He said, She said, Murder (He said, She said Detective Series Book 1)

by Jeramy Gates

  The place had given me chills just looking at it from the outside. Inside, it was like walking through a crypt. It was a graveyard of ghost ships, dozens of vessels of every type and size, abandoned and forgotten, left to rot away to nothing inside some dark old warehouse. I kept expecting to look into one of the boats and see a skeleton with a captain’s hat grinning back at me. Part of me wanted to run shrieking out of there. Another part wanted to find a match and burn the place to the ground.

  Halfway across the room, I paused to pull a cobweb from my hair and I heard voices drifting down from above. The web tugged at my hair as I pulled on it, and clung to the skin of my shoulders. I ignored the creeping sensation that crawled up my spine and pushed forward, straining to hear the conversation over the racket of the building’s metal roof in the storm. I recognized Joe’s voice, but the other was muffled. I couldn’t tell if it was King or Pishard. It had to be one of those two.

  I made my way to the staircase, dodging around rotten old life vests and the carcass of a wooden kayak, and began climbing the stairs.

  “Nine millimeter,” King’s voice said. “James chose an excellent weapon for his suicide, don’t you think?”

  Suicide? My breath caught in my chest. We were too late. King had already killed Pishard. Now he was going to kill Joe. I raised my Glock to eye level as the top of the stairwell came into view. I saw Joe’s legs, and a chair next to him. I took another step.

  Creak! The sound of the stair groaning under my weight sent my stomach churning. I heard a noise behind me and swung around to see Solomon King lurking at the edge of the stairwell behind a partial wall. He was carrying a pistol.

  King fired a shot, but not at me. He was aiming at Joe. The explosion of gunfire shocked my eardrums and filled my ears with a loud, pulsating tone. I spun around, leveling my sights on the teacher, and squeezed the trigger. Plaster exploded and King dropped out of sight. I ran to the top of the stairs and saw Joe’s face peering out from behind Pishard’s body.

  “Move!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. His gaze flashed over my shoulder, and I knew King was taking aim at me. I dropped to one knee and rolled sideways.

  As I landed, I felt something tear inside me. I cried out and dropped the pistol, clutching at my belly. A warm gush of fluid went rushing down my thighs. A contraction came out of nowhere, forcing an involuntary scream out of my lungs.

  I heard another gunshot, like a distant pop! beneath the ringing in my ears. In the corner of my eyes, I saw Joe drop. I turned, half-expecting to see my husband lying on the floor dead from a bullet wound. Instead, he was crawling towards me.

  King fired another shot. The bullet came so close that I felt the wind of it against my hair. The floorboards exploded between us, and we both flinched as slivers of wood sprayed up into the air. Joe lunged for my gun. He rolled onto his side, leveled the sights, and began squeezing the trigger. The teacher leapt back out of sight, but I knew Joe had hit him at least once because I heard a scream. The sound was cut short, and I heard and felt the thud of King’s body hitting the floor. Joe looked back at me. His eyes widened as he realized my predicament.

  “Are you okay?” I could barely hear his words over the ringing in my ears, but I understood. I nodded.

  “I think so,” I said, wincing as another small contraction rolled over me.

  Joe pulled my head onto his lap. From that angle, I could see King’s motionless legs sticking out from behind the wall. I looked up into Joe’s face and saw him staring down at me.

  “What happened?” he said, brushing my hair out of my eyes. “Are you all right?”

  “My water broke,” I said. “Joe, I think the baby is coming!”

  His eyes lit up in a panic. “Hang on,” he said, trying to twist out from underneath me. “I’m going to get you out of here!”

  “No, there’s no time for that. We have to do it here.”

  “What? We can’t just… where’s your phone? I’ll call an ambulance!”

  “There’s no signal,” I said. I breathed in deeply as the contractions subsided. “Relax, Joe. We can handle this. First, find me something to lie back on.”

  “Like what?”

