A Tooth for a Tooth

by Ben Rehder

  “You don’t think there’s any chance he just decided to haul ass?” I asked. I used a tone of voice that said, hey, this is just between you and me. I won’t tell anyone. Promise.

  “Zero chance of that,” Raul said. “None at all. Where would he go? All his friends are here. Besides, if I thought he was hiding out, I wouldn’t be talking to you.”

  “And I wouldn’t blame you. Friends stick together.”

  “Damn right.”

  “Did he ever mention anyone who was mad at him? Anybody who might want to harm him or get back at him for anything?”

  “Nah, man, except for his boss, obviously.” Raul said. “Jablonkski or whatever it is.”

  “Jankowski.”

  “Yeah, that’s it. He’s the one you should be looking at. He probably had somebody do it.”

  “I talked to his mom earlier today and she said Brent talked about having some kind of way out of his troubles with Jankowski—something that would make Jankowski drop the charges. You happen to know what that might’ve meant?”

  “You mean after he got injured in the scam?”

  Of course I did. Why would Brent be talking about a way out before his scam went south?

  “That’s right,” I said. “After the scam. Jankowski was coming after him hard, but Brent assured his mother he had a way to make all of his troubles go away.”

  “But he didn’t say what it was?” Raul asked.

  “I’m sure you can figure out the answer to that one, Raul,” I said, maybe a little too sharply.

  “Dude, I’m, like, trying to help.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Be patient with me.”

  “Of course.”

  “The answer is no, I don’t know anything about that. He was probably just saying that to make his mom feel better. That’s the type of thing he would do.”

  So Brent Donovan had disappeared. So what? How did that help me with the Lennox Armbruster case? Who’s to say it was connected?

  My thoughts turned again to Brandi Sloan. Had she reappeared?

  I knew from my years working in offices, such as the news station, that the receptionist always knows everything that is going on with the employees. Affairs. Divorces. Medical issues. Legal problems. Drug use. Who’s about to quit or get fired. The receptionist either hears about these things outright or can piece it together from incoming phone calls, mail, and overheard conversations. They are the eyes and ears of the organization.

  Had Brandi Sloan learned something she wasn’t supposed to know? If so, had something happened to her, or had she had the sense to get the hell out of there?

  Surely the police were looking into this by now. They had the authority to monitor her cell phone and bank cards. Should I tell them I suspected a connection between the Brent Donovan case and her disappearance—and, hey, by the way, maybe it had something to do with Lennox Armbruster, too?

  Yeah, right. I needed more than that. I wasn’t even convinced myself.

  Start at the beginning…

  Brent Donovan came up with a stupid scam and got exposed. Subsequently, Joe Jankowski wanted him prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Then Brent disappeared. No warning. No traces left behind. Just gone. And the consensus from his mother and friends was that Brent had not gone on the run, and something had happened to him.

  Why? By whom?

  I couldn’t answer the first part, but I could guess the second part.

  But why would Jankowski harm Brent Donovan when it appeared Donovan was going to be prosecuted for his scam? To make an example out of him? Maybe it was simply because Jankowski was an ill-tempered asshole. He got angry and did something rash. Or had someone do it for him.

  How did Lennox Armbruster fit in? No frigging idea.

  I was too tired to think straight.

  I woke at 2:23 in the morning. Didn’t need to take a leak. So what had stirred me?

  I lay quietly and listened. Five minutes passed. Nothing.

  Started to doze off again, but then I heard something. Just a soft, unidentifiable sound, like any old house makes many times in the night. Nothing unusual about it. Could be floorboards contracting, or the wind gently pushing against the siding, or the weight of water in the pipes in the walls.

  Damn it.

  I climbed from bed, slowly and quietly, and put on some sweatpants and a T-shirt that I’d draped over a chair. Then I went to my dresser and opened the second drawer. There, nestled under some sweaters, was a Mossberg pistol-grip pump-action 12-gauge I’d bought for home protection. This particular model had only recently become legal in Texas. Loaded with double-ought buckshot—one in the chamber, five in the tube. Less than thirty inches long.

  I stood there in the semi-darkness, the Mossberg cradled in my hands, and listened. Five more minutes passed. Still, nothing. I retreated quietly to my nightstand and grabbed my phone with my left hand, still holding the Mossberg in my right.

  Opened the app for my security cameras. Clicked the window for the camera on the front porch. Started with a live view. Nobody out there. Scrolled through the timeline, looking for activity in the past several hours. Nothing unusual. Cars passing on the street every now and then. An occasional moth flying past.

  Clicked the window for the camera on the back porch. Live view showed nothing there, either. So I scrolled through the timeline and saw a man in a ski mask on the porch seven minutes earlier. He had approached the back door, tried the knob, found it locked, then disappeared to the left side of the camera, moving counter-clockwise around the house, toward Regina’s house. When he walked away, I could see a handgun dangling from his right hand.

  Call the cops. Call 911.

