by Scott Cook
“He’s got his gun!” Crowe shouted. He motioned for Sam to join the others. They all came together by the chairs in the center of the foyer. They stood for a few minutes, not doing anything, as their hearing slowly returned.
“He can’t get downstairs from where he is,” Crowe said. It still sounded to Sam like he was listening through a wall, but it was better than it had been. “He has to come through here. I want you three to get the plywood off of one of these windows and jump for it.”
Before any of them could speak, Sam heard a voice bellow from the end of the hallway, “Leaving so soon? The party’s not over yet!”
They turned toward the sound, Crowe raising the shotgun as they did. Sam heard him pump the slide as the shadow moved closer towards them through the dust that still lingered in the still air.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Palliser said as he emerged into the light. As he did, Sam could make out another shape in the dust. It was Angie. And Palliser’s gun was pointed at her temple.
CHAPTER 42
Alex felt bile rise in his throat as he saw Angie’s weeping face. She seemed unharmed, at least physically, but still terrified. He wanted to grab the shotgun from Crowe’s hands and blow Palliser’s head into a splatter of blood and bone, but he knew he couldn’t. Even if he had been an experienced shooter, he knew it was impossible without hitting Angie as well.
“Now everybody just calm down,” Palliser said as they walked slowly through the hall towards the foyer. “Let’s talk this out. We want to have a happy ending here, don’t we?”
Crowe lowered the shotgun. His face looked like a war mask, painted in streaks of blood and dust. “There’s no happy ending here,” he said. “You gotta kill us all. Then you have to kill her, because she’ll be a witness. I don’t think you have enough bullets.”
“Maybe not,” Palliser said. He drew the gun away from Angie’s temple and fired it at Crowe. Alex watched in horror and Tess screamed as the bullet tore a small chunk out of Crowe’s right shoulder. “But I’ll do my best.”
Crowe went down, taking the shotgun with him. Sam moved to retrieve it, but Palliser turned the pistol on him, “I wouldn’t if I were you.”
He stopped about twenty feet from the four of them. The pistol was back at Angie’s head. Alex saw that her hair was matted and stuck to her head in spots. Her face was a glistening patina of tears and snot.
“It’s no good, Chuck,” Alex said. “The only thing you can do is run.”
Palliser smiled. “Yeah? How do you figure?”
Sam stepped forward. “You can’t fire off as many rounds as we have, plus a stun grenade, in a small town without drawing attention. I’m betting the Mounties are already on their way here.”
Palliser seemed to consider that. “Let’s say they are,” he said. “They’ll find a bunch of bodies.”
“I don’t think so,” said Alex.
“You got some ace in the hole I don’t know about, kid?”
“You could say that. See, I haven’t been storing the book on my laptop. It’s on a flash drive. You would have known that if you actually had my computer. Nice try at a bluff, though.”
Palliser was silent. He adjusted his grip on the pistol. “Good one,” he said. “Now tell me where the drive is, or your girl here dies.”
“I doubt that,” said Alex.
“You should know me better than that, kid,” said Palliser, pulling back the hammer of the pistol with his thumb. His eyes were steel.
Angie’s chest was heaving, her eyes wide with terror. “Alex,” she moaned. It was the first time he’d heard her voice since she left the cabin, and it made his heart cramp. “Just give him what he wants. Please.”
“Listen to her, Alex,” said Palliser. “You and her can have a hell of a life together if you just do the right thing here. But if you don’t, there’s only one way this can end.”
In the distance, the faint wail of sirens wended its way through the cotton that was still in his ears. “They’re too close,” he said. “You barely have time to get away if you go right now.”
Palliser’s eyes darted around the room like a caged animal’s. Alex saw his nostrils flare. He was panicking. Then the ex-cop blinked hard and shook his head.
“I’m sorry it had to end like this, kid,” Palliser said gently as he moved the gun away from Angie and aimed at Alex’s head. Alex’s stomach turned to water. He wondered for a moment what death would be like, whether it would spark another endless battle between his parents, or maybe bring them together. He wondered what would happen to Angie after he was gone. She was looking at him, her eyes as wild as Palliser’s. For a moment, no one moved. Then Alex saw her eyes close, as if resigning herself to her fate.
