by Beck Jones
Out of the corner of his eye, Russ thought he could see a light flash. He craned his head, and then he could see the flashlight strafing the darkness and then wobbling toward them.
“Paul!” a female voice called out. “Paul! Wait!”
Russ strained at the voice in the darkness. That couldn’t be Liz.
And then it was.
Liz, running toward them, disheveled, her hair flying, her purse swinging by her side.
“Stop!” she gasped as she reached them. She bent over, her palms pressed against her thighs.
“What the hell?” Paul said, a mixture of awe and amusement. “How did you find me?”
Still gasping for air, Liz said, “Why does everybody insist on thinking I’m a fool? It wasn’t that hard to figure out, not with Google and a GPS.” She glared at Russ. “And you! Why didn’t you tell me about this deal? Matt Lauer money, really? And you said not one word?”
She turned back to Paul. “There’s a deal in play with Vincent Sabine.”
Paul shrugged. “No shit, Liz. Who the fuck do you think made the deal possible for your useless piece of crap husband?”
“But surely you can see this changes everything. We’ll have plenty of money to share. A lot more than the six million in insurance.”
Russ felt his neck snap forward.
Liz looked back at him with what seemed nothing more than mild annoyance. “Well, what was I supposed to do? You get fired, who’s going to hire you? You know they wouldn’t touch you in any of the decent metro markets. We’d have to go to some dumpy little station, if that, where you might make forty, fifty grand a year, if that. What would I do? I couldn’t even get a job. They don’t teach art appreciation at community college. Three million is at least something. I was going to give Paul three. But with this kind of money on the table, we can all get past this. Paul, don’t even think about reaching for that gun.”
Suddenly, somehow Liz had a gun sprouting out of her hand, and she was standing straight, with the gun pointed at Paul.
“Be reasonable,” she said.
“Who’s being unreasonable?” Paul snapped. “You silly bitch! What the fuck do you think has changed? Your hubby has screwed too many women in Manhattan to count, and that includes interns for the show.”
“Yes,” Liz said patiently. “Five of them. Anna Beth told me. She said you gave her the list.”
Paul cast a glance at Russ. “My parting gift to you. I knew she’d try extortion. And hey, more power to her.”
“Two of those girls have—have passed away,” Liz said. “Unfortunately. That’s terrible. But that means we only have three that are left. And one of them is living in India. I bet we can come to some kind of accommodation with the other two. That’s a very manageable number. So let’s all forgive and forget. Everybody wins with this deal. Paul, you’ll get more money, and Russ and I will get to stay in Manhattan. He’ll still do the story about this mess here. And I can keep my life. Stop looking at me like that, Russ. The way you’ve treated me all these years, you’re lucky I don’t push you in that stinky pit myself.”
Paul shook his head. “No fucking way, Liz. We had a deal.”
Liz’ tone was calm. “Yes, we had a deal. And now we have a different deal.”
She stepped closer to Paul, kicked the Glock and sent it spinning. It landed a couple yards away.
“Untie his hands first,” she said.
Paul stared at her, breathing hard.
“Untie his hands,” she said, this time with an edge in her voice.
Paul bent down and began picking at the knot.
“Faster,” Liz snapped.
Paul picked harder and the knot fell apart. Russ began yanking at the knot at his feet. He was disgusted with himself. He hadn’t even been tied that tightly.
But then had he ever been tightly tied? He only thought he was.
“Get up,” Liz commanded, and actually pointed the gun at him.
He sighed, and lay back down on the concrete. He stared up at the sky. He thought he could see Orion, but then maybe it was just a bunch of twinkling lights. There was no order or pattern to any of it.
“Get up!” Liz said. “We’re getting out of here.”
“No, Liz, not right now you aren’t.”
Another voice. Not Paul’s. Now Russ sat up. Gabe stood behind Liz with a gun pressed against the back of her head.
“Stand very still, Liz,” he said. “Or I will blow your head off.”
