Gone Ballistic (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

“I’m thinking of going home now,” I said. “I need to decompress, spend an afternoon with my puppy.”

  “He’s not a puppy. He’s a sixty-five pound dog.”

  “And still growing. Just come over when you get off work. You can sit on the couch and watch me do aerobics.”

  “I’ll bring take-out. What would you like?”

  I told him to surprise me. When I’d hung up, I called Rodney Burns on his cell. “Where are you?” I asked him.

  “I’m working.” After a moment he continued, “I do get other jobs, you know. Fortunately for me.”

  “So what does this other client have you doing?”

  “I hate to tell you.”

  I waited.

  “I’m parked outside a bank on Midlothian Turnpike waiting to see who one of the loan officers takes to lunch. If he goes to lunch, that is. His wife seems to think. . .” He trailed off.

  “That he’s meeting someone for a nooner? Rodney Burns! You’re off stirring up marital problems.”

  “I think of it as exposing marital problems that were there already. Did you need something?”

  “Do you have a home address for Carter Fox?”

  “No. Have you tried the internet?”

  “I guess I will. You sound like you’re going to be busy awhile.”

  “I could look it up for you on my phone.”

  “I’ll do it.” I hung up, but didn’t reach for my computer mouse. I could do an internet search from home as well as from my office. The more pressing question was whether I wanted to eat lunch before I went home. I was hungry for food, but I was also hungry for home. I tucked my laptop and the subpoena for Carter Fox into my briefcase and headed out.

  I got to my parking garage, but stopped on the sidewalk just outside the stairwell. I was looking for Carter Fox—suppose he was looking for me, too? An image came to me of him sitting on the steps in the dim light of the stairwell with a baseball bat resting on his shoulder. Carter was a small, flabby-looking man, but that didn’t mean I wanted to meet him on the stairs.

  I looked up and down 9th Street. At the corner, a man crossed on Cary Street, walking along the sidewalk. A couple of cars went by just beyond him, an SUV and a sedan. Back on Main was a steady flow of traffic. A light had turned. As nonthreatening as all that looked, it told me nothing about what was waiting for me on the stairs.

  I bypassed the stairs, continuing down the hill to Cary Street and turning toward the automotive entrance to the garage. It was too warm a day to go slogging up and around one level after another, and by the time I got to my car, I was perspiring freely. I imagined Carter Fox sitting in the dim light of the garage’s stairwell, hot and thirsty and increasingly hungry as he waited for me to show. I didn’t really think he was there, but the image gave me a grim satisfaction.

  I glanced at the door to the stairwell as I opened my car door and tucked my briefcase behind the driver’s seat. I was being paranoid, I knew, but even paranoids have enemies. I didn’t see any as I wound my way down out of the garage—no Carter Fox or Peyton Shilling, not even an Aubrey Biggs or Tom McClane—but that didn’t mean they weren’t all there, lurking just outside my field of vision.

  At the exit onto Cary, I looked up the one-way street and pulled out into the flow of traffic. Aerosmith was on the radio, Steven Tyler singing about Janie and her gun, and I turned it up. If Robin was going to get a gun, maybe an M&P Bodyguard would be a good choice. On the other hand, it hadn’t done Chris Woodruff much good, or Willow.

  The radio station seemed to have fashioned a playlist from my favorites. By the time I got home, I was feeling mellow. I turned into the alley that ran behind my house. The garage door rumbled up, and I drove in. The door came down again behind me.

  As I went in through the kitchen, I was humming and singing “Stairway to Heaven,” though I was no singer, and it might have sounded more like I was strangling a chicken. I slung my briefcase with its laptop computer against the counter and carried my cellphone and my shoe-bag into the living room.

  On the back side of the living room, one of the French doors was shattered and standing ajar. Not just the glass panes were shattered; the muntins that held them were cracked and broken as if a battering ram had burst the door inward. I took a step to put my back against a wall, my eyes darting. The door of my front closet was standing open, another indication that someone had been in my house. I had changed the locks, but it hadn’t mattered. This time the intruder hadn’t bothered with a purloined key.

