The Kill Wire

by Nichole Christoff

Dirty mugs and juice glasses smelling suspiciously of whisky made rings on the otherwise clean countertop, and a desktop computer hummed at a little workstation notched into the Corian. I nudged the mouse with a knuckle and the monitor came to life. On the screen, pink letters flashed across photos of provocatively posed women wearing next to nothing. GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS: YOUR SESSION HAS EXPIRED, the blinking banner announced. WE TAKE ALL MAJOR CREDIT CARDS.

  Though I’d never met the Strathmeyers, all of this seemed out of keeping with the man and woman who’d hung blue gingham curtains over the kitchen window and didn’t wear their muddy boots in the house.

  And that concerned me greatly.

  “Hello?” I called. “Sheree? Are you home?”

  But neither Sheree nor her husband, Don, appeared.

  Cautiously, Marc and I bypassed the back stairs to make our way toward the front of the house. There, the lamp still shone in the window, but its cord ran into a receiver box plugged into the wall outlet. This receiver box probably accepted a signal from a motion detector mounted on the fence post by the driveway. It would warn Don and Sheree that they were about to have visitors. But from the look of things, they’d had guests who’d already come and gone.

  Corn chip crumbs, empty bags of beef jerky, crushed beer cans, and more lay scattered across the couch and coffee table like confetti. The throw pillows were askew where someone had spread out on the sofa. But balanced on the arm of a comfy recliner, a fine china plate with a delicate gold rim bore the remains of a rare steak, asparagus spears, and smears reminiscent of au gratin potatoes.

  Max Ribisi, with his refined palate and preference for the finer things, had been here.

  And he might be here still.

  Marc immediately came to the same conclusion. He drew his service weapon, mouthed, “Call the State Patrol.”

  I nodded, slipped into the kitchen, and snagged the cordless phone docked next to the computer. I dialed 911, but I didn’t stick around to speak to the operator. If the Strathmeyers were here too, they needed any help Marc and I could provide—right now.

  I signaled to Marc, crept up the back stairs while he tackled the front, and met him in the hallway above. In the master bedroom at the back of the house, the contents of the dresser drawers had been strewn all over the carpet. Shoe boxes and more had been dumped from the closet shelves. The bedclothes were a tangle of sheets as if someone had tossed and turned all night, but I didn’t think more than one had slept in this bed built for two. In the adjoining bath, damp discarded towels had been left to mildew on the tile.

  We moved on to the second bedroom. The lavender paint scheme suggested the Strathmeyers had a daughter, and judging by the photos of friends wearing sorority sweatshirts and the university decal tacked to her bulletin board, I’d have said she was currently away at college. Her belongings had been ransacked, too, and her bed, a rumpled mess, smelled strongly of male body odor.

  The bath in the hall was the worst of all. Ribisi’s henchmen had gone wild, smashing every bit of porcelain and glass. On the floor, shards of silvered mirror had been ground to dust by heavy boots. And side-by-side, in the bottom of the claw-footed tub, lay a man and a woman. They had bullet holes through their foreheads.

  “Don and Sheree Strathmeyer,” I whispered.

  I refused to allow my stomach to roll over. But the gruesome sight even disturbed Marc. He muttered a few choice words about Ribisi under his breath—and we still had one more room to explore.

  The bedroom at the front of the house must’ve been the one leased to Toomey. But here, the simple furniture hadn’t merely been searched. To a piece, it had been destroyed.

  The single bed’s bedding, box springs, and mattress were nothing more than shredded stuffing now. The bookshelf had been pulled from the wall and smashed into splinters. Even the desk chair was nothing more than kindling. The desk itself still stood beneath the window, but its drawers had been dumped and busted. Ribisi had no doubt been looking for a lead on Elena among Dustin Toomey’s things—and when he found nothing, he’d raged.

  Marc stepped into the room to take a closer look at the damage.

  And an air horn went wild.

  The blasting wail had adrenaline shooting through my system. I tasted fear, sharp and metallic, on my tongue. Instinct made me spin in a circle as I tried to sight my attacker, wherever he might be. But the culprit was long gone. And the horn, rigged behind the bedroom’s door, sighed as it ran out of air. Marc had triggered the thing when he’d stepped across the room’s threshold and tripped a length of crystal-clear fishing line stretched from jamb to jamb.

