Spiderstalk

by D. Nathan Hilliard

  ###

  “Going swimming?” Detective Rice asked, surveying the spectacle in front of him.

  Adam knew the combination of his swim trunks, his braces, his scars, and Ellen’s old Hello Kitty beach towel made for a ludicrous picture. On the other hand, he hadn’t been expecting company anyway, and saw no reason to worry about it now. He didn’t remember this swarthy, balding detective from his encounters with the Houston Police Department before, and wondered if he had been newly assigned to his brother’s case.

  “Actually, I was going to go down and take a therapeutic soak in the hot tub, but it can wait.”

  “No, that’s fine. It’s a nice day out and we can talk down there.”

  With a shrug, Adam closed the door behind him and worked his way down the stairs. Rice patiently followed, removing his jacket and throwing it over his shoulder. Adam’s apartment manager kept the complex shady and well manicured, so the walk was pleasant and not too difficult.

  “You seem to be getting around reasonably okay,” Rice observed as they crossed the parking lot. “All things considered, you seem to be recovering well.”

  “I suppose,” Adam grunted. “I keep telling myself I should feel lucky.”

  “You should. I saw the photos of the other victims of that crash. When your doctors said you were the only one to get pulled out in one piece, they meant it literally.”

  Adam wondered about Rice’s last statement. Why would a detective be looking at photos from the crash he had been involved in? What did his accident have to do with David’s disappearance?

  “Yeah,” he agreed as they reached the chain link fence surrounding the pool, “I know it could have been a lot worse. Sometimes I forget to remind myself of that.”

  Rice stepped ahead of him and reached the gate first. He opened it for Adam as he approached.

  For a second, Adam considered being insulted but then the strangest thought occurred. Could the detective be trying to provoke him? He could think of no reason why, but the very idea caused him to not give any outward response to the perceived slight. He simply went through the proffered gate and hobbled over to the hot tub.

  “So what can I do for you, Detective?” he inquired while easing down into a chair next to the hot tub, “Have you guys found something new about David?” He started the process of peeling back the Velcro straps on his braces, and carefully extracting his feet.

  “Not that I’m aware of, Mr. Sellars.” Detective Rice studied the process of Adam skinning the socks off and revealing his pallid feet. Atrophy had already started to make them appear to be pale copies of what you would find on a mummy in an Egyptian museum.

  “Not that you’re aware of?” Adam repeated, as he gently eased himself out of the chair and down to the edge of the hot tub. He raised his eyebrows inquiringly at the detective as he slid into the bubbling water.

  “No, sir. I’m not assigned to your brother’s case, although I did check on it before coming here. I’m a homicide detective.”

  That brought Adam up short.

  “Homicide?” His voice rose an octave. “You don’t mean to tell me…”

  “No, Mr. Sellars. I have no news regarding your brother. I’m here investigating the murder of Oscar Pennington.”

  Adam gaped at the detective.

  “Wait…what? Pennington is…is dead?” he stammered.

  “Yes, sir,” Rice said, “and we understand you were his current client.”

  An inkling of fear began to crawl in Adam’s gut. His private investigator was dead, apparently murdered, and a homicide detective had him cornered in a large tub of hot water. With his braces leaning over by the chair, he couldn’t have been any more trapped if he were already wearing cuffs and locked in a squad car.

  “Um…yes. Mr. Pennington was working for me,” Adam rallied. After all, he hadn’t killed Pennington or anybody else. “And I always forwarded all the leads and information he generated to Detective Aubrey. You can check with him.”

  “Already done, Mr. Sellars. We appreciate you keeping us abreast of your activities and not ‘going it alone,’ so to speak. At the same time, I have to ask…where were you the night before last, between seven and midnight?”

  Adam’s mind went blank, and for a panicked moment he felt painfully aware how much his pause made him look guilty of something. Then common sense reasserted itself and the obvious answer came out.