An instant before Palliser could squeeze the trigger, Angie threw her head back, connecting squarely with her captor’s nose with the sound of two bowling balls striking each other. Palliser stumbled backwards, squeezing off a blind shot. Alex watched in numb shock as Angie pitched forward and fell to the floor. She landed face-first on the linoleum, a black rose of blood blossoming in the soft fabric between her shoulders. He dropped to his knees beside her. All the strength in his body, his mind, his heart, was gone. His head dropped back on his shoulders as he loosed an animal wail into the room.
Sam was already on the move to Alex’s left. He rolled on his shoulder and righted himself next to Shitbox’s shotgun. Palliser was staring wide-eyed at Angie’s body on the floor, blood streaming freely from his broken nose, but Sam’s movement broke him from his reverie. Palliser turned and aimed his pistol at Sam’s chest. Before Palliser could squeeze the trigger one last time, Sam unloaded a .12-gauge shell directly into his throat. Palliser stumbled backwards, thrown by the power of the shot, and slammed into the wall behind him. His body glided slowly to its knees on the floor, then pitched forward face-down onto the linoleum. A river of black blood flowed from his broken nose, spreading around his head. If someone had bothered to look closely, they might have seen the vague shape of a rose forming in the gore.
CHAPTER 43
Crowe managed to get to his feet as Tess grabbed Sam in a fierce embrace. He looked at the damage to his shoulder: some flesh was gone, but no arteries had been hit. In the distance, the sirens were getting closer. Alex Dunn was in a catatonic heap on the floor next to Angie’s body. Crowe’s heart cramped a little as the image of Diane Manning’s white face bloomed, unbidden, in his mind’s eye. But he had the self-awareness to realize he couldn’t really know what Alex was feeling; Jason Crowe had never truly been in love with anyone, unless he counted himself.
He walked over to Sam and Tess, who were staring in horror at the scene on the floor.
“Nice shot,” Crowe said to Sam.
“It was too late,” Sam said, his face white.
“You saved the rest of us,” said Crowe, but the words sounded hollow even to his own ears.
“Yeah.”
“I can’t stick around.”
“I know.”
“Make sure they look after Shitbox. He’s in bad shape.”
“I will.” Sam frowned. He looked like someone awaking from a dream. “How the hell did he survive, anyway?”
“Kevlar in his vest. Why do you think he wears it all the time, even in this heat? Didn’t stop the shells entirely, but it slowed them down enough that they didn’t get past his ribs.”
Tess let go of Sam and grabbed Crowe around the neck gingerly. “Careful,” he said, clutching his bleeding shoulder.
“Thank you,” she whispered in his ear. “Thank you for everything. I don’t care what Palliser said. He was wrong.”
Crowe disengaged. “He wasn’t wrong,” he said. “I’m not a nice man.” He looked at Alex on the floor. Bad things happen when I’m around.
He stripped off his shirt and tied it around his bleeding shoulder by knotting the straps. That seemed to wake up Sam, who took off his own button-up shirt and gently eased Crowe into it.
“All right,” said Sam.
“You’re presentable. Now get out of here.”
“Thanks.”
Sam walked with him to the stairs. “There’s a lot of stuff here with your fingerprints on it,” he said.
“Doesn’t matter,” said Crowe. “They’re not on file anywhere, and they never will be. Besides, I won’t be in this godforsaken country much longer.”
“What about the eleven million?”
Crowe stopped for a moment; in the heat of battle, he’d forgotten what he was here for in the first place. Now, in the aftermath, it all seemed so pointless. Nothing more than chips on a poker table. The two people who had known where the money was were dead. Hodge was as good as dead. Aside from Shitbox, he couldn’t care less what happened to the Wild Roses.
Crowe looked Sam in the eye. “Finders keepers,” he said.
Sam appeared to mull that over for a moment. Crowe headed for the door. Then he stopped and turned.