  “Anyth-” I started to say, but another contraction cut me off. It was a behemoth. Spasms racked my entire body. I reached up, grabbing him by the collar, gasping for breath. Just as it began to fade, another hit me like a semi-truck. The pain rolled over my body. It gradually subsided, and I realized I had been screaming. I wasn’t sure exactly when I had started.

  “What the…!” Joe shouted. “Are you okay?”

  “Contractions,” I said when I could breathe again. “Remember, Joe? Remember the classes we took?”

  “Okay, let me think…” He took me by the hand. “Here, squeeze my hand. Now, breathe!”

  “I am breathing, you idiot! Get me a pillow before I squeeze something else that you won’t like!”

  Joe went scurrying across the room. He came back a few seconds later with a padded desk chair. He turned it upside down on the floor, and helped me lean back against it. It doesn’t sound very comfortable, but it was an adjustable reclining chair. Joe managed to get enough of an angle that I could relax a little. After getting me settled, he took my hand again, and wiped my bangs from my eyes.

  “Okay, deep breaths. You’re doing great. You’re going to be fine.”

  I started screaming my way through another contraction as a security guard appeared at the top of stairs. He was young, overweight, and dressed in a blue uniform clearly at least one size too small. He glanced at Pishard’s body and swung his flashlight in our direction, nearly blinding me with the light of a thousand suns.

  “TURN THAT OFF!” I screamed. The guy just stared at us, blinking. Joe told him to shut it off, or he would do something both profane and anatomically impossible. The guard finally got the hint. I was only vaguely aware of the conversation that followed:

  “Sorry,” the guard mumbled, flicking the switch. He licked his lips and threw his gaze around the room. “What in the world happened here?”

  “She’s in labor!” Joe barked. “Get us some help!”

  “Should I radio for an ambulance?”

  “Yes! No, wait. The Bodega Fire department. Call them. They’re closest. And call Sheriff Diekmann.”

  “What about… that guy?” the guard said, glancing at Pishard’s body.

  “I’ll make sure he doesn’t go anywhere,” Joe said.

  The guard seemed to accept that answer. He went running down the stairs. Somehow, I managed a hoarse laugh.

  “This isn’t nearly how I imagined this,” I said, my voice little more than a whisper.

  “Nothing ever is,” Joe said. “Don’t worry, you’re doing great.”

  “Joe, I’m sorry.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Grandma. The mortgage. I should have told you.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry for. You panicked, that’s all. It happens.” I started to cry.

  “I’m no good at this, Joe. I don’t know how to be a wife, or a mom.”

  Joe laughed, but his eyes were glistening with moisture. “Stop it. You’re the perfect wife. You are going to make a great mom.”

  “You think?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “How do you know? After all the mistakes I’ve made…”

  “What mistakes? Listen, the fact that you want to be a good mom tells me that you will be.”

  “I hope so. I don’t want to let Autumn down.”

  “We won’t. We’ll give her everything a kid could want.”

  I groaned as another contraction came, but it was a small one and quickly receded. I took a few deep breaths. Joe had my right hand in his. With his left, he reached over to wipe the tears from my cheeks.

  “This changes everything,” I said in a whisper. “Everything, forever.”

  “For the better,” he said.

  Another contraction came and I lost track of our conversa
tion.

  “I see her!” Joe shouted somewhere in the hazy distance. “I can see the baby’s head. Push, Tanja. Push now!”

  I gasped as the next contraction came. I screamed, and pushed so hard I thought my guts were falling out. I felt my body ripping apart. Violent searing fire burned through my nerves. My hands clawed at the floor, and everything else in the world disappeared. Everything except for the pain. Everything melted together.

  Hold, breathe, push… Scream!

  Count. Breathe. Push. SCREAM!

  Nine days later, baby Autumn was born.

  Well, it felt like nine days. In reality, the entire thing was over in less than an hour. In that time -in that split universal second- everything I ever knew or thought I knew about life had changed. The storm went calm, and for a few minutes, the light of the full moon broke through the clouds. The whole universe seemed to take a breath.

