Jack of Spades

by James Hankins

  Galaxo had almost reached him when Spader pulled the trigger, the bullet tearing into the bastard’s shoulder, spinning him halfway around before he crumpled on his side at Spader’s feet. He rolled onto his back. Spader quickly knelt beside him and grabbed for the weapon in Galaxo’s hand. He saw now that it was a knife.

  Then he saw that something was terribly wrong. His eyes rapidly absorbed several images. The knife was duct-taped to Galaxo’s hand. His pants were black, but weren’t the same shiny black as the running suit jacket he was wearing. And the shoes. Oh, shit. Low-heeled woman’s pumps.

  Oh, God.

  Spader tore off the mask. Olivia’s blue eyes stared up at him, wide, pained. Tape was stretched across her mouth.

  He tensed, realizing what Pendleton had done. He looked up quickly, at Pendleton’s scarred face, just five feet away, as the bastard leaned out of the shadows from which he’d just pushed Olivia. His gun was raised and pointed at Spader. Spader dropped to his left while at the same instant firing. A bullet whined past his ear just before he hit the ground on his left side. He fired a second time, then a third. His first shot missed, but his next one took Pendleton square in the chest and his third got him in the right shoulder, right where he’d shot Olivia. Pendleton dropped his gun and staggered back against the books. In a second he’d collapse to the carpet. Spader thought about firing again. Pendleton was incapacitated. It was over.

  Almost.

  Spader still had his gun aimed at Pendleton’s upper torso. There he was, at the line again. Given yet another chance to cross it. And there was Pendleton, guilty of dozens of acts of cruelty, the last of which was to force Spader to shoot the woman he loved. If Pendleton recovered from his gunshot wounds, he’d sit in court, his disfigured face on display for jurors, psychiatrists testifying on his behalf, opining that his actions were the product of a mind tragically damaged by the actions of others. Maybe there would be a sympathetic juror. Or more than one. Spader doubted he’d get off on a technicality, as Eddie Rivers essentially had, but would he ride out a less-harsh-than-deserved sentence in a cushy psych ward, only to be freed again one day?

  No. He wouldn’t. Spader aimed his gun a few inches higher and fired one last time, the bullet punching through Pendleton’s right eye. He didn’t bother to watch the body fall. He rolled up onto one knee at Olivia’s side and called for an ambulance. Only then did he hear police sirens approaching.

  He reached down and gently pulled the tape away from Olivia’s lips. There were tears in her eyes. When a tear landed on her cheek from above, he realized he was crying, too.

  Other than the bullet Spader had put through her, she appeared to be unharmed. Pendleton had been lying all along. He gently lifted her, eliciting a grunt, and looked at the back of her shoulder. Clean exit wound. He put his palm over the wound on her back, then laid her gently back down on his hand. He put his other hand over the entry wound and applied pressure. She winced and groaned once but didn’t complain.

  “Olivia, I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I shot you.”

  She smiled weakly, then spoke in a whisper. “Every ex-husband’s dream. You’re a lucky guy.”

  He smiled in spite of himself and thanked God he hadn’t killed her. “I guess I am.”

  THIRTY

  “How’s it feel being the hero again, John?” Dunbar asked. “People love the Jack of Spades again. You been reading the stories in the paper about you the last few days?”

  “You know not to call me that,” Spader said into his cell phone. “And I told you, I don’t read the papers anymore.” The stoplight in front of him turned green and Spader gave the car some gas.

  “Well, you should. They love you, man.”

  “They loved me before, too. Then they hated me.”

  “Come on, John, you’re holding a winning hand again. Enjoy it.”

  “Will you stop with the playing card references?”

  “Only a matter of time before someone wants to make a movie about you. Hey, great title, huh? The Jack of Spades.”

  “Give it a rest, will you?”

  “I’m just saying, you know?” Dunbar said nothing for a moment, then asked, “You ever get tired of being right?”

  “I was wrong about Wagner.”