“Hey, Walsh?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re pretty badass yourself.”
Sam smiled weakly and raised a hand. Crowe did the same. He turned and walked down the stairs, then out the side door. He loped into the woods that surrounded the office building and found the overgrown road that was a shortcut back to town. Half an hour later, he was in the big silver GMC. He stopped at the corner store in town for some light fishing line, a needle, and a big bottle of Tylenol. Four hours after that, he was at his little house in Bowness, where he changed, threw some clothes and a passport in the name of Gerald McFarlane into a bag, and grabbed a bottle of Percocet. He briefly considered contacting the Florence brothers, or maybe Digger Lewis, to tell them what had happened. Then he thought better of it. He wasn’t looking for an exit interview; he was just looking for an exit.
Before he locked the door behind him, he spared a moment to look in on his baby in the garage, the candy apple-red Boxter, for the last time. He blew it a kiss and closed the door. An hour later, he was at the Calgary airport, lamenting the fact that it didn’t even have a first-class lounge. He’d made up for it by purchasing a top-of-the-line ticket on Cathay Pacific; it had cost him nearly thirty grand, but the meal was exquisite, and the wine was a 2011 Louis Jedot Meursault. Twelve hours after that, the man who had called himself Jason Crowe for the last two years sat in a café on a promenade in Istanbul, sipping coffee that actually tasted like coffee and looking out at the azure sea. He soaked up the old world culture around him like a sponge, reveling in the humidity and the smells, and his mind was full of new possibilities.
CHAPTER 44
The local Mounties who arrived first on the scene weren’t qualified to conduct a murder investigation, so Sam, Tess and Alex had to wait almost three hours for backup to arrive from Cranbrook. They told the story as it had unfolded, leaving nothing out, except for any knowledge of Shitbox’s criminal activities. The big man had been taken away in an ambulance, unconscious but alive, soon after the local cops had arrived. The paramedic said he would probably survive; he had a collapsed lung, but the bullets hadn’t made it all the way into his chest cavity. The sheer thickness of his pectoral muscles, along with the Kevlar, had saved him, apparently.
Alex was grateful when the investigators finally covered Angie’s body with a sheet. He admitted that he had no idea who to contact about her death; outside of her dead mother and her deadbeat father, Alex didn’t know of any family.
Sam finally answered Shippy’s call. The old guy was practically having a stroke. Sam assured him that he and Tess would come into the Chronicle office in a few days and explain everything. Meanwhile, he suggested Shippy assign Henderson, the overnight guy who had first answered the call about the “death” of Chuck Palliser, to the story. He seemed like a go-getter, and he deserved a shot.
Alex retrieved his Macbook from the Bluebird Inn and settled his bill with the credit card he had been given by Leslie Singer. The book was still where he had left it, on the laptop’s hard drive. He had been bluffing, as Palliser had suspected. He erased it immediately. He wished he could erase the last year from his own memory as easily as he had wiped it from the silicon inside the computer.
#
Kathy and Josh Ferbey returned home a couple of weeks after the media started piecing together what had happened. They had been in Argentina, boning up on their Spanish. Sam and Tess spent an afternoon with them, telling them the whole truth about Tom Ferbey’s death. Many tears were shed, mostly by Kathy. Josh had taken the news like a man, or as much like a man as a fourteen-year-old could. In the end, they thanked Sam and Tess for what they had done for Tom’s memory. As she saw them out the front door of her little wartime house, Kathy took Sam by the arm and kissed his cheek. Later that evening, Tess went on to kiss many other parts of Sam in her low-rise condo in the southwest with the view of the foothills.
#
As they lay in the darkness of Tess’s bedroom, Sam tried to focus on how wonderful he felt. He tried to focus on the beautiful redhead with the jade-green eyes and the go-to-hell smile whose cheek was laying on his bare chest, and whose fingernails were tracing lines across his abdomen. He tried to focus on the scent of her, the feel of her body next to his, the feel of her lips on his. But try as he might, his couldn’t stop thinking about another woman.