  After listening a moment and hearing nothing, I crossed to my front closet. Pushing the door further open, cringing at the faint creak, I crouched to reach for my brother’s Louisville Slugger. It wasn’t there. I pushed at the hanging jackets and the raincoat, moved around the basketballs and soccer ball and tennis balls, thinking a tennis racket, maybe even a racquetball racket, would make some kind of weapon, but no kind of bat or racket was there.

  At a noise behind me, I turned my head. Carter Fox stood in the archway to the kitchen, cutting off my escape through the garage. I rose slowly, pushing the closet door shut behind me to open a path to the front door. Carter raised a hand.

  There was a pistol in it, not one of the Woodruffs’ Smith-and-Wesson Bodyguards—those were accounted for—but something like them. His index finger, I saw with unnatural clarity, was inside the trigger guard, and his knuckle was white with the pressure of his finger against the trigger.

  “Unh unh unh,” he said. The pistol was steady in his right hand, and his eye was visible just above the sight. It wasn’t his only weapon. His left hand held a tire tool against his leg.

  “Carter Fox,” I said, but I croaked on the name and had to pause to work a bit of moisture into my suddenly dry mouth, expecting the blast of the gun at any instant. I tilted my head in the direction of the French doors. “Looks like you were anxious to get inside.”

  He smiled, his eyes unnaturally large behind his thick lenses. “Let’s just say this time I want it to look like a break in. A home invasion by persons unknown.” His white button-down was open at the collar, his dark chinos rumpled. Surgical gloves were on his hands.

  “You weren’t in court,” I said, the hair at the nape of my neck stiffening and goosebumps breaking out on my arms.

  “You never know how things are going to go in court, do you? Let’s just say I didn’t want to be present when sister-dear was on the stand.”

  “Peyton called you afterward, I take it.”

  “She called me. I’m afraid she said some things about you that weren’t very nice.”

  “It is hard to imagine us ever being close friends,” I said. I was still wearing the cotton dress I had worn to court, but also the running shoes I had put on for my walk to the parking garage. My briefcase was in the kitchen, my shoe-bag on the floor by my left foot where I had put it when I knelt to root through the closet. All I had for a weapon was the cellphone I held in my right hand.

  Carter laughed, his customary series of nerdy honks, and, as his pistol came down slightly, the wavering end of the barrel pointed a foot or two above my head. I started to move, but Carter’s hand steadied at once, and I froze.

  “Always calculating the odds,” he said. “That’s one of the things I admire about you, Robin. So cool under pressure.”

  My pulse was beating palpably in my neck and in the palms of my hands. I was glad it didn’t show. I said, “You brought me into this case, mail feing me the murder weapon, making it appear and disappear. Why?”

  “I’ve been following your career for a couple of years now. You’re an exciting woman. I thought it would be a real turn-on to go up against you.”

  I felt my lip curl. “And was it? Was it good for you?” Movement through my front window caught my eye, but I resisted the impulse to turn my head. Across the street Dr. McDermott knelt by the bushes along the front of his house, possibly pulling weeds, his figure small and distant. He owned a pistol, I thought, but it would be inside the house. He wouldn’t expect
me to be home in the middle of the day, much less to be in trouble.

  “What I really wanted,” Carter said, “was to be on the inside, to get a blow-by-blow account of your development of the case. You don’t seem to be especially close-mouthed. I get the idea your friends stay up-to-date on everything, professional confidences be damned, but I never made it to the inner circle.” He shook his head. “Too bad. In the end you proved smarter than I thought—and I thought you were pretty smart to start with. I never expected you to tumble to what was going on with South of Main.”

  “So it was you who killed Chris Woodruff, not your sister Peyton.”

  “Doesn’t make much difference at this point, does it?”

  “Why not? You planning to shoot me?” The lamp on the nearby end table would be too clumsy a weapon, and I’d be dead before I could take the two steps to reach it.

