“Where is everyone?” Wes asked as he walked into the living room?
Sara had invited him over for a small get together. After spending several evenings and weekends together, it was time for an introduction to her circle of friends. According to Sara, her friends were curious about the guy who’d been taking so much of her time. Wes had to laugh when she’d said that because his friends had been wondering about Sara as well. So, he agreed to this dinner. Anything to make Sara happy.
“Out back,” she gestured casually to toward the set of closed French doors to their left. “I didn’t want to overwhelm you.”
The décor in the house was just a feminine as Sara, save for a few quirks. But then again, Sara had a few quirks herself. Frilly pillows accented plush floral sofas in the light yellow colored living room. Books lined the oversized bookshelves. Candles scattered around the room, some in jars, some in glass holders and others placed in empty liquor bottles covered in wax that had been dripped from other candles. The most interesting items we’re old bird cages in varying sizes hanging from the ceilings that housed porcelain dolls.
“Sara, I keep meaning to ask you, what’s the deal with the bird cages?” Wes asked.
“I don’t know. I just like to keep pretty things. There’s something satisfying about capturing beauty and not letting it go. It’s my version of a photograph.”
Wes loved her vision. It made sense in a way that only could by knowing Sara.
Exhaling loudly, Wes said, “Let’s get this show on the road.”
“I’d like to keep you to myself just a little longer. Once we go back there’s no more you and me. There’s you, me, and them,” she said reaching up for a quick kiss. “Sit. Let me get you a drink.”
“I like that idea,” he said, with a hint of relief.
“I was going to save it for later, but how ‘bout a glass of wine? I picked up a really fancy Bordeaux that I’ve wanted to try.”
“Sounds good.”
“I’ll be right back,” she said disappearing behind a closed door.
When she walked back through that door, Wes watched her move. The black dress she wore looked like it was painted on, the short length teasing Wes by showing him her upper thigh and then covering it back again. He loved the way her body did its own dance. She was graceful and sexy, and he watched with awed attention, imagining his own body swaying with hers. Sara was like lace and lightening: soft, sexy, and radiating electricity.
Handing him a glass, she sat next to him and took a sip of wine before she placed it on the coffee table. She leaned back and focused her attention on him.
“Mmm,” Wes murmured as he tasted the wine. “Come here.”
Sara cuddled up with Wes, her head in the crook of his neck. She cradled herself in his arms as they sat there enjoying the wine. Moments like these, where they were together, when there were no words, Wes felt most alive, aware of his beating heart because it was Sara who set the rhythm. If he never had to move from this spot, it would be fine.
They sat silently for a while.
“Is there anything that I shouldn’t bring up or say to your friends?” Wes asked.
“No, just be yourself. That’s all that matters. You make me happy.”
“You make me happy, too,” he admitted.
Sara squeezed Wes’s hand and stood. “Ready?”
Standing up, he nodded. “Let’s go before I change my mind.”
His feet felt a little numb. He wiggled his toes as much as he could in his constricting shoes.
Sara walked toward the French doors and slid them apart slightly, stuck her head in and asked “Are you guys ready?”
Wes, who was right behind her, didn’t hear any voices on the other side of the door. He figured that her friends were either calm or gesturing quietly . Sara slid the doors all the way open and walked in. It must have been his nerves that were making him feel so strange because as soon as he stepped into the room a surge of warmth touched his skin, but inside, his body it felt chilled, causing him to shiver a little.
The dining room had old style elegance, with walls a rich red color, like rust. Glass dining cabinets filled with china leaned against the walls. In the middle of the room five dining chairs sat around a large rectangular table with two place settings. The delicious smelling meal Sara prepared sat in the middle. At the end of the table, three severed heads in glass boxes were perched on the table where there should have been three more place settings.
“Wha…?” Confusion filled Wes’ head. His breath came faster . His heart beat ferociously. The cold he’d felt moments earlier rushed to his face.
Wes didn’t see Sara or where she had gone. He didn’t see her when she came up behind him and pushed him down into a chair. All Wes knew was that one moment he’d been standing there looking at heads on a table and the next he was sitting at the table at the other end of them.
Sadness took over for the shock and confusion. He searched desperately for the courage to look toward her. When he did, there was intensity in her eyes that he’d never seen before, an emotion that he could not touch.
Fear should have been the first emotion Wes felt, but it was third and it came much too late.
The cold sensation he felt never went away, the numbness in his toes had worked its way up passed his knees. He broke their shared stare to look down at his legs. It was then that he truly noticed the wheelchair he sat in. Wes looked at Sara again and tried to get up. He couldn’t. His body wasn’t working right.
“I need to leave.” The words came out slightly slurred. Panic surged through him at the sound of his own voice.
“Don’t be rude,” she said. “I haven’t even introduced you yet.”
She walked toward the end of the table where the heads sat.
“This is Ben,” she said as she laid her hand on the head closest to him. “This is Ian,” she said of the one in the middle. “And finally, this is Brandt.”
The fire never left her eyes. It spread across her face and rested itself on her lips. The smile she wore was out of place in contrast to the painful fear that Wes felt .
