Parting Shot

by Linwood Barclay

  Maybe this was his chance.

  But then Pilford disappeared from view, and his babysitter was seeking cover behind the Honda. The man on the boardwalk was heading this way, and—

  Shots!

  What the hell was going on?

  Cory moved deeper into the bushes on the other side of North Shore Boulevard. He could not believe what he was seeing. The man who’d been on the boardwalk going down, the older guy getting the drop on him.

  Where was Jeremy? Where had he gone?

  He hadn’t come this way. He must have run to one of the neighboring beach houses to hide.

  Should he go look for him? Cory wondered. Or was he taking a risk even being here? What with that fire starting to consume the beach house, and now gunfire, it was only a matter of time before emergency vehicles started descending on this scene like flies on shit.

  Cory didn’t just have to get away from this beach house, he had to get out of here completely. And that meant hightailing it back to his cabin, getting in his van and getting the fuck out of here.

  Just one small problem there.

  Dolly’s friend.

  He couldn’t leave her in the cabin. He might still need her for leverage. Even if he got away from Cape Cod without attracting attention, they were still going to be looking for him in connection with everything else.

  So he was going to have to move her from the bed to the car without anyone seeing him. Luckily, his cabin was far enough down the road that he thought he could manage that without being seen.

  Yeah, except everything else had gone to shit so far. Why not that?

  As he ran back to the cabin, he felt his eyes misting up with tears.

  “Everything is against me,” he muttered to himself. “God hates me! Everyone hates me!”

  As he ran, he wiped tears from his eyes. The cool night wind coming off Cape Cod Bay chilled his dampened cheeks.

  “Not fair,” he said again. “Not fair!”

  While he still wanted to kill the Big Baby, he wanted to do something even worse, if that were possible, to that asshole with the rifle who had ruined everything.

  He stopped to dig a tissue from his pocket and dab the tears that continued to puddle from his eyes.

  All he’d ever wanted was to be somebody.

  No, not just somebody. He wanted to be somebody better. Somebody better than his brother and his sister. Somebody better than his judgmental father. Somebody who made a difference, somebody who would be talked about for years to come.

  He’d come so close to that.

  He felt an aching sadness wash over him. What he wished, right now, was that he was home. That he was curled up on the couch in the basement under a blanket, knees pulled up to his chest, in front of the TV.

  He could cry all he wanted then.

  But he couldn’t do that now. He had to keep moving.

  A thought occurred to him.

  Maybe they wouldn’t catch him for the things he’d already done. He’d harbored a sense of inevitability up to now, figuring that sooner or later the police would close in on him. It was the whole reason he’d brought Carol Beakman with him. A hostage had seemed like a good idea at the time.

  But if he got in that van right now and drove through the night, he could be hundreds of miles from here by tomorrow. He could ditch the van, steal a car, and keep on going. Two or three days from now, he could be on the other side of the country. He could find a place to hide out while he figured out his next step. Figure out a way to change his identity. Alter his looks. Get some kind of job where you got paid in cash. It would be tough at first, but it sure beat the alternative of spending the rest of his life in prison.

  Yeah, that was a plan.

  But it raised another question.

  What was he to do with the Beakman woman? Let her go? Leave her tied up in the cabin to be found by someone in a few days?

  Suppose the police did eventually catch him? Charged him with various offences? They’d need witnesses to convict.

  Craig Pierce hadn’t seen him. Pierce had been masked.

  Brian Gaffney hadn’t seen him. Gaffney had been drugged and blindfolded.

  Dolly Guntner certainly wasn’t in a position to say anything bad about him.

  Which left Carol Beakman. Carol had seen him. And while she didn’t actually see him kill Dolly, if the police ever spoke with her, she’d be able to tell them it couldn’t have been anyone else but him.

  As far as Cory could figure, the only living witness to his crimes was Carol Beakman.

  He was nearly back to the cabin.

  It seemed clear what he had to do.

  And he’d have to do it fast.

  FIFTY-SIX

  CAL

  “WHERE’S the other one?” I asked the man I’d shot. “Where’s Calder?”

  “Jesus!” the man said, putting his hand to his right cheek, where my foot had connected. There was blood seeping through the shoulder of his jacket.

  “Where is he?” I yelled, again, wanting to be sure I was heard over the roar of the fire. The heat was getting intense—it felt like a hot pan pressed up against my right cheek—and if I was going to continue asking this son of a bitch questions, I was going to have to drag him away from the blaze.

  “Who?” he said.

  “Calder,” I said. Although Barry hadn’t said so in his message, it seemed reasonable to assume Calder might have a partner, which would mean we weren’t out of the woods yet. He might be watching us right now.

  “I don’t know any Calder!” he said.

  I shook my head wearily. “Wherever he is, you need to call him off.”

  “I told you, I don’t know any—”

  I brought my foot down on his knee. Hard. I wasn’t sure, what with all the crackling sounds of burning wood, but I thought I heard something snap. My new friend yelped loud enough to suggest I was right.

  “Goddamn!” he cried, his eyes squeezed shut in pain.

  “ID,” I said.

  “Fuckin’ hell! You broke my fuckin’ leg!”

