COLT (A Nicholas Colt Thriller)

by Jude Hardin

  She seemed determined to play this thing out to the end. She was a liar and a manipulator and a cunning sociopath, and I should have kept my eyes on her from the beginning. She needed psychiatric help. I knew that, but it was still hard for me to feel sorry for her. Regardless of the reasons, Shelby Spelling was a very dangerous person. She needed to be behind bars.

  She was breathing hard and cringing from the pain, but as far as I could tell she hadn’t shed a single tear. She was mentally insane and physically tough, and through the years I’d learned that those were an especially lethal combination of attributes.

  “You’re not fooling anyone,” I said. “If you don’t know anything, then why did you run away when you saw me?”

  “I thought you were after me about the stuff I did to your camper. And your car. I’m not sorry about any of that, by the way. You never should have messed with me.”

  “You’re going to pay me for the cleanup,” I said. “And my tires. And my laptop.”

  “Sue me,” she said.

  An ambulance followed three police cruisers into the alley. A state trooper and two deputies from the county sheriff’s office climbed out of the cars and pointed guns at us. Using their vehicles for shields, they shouted freeze and all that, and once Newly and I were facedown on the asphalt and handcuffed, the EMS guys rushed over and tended to Shelby. They patched up the hole in her ass, stuck an IV in her arm, and loaded her into the meat wagon. All in about ten minutes. They blasted the siren and headed for the hospital.

  The guys from the sheriff’s department put me in one car and Newly Toothless in the other. The state trooper gave the other officers a half salute, climbed into his cruiser and left the scene.

  It took a little over an hour to get everything sorted out. When all was said and done, Newly got arrested and I was set free. Amazingly, I had Detective Barry Fleming to thank for it. He’d been in contact with Bradley Harbaugh, and he knew that the feds were on the case now. As it turned out, I’d been spot-on about Everett being kidnapped, and Fleming had pretty much ignored me since day one. If I’d gone to jail, it would have only added to his embarrassment. So he went to bat for me, and the deputies let me go

  I apologized to Dr. Chavez for pulling a gun on him, and for all the trouble I’d inadvertently brought to his office. He didn’t seem real happy, but he wished me luck in finding the kidnapper.

  After everyone else had left the parking lot, I gave Bradley a call. It was a bad connection, lots of static, but I got the gist of what he was saying.

  “I guess this is it for me,” I said. “I’ve done all I can do. The FBI can interview Shelby at the hospital. I know she was involved, so I’m hoping they can get something out of her.”

  “I talked to an agent named Chet Overton a few minutes ago,” Bradley said. “They have a team on the way to the hospital there in Gainesville, and there’s one coming to my house to set up telephone surveillance in case the kidnapper calls back. Plus, they’re trying to trace the offshore bank account where I’m supposed to deposit the twenty million dollars. So everyone’s working on it, but there’s not a lot of time left. I’m just praying that the kidnappers will keep their word and give us Everett’s location once the money is transferred.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “I wish there was something more I could do.”

  “You’ve been a huge help to us, Nicholas, and I appreciate everything you’ve done. Just send me a bill for the time you’ve spent on this. Hopefully, Everett will be sitting here at the table later tonight drinking a can of Dr. Pepper and eating a bag of Doritos, and he can call you and thank you himself.”

  “What was that?”

  “I said hopefully Everett can call you and thank you himself.”

  “Not that. Something about what he’s going to be eating and drinking.”

  “Oh, that. It’s kind of a joke in our family. Since Everett was about three years old, his favorite food combination has been Nacho Cheese Doritos and Dr. Pepper. If you can even call that stuff food. It’s like he craves it or something. Can’t get enough of it. That’s how I knew it was Everett when I talked to him earlier. I asked him his favorite snack. It was a question that only he would know. Kind of like a secret code.”

  “I can barely hear you,” I said. “You’re breaking up really bad. I’ll call you back in a little while and see how everything’s going.”

  “OK. Thanks again, Nicholas.”

