What Farnon was really asking was, could Milo live with the fate of the workers and their families? Plenty of them would blame the whistle-blower. Milo understood. He’d probably blame himself. Could he face Uncle Paulie and Aunt Grace, Leslie, Stubby, Harry and the rest, if he was the one who’d cost them their jobs?
It wouldn’t bring his father back. Would it even be what Tim would want?
There were no railings down at this end. He headed back. Farnon’s voice reached him out of the mist. “Milo? Made up your mind?”
“I agree with my dad.” It felt good to say this. “I know now he wasn’t murdered. But there’s been embezzlement and blackmail, robbery and manslaughter, and now arson— and God knows what else Pearce will talk you into. It has to end.”
Farnon’s face showed clearly in the glow from the plant floor. Disappointment mixed with…relief. Definitely relief. It was important, later, to remember that.
Still, Farnon made one last try. “I’m thinking of Ellie here, Milo. This will be hard on her.”
Ellie! Ellie, the daughter Alf hadn’t wanted, and couldn’t even eat dinner with. The girl who believed her sorry excuse for a father hung the moon. Milo thought he’d heard it all, but this appeal disgusted him in a way Farnon hadn’t yet managed.
“Yeah, well, at least her dad will be alive,” he said. “You asked me what I thought. You’ve had plenty of time to stop Pearce, but you haven’t done it.”
“He never will, kid.”
Gordon Pearce stepped from the shadows. Even in the shifting light Milo recognized the shape of a Glock. “And neither will you.”
***
Chapter 23
Milo’s gut tightened. Zaffer. Where is Zaffer?
“Weren’t you listening, Shoemaker? I’m violent and unpredictable, remember?” Pearce shifted his mocking gaze to Farnon. “Did you think you were talking to a priest, Alf? He and his pal came here wired! This is their gun!”
Milo hadn’t heard a shot. Don’t let Zaffer be dead.
Farnon looked at Milo. “Is that true?” Incredibly, he laughed. “I told you he was smart, Gordon. It doesn’t matter, he knows everything. Your little fire was wasted, by the way. He got that flash drive after all.”
Pearce’s gun hand twitched.
“I made copies,” Milo said quickly. “I gave them to people.”
“It’s over,” Farnon said.
“Nothing’s over,” Pearce snarled. “Are we all out of fire trucks? I bet Monroe takes them as fast as Valeene. Couple of free Scarlet Ghosts, and another Shoemaker death gets listed as ‘Accident.’ ”
“Tim’s death was an accident.” Farnon was serious now. “Milo knows that. Don’t act crazy.”
Pearce’s black eyes glittered at Milo with something that did seem not wholly sane. “He’ll still report it. And us. He’s just like Tim. You’d never listen. There’s only one way to shut them up. But don’t worry, Alf, I’ll do this one.”
He stayed just out of lunging reach. Milo wondered if he could keep Pearce talking until he thought of something. The problem with crazy people was that they were…crazy. “No one will believe I got shot by accident,” he said.
“Who said shot?” Pearce said. “You’re a jumper, kid. A suicide. I hear it runs in your family.”
“Gordon, no. That won’t solve anything.”
“Careful there, Alf. You don’t want to be the late Hero of Valeene. Tragically killed trying to keep a depressed kid from ending it all.”
Milo’s eyes flashed to Farnon’s face. If Farnon would just distract Pearce long enough, Milo might—what was that? Was the ground shaking? Yes. Someone was racing toward them from the north edge, from the ladder. Zaffer!
It wasn’t Zaffer. Ellie burst into their midst from the same shadows that had concealed Pearce. But where he’d been silent as a serpent, Ellie’s breath came in noisy, tearing gasps. Her eyes were frantic. “Daddy! He’s got a gun!”
Pearce trained it on her.
Milo launched himself at it. When the gun went off the recoil traveled up Milo’s arms.
Farnon roared, “No!”
Pearce snaked a wiry arm around Milo’s neck, Milo kicked backward, Pearce’s knees buckled, and then they were down on the slippery, hail-studded surface and Milo could focus only on staying alive.
