I bring him up to date as quickly and as accurately as I can. I don’t tell him why I suspect what has happened, and he doesn’t ask. There is time for that later, whether I’m right or wrong.
All he asks is why we are at the girls’ camp if we think McKinney is at the boys’ version. “Jessie’s niece,” I say.
Nate and I walk to the tennis courts. We both have our flashlights, so it is not difficult to see the opening in the woods that Callie told Jessie about. It is a foot wide at most, just about big enough for one of Nate’s legs.
“We’re going to walk through that?” Nate asks.
“It gets wider.”
“It better.”
The walk through the woods takes about seven minutes, but it feels like a month. All I can think about is Jessie and what she might be doing. I hope it does not include going into that restaurant, but I know that if she thinks it’s necessary to do that, she will. She and I are different in one important respect: She’s my fiancée, but I sure as hell don’t want to be in her obituary.
We finally make it through to the boys’ camp. It is almost identical to the girls’ side in that there are the same six buildings, set up the same way, starting with the dining hall closest to the lake. That is the only building with a light on, so I’m certain that’s where McKinney is.
That is also the building that, on the girls’ side, had the pay phone.
Jessie had no idea how she would accomplish clearing the restaurant.
But she was positive that the first thing she should do is get in the car and drive there. It was about twenty minutes away, and as long as she had her phone with her, she could spend the twenty minutes as productively in the car as at home.
Jessie had always been outstanding under pressure. Things slow down in front of her; she sees situations clearly and acts decisively. That had always come naturally to her, and she had always thought of it as a gift she was lucky to receive.
Now it would matter like it never had before.
Her first call is to the sergeant on call at the station desk. She explains the situation in very few words, but leaves out nothing. He should get every available cop to the restaurant, as well as the bomb squad. And the cops should do whatever is necessary to clear that restaurant of people. The entire call took approximately twenty seconds.
Her next call is to the restaurant to warn them. At first she planned to identify herself, explain the situation, and insist that they evacuate. As the woman at the restaurant is answering and Jessie is about to open her mouth, she changes her mind.
There is just no time to follow the proper procedure. She is going to do something that could get her into trouble, but the possible alternative is too grim to contemplate.
“Listen, you son of a bitch bastard,” she says, in as harsh a tone as she can muster. “I’ve set a bomb to go off in your restaurant in seven minutes. You hear me? Seven minutes! Your ass is mine! The revolution is here!”
Click.
Our flashlights are off as we head for the building.
It’s easy to find our way, there’s enough moonlight to allow us to see quite well. Of course, that same moonlight would let McKinney see us approaching, and that will get even worse when we get close enough for the light of the building to illuminate us even more.
But we can’t worry about that now; this is no time for subtlety. We are here to take him down, not play games.
Our plan is for Nate to take the back door while I take the side door. That will bring me into the area just outside the kitchen, where the pay phone was in the girls’ building. Everything else so far has been the same, so I hope and assume this is no different. Although I obviously would rather there is no pay phone here at all.
I slowly turn the doorknob and find out that it is unlocked. In fact, there may not be a lock on it at all; there would be no reason to worry about a thief entering a camp dining hall. The food is generally not that good.
But I’m going to have to open the door, slowly and carefully, and there is a strong likelihood that it is going to squeak or make noise in some fashion. There is no way around that, and it is still preferable to bursting in without knowing what is on the other side.
With my handgun in my right hand, I use my left to open the door as slowly and quietly as I can, scanning the room as more of it comes into my line of sight.
“Good evening, Lieutenant. Welcome to the dining hall,” McKinney says. “Party of one?”
He is sitting on a stool at the pay phone. He has a gun in one hand, and his other one is poised over the push buttons. “I’m going to assume you know quite a bit if you took the trouble to join me here tonight. I’ve dialed six of the seven digits; I further assume you know what happens if I dial the seventh.”
The reservations clerk at the restaurant was not quite as calm in a crisis as Jessie.
Her initial reaction was to scream and start to cry uncontrollably. The scream might have been loud enough to attract the attention of the manager if he was in Connecticut, but that wasn’t necessary, since he was about five feet away from her.
“She said there’s a bomb in here … in seven minutes! She said we’re all going to die!”
“Take it easy. Who said that?”
“Some lady! She was horrible. She said there’s a bomb in seven minutes, and we’re all going to die in a revolution!”
This is the first time the manager had ever faced this situation, and it was certainly an inopportune time. The restaurant was packed, and there was a class reunion party in the banquet room.
But while he never had to deal with this before, he had undergone sufficient training for all kinds of emergencies, from bomb scares to live shootings. There was no doubt what he had to do, regardless of the unpleasantness it caused his patrons. He was not afraid of a potential bomb; the chance that the threat was real was quite small. But failure to do what he had been instructed to do could cost him his job, and that he was afraid of.