  In the sudden silence, Marc and I strained our ears to hear. But Ribisi’s goons didn’t thunder up the stairs. They didn’t leap from under ruined furniture or wrecked closets, either. I peered over Toomey’s desk and out the window. Across the way, framed by the wide-open doors of the barn, something moved.

  Men.

  Two of them, at least.

  One man retreated into the barn’s dark cavern. The morning sun glinted off a shiny object in the other guy’s hand. Too late, I realized what that object was.

  Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang!

  The windowpane exploded.

  Slivers of glass sliced into my skin as I threw up my hands to protect my face. I dove for the floor, banged the crown of my head on the leg of the desk. But I couldn’t just lie there.

  Ribisi and his goons could enter the house at any moment.

  And if they found us, they’d kill us.

  I scrambled to my feet, and ducking my head, I scurried for the hall.

  “Get down!” Marc shouted at me.

  I didn’t take his advice.

  Braced against the window frame, his weapon in his hands, Marc watched for movement in the barnyard. But he couldn’t see the back of the house. And that’s where the kitchen door remained unlocked. If Ribisi’s men entered that way, they could get the jump on us. And holed up in Toomey’s room, we’d be easy targets.

  Just like ducks in a shooting gallery.

  Chapter 34

  I reached the Strathmeyers’ back door in time to see the doorknob spin. Throwing my shoulder to the stile, I snatched at the deadbolt’s thumb-turn, flipped it closed, and felt the deadbolt slide into the jamb. Immediately, a boot slammed into the wood with so much force, it set the door trembling in its frame.

  It didn’t matter which of Ribisi’s men were outside, trying to kick the door in. That deadbolt wouldn’t give. But a panel might.

  The creep gave up on kicking the stile above the lock set. Instead, he targeted the decorative panel set between the door’s rails. As it splintered, I snatched up Sheree’s iron skillet from the cooktop—and when the panel fractured above the lock rail and an arm shot through to grope for the thumb-turn, I swung.

  But I wasn’t fast enough to connect. The unlocked door sailed open wide. The leading edge of it slammed into me, knocking me backward.

  The shaven-headed man who’d brandished brass knuckles on Alpine Place just three nights ago stepped into the Strathmeyers’ kitchen like he owned the place. Over his jeans, he wore a brace on the knee I’d damaged. I might not have ruined his medial collateral ligament after all, but his black pupils had shrunken to pinpoints, suggesting he was hopped up on something to kill serious pain. Still, he had enough sense to operate—and to recognize me. The smile he sent me was a sinister thing and it chilled me to the bone.

  The creep raised his right hand. He kissed the cast-metal fittings that turned the joints of his fingers into a deadly weapon. And then he lunged for me.

  I stood my ground and winged the iron skillet at him. It flew at his head, the handle rotating through the air like a buzz saw. He tossed his forearm across his face as a shield and ducked.

  And that’s when I grabbed the back of a kitchen chair in both hands.

  Ripping it away from the table, I swung it like a baseball bat. The body of it struck Knuckles’ bad knee, swept it from under him. He went down with a ro
ar of rage and pain.

  I grabbed a second chair, raised it high, and slammed it down on his head and shoulders once, twice, three times. The wood splintered like so many matchsticks. But Knuckles had collapsed. He made no move to get up. And that was the main thing.

  From outside came the sound of tires tearing through gravel.

  I ran to the living room, peered through the lace at the wide front window. A dark sedan fishtailed down the drive. Ribisi and his gunman were getting away.

  “Jamie? Jamie!”

  Marc hammered down the back stairs, shouted for me from the kitchen.

  “Jamie!”

  I flew from the living room, afraid that Knuckles had risen, afraid that he’d attacked Marc. But Knuckles still lay on the floor. And Marc covered him with his semiautomatic.

  I might’ve fractured Knuckles’ skull. Or maybe I’d even killed him. Guilt whispered in my ear, but I refused to listen to it because this man surely would’ve killed me. Given half a chance, he would’ve killed Marc as well. And certainly he’d helped Ribisi kill Don and Sheree Strathmeyer.

