by Jacob Stone
They weren’t going to use the bump-and-run today, at least not much. Instead, when Wainwright found a mark, he was simply going to ask them an innocent question, such as where one of the exhibits was located, and then distract them with additional conversation. He figured that these rural Kansas types would be too polite not to engage back. As long as no one was watching, it would be safe for Duncan to walk behind the mark and relieve him of his wallet. He’d just have to do so without breaking stride or acting suspiciously.
No one was watching.
The mark and his family were laughing at a joke Wainwright must’ve just told. Duncan was impressed that someone as mean as him could turn on the charm when needed. Duncan took a deep breath. Now was as good a time as any. He walked behind the mark and, in a quick, deft motion, slipped the mark’s wallet out of his back pocket and tucked it under his shirt. He was walking away when a hand clamped down on his arm. Wainwright had told him what to do if that happened. Punch the guy in the nuts and run as if the devil were after him. Except it wasn’t a guy who had grabbed onto his arm, but a woman. It startled him so much to see a woman staring at him sternly without a hint of pity that he lost his chance to break free. She dragged him over to the mark.
“This boy’s got sticky fingers,” she said loudly enough not only to get the mark and his family to turn around, but for other people to look over also. She took the wallet from under Duncan’s shirt and handed it back to the mark. “I believe this is yours,” she said.
Wainwright had been noticing this, but so had a small mob who encircled him. The mark at first gave Duncan a puzzled look. Soon his look hardened into something close to disgust. He shoved the wallet back into his pocket and turned to glare angrily at Wainwright. Others were also staring at Wainwright.
“This something you and the boy are doing together?” the mark accused.
“Friend, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Wainwright held up his hands in a let’s-be-calm gesture and tried to back up, but a few large farm-boy types had gotten behind him and blocked his path. One of them made a grab for Wainwright, and Wainwright surprised him by turning on his heels and smacking him in the mouth with a hard jab. It didn’t knock the man down, but it made him stumble backwards and left him with a bloody mouth. Another of these farm boys moved toward Wainwright, but Wainwright had taken a switchblade from his pocket and began waving the seven-inch blade in a wide arc. This made the crowd back up and when Wainwright lunged at the woman who was still holding onto Duncan’s arm, she let go and stumbled backwards. She quickly lost her footing and fell hard on her butt.
Duncan ran then. So did Wainwright. When they got to the car, the two of them jumped in, and Wainwright took off like a bat out of hell, the tires kicking up several pounds of dirt. A mob had chased after them, but they were too far back to stop them.
For a half hour, Wainwright sped along the country roads, too preoccupied looking for any police cars that might be on his trail to pay any attention to Duncan. Once he was convinced that the police weren’t after them, he began seething.
“You intentionally trying to get us caught?” he accused. “Is that it, boy?”
Duncan was seething also. Not over Wainwright’s accusation, which was too ridiculous to even address, but because it had been Wainwright’s responsibility to signal him if there was anyone standing behind him who could’ve been watching what he was up to. This was on Wainwright, not him!
“If you hadn’t been so cheap and bought me cotton candy or soda or something I could’ve been holding, that’s what that lady would’ve been looking at instead of me taking the wallet,” Duncan complained irritably. “It’s your fault I got caught and you know it!”
“You better watch your mouth, boy!”
“Or what? You’re going to knock my teeth out? You can only do that once.”
Wainwright was fuming too intensely to respond, his knuckles white as he gripped the wheel. Duncan didn’t much care whether Wainwright hit him or not. He knew Wainwright was to blame for what happened at the fairgrounds, and he was furious about it. He’d been looking forward to spending a month at a lake, and he knew that wasn’t going to happen now.
For the next hour they drove in an icy silence. All at once Wainwright broke into a wheezing laugh.
“Did you see the look on their faces when I waved that pig sticker around?” he said. “That was something, wasn’t it, boy?”
Duncan knew that was as close to an apology as he would ever hear from Wainwright, so he met him halfway and admitted that it was something.
Wainwright’s laugh died down. He wiped a tear that had leaked out from his eye. “The look on that bitch’s face when I showed her my pig sticker up close was worth the price of admission. She went paler than a glass of milk. Fell hard enough on her ass that I felt the earth shake.”
“I bet she left a big stinker in her pants.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it. I wouldn’t doubt it either if that good ol’ boy I popped needs some serious dental work. Ah hell, boy, money ain’t everything. At least we got to see that.”
They both seemed to relax after that. Wainwright stopped grinding his teeth and began holding onto the steering wheel loosely with one hand. Duncan found himself giggling when he thought about the scene at the fairgrounds. Wainwright might’ve transformed him into a hardened criminal, but deep down inside he was still only an eleven-year-old boy.
Duncan was soon absently staring out the window and watching as they drove past what seemed like endless miles of cornfields. Wainwright interrupted his daydreaming by telling him that even though they might’ve had some fun, today wasn’t a good day.