  Nope. I wanted to handle this one myself.

  I slipped my phone into the pocket of my sweatpants and moved slowly from the bedroom into the hallway, shotgun aimed ahead of me. The alarm system would alert me if the guy had breached a door or window. It was top dollar. Hard to get around, especially for anyone who doesn’t circumvent alarm systems regularly.

  I stopped in the short hallway and listened some more. The heater shut off and the place was quiet.

  Think like him. What would he do after he found the back door locked?

  Go around the perimeter of the house and check the windows. They’d all be locked. Okay, what next?

  If his job was to kill me, he couldn’t just give up and leave. Breaking in would be too noisy. I would hear him coming. So what would he do?

  Try to lure me out. Or to a window. Make me show myself and present a target. He’d make a noise. Something that would make me curious, but not suspicious.

  I waited some more. There was no value in moving around the house. I wasn’t going to peek out any windows or open any doors, so it was better to stay put. Wait for him to make his move.

  I checked the cameras again. Nothing. Made a mental note to add even more cameras to the perimeter of the house, including the sides. Should’ve done that already. Stupid. Needed to cover every possible angle.

  A few minutes later, the heater kicked on again. That would mask any soft, subtle sounds. Stupid of me, because I was standing right beside the thermostat. I reached over and lowered the target temperature several degrees. In thirty seconds or so, the unit would shut down again.

  Still waiting. Maybe the intruder had called it off. Lost his nerve. Good chance of that, unless he was a pro. Pros don’t just give up and go away without good reason.

  The heater shut down again.

  It was now 2:34.

  Checked the cameras again. Nobody in front, nobody in back. That I could see.

  Maybe he really had gone away.

  Then I heard the sound—very loud—and I’ll admit it made me jump.

  Cats fighting just outside
my bedroom window, between my house and Regina’s. For maybe a quarter of a second, I bought into it. That’s how realistic it sounded. Yowling like you wouldn’t believe.

  I let ten seconds pass.

  I took a deep breath.

  Then walked back to the bedroom doorway and turned on the light. That’s what I would normally do if cats actually were having a fight outside my window.

  Then I moved quickly but quietly down the hallway, through the living room, still in darkness, and eased the back door open. I stepped outside onto the back porch. Slowly. So glad it was concrete and not a wooden deck that might squeak or groan under my weight.

  The catfight was even louder now—and it didn’t sound quite right. Out here, without the walls as a buffer, it was more obvious that the sounds were artificial—coming from the man’s phone, most likely.

  I wanted to give my eyes time to adjust, but I couldn’t afford to wait. I stepped from the porch onto the cool grass, the Mossberg extended in front of me, and made my way toward the corner of the house.

  The yowling stopped.

  I reached the corner and paused. Then very slowly peeked around.

  The man in the ski mask was ten feet from my window, the handgun extended in front of him, gripping it with both hands. Waiting for me to show. The light from the window was washing over him, even through the curtains. What an idiot. It also meant he had light in his eyes—not a lot, but enough to prevent him from seeing me, should he look this way. Which he would, real soon.

  I had been in situations like this before, and it makes the adrenaline flow, but this time, I was oddly calm. Confident. I had him. No question.

  Staying where I was, the corner of the house providing protection, I pointed the shotgun at his midsection and said, very firmly, “Don’t move!”

  Know what he did? He moved.

  He swung toward me with his revolver and I had no choice.

  I pulled the trigger.

  16

  Helpful tip: Don’t shoot anyone if you need to be anywhere soon, because your next four or five hours are going to be occupied, at a minimum. Maybe several years or even decades, if the cops and the DA decide the shooting wasn’t justified.

  The detective assigned to the case was named Randy Wolfe. I’d never met him, but that might’ve been the point. Give the case to someone who’d had no dealings with me before, positive or negative.

  “So what happened tonight?” Wolfe asked. “Walk me through it.”

  We were seated in a small, windowless interview room inside Austin Police Department headquarters. Obviously, I’d already told my story—the highlights, anyway—to several people, including the 911 dispatcher and the initial responding officer, who had turned out to be Ursula Broward. Of course, she was followed by several more, because that’s what happens when you shoot someone. Then the crime scene techs arrive, and several members of upper brass, and sometimes the medical examiner.

  “Is he dead?” I asked. I was feeling nauseous. Somewhat lightheaded. Still adrenalized.

  “We’ll get to that,” Wolfe said.

  “That means he’s dead, right?” I said. “Who was it?”

  I knew it wasn’t Damon Tate. The guy I’d shot had been shorter than Tate. Smaller.

  “Go ahead and tell me what happened,” Wolfe said. Easygoing demeanor. Not pushy.

  He was in his mid-forties. Thinning hair, with a goatee. Maybe six feet tall. Dressed in jeans and a blue polo shirt, with his badge and revolver clipped to his belt. Slender, but well muscled, like a triathlete or distance runner. I’d gotten the sense, in just a few minutes, that he was keenly intelligent and competent. Could be wrong.