“Well, hello, partner,” Paul growled. “Convenient that you’re here to take care of the silly bitch.”
Gabe reached around and snatched the gun from Liz’s hand. Liz stood scowling, whether in anger or incomprehension, Russ couldn’t tell.
Gabe stepped over and kicked the Glock even further away.
“Gabe, I don’t know what Paul has told you,” Liz said. “But he’s not a nice man.”
“And you’re a nice woman?” Gabe said. “You were going to kill Russell Stockton. My mentor. My hero.”
Liz started crying. “Things are more complicated than they seem.”
“They are,” Gabe said. “Say, Paul?”
“What?”
Paul looked up at Gabe. And when the bullet hole bloomed in the center of his forehead, his expression remained unchanged, untroubled, even as his body fell backward and splashed into the lagoon.
Russ started to rise, holding up his hands. “Gabe, don’t hurt Liz. She’s an innocent here.”
“No, she’s not,” Gabe said. “Neither are you. And neither am I. But no one is going to know that about me. Because Paul McGann is dead. And Paul is the man who cut the deal with Lenny the Lisp to get one of his goons to help him fake his own death, and then went on to kill innocent young women in order to frame you. He’s the man who killed you both in an effort to create a scene that would resemble a murder suicide.”
“You weren’t trying to help me at all,” Liz said in horror.
“Well, I needed to you down here, and you made it surprisingly easy. I was going to come to you and tell you Russ was down here. But you conveniently turned up in the office. Helped with my cover story. You see, I’d been suspicious all along about what had happened to McGann, and to those poor girls. And even though I didn’t get here in time to stop him from killing you, I will be the guy who stopped his killing spree.”
“Vanessa and Phoebe,” Russ said dully. “You did that.”
Gabe smiled. “And more, actually. But officially it will be Paul who was driven mad with jealousy and bitterness. Which it was why it was such a clumsy job of framing you. You see, he was afraid you might not be ensnared in a scandal like he was. And he hated females. It’s pretty easy to connect the dots. Conveniently, he’s the one who made the visits to Lenny in prison, set up the back channel with the goons. And I’ll be right out front of this dump and in front of the camera connecting those dots in story that’s going to make my career. And by the way, bring to light an important corporate pollution story. And I’ll be a star, Russ, just like you. Thanks to you. You are really are my hero. But I can’t wait any longer for the success that’s due me. You’re too old anyway. I’m the right demo. I’m the fresh new face that Vincent Sabine needs for Project X.”
Suddenly, Russ felt a kind of peace. “Eleanor will never buy this.”
Gabe nodded. “Of course, she’ll protest, but everybody knows she’s your terrier, that her devotion to you has warped her mind. And what does a dog do when her master is dead? She dies of heartbreak, too. ”
“Please, Gabe,” Liz said, backing into Russell’s arms.
And then Gabe shot her, and Russ and Liz spun together, and Gabe fired again, and they fell into the lagoon.
Russ clenched his eyelids against the acrid sludge, diving deeper into it, pulling Liz with him, pulling and swimming toward where he hoped he would find the overhang. Finally, he brought them up, slowly, praying that Liz didn’t gasp when she broke the surface, and she didn’t. He watched as Gabe, just a small
dark shape now, stood at the edge, watching for their bodies to surface. Russ could feel the sludge scalding his skin. There was a flash of light behind the dark shape, and then Gabe’s shape moved away into the darkness.
The light came to the edge of the lagoon.
Russ forced himself to count to one hundred even as his skin seethed. He could call out for help to the person with the light, but he had enough of trusting that people were ever going to do good.
Finally, the light disappeared, and he drug himself out of the sludge and pulled Liz after him.
Her lips were bitter against his. Her chest seemed both unyielding yet too soft.
At last, he rocked back on his heels.
Her face. Oh, God, even in the moonlight. Her face.