There was an interior alarm in the restaurant, planned mostly for fire alerts, but which could be manually triggered. He set it off, causing a high-pitched intermittent series of audio blasts.
“Ladies and gentleman, everybody please get up and leave the restaurant in an orderly fashion! Please, carefully and safely, but you must leave now. This is an emergency!”
The waitstaff, similarly trained in these procedures, started to clear patrons from the restaurant, even though most of them had no idea why. The ones assigned to the reunion banquet went into that room to get those people to leave as well.
The patrons, worried but not understanding, did not move as quickly as instructed. Some went back for their handbags, some resentfully delayed simply because they did not want their dinner interrupted. The slower they moved, the more insistent the restaurant employees became.
No one had any idea how little time was left.
“There are fifty cops outside this building,” I say.
McKinney laughs in response. “Right, but they sent you in alone. I can then only assume your colleagues must agree with me that you are very unlikable.”
“They think I can talk some sense into you. There’s nothing to gain by keeping this going.”
“I’ll feel more comfortable continuing this conversation with your gun on the floor, Lieutenant. Now.”
“You do the same.”
“Lieutenant…,” he says. His tone is warning, but the fact that he moves his hand closer to the phone in a threatening manner is motivating. I put my gun on the floor.
“Nicely done,” he says. “And you’re wrong; I have everything to gain. You think you know everything, but you know nothing.”
Nate, where the hell are you?
“I know that you killed Danny Phelan, and Julie Phelan, and either killed or directed the murder of all the others.”
He smiles, then looks quickly at his watch. “And do you know why?”
I’m torn here. If I say that I know about the insurance scheme, he will have to a
ssume I’ve told others, and that his plan will never work. It might cause him to dial that last number in anger, or even more likely, shoot me.
If I pretend not to know his plan, then maybe I can keep this conversation going for a while, at least until my enormous goddamn partner can manage to get in here. His door was probably locked, and he’s no doubt trying to find another way in without making noise.
“I know all about your ridiculous insurance scam, you sack of shit,” I say, changing my mind in the moment. I can see him react, flinching as the realization hits him.
I continue, “The whole world knows about it. You press that button and that whole world will track you down; there will be nowhere for you to escape. Don’t do it and you can walk out of here and get under whatever rock you planned to hide under.”
He looks at his watch again, and for the first time I can see worry in his face. If I’m right, then he has no control over what is going to happen; he can detonate the bomb with a phone call, but he has no way to prevent the timer from detonating it on its own.
The next look on his face tells me that I’ve misjudged the situation. He knows the bomb will go off, and that he will have to run. So he wants to do it now, and he wants to do it without me being around to witness it and talk about it.
“Goodbye, Lieutenant, I need to be going.”
He raises his gun to fire, and I dive to the left as the shot goes off. I look up to see that the shot was not fired by McKinney at all, but by Nate. McKinney won’t be cashing any insurance checks, ever again.
Nate walks toward me, obviously pleased with himself.
“Where the hell were you that it took you so long? Going for a swim?” I ask.
“We’re even,” he says.
“Yes, we are,” I say, and I go to the pay phone to find out what is happening at the reunion.
Jessie is very relieved to find what looks like two hundred people outside the restaurant.
She pulls her car as close as she can get; which is adjacent to three state police cars already there. She runs toward the restaurant, screaming at the cops, “Is everybody out?”
Suddenly she hears a woman yell, “My husband is still in there.”
Without so much as pausing, Jessie continues running into the restaurant. Once inside, she doesn’t see anyone, and runs from room to room yelling, looking for anyone left behind.
She still sees no one and, thinking the woman must have gotten separated from her husband in the chaos, goes toward the exit. As she passes the men’s room, the door opens and Morris Feldman, a sixty-seven-year-old grandfather of four, comes out. He looks around, bewildered, at the restaurant, entirely empty except for Jessie. “Where is everybody?”
“Come on, we’ve got to get out,” Jessie yells, grabbing Morris by the hand. They run out the door, her pulling him on his arm, but his legs unable to match her speed.
They run toward the cops and patrons, all standing along a perimeter about fifty yards away. They’ve gone twenty of those yards when the building behind them explodes, the impact hurling them to the ground.
Some small shards of glass hit them in the back, causing bloody but not life-threatening injuries. Jessie turns to her running mate and says, “What’s your name?”
He is obviously shaken and in some pain, but manages, “Morris.”
She nods. “Morris, if I were you, I wouldn’t leave a tip.”
Jessie and Morris stay in the hospital for two days.
Luckily for them, the glass shards did not do significant damage, but the cuts are fairly deep, and they need to be on IV antibiotics to ward off potential infection.
I visit her as much as I can, though the aftermath of the McKinney situation forces me to be in the office most of the time. I also have to spend some time caring for Bobo, who stares continuously at me as if to say, “If you did anything to my mother, your ass is mine.”