  “Maybe. It would be more fun to beat you to death, I think. And ballistics evidence is such a hassle.” He raised the tire tool, keeping his pistol trained on my sternum. “Don’t take it personally, Robin. In the game of life, sometimes you get beat.” He gave a single honk of laughter. “Unless, of course, you cheat.” He started toward me.

  With a sharp, underhand motion I threw my cell phone at his face, and the gun went off as he flinched, the sound deafening. As the phone glanced off the top of his head, he swung the tire tool, but I stepped into him so that it was his hand rather than the tire tool itself that hit the side of my head. My arms closed around his body as I staggered, and I twisted to throw him away from me. The pistol went off in a second explosion, and Carter was on the floor, sliding, the pistol still in his hand and the barrel swinging toward me for a third shot. I took two running steps toward the front window and launched myself at it as the blast sounded.

  The large pane of glass split silently amid the crash of the gun and its aftermath, but I felt it give and closed my eyes against the expected spray of glass splinters as I burst onto the lawn. I don’t know what kind of glass the stunt actors jump through in the movies, but it probably isn’t a double-paned picture window. I hit the glass, my forward progress halted, and I seemed to hang there as the pistol crashed again. A few big shards of glass fell outward while others remained like a double row of jagged teeth in the frame of the window. My body dropped onto the sill and sash with its up-thrust blades of glass, then spilled out onto spiked branches of the bushes that lined the front of the house. Pain blossomed like sheet lightening as Carter Fox loomed in the window above me. I rolled away from him, spilling onto the lawn, and Carter put a foot on the sill to leap after me, but his feet failed to clear the bushes completely so that he pitched forward and his hands and one knee came down on my hip and chest.

  Numbness. Numbness and an unnatural clarity. I don’t feel the impact—even that first stab of pain is gone as if it never was—but the numbness fails to alarm me. I have the sensation of rising, of looking down at my sprawled body, though my view is blocked by the little man with the oily black hair who is getting to his feet. The action is soundless. As my perspective grows, I see a brown animal streaking into the yard, its head and tail down as it devotes all its efforts to speed. Beyond the dog a white-haired man steps into the street, crossing toward my yard. In the silence the little man towers over my body, one arm rising with something in his hand, and the dog leaps into the air, hitting the man in the chest and throwing him backward into the bushes as the dog’s jaws close on his face and its head jerks sideways, back and forth, as its jaws open and close again, and again.

  An SUV lurches to a stop at the curb, and two men jump from it, one circling the car from the street side, both running, the first reaching the carnage at about the same time as the old man. The dog releases its hold on the black-haired man and spins, backing so that it stands between the men and my body, the fur on its back standing in a ridge. The old man stretches a hand toward the dog, palm out.

  For a moment nothing seems to happen, then the dog lifts its head and moves toward the old man, tail wagging tentatively. One of the other men kicks at something with his foot and bends over the man on the ground. The third man has a hand to the side of his head, elbow out, and is gesticulating with his free hand.

  The old man and the dog lean over me, are joined by one of the other men. The old man pushes at the dog with his elbow, and both men are laying hands on me, the old man directing with movements of his head. The third man drops his phone to the ground and tears open his shirt, a button flying as he yanks it off, and he throws the shirt at the old man, who snatches it out of the air and turns to slip it under and around my leg. I seem to be lying in a black puddle that is spreading even as it fades into the grass.

  Another car stops in the street, and a man leaps from it and runs onto the lawn. I know him. He drops to his knees beside my body, and I try to say his name—Paul—but my lips don’t move, and my eyes stare glassily upward.

  Chapter 14

  I wasn’t dead, or, if I was, I didn’t stay dead. I remember moments in an ambulance, and in those flashes of memory I am on my back, looking upward, and Paul is there, and a woman I don’t know. The woman has her hair in a ponytail and is wearing a light blue shirt with a patch on the sleeve. I can’t move my limbs, and something is strapped to my face.

  There is a moment of bright lights and people in surgical masks around me.

  Finally there is darkness and a peace free of pain and worry. I am not alone in the darkness. Someone is with me, a presence as big as a house and gentle as a mother, as I drift on a current of dreamless sleep.