  Autumn screamed at first, and then fell silent as I put her to my breast. Joe put his arms around us, and kept us warm. As our precious newborn baby drifted off to sleep, I once again became aware of my surroundings. A few yards away, I saw Pishard’s body resting in the chair where he had been murdered. At some point, Joe had pushed the chair back to the far wall, and turned it away from us so it wouldn’t disturb me.

  I looked over at the stairwell, and saw the craters in the sheetrock from the bullets Joe and I had fired at Mr. King. I glanced at the floor, where King’s legs had been clearly visible after Joe shot him.

  “Joe?”

  “What is it, sweetness?”

  “Where is King?”

  Joe followed my stare. He leapt to his feet with my gun in hand and raced over to the stairwell, limping on his sore leg. He peered cautiously around the corner, and turned back to stare at me.

  “He’s gone!”

  Chapter 14

  Joe

  Tanja’s Glock had two bullets left in the magazine. I pulled back the slide, chambering a round so that it would be ready to fire. I knelt down, and put it in Tanja’s free hand.

  “Joe, what are you doing?”

  I leaned close, pulling my jacket up over her and the baby. “I have to make sure King’s gone,” I said. “He may still be in here. We don’t dare leave until we know for sure.”

  Her eyes widened slightly. Tanja’s smooth skin was pale and her eyes glistened in the dim light. She was beautiful; more beautiful than I could ever remember. I was more in love with her at that moment than I had ever been in my life. I kissed her on the lips, and bent down to kiss Autumn on the forehead. My baby girl flinched at the touch of my whiskers, and began to burrow into Tanja’s breast.

  “Be careful,” Tanja said. She placed the gun on the floor next to her so she could graze her fingers along my cheek.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t let him hurt you. Either of you.”

  I pushed to my feet, and felt a sharp pain in my hip as I rose. I winced, glancing at my cane lying on the floor next to Tanja. I didn’t pick it up. I wanted both hands free.

  I limped over to the stairs and peered down into the darkened storage area. The patter of a light rain on the tin roof filled my ears. I saw a drop of blood a few steps down. The shadows swallowed up the stairs. I grabbed the handrail and slowly began my descent into that eerie nautical graveyard, one awkward step at a time.

  Without my cane, the handrail had to bear a good portion of my weight. Thankfully, it was stable enough to withstand the pressure. I paused halfway down, turning my head side to side, scanning the dark, ghostly hulls for any sign of the killer. Through the windows at the front of the warehouse, I caught a glimpse of the cars sitting out front. That confirmed my suspicion. Solomon King was still in there with us somewhere, and he had a gun.

  I thought back to our encounter, trying to remember how many shots he had fired. At least four, maybe five. I couldn’t be sure. I thought the pistol he was carrying might be a Berretta. It was a nine millimeter, and depending on the model and year, the thing might hold as many as sixteen rounds. There was no doubt about it, I was in trouble.

  I continued my descent, carefully skipping over number eight as I came to it, and then moved as quickly as I could to bottom of the stairs. A powerboat rose up to my left. I knelt down next to it, wincing as my hip cried out in pain.

  I was just beyond the column of light shining down from the second floor, making it impossible for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. I moved slowly around the bow of the boat, deeper into the darkness of the warehouse.

  I hid myself in the pitch-black shadow of two large sailboats, and waited quietly for my eyes to adjust. My other senses came to life. I became very aware of the scents of dust and grease and oiled wood. I heard a quiet crack across the room, or possibly outside. I couldn’t tell which. The sound of the rain grew louder.

  I moved along the length of the sailboats in that direction. As I came around the stern on my right, I saw the still form of a body lying on the floor in a dark pool of blood. Even in the darkness, I instantly recognized the security guard. I hurried to his side, lowering myself as far as I could manage without my hip giving out on me.

  I grimaced as I saw the torn flesh on the guard’s throat, and noticed the boathook lying on the concrete floor next to him. I felt a horrifying chill crawl down my spine as I realized the full depth of King’s depravity. I had known the man was capable of murder, but the sheer violence of the act made my guts churn. King had ripped out the man’s jugular just to avoid firing a shot and alerting us to his presence.