  I said, “I woke up—still don’t know why, maybe a noise—around two-twenty or so. Checked my security cameras and saw that a man wearing a ski mask and carrying a gun had been on my back porch a few minutes earlier.”

  I was expecting him to ask a very obvious question right here, but he didn’t ask it. He let me keep talking.

  I said, “So I grabbed my Mossberg and waited to see what might happen next. I kept watching the cameras, but I didn’t see him again. I don’t have cameras on the sides of the house—just front and back.”

  “Where were you at this point?”

  “In the hallway just outside the master bedroom. I shut off the heater so I could hear better.”

  He nodded, as if he thought that was a smart move.

  I said, “Nothing happened for probably six or eight more minutes, and then I heard the sound of cats fighting just outside the bedroom window.”

  “The master bedroom?”

  “Right. But I knew it wasn’t really cats. He was playing a recording on his phone—trying to get me to part the curtains and look out.”

  “How did you know this?”

  “Gut instinct. It just didn’t sound real.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I turned the bedroom light on, because that’s what he would expect, and then I hustled down the hallway and out the back door. When I peeked around the corner, he was waiting there with the gun fully extended, aiming at the window. He was waiting there to shoot me. I yelled—told him not to move—but he swung around with the gun and I had no choice. I shot once and that was enough. He dropped his gun immediately and fell to the ground.”

  “It’s a twelve gauge?”

  “Right.”

  “Buckshot?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded again. “Why didn’t you call 911 before you went outside?”

  There it was. The obvious question. Could be a legal minefield.

  “I wanted to handle it myself. I’m within my rights to respond to an armed man on my property. Standing my ground, right? He was a danger to me, and if I’d waited for an officer to arrive, he could’ve been gone by then, at which point he might’ve been a danger to my neighbors, too. Or he could’ve come back later. I had the element of surprise, knowing he was there, so I wanted to take advantage of it. But I didn’t want to kill him.”

  Wolfe didn’t argue the point.

  “Do your security cameras record to a DVR or stream to the cloud?”

  “The cloud.”

  Smart question. Video on a DVR could be deleted fairly easily and quickly, whereas video on the cloud, not so much.

  “We’ll need that video,” he said.

  “Absolutely. I’ll get you a copy.”

  See how cooperative I was?

  “Tell me what was going through your mind as you made your way outside,” he said.

  Trying to get me to say the wrong thing. That was his job, to some extent.

  “I just wanted to catch him and hold him until the police arrived. I would’ve much rather had it happen that way. I didn’t want to shoot him, but he forced the situation.”

  Which was all true.

  “How much time elapsed between the time you told him to drop his gun and your shot?”

  “It was immediate. He spun toward me and I shot.”

  “Could there have been some other explanation for his sudden move? Maybe he was simply surprised.”

  “No. No way. He was turning to shoot me. No question about it. He led with the barrel.”

  “It was pretty dark on that side of the house,” Wolfe said. “Are you sure you could see what—”

  “I saw the gun in his hand,” I said. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but there was plenty of light for me to see the gun. There was no question in my mind about that. And you’ll see the gun clearly on the video from the porch.”

  I didn’t want a prosecutor to claim later that I’d seen the gun after I’d shot the guy.

  “What happened after the shot?” Wolfe said.

  “He dropped his weapon and fell to the ground. I stayed at th
e corner of the house, watching, to make sure he didn’t reach for the gun again. There was a little bit of movement, and some unpleasant sounds, and then nothing else.”

  “What kinds of unpleasant sounds?”

  “Coughing. Gurgling. He sang part of a Barry Manilow song.”

  He raised an eyebrow at me.

  “Just trying to lighten the mood,” I said. “I’m kind of shaken up, to be honest.”

  “Understandable. So he didn’t actually say anything?”

  “He did not.”

  Right now, as we were having this conversation, I knew my house was cordoned off with yellow tape and crawling with police personnel. The curb in front of our house would be crowded with marked and unmarked vehicles. All the commotion would wake the neighbors on both sides of the street. I’d sent Mia a lengthy text earlier, explaining the situation, so she wouldn’t hear it first from someone else and wonder if I was even alive. I’d stressed that I was fine and she shouldn’t worry and I’d be in touch ASAP.

  “Did you approach him?” Wolfe asked.

  I noticed he didn’t say “the body.” Might mean something. Or not.

  “No, I stayed right where I was at the corner of the house and called 911.”

  “You had your phone with you?”

  “I did.”

  “Were you holding it and the shotgun at the same time?”

  “It was in the pocket of my sweatpants. I was wearing sweatpants. No shirt, no shoes.”

  In these interviews, no detail is too small. That’s how they determine if you are telling a consistent story. Would I mention the sweatpants later, or say I was wearing something else?

  “So you shot him and then called 911?”

  “Right.”

  “How quickly after the shot?”

  “Within thirty seconds. After it appeared he wasn’t going to move.”