  “I…I was at home. The same place I always am.”

  The merry sound of the water bubbling contrasted sharply with the tension filling the air. It sure wasn’t doing a damn thing to relax him.

  “Do you have any witnesses to that effect?”

  “Witnesses?” Adam tried not to squeak. Witnesses would imply he entertained visitors, and nobody visited him. He tried to think of something, anything, to keep him from looking guiltier than he already looked. “Um…you could check with Miss Schaffer downstairs. She might have seen me, or at least heard me…Oh yes! She heard me fall around eight thirty and came out to check on me!”

  “You fell?” Detective Rice jotted notes in a little book.

  “Yes sir, it happens to me…a lot, I’m afraid.”

  “Were you on the Internet or the phone during that time?”

  Adam found himself sweating, and not solely due to the hot water. He couldn’t help but feel guilty, even though he mentally told himself he had done nothing wrong.

  “Ummm…yeah. I was surfing the Web for most of it.”

  To his surprise, his answer seemed to satisfy Detective Rice, and he nodded to Adam.

  “That should be easy enough to confirm. So why don’t you tell me in your own words about your last contact with Mr. Pennington.”

  The atmosphere lightened noticeably, and Adam sensed with enormous relief that his role had changed from suspect to witness. Cornering him in the tub like this had been a rotten thing to do, but he currently felt too happy to be out from under the cloud of suspicion to make an issue of it.

  “I got an email from him three days ago, on Monday. He said he had talked to the Sheriff and been passing out flyers around Hallisboro with pictures of David and his family on them. They had the number to his office on them, in case somebody wanted to call and report anything. Apparently, his secretary had called and told him that she received a tip from somebody claiming to have seen my nephew, Tucker. They were going to arrange to meet, and then Pennington was supposed to get back to me with the results. I haven’t heard from him since. Honestly, I was going to call his secretary tomorrow to cut off payment until he got in contact with me, because I was beginning to wonder if he was trying to run up the bill on me.”

  “No, sir,” Rice added as he wrote in his little book. “Oscar Pennington pretty much stuck to the straight and narrow when it came to dealing with his clients. His reputation was good for a reason.”

  “So can you tell me what happened to him?”

  Rice snapped his book shut and leaned back in his chair. The sound of the birds chirping and water bubbling once again seemed at odds with the content of their discussion.

  “I don’t have all the facts yet, so this is preliminary. The night before last, a fire was reported at the address of Pennington’s office. As you know, it’s a little wooden house beside the railroad tracks on Hardy Road. By the time rescue units arrived, the house was engulfed in flames. It took them half the night to put it out, and then they pulled two bodies from the wreckage, a man and a woman. The bodies were identified, with difficulty, as Oscar Pennington and his secretary Della Bradley.”

  “Could it have been an accident?”

  “No, sir. Fire investigators have already found evidence of an accelerant, and this morning we got preliminary results from the autopsy. There was no smoke in either of the victim’s lungs, meaning both of them were dead before the fire started. We don’t have an official cause of death yet.”

  “And you think it might have something to do with David’s case?”

  “Probably not,” R
ice rose from his seat. “Oscar Pennington was a private investigator. That means he’d made a list of enemies longer than your arm from cheating spouses alone. More than likely, one of them finally decided to get some payback over an unwanted divorce. It’s a hazard of the business.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about it.” The expression sounded lame to Adam’s ears even as he uttered it.

  “Yeah,” Detective Rice responded as he picked up his jacket. “Well, I’m sorry to have bothered you over this. I had to ask you those questions though.”

  “I understand.”

  “Goodbye, Mr. Sellars.” The detective slipped on his jacket, “I wish you all the luck in the world in finding your brother. Don’t lose hope, things have a way of turning up.”

  ###

  Detective Andrew Rice let himself out through the pool gate, and headed back across the sun-dappled parking lot toward his car.