Cross country fitness turned out to be no match for fighting skills honed in prison. Pearce knew moves Milo could name only by the pain they caused. Not finding a grip on his short hair, Pearce used his own skull to crack Milo in the head. Lights exploded behind his eyes as his nose broke and choked him with blood. He twisted under Pearce, one arm trapped, his free arm flailing for Pearce’s eyes. But the man was too strong. On the way to straddling Milo he kneed him in the groin, then got his hands around Milo’s throat. Milo bucked and struggled but Pearce’s whiskey-smelling breath blew in his face, and his vision darkened.
His foot hit something that clanged. The toolbox. Pearce heard. He kept one hand pressed to Milo’s throat as he scrabbled in the box with the other. With savage force he stabbed a screwdriver through Milo’s shoulder. Ellie screamed. Pearce pulled Milo to his feet and forced him backward toward the edge. Milo went limp and heavy but it didn’t work, he was being dragged, his feet scraping ground, almost there…. Then the stinking breath receded as the iron grip let go.
Alf Farnon dangled Pearce in his massive hands like a toy. Milo staggered against a skylight and watched Farnon’s punch send Pearce flying. Unlike Tim Shoemaker, Pearce landed on spongy ground. He rolled over and tried to rise but Farnon snatched him up and slammed him into the skylight. The glass cracked but held. Pearce slid to the ground.
Someone was whimpering. Had been whimpering, Milo realized, for a while. Ellie was down on all fours making high-pitched animal noises as she groped through the grass. Suddenly light blazed out from the plant floor below; broad beams of gold raked the dark roof. Ellie cried out and pounced on the gun.
Pearce was struggling to stand. The shot missed his head by an inch, stunning him long enough for Farnon to grab him. Again Farnon smashed him into the skylight. This time, it broke.
Pearce clutched Farnon’s shirt and pulled the bigger man with him into the void.
Without thought, Milo sprang and caught Farnon’s belt. But the weight of both men was too great, it yanked him skidding across the wet ground. He strained sideways to use the skylight frame as a brake, though his left arm wasn’t working properly. The frame buckled, cloth ripped, and the belt tore out of his hands. But the delay let Farnon get one leg braced around the frame. With the other, he kicked Pearce away.
Pearce fell with his mouth wide open.
Down on the plant floor people started to shout. Or maybe, Milo thought in a haze of pain, they’d been shouting all this time and he only now heard them.
He slumped to his knees, then toppled over, coming to rest on hard little pellets of hail. A few feet away Farnon clung, wheezing, to the twisted skylight frame.
Milo closed his eyes. After a moment someone leaned over him. Soft hands touched his face, his clothes. Silky, sweet-smelling hair brushed his face, and something hot and wet dropped on his cheek. This wasn’t so bad. He would just lay here for a while.
“You’re bleeding,” Ellie murmured in his ear. “Don’t move, Milo, you’re hurt.”
***
Chapter 24
He woke in a high hospital bed in an air-conditioned room, with bright sun streaming through the windows. His chest and shoulder seemed to be swathed in tight bandages that didn’t hurt nearly as much as his mother’s grip on his hand. A clear tube was taped to his other hand. Somewhere outside, church bells were ringing.
“Hey there. You’re back with the living,” his mother said softly.
“Is it Sunday?” Milo asked. His voice was froggy.
“Uh-huh.”
“Are we taking the hospital dispensation?”
She burst into tears.
Women kept crying over him. Milo wondered what Zaf
fer would make of that. Events came rushing back. “Is Zaffer okay?”
His mother wiped her eyes with a tissue from his bedside table. “He’s fine. He’ll be here later, he said to call him as soon as you woke up.”
Relief flooded Milo. “Mom.” She looked up at the urgency in his voice. “Dad didn’t kill himself. And he wasn’t gambling.”
“But—how do you know? Who told you?”
“I found out. He wasn’t gambling,” Milo repeated. “The car crash really was an accident. From the fog.”
Gloria searched his face, as though trying to see into his brain. Then she let go of his hand long enough to pull a business-sized envelope from her purse. “This came in the mail yesterday.”
Milo took out the letter.