He rolled her body back into the lagoon and trudged, one leaden foot after the other, toward Paul’s vehicle. His eyes were scalded, but he could see enough, and he was going slowly enough that he didn’t stumble. He still remembered how to hot-wire a car, a skill he had learned so many years ago when he was the ace young news reporter investigating a rash of stolen cars.
So many years ago. So many dreams ago.
THE AVENGER
He didn’t trust the cameraman, a local yokel from the Raleigh affiliate who didn’t seem to get the importance of the story here, or even how to get the fricking lighting right. The darkness was pockmarked with lights, car headlights coming into the processing plant, floodlights being set up around the lagoon.
But there was a deadline. They couldn’t wait for morning. By then, the local yokel he had sweet talked into letting him get in front of the camera would be sidelined, and the big boys would be here to insist on a debriefing first.
Still things were going according to plan. There had been the little hiccup a few hours ago when he took off running when he thought he heard someone in the compound. That had not been his finest moment. He shouldn’t have run like that, all the way across the road and into the woods. But the whole thing was more unnerving than he had expected. His hands were shaking, and he had vomited. When he finally got his nerve back, he walked back to the front of the plant and called the cops, so that he was waiting in this same spot when they arrived and he waved his arms dramatically.
What he needed now—all he really needed now—was a teaser. Big emotional impact with a promise of inside details. Details that nobody else would know. Plus all the big human drama. The wrenching emotional crucible of Gabriel Huntsman, enduring the loss of his hero and mentor, his own guilt at allowing his hero’s beloved wife to accompany him down here, to what became her fateful and fatal end.
And then there was the big story that he would pursue, to fulfill his former boss’s mission: The perfidy of Argofel. Perfidy. That was a word that Russ would like.
THE COPS
“Paul McGann,” Yablonski said, and tucked away his phone. “Once dead, now dead again. Down in North Carolina. In some kind of industrial sewage pond, if you can believe it. McGann shot and killed Russell and Liz Stockton, before little Gabe shot McGann.”
“What the hell? North Carolina?” Murphy said. “And our little Gabe shot it out with McGann?”
Yablonski shrugged. “That’s the story so far.”
“We can take the first flight out in the morning.”
“Screw that. Let’s go now.”
D A Y F O U R
The throes of Thursday
THE AVENGER
“I don’t mean to be uncooperative, but I really need to get back in touch with my bosses at the network,” he said. “I’m the point man down here, and I’ve got a lot of work to do and a lot of responsibilities, too.” It had been three hours of grilling, but so far he had aced it. “I think I’ve answered all your questions.”
“Yeah,” the bitch Murphy sighed. “I’ll give you that. You’ve had an answer to everything.”
He ran his hand through his hair. Remember, you’re tired, you’re hungry, you’re disconsolate. Okay, so it was two out of three that he actually felt. But the last was the most important: Disconsolate. Another word that Russ would have liked. Actually, this had all gone so well, he could almost believe Russ would approve of his performance. After all, Russ had once been a young ambitious guy, and now it was more important than ever to bring up more younger guys to the front in this ridiculous new world where women thought they would take over. Males who could hack it were needed urgently.
The gargantuan cop came into the room, settled in the chair next to Murphy and pushed an unopened Coke can toward him. “Good news and interesting news,” he said.
“What do you mean by that, Detective Yablonski?” He spoke deferentially. He wasn’t playing the defensive kid anymore. He was the newsman who had cracked the case before the cops, but was now behaving very graciously about the whole thing.
“Well, the divers have found a couple of bodies, but only a couple. They’re not a pretty sight, but the body sizes indicate they are those of Paul McGann and Liz Stockton. And you know, Gabe, here’s what’s weird. So far no sign of Russell Stockton anywhere.”
He felt the sweat bloom on his forehead. “So Russ may still be alive,” he said slowly, drawing out the words even as his heartbeat kicked into overdrive.
If Russ was out there, why hadn’t he come to the cops?