  I hung up, wondering if I was the smartest detective in the world or the dumbest.

  I left a little rubber on the pavement as I took a right out of the parking lot and headed for the PEAK house.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I was low on gas, so I stopped at a service station with a convenience store attached to it and pumped out twenty dollars worth of regular unleaded. When I walked inside to pay, I glanced down the potato chip aisle and noticed some shirts for sale on a rack. I needed one. I’d used mine to apply pressure to Shelby’s bleeding buttocks, and all I had on now was the tank top I’d been wearing underneath it.

  The gas station T-shirts were $3.99 each. They were knockoffs, unauthorized versions of shirts sold at concerts back in the seventies and eighties. There was one that said Colt .45 from a show we did in Baton Rouge in 1986, but the only size they had was small. I settled for an extra large Lynard Skynard from 1975. I took it to the register and paid for it and my gasoline and left the store. The shirt was too big for me, but I wanted something that would cover my revolver when I slid it back onto my belt. It would be perfect for that.

  It was dark by the time I got to the fraternity house. The gravel lot behind the building was full, so I had to find a place on the street to park the Caprice. It took a while, and I ended up squeezing into a place three blocks away. I pulled out my cell, thinking I would give Laurie a call and let her know what was going on, but the battery was dead. I tossed the phone into the glove compartment, strapped on my .38, climbed out of the car and started walking. On my way, I passed a couple of guys going in the same direction. I figured they were students, Everett’s age or maybe a little younger. One of them wore a University of Florida football jersey, the other a blue polo.

  “Kind of hard to find a parking place around here,” I said.

  “There’s a party at the PEAK house,” Blue Polo said. “Nine kegs and a live band.”

  Football Jersey chimed in with a vulgar, demeaning, misogynistic reference to the “all-you-can-eat buffet” they were expecting to indulge in at the party. I didn’t know how accurate their assessment was, but they made it sound as though the night would undoubtedly evolve into a wild, drunken orgy. It reminded me of what Laurie had said about the Phi Epsilon Alpha Kappa fraternity. If you can’t go Greek, go PEAK. In my book, these guys were rejects for sure. Not only from every other fraternity on campus, but from the human race.

  They got me thinking.

  If my little girl hadn’t died in the plane crash, she would have turned fifteen this year, just a couple of years away from starting college herself. She was my baby, and every girl going to the party at the PEAK house was somebody’s baby too. Every one of them had someone who cared about them, someone who would be horrified by what Blue Polo and Football Jersey were talking about. Someone who would happily wring their necks for saying such things.

  Kids grow up and they develop an interest in the opposite sex, and that’s the way it should be. It’s natural. It’s why we’ve survived as a species. But to me, at that moment, Football Jersey and Blue Polo seemed like some sort of predators. They were out for one thing, and one thing only, and I couldn’t just walk on by without giving them an earful from the daddy inside me.

  “Is that the way you guys think about women?” I said.

  “You know,” Football Jersey said. “They’re basically just a life support system for a vagina. Stupid bitches. If it weren’t for that thing between their legs, there’d be a bounty on them.”

  Blue Polo laughed. I didn’t.

  “You guys
go ahead and have your fun,” I said. “But remember this: your mothers were young women at one time too. And maybe you have sisters, female cousins, whatever. Think about them, and then think about a couple of mouth-breathing, tongue-lolling, slimeball losers following them around as if they were dogs in heat.”

  The insults I’d hurled at them didn’t seem to register. That’s how stupid these guys were.

  “Anybody touches my sister, I’ll kill them,” Blue Polo said.

  I stopped in front of him and faced him down. “Just remember,” I said. “Someone feels the exact same way about every girl you’re going to talk to tonight. Think about that and try to show a little respect.”

  I turned and walked on ahead, hoping I’d planted at least a tiny seed of conscience into their pea brains.

  When I got a little closer to the fraternity house, I could hear that the band had already started playing. They were rocking out to an old tune by The Clash called “Should I Stay or Should I Go.”