  He’d never really considered Adam Sellars a suspect in the first place, but he possessed a penchant for being thorough. Sometimes the suspect you were ready to write off from the start turned out to be your man. In this case though, the victims had been found lying side by side, suggesting they had been moved and placed in their current positions.

  One look at Mr. Sellar’s legs ruled out the idea of him dragging Oscar Pennington’s 265 pound corpse around. The man was obviously hard pressed getting himself from place to place. Now, with Pennington’s current client removed from his list of suspects, he knew the real footwork would begin.

  Fortunately, Pennington’s killers hadn’t known that the detective’s secretary often worked from home and her computer’s hard drive had been a treasure trove. Rice’s notebook contained a list of suspects that spanned pages, all spouses of the private investigator’s former clients.

  As he reached his car, he looked up to see somebody standing at the top of the stairs next to Adam Sellars’ door. The man resembled nothing so much as a farmer in his late middle ages. A cap bearing the logo of some local agricultural company sat on his grey head, and he wore a long tan vinyl jacket over a faded pair of overalls. Detective Rice’s first guess was that he must be a handy man coming to repair an appliance or something.

  “Excuse me,” he called up, “you looking for Adam Sellars?”

  “Yep,” the oldster answered. “I hear he has a refrigerator busted, and I wanted to take a look at the thing.”

  Mildly pleased at guessing right, Rice gestured across the parking lot.

  “He’s over at the pool, if you need him to let you in.”

  “Thanks, Detective.”

  “No problem.”

  Rice got into his car and fired it up. Backing out of the parking space, he turned and accelerated around the long curving parking lot leading to the front gate. With his other hand, he fished out and flipped open his little case book.

  The next name on his list was the first he counted as a real suspect.

  “Buddy Murdoch,” the detective muttered to himself, “sponged off his wealthy wife while seeing a stripper on the side. Not very smart there, Buddy. She hires Pennington to track him, and he catches old Buddy doing a strip act of his own at a local hotel. A few pictures later and Buddy is out on his keister, and having to relearn what working for a living is all about. Two former convictions of assault, and one charge of assault with a deadly weapon that got pleaded down.”

  Now Buddy sounded like his kind of suspect. Motive…means…and a history of problems with anger management. These days, Buddy lived in a trailer with a couple of other lowlifes, in a shabby little trailer park off of FM 1960. He would remember to request a squad car to loiter around the entrance to the trailer park in case Buddy decided to make a run for it.

  Pulling up to the exit of the apartment complex, Rice stopped the car as the automatic gate slid open before him. He tapped his finger on the wheel, trying to get a bead on an annoying feeling in the back of his head…a feeling he had experience with before.

  “Okay, what’s wrong?” he muttered to himself. “What am I missing?”

  He sat there at the gate, letting his car idle. Instinct played as much a role in his job as intellect, and his instincts were trying to tell him something. Something important. Something about that handyman.

  The handyman with no tools.

  The handyman who called him “Detective” despite the fact he had neither identified himself as a police officer or a detective in any way.

  ###

  As Adam watched the detective leave he decided he’d had enough hot water for one day.

  Levering himself up by his arms, he positioned himself so he sat on the edge of the hot tub with the swimming pool behind him. Then he simply “scooched” himself backwards until he reached his destination. Since he was now alone he decided dignity wasn’t an issue. Pivoting himself on his bottom, he slid his legs into the pool.

  Even though the water lay tepid under the Texas sun, it felt blissfully cool after the bubbling cauldron of the hot tub. Adam slid the rest of his body into the pool, and started working his way down the edge to the deeper end. Once the water reached his chin, he let go of the side and closed his eyes.

  Buoyed up by the water, he spread his arms and used small motions of his hands to keep him in place. As long as he stood still he could create the illusion in his mind that his legs functioned as they did before the wreck…that he was again the man who once ran an interception back for a touchdown for the University of Houston, and could take the stairs two or three at a time at the refineries and offshore oil rigs he worked the past eight years. His body weight felt right for the first time in months, and the effort from his legs to maintain his stance felt normal. Only when he moved his legs would the water drag against his limp feet, threatening to cut them out from under him.