  “Jamie.”

  My name was like music on Marc’s lips. He slung an arm around me, pulled me into his chest. I tried to lay my cheek against Marc’s shoulder, but sudden pain searing my face had me jerking away.

  “We’ll get those lacerations cleaned up,” Marc promised.

  And then I remembered the windowpane in Toomey’s room, shot through by Ribisi’s gunman. I caught sight of the hand I’d looped beneath Marc’s arm and up into a hug. I saw a hundred bloody cuts crisscrossing the back of it and knew my face hadn’t fared much better.

  Sometime later, the Highway Patrol found me and Marc in that farmhouse kitchen. We hadn’t moved an inch. His arm still folded me to him, his gun was in his hand, and the man I’d killed still lay on the Strathmeyers’ linoleum.

  The troopers questioned us separately while a kind EMT tended my wounds. He let me peek into a small round mirror he produced when he was done. Half of my face looked as if it had suffered a pirate’s punishment of fifty lashes, and my bruised eye, which had faded to a glamorous shade of green, complemented the red stripes beautifully.

  I just couldn’t quite appreciate the combination.

  In the early afternoon, Marshal Ingram found me where the EMTs had parked me on a chair on the Strathmeyers’ brick patio. They’d wrapped me in a blanket to ward off shock. The mirror lay on the glass patio table beside me.

  Ingram wore a different suit than the one she’d had on when we’d tussled at Hearth’n’Home, but it was just as gray. She didn’t greet me when she saw me. However, her concerned frown said it all.

  “You should see the other guy,” I told her.

  “I did,” she replied. “They carried him out through the front door—feet first.”

  She dropped into the chair next to mine, crossed one leg casually over the other.

  “You ever kill a man before, Ms. Sinclair?”

  I wanted to lie, but there was no point in that.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Ingram clasped her hands together over her knee. They were nice hands, slender and pretty. She wore a golden signet ring on the third finger of her right hand. The scale of the ring was meant for a woman. It hadn’t been sized down from a man’s. It flattered her bone structure. And it looked like a class ring from one of the military academies.

  Before I could ask her about it, she said, “Killing a man never gets easier.”

  “No,” I agreed. “It doesn’t. And heaven forbid it ever should.”

  But Ingram and I both knew killing came easily to criminals like Max Ribisi. Life had no worth if it wasn’t his own.

  Ingram said, “Marshal Douglas would like to hear your account of this morning’s events, and the events surrounding Dustin Toomey’s murder last night.”

  “What’s the matter?” I demanded, feeling snarky all of a sudden. “Does Douglas need you to do his asking for him?”

  “No, but directing me gives him something to do.”

  “If it’s like that, I’m sorry.”

  She shrugged. “It’s okay. I’m on the way up. And he’s on the way out.”

  I laughed, though I supposed her situation wasn’t really funny. Still, it made me feel good to know Ingram couldn’t be cowed. Because I liked her.

  Marc emerged from the kitchen doorway, his eyes riveted to me. As if Ingram weren’t even there, he crouched beside my chair, snugged the blanket closer around me.

  “You okay, babe?”

  “I’m still standing,” I replied, wanting to reassure him. “Well, actually, I’m sitting, but you get the idea.”

  “How about you come sit in my car for a while,” Marshal Douglas said, turning up at the edge of the Strathmeyers’ patio like a bad penny. “Marshal Ingram and I will drive you to your motel.”

  I wasn’t staying in a motel, but if Sam Brewer hadn’t given Douglas that little detail, I wasn’t about to provide it. After all, Marc and I didn’t need Douglas dropping by the cabin as he had at Hearth’n’Home. He could keep his insinuations and veiled threats to himself.

  “Ingram and I will even buy you a late lunch,” Douglas added, as if that offer could sweeten the deal.

  But I knew there was no such thing as a free lunch, no matter what he called it, and I was old enough to say so. “Am I under arrest?”

  “Arrest?” Douglas sputtered. “Of course not.”

  “Then I’m riding with Special Agent Sandoval,” I told him. “We’ll follow you and Ingram wherever you want to go. And he’ll have a seat at the table while we talk.”