  It was a question I kept asking myself as I walked around to the front of the building and mounted the porch. Should I stay or should I go? Technically, I’d signed off on the job of finding Everett Harbaugh. His parents weren’t paying me anymore. I was running on my own dime now.

  Not that the money was ever the most important thing. Everett had seemed like a fine young man during our brief encounter, and I’d found myself genuinely caring about what happened to him. Still, some people might have said that I didn’t have a horse in the race anymore. That the police and the FBI were more than capable of bringing this to a conclusion—satisfying or otherwise—without my help.

  But Bradley Harbaugh had mentioned something over the phone, something that had sent a chill up my spine. That bit about Everett’s favorite food combination. It was probably nothing, but I had to check it out.

  There was a cluster of young men standing out on the porch, mingling and talking and trying to look thoughtful and sophisticated. They wore khaki pants and Lacoste shirts and topsiders, almost as though it was some kind of uniform. They all had disposable red plastic cups in their hands, and some of them were smoking cigarettes. As I approached, they looked at me as if I’d just climbed out of an alien spaceship.

  I didn’t belong there. I was about two decades too old.

  “I’m looking for John Patterson,” I said.

  “He’s up in his room,” one of the guys said. “Studying. On a Friday. What a geek.”

  The others laughed.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I opened the door and walked inside. A bunch of people were milling around in the front room. Again, everyone was carrying a drink. It was mostly guys talking to guys and girls talking to girls, but I figured that would change once the alcohol kicked in.

  I climbed the stairs and navigated the hallway to room 212. I knocked. Waited. Knocked again. The peephole darkened. I stood there for a few seconds staring at the knob, expecting it to turn. Nothing happened. I cupped my hand around my ear and pressed it against the door, but the band was still playing and I couldn’t hear anything.

  I waited until the song ended, and then I listened again. I heard voices. Male. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but I could tell that there were two of them, that it wasn’t just John Patterson talking to someone on the phone.

  The band started playing again. “Funk 49” by The James Gang. They’d cranked the volume up a notch. They were even louder than before. I knocked a third time, and when it became obvious that nobody was going to answer, I pulled my revolver from its holster and used my shoulder as a battering ram. Like Humphrey Bogart might have done, back in the day when men were men and doors were props.

  It was an overly aggressive move, but I’d been through a lot in the past couple of days and I didn’t feel like pussyfooting around. I knew that Patterson was in there, and I knew he was trying to hide something from me. Otherwise, he would have answered the door—which, in this case, was definitely not part of a movie set. It was solid and heavy and built to keep fire and Nicholas Colt on the other side of it. After the painful first impact with my shoulder, I decided to give my foot a try.

  The lock popped and the door swung inward.

  John Patterson was sitting on one of the beds, the one with the Jack Nicholson poster over it. He was holding a shotgun, aiming it at my chest. It was an antique single-barrel, probably another family heirloom that had been passed down for generations. It looked like something Jed Clampett might carry around. Personally, I would have been afraid to shoot the thing. I would have been afraid that it might blow up in my face.

  “Drop your gun and close the door,” Patterson said.

  I dropped my gun and closed the door. I didn’t have much of a choice. The shotgun might have been old, but the barrel was long and fat and menacing and pointed right at me. If Patterson decided to squeeze the trigger, that would be all she wrote. BLAMMO! I would be cut in half.

  “Where’s Everett?” I said.

  “Where do you think he is?”

  “I think he’s hiding inside one of those armoires. The same place he was the first time I came into this room.”

  “I guess you think you’re pretty clever, don’t you?” Patterson said.

  “What can I say? I get lucky sometimes.”

  “How did you know?” he said. “How could you possibly have known?”