“I was counting on that money,” he said. “We won’t be able to show our faces back at those fairgrounds tomorrow or anytime soon, and we won’t be able to make enough money lifting wallets like we’d been doing. We’ll have to do something else. But don’t worry. I’ve got some other ideas.”
Wainwright had spoken to Duncan more in that one day than the past fifteen months combined. It made Duncan feel better. He even found himself feeling an attachment to this miserable sonofabitch. Wainwright was his grandpa, after all. And if he squinted real hard, he could see his dad in Wainwright’s features.
Chapter 32
Wichita, Kansas. July 2001. Six days later.
They were in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Wichita, and the house Wainwright had taken them to looked bigger and ritzier than any Duncan had ever seen. Nothing like it in Jasper, that was for sure!
It was a little after two in the morning and Wainwright had opened a broken window for a first-floor bathroom that was in the back of the house, and he lowered Duncan to the floor inside of it. The reason the bathroom window was broken was a man named Earl Sarkosky broke it when he was at the house a month earlier installing some fancy closets. Sarkosky’s side business was sizing up homes to rob, making sure there’d be an easy entry by making copies of keys or breaking window latches, and selling the information to criminals like Wainwright. When he went over the job with Wainwright, he told him where the jewelry could be found, and he also warned Wainwright that the owners had a guard dog.
“A mean mother,” Sarkosky had said. “Some sort of shepherd. All black. Big teeth.”
“That’s all right.” Wainwright winked at Duncan. “The boy’s got a fondness for dogs.”
Duncan wasn’t entirely sure that was true. He’d liked Buster all right, but he didn’t want to deal with a mean dog with big teeth. Later, when he expressed his concern, Wainwright seemed amused by it.
“Don’t worry, boy. That’s what the hamburger will be for. You just feed it to that dog and he’ll be asleep in no time.” Wainwright winked at him. “I been taking you along slow this past year or so, but you’ll be poppin’ your cherry tonight. Your first home robbery.”
All that happened only five hours ago. Now Duncan was in a strange
family’s bathroom with a small ball of hamburger meat, inside of which were two sleeping pills, and he was worrying. Trembling, actually. Like he had a bad case of the flu. What left his heart thumping wildly in his chest was the thought of coming face-to-face with a big, mean dog with sharp teeth.
The bathroom door was closed. He held his breath and tried to listen for a dog growling. Nothing. But would he have been able to hear anything over the pounding of his heart? He turned around, thinking he’d go back out the window, but Wainwright had already closed it. Wainwright had also brought his gun along, and had told him that if Duncan wasn’t able to rob the family quietly, he’d go in there with his gun and rob them more noisily, and Duncan knew that meant people getting shot. He didn’t want to be responsible for that. He moved as quietly as he could to the door, and turned the knob ever-so-slowly so it wouldn’t make a clicking sound. The door, though, made a squeaking noise, the hinges needing oil. The squeaking probably wasn’t that loud, but it made Duncan jump as if an owl had screeched in his ear.
He opened the door enough to step into the hallway. The dog stood silently waiting for him, its yellowish-orange eyes shining in the darkness. The animal was close enough to Duncan that he could see it was as big as advertised. Before he could react, the dog knocked him to the floor and stood over him, its fangs bared and inches from his throat. Drool from the beast dripped onto Duncan’s face, the animal’s breath hot and smelling like rotting garbage. Duncan was too scared to cry. Really, too scared to do anything. He remembered the hamburger meat and somehow willed his arm to hold up the meat to the dog. He clenched his eyes shut, expecting his hand to be torn off and chewed up with the meat, but the dog stopped its snarling long enough to take the meat, and it did so without hurting Duncan.
For the next several minutes the dog continued to stand over him and growl fiercely, but the animal otherwise didn’t hurt him. The dog’s face was close enough to Duncan’s that he could see when the eyes began to lose focus, and it wasn’t long after that that the dog wobbled drunkenly and then fell to the floor. Duncan wondered at first whether Wainwright had lied to him, and instead of using sleeping pills had poisoned the hamburger meat, but the dog appeared to be sleeping.
Duncan scrambled to his feet. He was too jittery right then to continue on to the bedroom upstairs so he could steal the jewelry hidden away up there. The intense fear he had suffered also left him faint with hunger.
There was enough ambient light in the room for him to see the dog’s rib cage rising up and down as the dog slept, and once he convinced himself that the dog wouldn’t be any further threat, he went searching for the kitchen.
He found sliced ham, Swiss cheese, mayonnaise, and a loaf of white bread in the refrigerator. Also root beer. He knew Wainwright was outside hiding in the bushes. Well, he could just wait! After what Duncan had just gone through, he deserved to take whatever time was needed to calm his nerves.
He made himself a sandwich, chewed each bite carefully, and drank the root beer from the can. After that, he climbed onto one of the countertops so he could search the upper cabinets, and he found a box of Hostess cupcakes. He ate two of them, licked his fingers clean, and then decided he’d better get the jewelry before the dog woke up.