“Dear Timothy Shoemaker: Congratulations on being one course away from completing your Online Graduate Certificate in Forensic Accounting…”
“They were his schoolbooks,” his mother was saying. “Remember those books you found? He wanted to surprise us. I know it, I know that’s why he didn’t tell me.”
His father hadn’t been lying. About anything.
She was crying again. Milo patted her hand and felt a sharp, hollow pang no hospital drug could erase.
What had Zaffer said? “…he’s not a fraction of the man your dad was. Not a tenth.” The cosmic injustice of the wrong man dying wrapped Milo in a red haze of anger. He waited it out. He would bear it—he had no choice. But he couldn’t bear to think how the true story would affect his mother.
Tim had been honest up to the minute he died. Whereas Farnon, who lied as readily as he breathed, was alive and well and scheming.
Milo pondered the irony. After a while he said, “I’m starving.”
Gloria laughed a little and blew her nose and said she’d send Grace out for a milkshake. She kissed him on the forehead and left. Milo went back to sleep with the letter in his hand.
The next time he woke the sun’s path across his blanket had shifted, and the person sitting by his bed was Zaffer. With a nasty bruise on his temple.
“What happened to you?” Milo asked.
“The same creep that happened to you.” Zaffer held up a white bag with a straw sticking out. “Can you drink this? Chocolate chip. It’s good.”
Milo acknowledged he could probably choke it down, if only to prevent Zaffer hogging it all. Zaffer pressed the button that raised the mattress up, and Milo let the cold sweetness of the milkshake slide down his throat.
“You talk first,” he said between swallows. “I’m the patient.”
Zaffer grinned. “Being a hero doesn’t come cheap.” He glanced at his watch and said he’d hurry, Milo’s mother was coming back with the twins and then no one would be able to talk.
Gordon Pearce had taken Zaffer by surprise.
“I never heard him,” he admitted, mortified. “Don’t tell the Marines.”
“Deal. You didn’t see his car?”
“I didn’t see a thing. I was in the truck, listening on the Spy Pen. Which worked great, by the way. You came in really clear and so did Farnon. Even when the hail came I caught enough to know the recorder was picking you up.” His voice grew sober. “I’m sorry about your dad, Shoe. Farnon—what a weasel!”
“You heard that?”
“Yeah, but not much after it. I had to take a leak, see? Only the cord from the recorder to the earpiece doesn’t stretch far, so I put you on speaker through the radio.”
The hailstorm had stopped. Mist was rising from the grass as Zaffer peed into the shrubbery by the storage shed, listening to Milo and Farnon over the truck speakers. He was watching the last of the lightning in the distance when something—someone—hit him a crashing blow to the head.
“He must have recognized you,” Milo said. “He knew your name from when you moved the cartons. And he’d just been up all night torching Zaffer’s Pawn and Jewelry. I can see why he wouldn’t stop to ask what you were doing back there.”
“With you guys on speaker, he didn’t have to ask.” Zaffer shook his head at his own ineptitude. “I came to in the trunk of his car with a hell of a headache and no gun. I started yelling and kicking, and after a while—a long while—some cops with a crow bar let me out. I think Ellie told them where Pearce left his car, but by the time they got me, she and her dad were gone.”
“How did you explain being in Pearce’s trunk?”
“Didn’t. I acted stupid—don’t say it—said I didn’t see who hit me, I’d just been waiting for you. I told them I worked there. They wrote that down, told me to put some ice on my head, and let me go.”
“Has Ellie called?”
Zaffer picked up the remote control on the bedside table and flicked on the TV facing Milo’s bed. “No, and she’s not picking up her phone. But watch this. They’re running it every half-hour.”
Channel 64 in Valeene hadn’t had such a big story since a school bus hit a runaway pig. Milo watched a banner scroll across the bottom of the screen: “Up Next: Death on the Living Roof.”
There was the Wolverine office building. The lobby. Folding chairs like the ones that had been stacked on the roof filled the space in front of the reception desk. The chairs were full of reporters, with camera crews behind them.
Milo recognized the Chief of the Valeene Police Department. He was deferentially introducing Alf Farnon. Looking tired and suitably somber, but wearing a fresh shirt and tie, Farnon read a prepared statement.