  Douglas didn’t like that suggestion. The crimp on either side of his mouth said so. But he knew better than to argue about it, and once the troopers were done with us, Marc piloted our SUV after the marshals’ sedan while I rode shotgun, exactly as I’d said I would.

  Douglas drove toward Fortune’s Crossroads and down the long strip where Big Business was trying to crowd out the little guys that bought and sold essentials to their fellow workmen with no more overhead than shiplap huts or a canvas tent. Turning from the main drag, the marshals’ sedan bumped over a rough track and into a cleared field crammed with trucks and cars. A little shanty had been erected between a rusty mobile home and the chain-link fence where bulldozers were digging a foundation for something big.

  In front of the shanty, a dozen picnic tables dotted the stubble of last year’s grass. Men clustered at most of them. And even before Marc parked, the smoky scent of flame-grilled burgers wrapped itself around me.

  “How do you suppose Douglas knows about this little eatery?” I said, releasing my seatbelt.

  “If you’re going to suggest he and Ingram have spent some time in Fortune’s Crossroads during previous visits,” Marc said, “I’d have to agree with you.”

  But try as he might, Marc couldn’t come up with a good reason why.

  And neither could I.

  Chapter 35

  The burger joint’s late-afternoon patrons looked the four of us out-of-towners up and down like the newcomers we were. Gazes lingered on Ingram’s figure. And my battered face. The sight of the marshals’ suits prompted some diners to hurry up and hit the road. They might not have known that Marc, Ingram, and Douglas were assorted flavors of fed, but they knew the law when they saw it, maybe from hard personal history.

  We sat at a table by ourselves. Ingram got dispatched to order some food. She returned bearing sodas and a variety of burgers, including one for me loaded with absolutely everything.

  “So,” Douglas said, around a mouthful of meat. “What happened today?”

  I found it curious that Douglas didn’t want to start with last night and Toomey’s murder in the little church. Maybe he’d framed his open-ended question so Marc and I could backtrack if we had a mind to. Douglas’s approach was a standard interview-and-interrogation technique. It gave the suspect plenty of elbow room to tell the truth. And to be caught in his own lies as well.

 
“You know what happened,” I said, cutting to the chase. “The question is why.”

  Marc appeared to be deeply involved in squeezing ketchup onto his fries, but only a fool would believe he wasn’t paying full attention to this conversation. For her part, Ingram’s eyes slid toward Douglas as she sipped from the straw in her soda. She wanted to hear his answer as much as I did.

  Douglas said, “Ribisi couldn’t force Elena Preble’s location out of Toomey, so he trashed his place, hunting for anything that would point to her such as a cellphone, postcard, you name it.”

  “But why the trip wire?” I asked. “And the air horn?”

  Douglas took another bite. “When he still didn’t come up with a lead on Ms. Preble, he took over the farmhouse to sleep, eat, and regroup. The air horn would warn him if anyone came to snoop through Toomey’s things.”

  Except the horn had booby-trapped Toomey’s bedroom, which was inside the house and up the stairs. The motion sensor in the driveway would’ve given the real warning—if that’s what Ribisi had wanted. No, Max Ribisi had anticipated that Elena would come for Toomey, and might go to his room for a memento or to mourn him. The horn would’ve frightened the bejesus out of her—just as it had done to me. And in those moments of fear and confusion, Ribisi or his boys would’ve come running.

  But for Max Ribisi, getting his hands on Elena was only a means to an end.

  I said, “Where’s Lucy Ribisi these days?”

  Marc eyed Douglas.

  And Ingram set down her soda can with a bump.

  “She died in a house fire. In Omaha. Almost three weeks ago now.” Douglas popped a French fry into his mouth and chewed. “It’s old news, Ms. Sinclair. The real problem is stopping Ribisi before he takes his revenge on Ms. Preble for protecting Lucy when it counted.”

  I nodded, wrapped up the delicious burger I’d hardly touched.

  “Well, thanks for lunch—or dinner,” I said. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll crawl into a hole somewhere and take some more Tylenol.”

  Douglas opened his mouth to object.

  Marc and I rose from the picnic table. Ingram stood to shake hands all around. And that meant Douglas had to either get with the program or pull a dirt move and stop us.