by G. M. Ford
“So it would seem.”
“The house has so many memories,” she said.
I couldn’t help it. I had to laugh out loud.
“Sometimes things just work out for the best,” she said with an ironic shrug.
“Sometimes they get a little help.”
She turned and walked away. No cane. No limp. No nothing.
“You seem to have staged quite a recovery,” I said to her back.
She stopped out in the middle of the street, and looked back at me. I ambled in her direction.
“Misdiagnosis,” she said with an unctuous smile.
“A miracle perhaps,” I offered.
“More like a great weight’s been lifted from my shoulders,” she said.
I walked over and scratched Poco behind the ear. I was working on something pithy to say when I first heard the sound of an engine. A tenth of a second later the cop behind the wheel of the parked SUV laid on the horn. I turned that way in time to see both its doors fly open.
The passenger-side cop shouted something as he scrambled out of the vehicle, pointing out over my head with one hand and reaching for his gun with the other. The engine roar was louder now; I turned toward the sound.
A white XFINITY van with a ladder on top was bearing down at us at about twice the speed limit. I reached for Janet Seigal, reached to pull her to safety, but she’d already bolted in the other direction, trying to get to the far side of the street.
The van hit her flush, sending her pinwheeling up and over the top, like a broken doll, before it abruptly veered right and came screaming at me. In the second before I dove for the ditch, I caught sight of Brother Biggs’s grinning face behind the wheel, and heard the crack of gunshots again tearing through the night.
The rear of the van passed so close to my head that the tailpipe nearly parted my hair. I covered my head with my hands as more gunfire rang through the trees.
I got to my knees in time to see both cops pouring fire into the windshield of the van as it headed their way. I watched, slack-jawed, as the van veered right, bounced off one of the stone pillars that held up my gate, and then careened back the other way, the momentum shift so sudden that the van began to roll, tearing loose the ladder, bursting open the back doors, puking its contents all over the street in the second before it completed its roll and disappeared over the edge of the bluff.
I could hear the van tearing itself to pieces as it bounced off the cliff face on its journey down to the beach. I turned and ran in the direction of Janet Seigal, but I didn’t run very far. Her red shoes were standing there in the street like she was still wearing them, but, even from a distance, I knew Janet Seigal was dead. Looked like the impact had broken every bone in her body. I looked around for Poco, but didn’t see him.
I whistled and called his name. I was thinking maybe he was under her body, and I was going to have to go over there and make sure, when he poked his little white head out of the Morrisons’ hedge and barked.
I looked back up the street. One of the cops was standing at the edge of the cliff looking down. The other was yelling into the SUV’s radio. I sat down on the shoulder, violently shaking from spilled-over adrenaline. Poco climbed into my lap.
“What are you going to do with the dog?” Rebecca asked.
I was standing at the stove watching bubbles form in the tops of blueberry pancakes. Rebecca was sitting at my kitchen table with Poco curled contentedly in her lap. She was drinking Irish coffee with one hand and scratching Poco’s ears with the other.
“I’ll find somebody in the neighborhood who wants him,” I said. “Animal Rescue was going to take him to a shelter, but . . . I don’t know . . . seemed like he’d already had a tough enough day. I didn’t see any reason he had to go through that too, so I brought him home with me.”
“Maybe you should keep him.”
“I’m not responsible enough for pets.”
“It takes a big man to walk a small dog.”
Before I could respond, the doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it,” she said. Rebecca took the coffee and the dog along with her as she disappeared into the hall.
I heard the low mutter of voices from the front door as I flipped the cakes.
A minute later she came back into the kitchen and nodded back toward the door.
“I think you probably ought to handle this,” she said. She set her coffee on the table and held out her hand. I gave her the spatula, wiped my hands on a dish towel, and headed for the front door.
Lieutenant Timothy Eagen. Standing on my front porch holding a standard-issue cardboard box and a black garment bag.
“I brought you your gear back,” he said.
And then Poco was at my heels, barking like crazy at Eagen. I picked him up.
“That the Seigal dog?” Eagen wanted to know.
“He’s just visiting.”
“You should keep him,” he said.
I reached out with my free hand and took the box from him. It was heavy enough for me to tell it held the Smith & Wesson and the rest of the ammo.
“Come in for a second,” I said. “We’re making pancakes.”
“Aw, no. I’ve got to—”
“Blueberry. Come on.”
Shrugged. “Okay. But really, I’m gonna have to head out pretty quick.”
I stepped aside and let him walk down the hall past me. I left the box on the table in the hall and padded back into the kitchen.
I pointed at the garment bag. “What’s that?” I asked.
Instead of answering, he stuck out his arm and handed it to me.
The pure heft of the thing told me what it was. I peeled off the plastic and there it was. My old man’s tweed overcoat. All forty pounds of it. I don’t know why, but I leaned over and gave it a sniff.
“I had it cleaned,” Eagen said. “Thing stunk to high heaven.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I walked over and hung it from one of the knobs on the kitchen cabinets. “You want coffee?” I asked Eagen.
“I mean . . . if you got some made . . . no trouble.”
“No trouble at all,” I assured him.
As I was pouring him a cup, he said, “I went out to the Townsend house last night. Hell of a spread they had out there . . . except that the place was crawling with EPA guys in nuke suits.”
“The lake’s contaminated with anatoxin-a,” Rebecca said.
He took a sip of coffee. “I guess sometimes Mother Nature takes her own brand of retribution,” he said.
“Amen,” I said.
About the Author
Photo © Skye Moody
G.M. Ford is the author of eight other novels in the Leo Waterman series: Who in Hell Is Wanda Fuca?, Cast in Stone, The Bum’s Rush, Slow Burn, Last Ditch, The Deader the Better, Thicker Than Water, and Chump Change. He has also penned the Frank Corso mystery series and the stand-alone thrillers Threshold and Nameless Night. He has been nominated for the Shamus, Anthony, and Lefty Awards, among others. He lives and writes in Seattle, Washington.
