by Sara Rosett
I didn’t like being on the street, even with the trees and houses around me, so I stepped over the low plastic fence and went over to a pallet of bricks in the yard of one of the unfinished houses.
After a few seconds of silence, I heard an exclamation.
A muted crash. I cringed. That would probably be the stroller, hitting…something. Hopefully one of the fancy bricked mailboxes and not a car or a person.
I whipped out my phone and dialed Mitch. Maybe at the sight of an unmanned stroller zipping by him, he’d pull out his earbuds…
The phone rang twice, then Mitch, his breathing labored, said, “Ellie?”
“Mitch. Do not come up the hill.” My breathing sounded worse than his and I hadn’t been running for a few minutes.
“What?”
“Get off the road. It’s Henry. He’s got a rifle and he’s waiting for you to hit the clearing at the top of the hill. He’s going to shoot you, like he tried to shoot Dan.”
There were a few beats of silence broken only by Mitch’s ragged breathing. “Where are you?” he finally asked.
“I’m up the hill from you—at the top where it levels out. I’m in front of…” I twisted around and saw the house numbers spray-painted on a piece of plywood nailed to a stake in the yard, “1303. Beside a pallet of bricks in the front yard.”
“Stay there. I’m coming to you.”
“No. Don’t come up the street,” I practically screamed into the phone.
“Trust me,” he said, his voice calm. “I’m not coming up the street. So the stroller was a warning from you?” His breathing was more even now and I could hear a hint of a smile.
“Yes. Best I could do,” I said, looking over my shoulder. “The mom I stole the stroller from is standing in the street watching me. She’s clearly debating whether or not I’m some sort of deranged lunatic she should avoid.”
There was silence on the line. “Mitch?” I glanced down the street, but didn’t see him, then looked back over my shoulder. The mom wasn’t staring at me anymore. She was carefully backpedaling to the park. I followed her gaze and saw Henry, rifle tucked in the crook of his arm, casually walking across the street toward me.
Chapter Twenty-six
Henry stepped into the yard and strolled toward the pallet of bricks. I scrambled backward, away from the tip of the rifle, and tripped over the uneven ground, dropping my cell phone.
“Ellie,” he said, his tone chiding. “No need to look so scared. You’re not my target.”
I grabbed the phone, but it had flipped closed, ending the call with Mitch. I hoped Mitch had heard Henry’s voice. Then at least he’d have some warning. I did an awkward crawl for a few feet, backing away as he closed the distance. I stood, the phone gripped in my hand, wishing I was good enough at texting that I could send a message without looking at the keypad, but Henry was close enough he’d hear the sounds from my phone if I punched the keys.
He was too close. I shifted around to the other side of the pallet and he followed. I stepped back again, clinging to the next side of the cube of bricks. Part of my mind fixated on what a strange picture we made. Were we going to play some crazy Ring-Around-the-Rosie game until we were too dizzy to stand? This was Henry in front of me. Good old, dependable Henry. Henry with a rifle. I felt a giggle bubble up and firmly told myself to get a grip.
“That’s far enough,” Henry said and my stress-induced hysteria faded at his flat, conversational tone. How could he be so…normal? He looked the same. His face, his posture. Nothing was different about him. Well, except for the rifle. That was the major difference. I realized my breathing was coming in short puffs and my hands were gritty with dirt from my sprawl.
“I assume you were chatting with Mitch when I arrived and he’ll be along shortly?”
I glanced around and realized that Henry had positioned himself behind the pallet of bricks, which shielded his rifle from the street. Anyone driving past would see only his upper body. The bricks would block the view of the rifle pointed at me. And my back was facing the direction that Mitch would arrive from. “He’s on his way,” I said, playing for time. I gripped the phone tighter in my hand, trying to think what to do. I had to get back on the other side of the bricks or shift around so that I could watch for Mitch. Maybe give him some sign. He’d be here any minute.