  “Not really. He wasn’t Galaxo, but he was gonna put a hurt on the guy who fired him. And you were sure right about Pendleton being Galaxo.” A pause, then, “And everyone who thought it might be Eddie Rivers was wrong.”

  Spader said nothing. Perhaps Eddie Rivers had driven Spader to fire that last bullet through Stanley Pendleton’s eye. Spader could have taken Rivers out for good in his apartment two years ago and he hadn’t, and for whatever reason justice was denied and Rivers got to breathe free air again, and kill at least two more innocent people. Spader felt the weight of those deaths on his soul. Two more things he tried every day to learn to live with.

  “Hey, you did good,” Dunbar said, as if sensing that Spader’s thoughts were heading toward a dark place. “You stopped a really bad guy and saved the life of a really great woman. How’s Olivia doing, by the way?”

  “She’s doing well.”

  “And David?”

  Spader hesitated. “David’s okay. He really is. Finally, after a long while, he’s okay.”

  “Glad to hear it. Listen, I wanted to tell you, Fratello finally admitted to being the leak, the one who told Estelle Lisbon that we were looking into Oscar Wagner for the Galaxo thing. He said he was doing it as a courtesy to the wife of an ex-trooper, one who died in the line of duty. She’d called the office asking about the investigation, someone transferred her to Leon, and he said what he said. He obviously never thought she’d kill the guy.”

  “Obviously. Leon in any trouble?”

  “Official reprimand.”

  “He got off easy,” Spader said.

  After a brief pause, Dunbar said, “They’ll finish their investigation soon, John. You’ll be back on the job in no time.”

  When an officer shot a suspect, there was a mandatory investigation. In this case it would be nothing but a formality, yet a formality that procedure required be undertaken. Until the process was complete, Spader was going to try to relax.

  “Listen,” he said, “I’m almost there, so I have to go. There’s one thing you need to do, though. Take this number down, okay?”

  He recited it for Dunbar.

  “Who am I calling?” Dunbar asked.

  “Hannah.”

  “Don’t kid me.”

  “I’m not. I called her, told her about you, and she said you could give her a call.”

  “Yeah, you told her about me? What’d you say?”

  “Don’t worry, I lied.”

  Dunbar chuckled.

  “Listen,” Spader continued, “Hannah’s really great, you hear me? A really good person. If you call her, you be nice to her.”

  “You’re my hero, John.”

  Spader smiled and folded his phone closed, then pulled his car to a stop in front of the house he used to call home.

  “No more flowers, John.”

  “Last bunch,” Spader said. “I promise.”

  Olivia moved aside and he stepped into the foyer and put the colorful bouquet on the half-moon table, beside a framed five-by-seven photograph of the two of them with David. It was taken on Thanksgiving four years ago. They were all smiling. Spader hadn’t realized until just then that Olivia had left this picture right where they’d always kept it.

  “I’ve got two dozen roses in my bedroom,” she said, “a couple of baskets of mixed flowers in the kitchen, and a vase of lilies in the living room. I could open a flower shop.”

  “Maybe David could run it for you.”

  She smiled briefly before forcing her face to turn serious. “That kind of stereotyping isn’t going to make this easier on David or you.”

  “Me? I’m fine about it. I’d rather David be gay than using drugs, turning into an alcoholic, or losing his ambition in life. I’m relieve
d to know the reason he did badly this year at school was because he’d fallen in love, rather than because he simply didn’t care about anything anymore. I’m happy that when he was staying out all night this summer, it was to spend time with someone he cares about and not someone he was getting into trouble with.”

  “He’s worried you don’t respect him.”

  “I’ll straighten him out on that. Bad choice of words, I guess. But I respect the hell out of him and I’ll make sure he knows that. He must have had it tough this year. Fighting against his, uh, his nature, sneaking around, seeing his, well, boyfriend, I guess, in secret, the two of them trying to keep it from the other kids on the lacrosse team. On top of that, he was scared to death to tell us. No wonder his grades went to hell. I feel bad for him. But he survived and I’m proud of him.”

  “Now that it’s out in the open, I think he’ll do a lot better at school.”