  “I didn’t until just a little while ago, when Bradley Harbaugh mentioned the significance of Everett’s favorite food combination. There was a bag of Doritos and a can of Dr. Pepper on the desk when I talked to you Wednesday, as if someone had been sitting there snacking. At the time, I assumed it was you. But it wasn’t. It was Everett. He’s been here all along, hasn’t he? He was devastated when he heard the news about his mother using a sperm bank to get pregnant, and he was furious with her for not telling him sooner. And when you think about it, who wouldn’t be angry about something like that? Everett’s whole life had been a lie, in a way. He was pissed, and all that rage kept simmering inside him until it reached a boiling point. He wanted to get his mother back, somehow, to get revenge on her for keeping the big secret for so long, so the two of you tossed some ideas around, and you cooked up this little kidnapping scheme with a twenty million dollar ransom. Everett knew his mother was good for the money, and he knew she would pay it to get him back safely. How am I doing so far?”

  “Pretty good,” Patterson said. “Please continue.”

  “So you came up with the kidnapping bit, but that wasn’t enough. Everett wanted the sperm donor to suffer too. You guys didn’t know his identity, but you knew the names of the other children he produced. You got all that from the Siblings Board website. When you saw that Philip Davenport had been murdered on the day he turned twenty, and that Stephanie Vowels’ twentieth birthday was coming up soon, the plan really started coming together. You guys decided to frame the sperm donor for the abduction, and the only way to do that was to frame him for murdering a couple of his other offspring. You wanted to make him look like a serial killer, methodically working his way down the list as each of them turned twenty. It didn’t matter that he would eventually be exonerated. It would disrupt his life in a major way for a while, and it would be the perfect diversion for the police, aimed at giving you and Everett plenty of time to take the money and run. And by golly, you almost got away with it. You would have, if Bradley Harbaugh hadn’t told me about Everett’s mad cravings for Doritos and Dr. Pepper on the phone earlier.”

  “We’re still going to get away with it,” Patterson said. “You can’t stop us now.”

  One of the doors on the armoire to the left of me swung open, and Everett Harbaugh stepped out into the room.

  “Sorry it had to go down like this, Mr. Colt,” he said. “I really didn’t intend for anyone to get hurt.”

  “What about Stephanie Vowels?” I said. “Seems like she was the big loser in this whole deal. You drove down to Cocoa Beach, tied a rope around her neck, and dropped her off a bri
dge. You killed her to throw me and everyone else who might be looking for you off the trail.”

  Everett stared at the floor. He seemed to be ashamed of that one little detail.

  “You have to admit, it was a pretty cool plan,” Patterson said.

  “There’s nothing cool about murder,” I said.

  Everett looked up. “Anyway, what’s done is done. And John’s right. There’s no stopping us now. The money will be transferred soon, and we have a private plane waiting for us at a private airstrip. Next stop, Mexico.”

  “They’ll find you and extradite you,” I said. “You might be able to bribe your way through for a few years, but they’ll catch up with you eventually.”

  “Oh, we’re not going to stay in Mexico,” Patterson said. “That’s just the first leg of our trip. We have everything lined up to be in the Philippines by day after tomorrow. No extradition from there. With twenty million dollars at our disposal, we’re going to live like kings. We can buy our own island if we want to.”

  “So what are you going to do now?” I said. “Shoot me? The band downstairs is loud, but it’s not loud enough to mask a shotgun blast. And it’s going to be kind of hard to explain all the blood splatters on the wall.”

  Everett turned to Patterson. “That’s a good question,” he said. “What are we going to do with him?”

  Patterson set the shotgun down and grabbed one of the pillows from the bed. He stood and walked over and picked my revolver up off the floor.

  “Simple,” he said. “We’ll just shoot him with his own gun and leave him here. We’ll use the pillow for a silencer. I saw it on TV. Works like a charm. By the time someone comes in to check on the room, we’ll be long gone.”

  Beads of sweat dotted Everett’s forehead. He looked at his watch.

  “All right,” he said. “Go ahead and get it over with. We need to get out of here.”

  Patterson handed him the gun and the pillow. “I did the girl, bubba. It’s your turn.”