“I need to get out there and find Russ,” he said. He grabbed at the jumpsuit they’d made him wear so they could check his clothes for gunshot residue. “I need to get some clothes on and look for him. He’s injured. He must be in shock. Have you checked the hospital?”
“Yeah, we did that,” Yablonski drawled, stretching out in the chair. “Something else. We only found one vehicle there at the lagoon, the one that Liz Stockton rented.”
Did that mean Russ had taken Paul’s vehicle?
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Why had he acted like such a pussy last night? Sure, shooting Russ and Paul was not at all like sticking the needle into that stupid bitch at the club. He could still remember idolizing those guys. So yeah, it was a big deal. And yeah, it was weird how it ramped up his adrenaline, for good and bad. It was a test of his manhood, and he’d passed. But taking off like a scared rabbit, running all the way across that back road and into the woods, crouching behind a tree. And vomiting. God, that was kid’s stuff. He didn’t even bother to scope out that back area again before he ran around to the front of the plant and called Jerry at the network, and then the cops. He was so eager, too eager, to get started with his new life.
“You said you took an Uber out to the lagoon when Liz Stockton ditched you,” Murphy was saying.
“We’ve already gone over that. Just like I told you. I think she was so panicked about Russ. She had been getting more and more hysterical on the drive down. I think she’d been under a lot of stress for a while now. She was worried about Russ, that he might get caught up in all this me too stuff. I should have never let her go with me. It’s all my fault.” It was surprisingly easy to let his voice rise in distress. If Russ somehow got out of the lagoon and drove away, why hadn’t he come forward? Maybe Russ had crawled off to die somewhere else. The best he could hope for.
“So if Mrs. Stockton was stressed about the me too accusations, maybe she thought her husband was not as innocent as the driven snow?” the bitch asked. “Maybe he had something to do with those interns?”
“No! But nowadays all it takes is an accusation and men, good men, are tossed out. The accusation doesn’t have to be true to destroy your career. Liz understood that. And then you two came barging into the network, making even wilder accusations, that Russ could have murdered those girls. Of course, she was terrified. This is your fault, too.”
“Okay,” Yablonski sighed. “So when the Uber got you to the lagoon, did you see any other vehicles? I’m wondering how McGann and Stockton got there.”
“I saw a dark colored four-wheel drive parked just ahead of Liz’s rental. I assumed it was Paul’s. Was it not there this morning?”
“And you w
ent all the way back there to get into the plant because you couldn’t get into the front.”
“I’ve told you all of this.”
“And you saw the Stocktons fall into the lagoon together.”
“Yes. Russ was holding Liz when Paul shot them both.”
“And that’s when you grabbed Stockton’s gun and shot McGann,” Murphy said.
He knew what the bitch was implying, that he was such a little dweezil that he could never have made a play like that. Which he could have. He could have done that. Women like Murphy were always looking to put down guys at every opportunity. Penis envy. He wouldn’t rise to the bait. He wouldn’t panic this time.
Instead he held his head in his hands and closed his eyes. “I should have jumped in to try to save them. I honestly thought they were dead. And I knew whatever was in that lagoon was toxic as hell. If I’d had any idea.” When he opened his eyes, he was pleased to realize he’d squeezed out a few tears.
“I’ve got to find him,” he said, as he set his jaw with determination that was in no way faked.
“Well, here’s the thing,” Yablonski said, shifting in his chair. “If you were there waiting for the local police, why didn’t you see at least hear him as he dragged himself out? Why wouldn’t he have called out to you?”
He kept his face blank while he waited for something to come to him. Finally, he said the only thing he could. “I don’t know. I don’t understand it.”
“You didn’t hear a vehicle leave out the back?”
“As soon as I called the police, I ran out the way I came in and ran around to the front of the plant, so I could flag them down when they got there.” That was in some ways true, and it would have to do for now.
One of the locals stuck his head in the door. “We found something you guys might be interested in. Somebody just spotted a vehicle in the river.”
“Dark four-wheel drive?” Yablonski asked.