In fact, he should have been here by now. Maybe he’d heard Henry’s voice or seen what was happening and he’d cleared out so he could call the police. As soon as the thoughts formed, I discarded them. Mitch wouldn’t run. He said he’d meet me here, so he’d be here. He was probably taking his time. He’d said he wasn’t on the street, so he must be keeping to the cover of the trees and houses.
“Why so quiet? Afraid he won’t show?” he taunted. “Don’t be. You’re a sickeningly devoted couple. He’ll be along,” Henry said, sweeping his gaze along the street and trees. The barrel of the rifle remained steadily trained on me.
A flicker of movement in the woods beside the half-finished house caught my eye. I tried to focus on it without giving away to Henry that I was staring at something over his shoulder. No. Nothing. Just a branch moving in the wind.
I glanced up the street. The mom was gone. I hoped she’d called the police, but in this day of random shootings, I’m sure her first instinct was to get her kid out of the area. Then maybe she’d called the police, but it would take them a good ten or fifteen minutes to get to our secluded subdivision. I licked my lips, trying to think of something to say to Henry. He seemed so blasé. His hands weren’t gripping the rifle and they weren’t shaking with nerves either.
I felt a bead of sweat trail along my hairline and reached up to wipe it away. Unlike Henry, my hand trembled. “Henry, why are you doing this?”
He reacted to the movement of my hand. His attention, which had been focused on the woods, whipped back to me. He noticed my shaking hand. “I told you, Ellie. You have nothing to worry about. My quibble is with Mitch.”
“But why? What’s Mitch done to you?” I asked.
His casual attitude dropped away. “He’s got my slot.”
“The school slot?” I asked.
Henry’s eyes narrowed and he enunciated each word slowly as if I didn’t speak the language. “It’s my slot. Colonel Scofries promised it to me. It’s mine.”
Colonel Scofries had been the commander when we were first transferred to Taylor, but had moved on after a few months, and Colonel Pershall took over as the commander. “But if Colonel Scofries promised you the slot, then he’s the one you should be upset with, not Colonel Pershall or Mitch.” Promises in the military are like airline tickets—they’re not transferable. You couldn’t count on promises to be passed on from commander to commander. If someone said they’d do something for you, then you’d better hope they were still in the position to do it when the time came. Mitch found this out the hard way a few years ago when it was time for him to upgrade from copilot to aircraft commander. His squadron commander had told Mitch he was next in line to upgrade, but when the time came, that commander was gone and a new commander put several other guys in for upgrade before Mitch. Mitch had eventually gotten his turn, but it wasn’t what had been promised.
“Normally, yes, that would be how it worked, but Scofries told Pershall about the slot and Pershall agreed to send me.”
“Well, what happened? Colonel Pershall was a man of his word.” I couldn’t believe that Colonel Pershall wouldn’t follow through. It would be like Mitch deciding he didn’t want to watch the Super Bowl.
He muttered something, looked away.
“Something must have happened,” I persisted and risked a glance over my shoulder. I didn’t see anything.
“It was a misunderstanding. I explained the whole thing, but he blew it out of proportion. Said because I’d done it, he wasn’t sending me. Said it showed poor judgment on my part.” He snorted. “Poor judgment. He was the one with poor judgment. I deserved that slot. I was the one who came in early, who stayed
late, who picked up the slack when everyone else was goofing off. That slot is mine and something as insignificant as a charge on my credit card can’t outweigh everything else I’ve done.”
“So you charged something on your government card? Something other than official travel or expenses?” I asked. Another shadow seemed to shift and I slowly turned my head a few degrees.
“No. It was a bogus charge,” he said, all righteous indignation. “I told Pershall that, but he refused to believe me.”
The empty house behind Henry had plenty of places to hide. Maybe Mitch was inside the house. I thought I saw a shadow trace across a wall inside, but when I looked closer, I couldn’t see anything.