Duncan’s eyes had adjusted enough to the darkness so that he could move around the house without needing to turn on any lights or to use the penlight Wainwright had given him. Sarkosky had told Wainwright that the master bedroom was the first one on the right at the top of the stairs. The door was closed, but this one didn’t squeak when Duncan inched it open. The room was darker than the rest of the house, and he considered using the penlight, but after a minute he could make out two large lumps under the covers in the bed. He also heard heavy snoring coming from one of the lumps.
Sarkosky had drawn a rough map of the room so Duncan would be able to find the wife’s jewelry box with his eyes closed, if needed. Duncan, being careful not to make a sound, headed toward a dresser where the box was hidden in the second drawer. He was halfway there when the sound of someone stirring in bed froze him. The noise grew louder, and he turned to see the darkened shape of the husband sitting up.
Duncan dropped to the floor and crawled on his belly until he was under the bed. If the man had heard or seen him, it was going to be bad. Earlier, when they were waiting for it to get late enough, Wainwright sat in the car, drinking rye whiskey from the bottle, and when he drank, he got meaner than his usual ornery self. Wainwright wanted that jewelry, and if he heard trouble inside the house, he’d be climbing through the broken window and he’d use the gun. Duncan had no doubt about that.
The husband must not have seen him, because Duncan saw him plodding out of the room. Minutes later he heard a toilet flushing, and then the plodding footsteps of the husband returning. The bed sagged as the man climbed back into it, and Duncan held his breath until he thought he was going to pass out. Soon, though, he heard snoring again, and although his heart was racing even faster than before, he crawled out from under the bed and found the jewelry box. He also took the man’s wallet and the women’s pocketbook, both of which had been left on top of the dresser. As far as he could tell, as he made his way down the stairs, the man and his wife were still sleeping. As he had arranged with Wainwright, he left through the front door and found Wainwright in the bushes in the back of the house. He handed him back his penlight and everything he had stolen. Wainwright seemed impressed that he had had the foresight to steal the wallet and pocketbook also.
Wainwright used the penlight to make sure everything he was expecting to find was in the jewelry box.
“You did good, boy,” Wainwright said after his inspection. “No problems in there, huh?”
“I thought that dog was going to rip my throat out.”
“He didn’t, so quit your complaining.”
Whatever good mood Wainwright had temporarily slipped into was gone. He headed back to where he had parked the car three blocks away, and Duncan followed along behind him, making sure to keep his distance.
Chapter 33
Los Angeles, the present
Lindsey Bushnell looked miserable as she sat in one of the interrogation rooms at the Wilcox Avenue precinct and told Morris about the circumstances that led to her finding George and Meagan Campbell inside their house earlier that morning.
“George and I work together, and for the last year we’ve been involved—”
“Involved, as in you two having a romantic affair?”
“That’s right.” She sat slumped in her chair and chewed on her lower lip. Several times already she had tried to make eye contact with Morris and failed each time. She tried once more and was once more unable to meet his gaze. “Six months ago his wife found out about it and moved out right afterwards. George promised me after his divorce we would get married, but it turns out he was just stringing me along. A week ago out of the blue he broke it off with me. No explanation. Nothing.”
“That must’ve pissed you off.”
“I was too stunned to be angry. I didn’t know what was going on with him, and thought it was only a phase he was going through. To be honest, I’d convinced myself he’d be calling me back later and apologizing. When George wasn’t at work yesterday, I wormed it out of Bob what was going on.”
“Bob?”
“Sorry. Bob Doltrice. He works with us and is buddies with George, and he told me that George was spending the day with his wife, and that he’d been trying to reconcile with her ever since she moved out on him.”
“Now that must’ve pissed you off.”
Her expression turned bleaker, but she was able to meet Morris’s gaze then.
“I felt like I’d been punched in the face,” she said. “I realized that I had been his backup plan. That if he couldn’t win his wife back he’d settle for me. For most of the day I was in a daze and couldn’t think or feel much of anything, but by the evening I started
to get angry. I was at my friend Sam’s. The two of us were drinking wine and having a bitch session, and I borrowed her phone so I could send George some pretty mean texts.”
Morris had seen them and agreed with her assessment. “Sam?”
“Samantha Rigby. My best friend since college.”
“Why’d you use her phone?” he asked.
She gave him a puzzled look as if she couldn’t understand why he’d ask something so obvious. “George had blocked my number.”
Morris already knew the text messages had gone unanswered. “What happened next?”
“I hung around with Sam until one, then went back to my place, but I couldn’t sleep. I just kept thinking about how George had lied to me over the last six months. I know I was only being spiteful, but I wanted his wife to know about his lies. So I went to his house this morning, hoping to confront them, and that’s when I found them.”
The memory of what she found caused her to shudder.
“How’d you know Meagan Campbell would be there?”
“I didn’t know she’d be there. It was just something I felt in my gut.” She winced, almost as if she were experiencing a small part of what Meagan Campbell had gone through. “It was so awful what was done to her. I almost fainted.”