Not much has come out to shed any further light on the situation; McKinney is the one who knows all the answers, and he won’t be doing any more talking.
But I’ve thought about it, and I think I know what precipitated Gero taking a shot at me, and McKinney capturing Julie and keeping her imprisoned with her father. I think that all happened when Julie promised that she would give me some of her father’s papers. There must be something in there that would have somehow tipped us off.
We haven’t tracked those papers down yet to whatever storage area Julie had them in, but eventually we will, and maybe we’ll learn more.
We’ve also learned from the amazing Lieutenant Anderson that McKinney was the one transferred into the unit when Phelan went out. That was the “trade.” So while Phelan would not have known McKinney, that’s how McKinney came to know Gero and Scanlon.
The entire case has left me shaken in a way that Jessie and Nate would say is inconsistent with the “old me.” I think that is partially because of the danger I sent Jessie into; I don’t know how I could ever have dealt with it if something terrible had happened.
Mixed in with all this is tangible relief that Phelan turned out not to have been the guilty party. It means that my letting him off the hook for Brookings was not the cause of the subsequent deaths.
Jessie is being hailed by the media as a hero, and rightfully so. She saved a lot of people with some damn quick thinking. And my guess is she’ll be crowned Queen of the Reunion.
When I go to pick her up to bring her home, I get a little emotional and even discover a lump in my throat. It’s not a feeling I’ve often experienced.
“Jessie, I don’t know what I—”
She cuts me off. “We’re a pretty damn good team,” she says.
Yeah, we are.
I’m attending an evening gathering to honor Danny and Julie Phelan.
In my experience, it’s the first memorial event held in a sports bar, but Andy Carpenter is hosting it and no doubt paying for it. Not surprisingly, it’s at Charlie’s, his favorite hangout, so it will also have the best French fries and beer in the history of memorial tributes.
I haven’t spoken to Andy since the Phelans were killed. He comes over to me as soon as I enter and says, “Welcome. Glad you could make it.”
“Interesting choice of venues.”
“Actually, Danny and I had all our meetings here; he loved the burgers. I think he would approve of the choice. And Julie would have happily gone along with anything her father wanted.”
“I’m sorry it had to end the way it did,” I say.
He nods. “Me, too. They were good people who could have used better breaks along the way.”
Andy had been telling me all along that Danny was innocent, but he’s not throwing in any I told you sos now. I respect and appreciate that, even coming from a defense attorney.
I see Pete Stanton and Vince Sanders at their regular table, eating and drinking. “How come they’re here?” I ask. “Did they even know the Phelans?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Andy says. “They would have attended services for Osama bin Laden if the beer and food were free.”
“Let me ask you something,” I say. “I think McKinney was worried that Julie was going to turn over some of Danny’s papers that she had in storage. It worried him enough to precipitate his capturing her and taking a shot at me. You have any idea what that could have been about?”
He thinks for a moment and then says, “I’m not sure, but Danny had been in and out of drug treatment for a very long time. A therapist once told him that keeping a daily journal would help him ‘stay in the moment,’ whatever the hell that means. But he did it for many years.”
“Interesting, but still doesn’t tell me what’s in there.”
“Could have been his relationship with Gero and Scanlon, which had been bad ever since the army. They thought Danny ratted them out on some drug stuff. He didn’t, but that’s why he was willing to leave that unit.”
“I wish I would have known that,” I say.
“Would it have changed things?”
&n
bsp; “Probably not.”
“Then have a beer and toast their memory. And don’t beat yourself up. You did good,” he says, and then adds, “For a cop.”
ALSO BY DAVID ROSENFELT
ANDY CARPENTER NOVELS
Deck the Hounds
Rescued
Collared
The Twelve Dogs of Christmas
Outfoxed
Who Let the Dog Out?
Hounded
Unleashed
Leader of the Pack
One Dog Night
Dog Tags
New Tricks
Play Dead
Dead Center
Sudden Death
Bury the Lead
First Degree
Open and Shut
THRILLERS
Fade to Black
Blackout
Without Warning
Airtight
Heart of a Killer
On Borrowed Time
Down to the Wire
Don’t Tell a Soul
NONFICTION
Lessons from Tara: Life Advice from the World’s Most Brilliant Dog
Dogtripping: 25 Rescues, 11 Volunteers, and 3 RVs on Our Canine Cross-Country Adventure
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAVID ROSENFELT is the Edgar and Shamus Award—nominated author of ten previous stand-alone novels and eighteen Andy Carpenter novels, most recently Deck the Hounds. After years of living in California, he and his wife moved to Maine with the twenty-five golden retrievers that they’ve rescued. Rosenfelt’s hilarious account of this cross-country move, Dogtripping, and his moving memoir of the dog that inspired his love affair with dogs, Lessons from Tara, are both published by St. Martin’s Press. You can sign up for email updates here.
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