  “ID,” I repeated. “And your phone. Or I break the other one.”

  “Motherfucker!” he shouted, and opened his eyes to see the gun still trained on his face.

  “Now,” I said. “Slowly.”

  He reached into his jacket and pulled out a phone, which he tossed about five feet from me.

  “I don’t fetch,” I said. “If you make me fetch, I’ll get annoyed, and if I get annoyed, I might just shoot you in the head. Wallet.”

  The man swallowed, took three breaths and said, “Back pocket. Have to move.”

  “Carefully.”

  He struggled to raise his butt off the gravel far enough to slide his hand under himself and dig the wallet out of the back of his jeans.

  “Hand it to me,” I said. “With the tips of your fingers.”

  He stretched his arm up and I took it from him gingerly, watching for any attempt to grab me. I knew that if I were him, I’d be desperate to try anything at this point. He was looking at a very long stay in prison. Arson, two counts of attempted murder. Being an asshole.

  “Who’s he?” said a voice behind me.

  I glanced over my shoulder for half a second to see Jeremy standing there. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “I saw you drop him, figured it was okay,” he said. “Which was kind of awesome, by the way. But that’s not the person we met on the beach.”

  “I know.”

  “Who is he?”

  I handed him the wallet. “You tell me.”

  I kept my eyes on the man while Jeremy opened up the wallet and started looking through it. “Okay, I’ve got his driver’s license.” He tilted it toward the fire to get enough light to read it. “He’s Gregor . . . Hang on. Last name is spelled K-I-L-N.”

  “Kiln,” I said, looking down at the man. “Did I say that right? Like the oven for pottery?”

  The man grunted.

  “I’ll take that as a yes.” To Jeremy, “W
hat else can you tell us about Mr. Kiln here?’

  Jeremy held up more cards to the flames. “He lives in Albany. He was born in, uh, 1973. He’s got some Visa cards and shit like that.”

  “His phone’s over there.”

  Jeremy spotted it, scooped it up off the ground. “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

  “Check emails, recent calls.”

  “Listen,” Gregor Kiln said, “maybe we can work some kind of deal.”

  I thought I heard conversation, looked down to the end of the driveway, where half a dozen people, some in what appeared to be pajamas, had gathered. A man was coming our way.

  “I’ve called the fire department!” he shouted. “Ambulance, too! That man hurt?”

  I said, “Please stay back, sir!”

  “You need to come away from the—”

  “I know! Please go back by the road!”

  The man stopped, hesitated, clearly puzzled by my reluctance to accept assistance. But he did as I’d told him and retreated to the road, where he huddled with the others, undoubtedly speculating about what the hell was going on.

  For the first time, I started hearing sirens.

  “Did you hear me?” Kiln said. “A deal?”

  “You’re not in what I’d call a good bargaining position,” I said.

  “I give you a name, you let me go.”

  “A name?” I said. “What do you mean, a name? Like, the name of a website? A person? What?”

  “A website?” Kiln said.

  I realized, at that moment, that this was not like the other incidents. This was not the outgrowth of some social-media outrage. This was something very different.

  “Give me the name,” I said.

  “We have a deal?”

  “No.”

  “No name.”

  Jeremy said, “I found something.”

  I gave him a quick glance as the wail of the sirens grew louder. “What?”

  “No interesting emails, but there’s a number here. Some calls around five hours ago. And a text.”

  “Read it to me.”

  “Okay, the text is from the same number as the calls. Um, someone says, ‘Needs to be done tonight.’ And Kiln here says, ‘No problem.’ And then the other guy—”

  “Is there a name for this other guy?”

  “No. But the other guy, he says, ‘Confirm when done.’”

  If it was a guy. My mind was racing, trying to figure out who knew that Jeremy and I were in Cape Cod.

  Only one name came to mind.

  Madeline Plimpton.

  But did that make sense? Not only had this man I’d shot known where we were, but Cory Calder had known we were here, too. Did it make any sense that Jeremy’s great-aunt would tell either of them where to find us?

  “What else?” I asked Jeremy.

  “That’s it.”

  The fact that we had a number to connect to those calls and texts was a start. I got out my own phone, brought up the number I’d used to call Madeline Plimpton.

  “Read me the number,” I said to Jeremy. He called it out, and I compared it to what I had for Ms. Plimpton.

  Not a match.

  Not that that really proved anything.

  I gave Kiln a wry smile. “With that number on your phone, maybe we don’t need you to give us a name.”

  Kiln said nothing.

  A fire engine screamed to a stop at the end of the driveway, and slowly turned in. I asked Jeremy to hand me Kiln’s phone, then said, “Help me move this asshole.”

  We each grabbed an arm and dragged him across the gravel and into the backyard of the neighboring beach house. As we dropped his arms, a fireman ran toward me.

  “Paramedics on the way!” he said. Then a look of alarm crossed his face as he saw the gun in my hand. I had it pointed to the ground.

  “Police, too?” I asked.

  The man nodded. “Why?”

  I nodded toward Kiln. “He’s our firestarter.”

  The fireman shook his head. “He torched the place?”