“Wes, don’t you want to say hello to my friends?” she asked with a threatening tone. “They’ve been waiting a long time to meet you. So far you haven’t been very friendly.”
“Hello,” he said unsteadily.
Sara walked to her place at the table on Wes’s right side. She carefully took her seat and began serving herself saucy cubes of meat from a tureen in the middle of the table.
“Sara, what’s happening to me?” He asked.
She didn’t look at him.
“Am I going to die?”
The question floated in the air unanswered.
“Ssara,” he called her name again. Still, she didn’t acknowledge him.
Sara poured herself a glass of water and took a drink. When she broke her silence it wasn’t in answer to Wes’s question.
“Ian, do you think that you could help me hang that mirror in my bedroom tomorrow?”
Sara was talking to the heads and asking them to help her around the house. Were they talking back to her? Wes was terrified.
“Oh good,” she replied to the empty air. “But, Ian, we won’t have a repeat of what happened last time. What we had is over.”
She ate delicately, and as she did, Wes thought about how he was feeling, so numb and cold. She must have put something in his wine; it was the only thing that he’d had to eat or drink since lunch. The numbness was moving up his legs and throughout his body. The cold was constant. There was no way that he would walk out of that door. Sara clearly had a plan about how the night would go. The idea that she’d been planning this was too much to comprehend.
Second, he thought about God. Wes had never really given credence to religion. It was just something that existed. He never prayed and hadn’t been to church since his mother’s funeral. So now, possibly being at the end of his life, he questioned whether he should have believed more, whether he should have gon
e to church more. More—such a simple word, but not so simple when there’s no time left. There would me no more of anything. There was so much that he hadn’t done. Anger fueled inside of him.
The third thought, simple really, yet he wasn’t sure that he wanted to know the answer. What happened to the bodies of these men?
He eyed the tureen in the middle of the table and traced its contents to Sara’s plate; to her mouth. Could it be? Would she…?
Wes was deep in thought when Sara giggled. Such an out of place sound.
“I’m not sure,” she said.
Apparently, conversations were happening that he was not privy to.
“Sssa…wa.” It was getting harder for him to speak.
She did not answer him. She did not look at him. Instead she looked at the clock that hung on the wall next to her. Sara was waiting. His heart thumped faster at the realization that his time was running out.
Wes began to panic. It would have been a natural reaction to hyperventilate, but he could hardly breathe, when moments before it hadn’t been a problem. In fact, the way he felt had completely changed. Wherever he’d gone cold, he felt numb. And wherever he had gone numb, he could not move.
His heart stuttered
As if Sara had heard his heart struggle, her head turned toward him. Their eyes met, ocean blue to chocolate brown, and they stared at each other. Neither of them moved. With a jagged breath, an eerie calm washed over Wes.
Looking in Sara’s eyes, he remembered how she made him feel before this night. He remembered feeling love, feeling like she was his home. Again he thought about God. But this time he realized that God didn’t matter. He told himself that heaven was just a place to go and the only place he wanted to be was here, with Sara. This was his heaven and she was all that he needed to believe in.
Wes took a shallow breath and shed a single tear.
His heart stopped.
Danny
Michael Bracken
Nobody tried to stop Danny when he beat the crippled kid to death with a Louisville slugger. The rest of us stood back and watched until the crippled kid’s face was nothing but a pulpy mess and Danny dropped the bloody bat beside the dead kid.
Then we followed Danny to the garage behind the apartment building where Danny lived with his mother. He opened a fifth of Jack Daniels, took a long draw, and passed the bottle around. No one spoke about what we had just seen and none of us dared look Danny in the eye as we drank.
The gang drifted apart after that because Danny’s family moved out of the neighborhood at the end of the school year, and the crippled kid’s murder remained an unsolved crime that ultimately caused his parents to divorce and drove his mother into long-term therapy.
That none of us ever admitted to witnessing the crippled kid’s death was as much a testament to our camaraderie as it was to our fear of Danny even decades after the fact.
When Danny stepped into my office one bitterly cold December morning I felt a chill roll up my spine that couldn’t be attributed to the weather.
“I got a job for you,” he said without preamble. “I need you to follow a guy.”
“I don’t need your money, Danny,” I said from behind my desk. “I’m doing just fine without it.”
“I wasn’t planning to pay you,” he said.
“Then why would I take the job?”
His eyes narrowed as he stared at me across my desk. “Because I still play baseball.”
A second chill rolled up my spine. Over the years I had faced bigger men and stronger men, but none had ever instilled in me the same level of fear that Danny had that night with the baseball bat. Despite my posturing, we both knew he had a tight grip on my balls and that I would ultimately do anything he demanded of me.
“Who do you want me to follow?”
Danny told me the name and it took me a moment before I realized he wanted me to follow the crippled kid’s father.
“Why him? Why now?”
He didn’t answer my questions. Instead, he gave me the man’s address. “Where he goes. What he does. Who he talks to.”