  So he half floated there, motionless, fantasizing for one blissful moment he was whole again. That the past nine months were a lie. He imagined he could crawl out of the pool and stride back to his apartment without the aid of awkward braces or supporting cane. Perhaps jog up the stairs to his apartment, or run over to the tennis courts.

  Oh God, to be able to run again.

  It wasn’t fair.

  He still had places to run. He still wanted to dance, to jump, to walk a supermarket without needing to push a cart for support! Where the hell was modern medical science? How could he be consigned to unsteadily shuffle his way through the world for the rest of his life? How could this happen to him? When did he get his do-over, next time to react a split second sooner and avoid that tumbling wreckage in front of him? When was he going to wake up from this?

  Adam realized his breathing had become ragged, and forced himself to calm down. This kind of thing didn’t help, and only pushed him toward an event he had no desire to experience. He knew he needed to accept the current reality, and find a way to go forward with all the grace he could muster. Figuring out how to do it was the hard part.

  He still floated there, eyes closed and emotions warring within him, when he heard the gate open.

  Idly cracking one eye, he saw a man in a large tan work jacket and a faded pair of overalls enter the pool area. His work boots were scuffed and worn, and he wore a crumpled old cap on his head. He appeared to be somewhere in his sixties, and looked as though he had spent his life out working in the sun. Scanning the area, the rustic spotted where Adam floated in the pool and immediately headed his way.

  Both of Adam’s eyes flew open when he saw the man pull what appeared to be a short, double barreled shotgun out from under his jacket.

  What the hell!?

  “Adam Sellars.” The man spoke it as a statement, not a query.

  He strode toward Adam as he cracked the breach of the shotgun and reached into his pocket. His hands were as weathered as his face, wrinkled and brown from long exposure to the elements. His walk and all of his motions were those of a man who approached the world with no thought to style or artifice…merely as a man who moved from one task to the next.

&nbs
p; Sudden terror rocked Adam like a punch to the gut.

  “Wh-wh-what do you want?” His voice cracked as he tried to come to terms with this new development.

  “I’m sorry about this, son. I really and truly am.”

  The old man had the kindest and saddest eyes, but he loaded the shotgun with the efficient skill of somebody who had used it all his life. He plucked the shells out of his pocket and casually rammed them into their chambers without even looking.

  “Wait! I don’t even know you!” Adam gasped as he tried to pull himself further out into the pool.

  “I know. It’s not your fault, but this has to be done.” The intruder stared sorrowfully down at him as he snapped the breech closed. It sounded uncomfortably like a coffin lid locking shut. “I don’t blame you. I would have probably done the exact same thing if I had been in your place. I like to think so anyway.”

  “Bu- but wait!”

  “If it’s any consolation,” the man continued with a tone of true regret in his voice, “your brother and his wife didn’t suffer much. And the boy is going to be okay. He’s still shook up, any kid would be after what he witnessed. But he’s going to make it. We’re taking care of him, just like he were one of our own.”

  He raised the shotgun to take aim…

  “FREEZE! DROP THAT GUN INTO THE POOL! RIGHT NOW!”

  Shocked again, Adam twisted his head to see Detective Rice leaning over the pool gate, both hands braced with his pistol trained on the old man. The cavalry had arrived. And for the briefest of instances, he thought it would all work out okay.

  But the man with the shotgun didn’t stop.

  The rustic continued to raise the gun, his expression full of sorrow and regret, and took aim. The idea of having a large pistol pointed at him didn’t seem to register, or bother him in the least if it did.

  To Adam’s horror, he found himself staring down two enormous dark tunnels of steel, while some voice in the back of his mind screamed at him to do something…anything!