“So you…”
“Killed him, yes,” he said matter-of-factly. “It was laughably easy, actually. Just wear the right clothes, pull the hat low, and drop off the drink at the table. They were so deep in conversation—important squadron business, I’m sure—they didn’t glance at me. Once he’d drunk it…well, the rest was easy. He hardly put up a fight at all. You can stop gaping at me like that. Yes. I did it, but it wasn’t cold-blooded murder. He refused to listen to me, so I removed him. Colonel Barnes is much easier to work with. He’s acting squadron commander, you know. He’s got the power to fix things. A suggestion here and a nudge there. He likes me. I’ve pulled him out of hot water often enough—he owes me a few favors. He can’t do jack in PowerPoint and every slide presentation he’s given to the general in the last year, I’ve done for him. He’s agreed that I should have the next school slot.”
“But what about your assignment? The UAV squadron?” A tiny no-see-um bug hovered near my eyes, but I resisted the impulse to wave it away. No sudden movements on my part.
“Barnes can take care of that for me.” I blinked a few times, at a loss for words. I didn’t know if Colonel Barnes could get Henry’s assignment changed, but Henry clearly thought it was going to happen.
“So it’s simple, really. I remove Mitch from the picture and it bumps me up. Barnes sends me and I’m on my way up again.”
“So this whole time…it’s been you,” I said, working it out as I spoke. “That shot, the one that barely missed Dan. You thought he was Mitch. You were trying to kill Mitch.”
“Yes. Quite frustrating, your family reunion and plethora of relatives. But it was only a temporary setback. It simply postponed the inevitable.”
His casual tone paired with his truly creepy words frightened me. He was so offhand. He really didn’t think killing someone was a big deal. I pressed my free hand into the rough edges of the bricks, to see if I could work one loose. To distract him from what I was doing, I said, “When that didn’t work for you, you set up a few more things—the leaf blower. You did that, didn’t you?”
He half-shrugged a shoulder in acknowledgment, then said, “Now, we must get down to business. I can’t stay around here all day—”
The bricks were packed too tightly for me to slip one out without him noticing. “Not very effective, the leaf blower, I mean,” I said, interrupting him. There was no way I was going to let him “get down to business” if I could help it. The miniscule bug had drifted to my ear. I tried to ignore it.
A spark of anger flashed in his eyes. “Your stupid family was crawling all over your place and then you’ve got that big lug of a dog. It’s amazing I was able to get to the leaf blower and the tire on his car. I was on a time line.”
“You had to get back to Atlanta,” I said.
“Considering my limitations, not bad.” He swatted at his ear and muttered, “Dang bugs.”
“But why all the convoluted setups?” I licked my lips and said, “Why didn’t you take care of Mitch like you’d taken care of Colonel Pershall? Why didn’t you garrote him?”
He lowered the barrel of the rifle a faction of an inch. “Because then they’d be linked. I’m not that stupid.” His tone indicated that he thought I was an idiot for even asking the question. “I did my research. I didn’t want the cops to think they had a serial killer on their hands. They’d call in all their experts and the media might pick up on it. No, one garroting and one death from a stray hunter’s bullet wouldn’t be connected. Of course, I went to all that trouble to make them different and then Carrie almost did my job for me. Too bad her little dry ice bombs didn’t get Mitch.” He sounded sincerely regretful. “It really would have saved me so much trouble.”
“But that doesn’t make sense. Why go to all those lengths and then send everyone the slightly altered squadron coins?” I truly didn’t understand. The tiny bug drifted off. I thought I heard an engine and tensed, but then I realized it was far below us in the area of the neighborhood where our house was.
He shook his head. “Because it was too easy to fool them. Everyone thinks getting away with a crime is difficult. It’s not. It’s easy. Planning and intelligence are all it takes. All their high-tech equipment, the fingerprinting, DNA analysis, and computer databases. They’ll never put it together. That’s why I sent the coins. My signature, if you will.”
“To let them know you’re smarter than they are?” I asked slowly as I considered yelling for help. But would anyone get here before he could shoot me? No. I abandoned that idea.
“Now you’re beginning to understand,” he said in an encouraging tone, like I was a student who’d answered a difficult question correctly.