“Last night Mr. Gordon Pearce, our Vice President of Finance, and I went up to the Living Roof to inspect storm damage. In the freak mist from the hail he tripped over a hose and fell through a skylight to his death. One of our workers was injured trying to rescue Mr. Pearce but is in stable condition. The police are investigating and we are cooperating fully. The fireworks display is canceled. I speak for all of us here at Wolverine Motors when I say we deeply regret this tragic accident.”
“Now he takes questions and they stonewall everyone.” Zaffer flicked off the TV.
“That worker was thinking fast,” Milo said.
“Wasn’t he? I wish I’d seen how he got injured. Now there was a tragic accident. What really happened?”
“It wasn’t a hose Pearce tripped over. It was Farnon’s fist.”
Milo related what had happened from the time the Spy Pen had cut off. Pearce sliding out of the shadows. Ellie racing up, Pearce turning on her, Milo jumping him.
“He’s stronger than he looks,” Milo said. “Looked, I mean. Even stronger than you.”
“No shit.” Zaffer rubbed his temple.
“I felt like Fatso—never had a chance. He stuck me with the screwdriver, and he’d have had me over the edge if Farnon hadn’t pulled him off.”
From the safety of his hospital bed, Milo considered this. Farnon had certainly taken his time coming to Milo’s rescue. If his daughter hadn’t been there, would he have acted at all? “You were right, Farnon is good at accidents. Bad luck, Mr. Pearce, case closed.”
Zaffer cleared his throat. “Was it at least… self-defense?” Milo heard it in his voice—the need to retain some scrap of respect for the president of Wolverine. Heroes died hard. “I mean, it sounds like Pearce was trying to shoot Ellie, before throwing you off the roof.”
Milo drained his milkshake cup. Groggy and punctured he had been, but he knew what he’d seen. Farnon had fully intended Pearce to either go through that glass or get battered to death against it. Was that murder, or self-defense?
It was at times like these—not that he’d ever known times like these—Milo missed the Old Testament. An eye for an eye was as satisfying as a balanced checkbook. But this! A mess. You needed murder for Relative Justice. In accidents or manslaughter or self-defense—even if the self-defender was happy to kill—things got tricky. Milo’s head, and then his shoulder, started to throb. He could use another hit of whatever flowed through that clear tube.
“Don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know.”
He stil
l had a choice to make. When the police came, he could turn Farnon’s account of everything upside down. Or let it stand.
Zaffer took a miniature cassette tape from his pocket and handed it to Milo. “You keep it,” he said. “It’s too hot for me.”
Milo closed his fist around the only proof—besides Zaffer’s hearsay—that Alf Farnon had killed his father. He thrust it back at Zaffer. “Hang onto it till I get out of here. In case any goons come looking for it.”
Zaffer’s expression brightened. “Good thinking. You never know, Farnon might—”
The room phone shrilled, and they both jumped.
“Probably a reporter.” Zaffer answered it. His eyes flicked to Milo. “Hello?..Ben Zaffer, sir…That’s right… Thank you, but we were insured…Yes, sir. He’s right here, Mr. Farnon.”
Milo took the phone and nodded toward the door. A little privacy, please.
Zaffer went out. But he didn’t shut the door all the way.
“Hello,” Milo said.
“You’re alive,” said Alf Farnon.
“Yeah. Thanks, by the way.”
“I’m sorry about last night. That took me by surprise.” Funny how that kept happening. “You saved my daughter’s life. And mine. I’d have fallen for sure.”
Milo said nothing. Adding up who’d saved who could take all day. As for why—that might take forever.
“Dammit, Milo, now what? Do I have to tell the world everything?”
Milo sighed and scratched under his bandage. For good or bad, he was not his father. “I don’t think you’re a murderer, Mr. Farnon.”
“Call me Alf,” said Farnon dryly.
“But you’re a lot of other things. If people find out you helped Pearce cheat on taxes, you can kiss your job goodbye. You might have to do that anyway once the IRS gets going. Three million dollars is real money, even these days.”
“What if they don’t get going right away?”
Unaccounted For Page 22