  When I came hard awake, it was only for an instant. I was in bed and the room was dimly lit and Paul Soldano sat slumped in a chair beside me. When I woke again, I was thirsty, and Dr. McDermott stood above me, looking down.

  “Hey,” I whispered.

  “Hey. How do you feel?”

  “Thirsty.”

  He stepped away from the bed. When he came back, he had a cup, and he spooned a little shaved ice onto my tongue. I nodded my thanks.

  “You damaged your femoral artery coming through the window, and you lost a lot of blood,” Dr. McDermott said. “Your blood pressure dropped, your body temperature dropped. . .” He took a breath and let it out. “I thought we’d lost you.”

  I moved my head in a slight nod.

  “There was evidently some tricky repair work down there. You were in surgery nearly four hours, and it was three before a nurse came out with a positive prognosis.”

  “Carter missed me?”

  “Carter. . .” Dr. McDermott’s face cleared. “Oh. No, I forgot to mention that. There was also a bullet in your shoulder, but there wasn’t much to it. It was lying up against the humerus, and they just took it out. The bullet, not the humerus.” He touched my arm, and, twisting my neck, I saw the bandage.

  “How much. . .blood. . .” I trailed off.

  “How much blood did they give you? No whole blood, though you had a number of volunteers. You’d lost too much for that. They gave you packed red blood cells and fresh frozen plasma.” After a moment he added, “Detective Hernandez has your blood type, if you want to tuck that away for future reference. You’re both A-positive.”

  I closed my eyes, and I must have slept.

  The next time I opened them, Brooke rose up next to me. “Paul, I think she’s awake.”

  Paul appeared beside her. I looked up at them, and they looked down, neither speaking.

  “Who died?” I said.

  Brooke gave a little laugh. “Dr. McDermott said you’d been awake, but we weren’t sure we believed him. Your mother, father, and brother are all here, but they’re down in the cafeteria right now.”

  Paul said, “Those two cop friends of yours are out in the hall. They’ve been stopping by.”

  “Carter Fox. Is he. . .”

  “Who cares,” Paul said flatly.

  Brooke laid a hand on his arm. “He wasn’t as badly hurt as you,” she told me.

  “Though he looked a lot wors
e,” Paul said. “I haven’t seen him since he got his face and neck stitched up, but I imagine he’s going to look like Frankenstein’s monster.”

  “Your own face wasn’t even scratched,” added Brooke. “You do have some stitches in your right arm.”

  “And both legs, most of them in your left,” Paul said. Brooke jabbed him with her elbow.

  “Anyway,” he said. “Deacon saved your life. I owe him a steak.”

  Brooke motioned with her hand, then went out into the hall. Paul stayed where he was as Hernandez and Jordan came in.

  “You look better,” Jordan said. “No thanks to us, I’m afraid. We were listening to everything, of course—”

  “Even your singing,” Hernandez said, “though it was a bit much.”

  “But we’d stopped for a couple bottles of water and were five minutes away when we realized you had a home invader.”

  “I think you’ve ruined ‘Stairway to Heaven’ for me forever.”

  The favor I had asked was for them to put a wire on me and record my conversations until I found Carter Fox. The world had changed since I’d seen cops taping a wire to Leonardo DiCaprio’s belly, though. I’d just had to download an app onto my iPhone—something called Report-It, developed for news reporters, designed to broadcast high quality audio to a mobile receiver called a Phantom.

  “But you got it,” I said. “You’ve got a recording of everything he said.”

  “We’ve got it,” Jordan said. “Already played it for Aubrey. He was a little slow to accept what he was hearing, but he did.”

  “You fighting for your life in the O.R. gave it a lot of credibility,” Hernandez said.

  My injuries must have given me credibility. The next day I was sitting up, waiting to be moved out of ICU into a regular room, when Aubrey Biggs himself came by just as visiting hours began. It was Saturday, and he was wearing jeans and sneakers. Since he was the height of a middle-schooler, the casual clothing made him look more like a boy than a grown man, much less the district attorney for the city of Richmond..