  I searched the body, hoping to find a gun or a tazer, but came up empty. I picked up the flashlight that had fallen on the concrete floor next to him. I hesitated a moment, and then picked up the boathook, too.

  “King!” I shouted into the air, turning my head so as to throw my voice around the room. “I know you’re in here!”

  I crept back into the shadow between the two sailboats and waited, listening intently, every muscle taught. I held the boathook in my right hand and the flashlight in my left. I had decided that I might be able to blind King with the flashlight long enough to use the hook on him. What might happen after that, remained to be seen.

  At that moment, I was acutely aware of the fact that I might have to take a bullet for Tanja and Autumn. I was okay with that. The only thing I cared about was making sure that King couldn’t hurt them. I was more than willing to die in order to ensure their safety. If I had to, I might even do what he had done to the guard. I didn’t like the idea, but such moral principles fade into irrelevance when it comes to protecting your family.

  I heard a sound up above me, and swung around just in time to see King’s dark shape looming over me. He had climbed up into one of the sailboats. I saw his hand go up, and I leapt to the side as he fired a shot. The muzzle flare lit up the room. I landed awkwardly on my side and grunted as jolts of pain shot up and down my leg. I turned the flashlight on, and pointed it at him. The beam illuminated the deck of the boat, but King was gone.

  I turned the light back off and crawled backwards, around the second boat, looking for cover. I couldn’t see a thing. I clutched the boathook as if it was the fine line between life and death. Maybe it was.

  “Joe!” King’s voice said somewhere very close. “Joe, I can see you!”

  I pushed painfully to my feet, wincing. I turned slowly, my ears straining to locate him. Say something else! I thought. Just one more word.

  I heard a noise behind me, and spun around to see the dark silhouette of King’s figure outlined against the hull of another boat. I struck out with the boathook just as he fired, and in the momentary flash of light, I saw the crazed look in his eyes. The shot missed, but I did too. I struck at him again, aiming for the space where I’d seen the muzzle flash. I was rewarded by the violent thwack of metal against bone.

  King cried out, and I heard the gun clatter to the floor. I hit the switch on the flashlight, trying to blind him. King leapt on me, and we went down in a heap. My leg twisted as I fell, and an involuntary
cry of pain escaped my lips. King took heart in this, laughing wickedly as he climbed up to straddle my chest, and started punching me in the face.

  I had to release my grip on the boathook. It was too long to use in close quarters combat. King hit me with another fierce blow to the nose, and stars filled my vision. I struck out blindly with the flashlight, and hit him on the shoulder. I swung again, but King caught my arm in both hands.

  Having released my grip on the boathook, I was free to swing at him with my right hand. I delivered a glancing right hook that had little effect, and King threw his head back, guarding his face with his arms. The flashlight was impeding my ability to fight, so I let it go. I thought this would allow me to strike him in the face.

  King thwarted my plan. He took control of the flashlight. Using it as a weapon, he brought it down on my thigh as hard as he could. I roared, blinded by pain. I reached out, trying to latch onto him. As my hand closed on his shirt, King raised the flashlight over my head.

  Seeing what he intended to do, I struggled frantically, trying to find enough movement to avoid the inevitable skull-crushing blow. I pushed back at him, and King swung the flashlight violently down towards my face. At the same moment, there was a flash of light accompanied by the explosive report of gunfire.

  King lurched. His swing went wide, and the flashlight tumbled out of his feeble grasp. The teacher went completely still, and I felt warm liquid dripping down from his chest onto my face. He fell sideways, dropping to the floor.

  Behind him, I saw my wife’s silhouette, one hand brandishing her Glock, the other clutching our little baby to her chest. I moaned painfully as I crawled out from underneath King’s legs. I grabbed the flashlight, and put two fingers on his throat, checking for a pulse. There wasn’t one. King had an exit wound the size of a golf ball in the center of his chest. I looked up at Tanja.