“But even in that, I laid down a false trail.” He lifted the barrel of the gun slightly as he leaned forward in his eagerness to explain on his cleverness. “When I realized it wasn’t Mitch that I’d shot at, I knew I had to send a coin to Dan, too. It wasn’t hard to find his name. A call from a ‘florist’ to the hospital confirming a delivery was all I needed to find out his name.”
He swiped at another bug, this one by his nose, and I jumped at his unexpected movement. Then he said, “I asked Mitch a question or two and I knew he had cousins in Alabama. Then, a Web search for Dan Avery brought up his address, and I had all the information I needed. If any investigator ever tracked down the coins and made the connection between the three incidents, the coin to Dan would negate any speculation. A rather brilliant red herring, don’t you think? There wouldn’t be a pattern in who had received the coins. Investigators love patterns, which would automatically make them discount the coins’ significance.”
He raised the barrel again and checked his watch, then barked, “Mitch, I know you’re close.” I jumped at the sharp shout. “You’ve had plenty of time to get here and I’m sure you’re planning some sort of heroic ambush.” He raised the rifle, aimed it at my face. “But let me assure you, you don’t want to do that. Show yourself or I’ll put a bullet between her eyes.”
I swallowed and felt my heartbeat go into overdrive. Leaves rattled somewhere to my left and Mitch stepped into the yard, his arms bent up at the elbows, hands raised and empty.
“Ah, there he is, the fast burner, the golden child.”
I’d never seen Mitch look so strained. He spoke slowly, calmly. “Henry, this is between you and me. Let Ellie leave.”
“Interesting proposition, considering that you have nothing to bargain with. I hold all the cards here, Mitch.”
I noticed that Mitch was slowly edging closer to me.
“This is ridiculous, Henry,” I said. “You can’t just…just shoot Mitch and go on your merry way. This isn’t happening in a vacuum. I’m here, for one thing, and—”
“Well, in that case, it seems I may have lied. I may have to remove you as well,” Henry said, positioning the rifle at his shoulder.
The first notes of “Livin’ On A Prayer” sounded and for a second we all looked at each other in confusion. I realized it was my cell phone going off in my hand. Three things happened almost simultaneously.
I chucked the phone at Henry. Mitch covered the distance between us and took a flying leap at me as Henry fired the rifle. Mitch’s body hit mine and took us to the ground.
There was a rush of feet and a flurry as several people in
dark clothing erupted from the foliage and the house. There were some shouts, but I wasn’t paying attention because I was more focused on the primary sensation of an aching knee and the taste of dirt in my mouth. But I figured if those were the main things I felt, that was a good sign, and it meant there were no bullet holes in me.
My cell phone stopped ringing and I heard a stern voice telling Henry to keep his hands where they could be seen. Mitch rolled off of me with a groan and I twisted around to check on him. “Are you okay?” I asked, looking for blood.
“Yeah. When you threw the cell phone, he flinched and fired in the air.” He propped himself up on his elbows. “But you can keep patting me down, if you’d like.”
I realized I’d been running my hands up and down his legs and arms, looking for broken bones or worse.
I leaned back on my heels. “I can see you’re fine.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll return the favor later,” he said with a smile.
“What’s going on?” I realized the people swarming around were law enforcement and most of them were wearing bulletproof vests. A veritable alphabet soup of acronyms identified them. I recognized the Georgia Bureau of Investigation “The GBI? And the DEA? Where did all these people come from?”
Mitch sat up and crossed his legs. “It seems that this new part of Magnolia Estates is a perfect location for drug deals.”
“What? No! It can’t be. This is one of the best neighborhoods in North Dawkins.”
Mitch glanced around the lot and said, “I think all these people have a different opinion.”
“I believe this belongs to you?” The voice came from behind my shoulder.
“Gary!” I took the phone and said thanks. He was dressed in dark clothes and bulletproof vest.
Mitch said, “Ellie thinks our neighborhood is too nice to be a hotbed of crime.”
Gary glanced around and said, “Don’t think so. Not that it’s not a nice neighborhood but, hey, a drug house is a drug house.”