I found Kevin Dyson’s home easily enough the next morning. He had remarried and moved to the suburbs. Dyson’s wife, a lithe blonde several years his junior, left the house first that morning, and Dyson followed half an hour later. He drove to a diner in the old neighborhood and settled into the last booth, where he could watch everyone who entered. A young waitress filled his coffee cup and took his breakfast order.
A few minutes later he was joined by a pug-faced side of beef who settled into the booth opposite Dyson. They exchanged several words and then Dyson slid an envelope across the table. The envelope disappeared into the other man’s jacket pocket, and he was gone before the waitress brought Dyson’s breakfast.
Nothing else Dyson did that day piqued my curiosity, and when I had the opportunity late that afternoon I described Dyson’s diner companion to my connections on the street, hoping someone knew him. Then I followed Dyson home and sat watching his house until late in the evening when all the lights were extinguished and I presumed he had gone to bed.
I drove to Ted Wilson’s home and banged on the front door until he finally answered. He wasn’t pleased to see me, but I pushed past him into his house and we sat in his darkened living room while I told him what Danny had hired me to do.
“Don’t drag me into this mess,” he said.
“You’re already in,” I said. He had been standing to my left while Danny beat the crippled kid to death, and he’d grown up to be a research librarian I occasionally tapped for help with my cases. “You’ve always been in.”
“I try not to think about that night,” Ted said, “but sometimes it’s all I think about. We were cowards then and we’re cowards now.”
“We were kids,” I said. “We were more afraid of Danny than we were of the police.”
“And now?”
I understood his question, but I could not answer it. So, I asked one of my own. “After all these years, what does Danny want with Mr. Doyle?”
“How the hell would I know?” he said. “Have you asked Joe?”
Joe Zimmerman was the third witness to the crippled boy’s murder. I said, “Not yet. He won’t answer my calls.”
“Do you blame him?”
My cell phone rang. I pulled it from my pocket, checked the caller ID, and then answered. At the other end of the call was one of my street connections letting me know that the pug-faced side of beef I’d seen taking an envelope from Doyle was some out-of-town leg breaker who usually collected debts for bookies and loan sharks.
After I ended the call, I told Ted what I had just learned.
“How does Doyle know a guy like that?”
I didn’t have an answer for Ted’s question. All I had were more questions, but as I stood to leave I knew I had kept the promise I had made long ago. Ted now knew that Danny was back in my life and chances were that it wouldn’t be long before Danny was back in his.
Ted walked me to the door. After he opened it, he stepped to the side and said, “I’ll check into Doyle’s past. I’ll let you know what he’s been doing the past few years.”
I drove home, caught a few hours of sleep, and returned to my vantage point outside Doyle’s house. I was still there two hours later when I learned why Joe had not answered any of my calls the previous day. Someone had used him for batting practice and had left his body on his living room floor. The woman who lived in the apartment next to Joe’s had discovered his body that morning when she was taking out the trash and noticed his door was open.
Ted seemed distraught as he explained all this to me. Then he asked, “Do you think Danny did this?”
“Not his style,” I said. “Danny would have gone for the kill shot right away. From what you said, whoever killed Joe wanted to inflict the maximum amount of pain first.”
“It can’t be a coincidence that Danny hired you the day before Joe was killed.”
Doyle stepped onto his front p
orch a briefcase in one hand, and looked both ways before he closed the door.
“You’re right,” I told Ted as Doyle walked to his car. “We’ll talk about this more later. Call me when you have the dope on Doyle. I have to go.”
I followed Doyle into the city, holding back a safe distance even though there was no indication that he knew he was being followed. He found an open spot on the second floor of a parking garage downtown and I had to pass him to find a spot on the third.
By the time I hustled down to the second floor, he had already left the parking garage. I caught up with him on the street when I spotted the briefcase, and I hung back half a block until he entered one of the office buildings. I quickened my step and entered the building just in time to see him enter an elevator. I couldn’t catch up to him so I hung back and watched which floors the elevator stopped on before it returned to the ground floor.
The fifth floor, where the elevator made its first stop, was given over to a law firm. The ninth floor, where the elevator made its second stop, held three offices—an accounting firm, a temp agency, and an insurance broker. There was no way I could check out all four offices without either giving myself away or losing track of Doyle. So, I made myself comfortable in the lobby coffee shop and surreptitiously watched the elevator while I nursed a latte.
I picked Doyle up almost an hour later and followed him down the block to a bank, where he cashed a check for an unknown sum of money and stacked the currency inside his briefcase. I followed him back to the parking garage, but lost him when an elderly woman in a Cadillac El Dorado cut me off.
I circled the parking garage and didn’t spot his car. So, I headed back to his house, where I knew he would return sooner or later. I was halfway there when my cell phone rang.
Ted was at the other end of the call. “Here’s something nobody knew,” he said. “Doyle had a quarter million dollar life insurance policy on his kid.”
“That was a lot of money back then,” I said.
“That’s not chump change now, either,” Ted said. “What’s more, his wife didn’t get a cent of it when they divorced.”
Shotgun Honey Presents: Locked and Loaded (Both Barrels Book 3) Page 8