Tess propped herself up on an elbow and looked at him crossly. “Jesus Christ, Walsh,” she said. “Even now? After sex?”
“What?”
“You’re deep inside your head about something. What the hell could be so important that you have to think about it now?”
“It’s nothing,” he said. “I’m all yours.”
“Bullshit.” She rolled onto her back and sighed. “You might as well tell me what it is.”
Sam grimaced. Why did his brain have to work this way? Why did certain thoughts turn into infected splinters that he had to pick at, over and over again?
“I really am sorry,” he said. “I can’t stop thinking about Angie.”
“Well, isn’t that what every girl longs to hear after she just slept with a man for the first time.” she said. “Another woman’s name.” She rolled back over towards him, draping an arm across his chest. “It is hard to get out of your head, isn’t it? One morning last week, I woke up thinking, ‘God, I dreamed a woman was killed right in front of me,’ and then I realized . . . well, you know.”
“Yeah. Except that’s not really what I’m thinking about.”
“Well, what, then?”
“I’m thinking about the bathroom at the gas station.”
Tess propped herself up on an elbow and stared down at him. “Uhhh – what?”
“I mean, why did Angie go to the bathroom again at the gas station when she’d already gone at the cabin?”
“I told you at the time, dumbass.”
“Yeah, and I believed you. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder.”
“Wonder what?”
“Why didn’t we hear any signs of a struggle? We weren’t that far away. And there were other people in that lot at the time. Someone should have seen something.”
Tess flipped on the lamp next to her side of the bed. “Palliser must have knocked her out somehow.”
“And then carried her off into the woods for over a mile? How the hell did he manage that?”
“He must have had a vehicle.”
“There were no vehicles at the mine office.” Sam took her hand in his. “And how did Flowers know to come to Lost Lake? All I said in my message to him was that I was going out of town. I never actually mentioned where I was going. And they couldn’t have known that Crowe knew where Alex was. Someone had to have tipped them off that we were headed there.”
Tess chewed her bottom lip as she pondered. “Maybe they followed us?”
“Crowe would have noticed.”
“So what are you saying?”
Sam sighed and stroked her shoulder. “I know how this is going to sound, but here it is: what if Angie wasn’t kidnapped?”
“You
’re saying she went willingly? Why in the hell would she do that?”
“I don’t think Angie would have,” he said. “But somebody else might have.”
“Will you stop being so goddam cryptic? Just get to the point.”
Sam sat up in her big four-poster bed and slid on his boxers. He padded out of the room and returned with Tess’s HP laptop. He climbed back into the bed and took the computer out of sleep mode as Tess looked on in consternation.
“Earth to Sam,” she said. “What are you doing?”
“Fishing expedition,” he said, eyes glued to the glowing screen. “Crowe said it had been a woman who contacted the Stetson Dragons about the hit on Rufus Hodge. He thought it was Diane, but obviously it wasn’t. Then, when he found out about Sarah Payne, he assumed it was her that had made the call; she wasn’t a victim of the Wild Roses at all, she was the third member of Palliser’s team.”
His fingers typed quickly. He used his thumb on the trackpad at the base of the laptop’s keyboard, scrolling through pages and clicking. Tess followed his movements with her eyes.
“Jesus,” she breathed as she saw what he was doing. “Are you serious?”
“The cops still haven’t managed to find Sarah yet,” said Sam. “She’s the key to finding the money. But what if they’re looking in the wrong place?”
As he said it, an image popped up on the screen. It was a yearbook photo from a high school in Medicine Hat. Underneath the standard headshot was the name Sarah Payne. The photo was unmistakable: a teen girl with full lips and prominent teeth. Sam could see horror dawning in Tess’s eyes.
“If they want to find Sarah,” he said, “they need to look in the morgue.”
“Oh my God,” Tess breathed. “Oh my God.”
“It’s been tickling the back of my brain for weeks,” said Sam. “I didn’t want to believe it. Just like I didn’t want to believe Flowers could be in on it.” He put a hand on hers. “Sorry it finally came to a head … you know, now.”
