie’s corpse slide to the floor, Gunnar flash aimed at Laura’s captor and squeezed off three rounds. The punk’s body shuddered three times as tiny spouts of blood blossomed on his chest. Then he spun around on one rubbery, collapsing leg and hit the floor face down.
Now Gunnar sensed movement off to his right as well. Diane was behind the desk, but Amy was there for reinforcement on his right. Except now, the movement on the right continued. And it was very close.
Erika!
Gunnar dropped down to one knee, hoping to be more inaccessible for Diane, all the while throwing a glance toward Erika. Just as he suspected, he saw her retrieving Laura’s automatic from Eddie’s back.
“Get her.” Gunnar saw Erika mouth the words and point her chin toward the desk as she cocked the pistol.
Both Gunnar and Erika flinched as a bullet and wood splinters whizzed by. Diane was trying to retaliate by shooting through the desk, all the while hoping to keep from exposing herself.
Except if bullets could come out from one side of the wood panels, bullets could go in from the opposite side as well. Amy seemed to realize and act on this first. Using the gun of the hoodlum she’d dispatched, she pumped three rounds into Gunnar’s desk. A painful yelp trilled from behind the desk, and two more shots rang out.
“Give up, damn it,” Gunnar growled through clenched teeth. Diane had three guns aimed in her direction. She had no chance.
Instead, a barrage of gunfire ripped up the desk from behind once more. In some insane, suicidal rage, Diane thrust herself upward and tried to aim at Gunnar with his own weapon.
But Gunnar already had a bead on her. So did Erika and Amy. They all opened fire on Diane at once.
CHAPTER 72
Laura Preston could barely utter a few words. There was but a faint flicker of life in her eyes when Gunnar reached her side. She hardly had the strength for anything more than a final breath.
“Not…,” she whispered. “Not…to kill you.”
Those were the last words out of her.
But there was really nothing more to say, Gunnar knew. He closed her eyes. He let her lie in the expanding pool of blood draining out of the wound in her back.
Her captor had shot her before Gunnar took him down.
It almost seemed like time had sped up after the gunfight. The office and gym were brightening, first by the lights in the building, then the colored flashes off the police cars’ lights, and then the sun creeping above the horizon. It would be a long day, Gunnar knew, and it would involve endless analyses of every moment of the shooting. His office had turned into a morgue in a matter of seconds, and it would take hours to let the authorities understand it all.
For now, while he had the chance, Gunnar wanted to distance himself from it all. He stood by the door leading to the stairs onto the parking lot. There seemed to be normality out there. A bright morning sun was rising, the traffic was picking up, and Cassandra Hill was still pouting ever so seductively off the billboard advertising American Centerfold.
“Are you okay?” Gunnar heard Erika behind him. He felt her hand stroke his back.
“Am I okay?” he asked and gave her a tired smile. “I’m a tough private eye, don’t you know?”
Her smile was just as tired.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yes. It’s all over. We’ll get out of here soon and let everything get back to normal.”
Gunnar nodded. “It looks normal. But they’re out there.”
“Who?”
“The monsters.”
Gunnar put his arm around Erika’s waist. He had to hold her close. He had to feel her. And as they stood there, he was flooded with love for her.
THE END
About the Author
Barna William Donovan, a professor of communication and media studies, is a graduate of the film school of the University of Miami and he earned his Ph.D. from Rut
gers University. His books on film and fandom include “The Asian Influence on Hollywood Action Films,” “Blood, Guns and Testosterone: Action Films, Audiences, and a Thirst for Violence,” and “Conspiracy Films: A Tour of Dark Places in the American Conscious.” He is also the author of the novels “Confirmation: Investigations of the Unexplained” and “The Cedar Valley Covenant.” His commentaries on film, television, and popular culture have been quoted in media like the BBC, Variety, LiveScience, Forbes, Yahoo News, HLNTV, and various publications from Europe to Latin America.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
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