  I nodded. “That, and more. I can’t have him heading off in an ambulance. We need the police.”

  “I’ll alert them,” he said, and then glanced at the beach house. “It’s a goner, but maybe we can stop it from spreading to the other houses.”

  I nodded and watched him run off. His fellow firefighters were unspooling hoses and dragging them toward the house.

  There were two calls I needed to make. The first was to Barry Duckworth. It was late, but I was pretty sure he’d want to hear from me. For the second call, I’d need someplace quieter.

  But I didn’t want to let Gregor Kiln out of my sight. Even with a bullet in his shoulder, and quite possibly a broken knee, he struck me as someone who’d try to make a run for it if we let down our guard.

  Jeremy said, “What do you think happened to the other guy? The one on the beach?”

  I gave him a smile. “Jeremy, I have absolutely no idea what’s going on.” I held up Kiln’s phone. “But I think maybe I’m gonna find out. I’d like to let Mr. Kiln’s friend know the job is done.”

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  BARRY Duckworth was in a deep sleep when the cell phone on his bedside table began to buzz. If Maureen hadn’t given him a shove on the shoulder, he might have slept right through it.

  “Barry,” she said. “Barry!”

  He opened his eyes, reached for the phone and knocked it to the floor. “Shit,” he said. He leaned down, his hand hunting in the dark for the device as it continued to buzz. He found it, hit the button to accept the call and put the phone to his ear without seeing who it was.

  “Duckworth,” he said as Maureen switched on the lamp on her side of the bed.

  “Barry, it’s Cal Weaver.”

  “Jesus, Cal.” Duckworth threw back the covers and planted his feet on the floor. “What’s happening?”

  “A lot. Your guy Calder was here. We met him on the beach today.”

  “Tell me everything.”

  Weaver brought him up to speed, ending with the fire at Madeline Plimpton’s beach house, how it was designed to force them out of the house so they could be shot.

  “I knew you were there,” Duckworth said. “I knew Jeremy Pilford had been staying with her. Went there today, met her and the boy’s mother and her boyfriend. Warned them about Calder. He torched the beach house?”

  Weaver said no, that he’d caught a man named Gregor Kiln.

  “I’ll check into him,” Duckworth said.

  “I don’t think this is related to the social-media outrage surrounding Jeremy,” Weaver said. “This Kiln has the ring of a professional about him.”

  “I’m on it.”

  “And I need another favor. A number I want you to check. It’s probably a burner, not traceable.”

  Duckworth reached for the pad and pen he always kept by the bed, tucked the phone between head and shoulder, and said, “Fire away.”

  Cal gave him the number.

  “Okay, I’ll get right on it.”

  “And assuming it is a burner, and we can’t attach a name to the phone, I’ve got something I want to try.”

  Cal told Duckworth what he wanted to do, and what he thought he might need from Duckworth to make it happen.

  “And I need you to talk to the locals here,” he added, “and have them keep a lid on things. At least for twelve hours.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Nothing gets out about what happened here beyond the fire.”

  “I said I’d do my best,” Duckworth said. “And I’ve got a favor to ask you.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “We’ve got a missing-woman case. Carol Beakman. I think her disappearance is linked to this Calder character.”

  Maureen suddenly sat up in bed.

  “What do you think’s happened to her?” Weaver asked.

  “I’m fearing the worst.”

  “Shoot me a picture. I’ll keep my eyes open.”

  “Will do
.”

  “Local cops are here,” Weaver said. “Gotta go. I’ll get the name of whoever’s in charge and text it to you.”

  “Good. How’s the kid?”

  “Jeremy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s okay,” Weaver said. “Can’t get into it now, but there’s something not right there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Later.”

  “Okay. And when the dust settles, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  “What?”

  “Later,” Duckworth said. He ended the call, set the phone down and stood up out of bed.

  “Carol?” Maureen said.

  “Nothing,” he said. “But Cal encountered Calder in Cape Cod. We know he’s been there, and still might be. I need to get on to the Mass state police.”

  Duckworth reached for his pants, pulled them on, then went to the closet for a fresh shirt.

  “What’s the thing you want to talk to him about?” Maureen asked.

  Duckworth found a white shirt that still had a cleaning tag attached and removed it from the hanger. “Career advice,” he said.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  AS Cory inserted the key into the cabin door, he considered ways to get rid of the body.

  He hadn’t thought things through very well when it came to his girlfriend. Carol’s car with Dolly’s body had to have been found by now. He should have taken more care, thought of a way that neither of those things would have been discovered for some time, if ever. He had to admit it. He’d panicked. Had he had more time to think things through, he could have run them off a bridge, for example. Left them at the bottom of a river.

  He needed to do something like that with Carol’s body.

  Once she was dead, he’d put her in the van and look for a suitable spot to dispose of her. Deep in a forest, say. Maybe he’d get lucky and find a shovel in the cabin somewhere that he could take with him. He’d dig a deep hole, toss her in, cover her up. Someone might find her some day, but it could be weeks, even years.

  At least now he had more time to do things properly. When he was getting rid of Dolly and Carol’s car, he was working to a deadline. He was on the trail of Jeremy Pilford and didn’t want to lose him.