  She turned and walked a little stiffly into the living room, and he followed. As he passed the dining room, he saw a vase of flowers on the table, ones he hadn’t sent. Probably from Dr. Jason. In the living room, Olivia sat on one end of the couch. On the coffee table in front of her were lilies he’d sent. He sat at the other end of the couch.

  “What did he say when you told him he could go back to school?” he asked.

  “He actually cried.”

  “The big sissy.”

  “I mean it, John, you better stop it.”

  “I’m just kidding.”

  “He did, though,” she said. “He cried. And he hugged me and said that he’d do a lot better at school from now on because he was just going to come out with who he is and not worry about what anyone thinks. It was the keeping it secret, the sneaking around that was so hard on him. I’ve gotta say, he’s been a different young man since he told us.”

  “Yeah, it’s good to have him back,” Spader said. “He’s such a good kid. I really missed him. We had lunch yesterday and just sat and talked, like we used to. It was nice.” Spader was silent for a moment. “It’s not going to be easy for him. Or his boyfriend.”

  Spader was thinking about the facial bruises and chipped tooth David had come home with last week, which David had only just admitted had come from a fistfight with a couple of gay bashers who’d seen him walking along with his boyfriend, Craig.

  “He knows it won’t be easy,” Olivia said. “But in case you haven’t noticed, David’s a big boy. He can take care of himself.”

  Spader nodded. Olivia was looking at the lilies. Spader was looking at her.

  “You look really good,” he said.

  “I feel good. Considering you shot me.”

  “Never gonna let me forget that, are you?”

  “I think it might come in handy now and then.”

  She did look good. His bullet had passed through her shoulder, missing bone and arteries and doing as little damage as anyone could have realistically hoped for. She was really lucky. And really beautiful in her baggy New England Patriots T-shirt.

  “She finally started talking,” he said. “Told us just about everything.”

  “The mother?”

  He nodded.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “Are you sure you want to hear it?”

  “No, not really, but I have to.”

  He knew that she remembered some of it, of course. She was a counselor at Camp Wiki-Wah-Nee, and she and two other counselors had taken some of the kids for a hike in the woods. They’d found a nice clearing by a narrow gorge, at the bottom of which, thirty feet below, ran a gentle stream. While some of them relaxed or explored the clearing, Olivia took a couple of the kids back into the woods to look for the source of an interesting birdcall they’d heard. Minutes later she heard yelling and ran back to the clearing, taking a nasty tumble over an exposed tree root on the way, tearing open her shin on a sharp rock. Twenty-one years later, she still carried a five-inch scar from the fall. Spader knew she remembered what she’d found when she returned to the clearing that day. One of the boys had fallen into the little gorge. What happened while she was gone was what she never knew. It was the information Louise Pendleton supplied. Well, she supplied her son Stanley’s version of it, anyway.

  Spader told Olivia about the fallen tree, about the kids going across it, then teasing Stanley, trying to get him to try it himself. He explained that Stanley had looked for help from the counselors, but instead found Alison Greenwell giving Jeff Golding a blowjob in the woods. When Jeff yelled at him, he ran back to the other kids, who teased him until he finally stepped out onto that log. And then he slipped and hung there and looked to the other kids for help. Help that didn’t come. Spader told her Pendleton’s reasons for removing Andrew Yasovich’s tongue, and sawing off Peter Lisbon’s feet, and taking out Matthew Finneran’s eyes, and trying to cut off Madeleine Wollner’s hands.

  “And because he was off getting a blowjob from Alison Greenwell,” Spader said matter-of-factly, “instead of watching the kids like he should have been, years later Stanley made Golding perform oral sex on him in front of his wife.”

  Olivia was still staring at nothing. “I remember hearing them scream. Some of the other kids and I were looking for that bird and I heard the screaming. I ran back to the clearing. Jeff and Alison were out of the woods at that point, I guess, and I told him to find a way down to Stanley and see if he could help him. You know, I couldn’t for the life of me have told you his name two weeks ago. Stanley’s. Anyway, I ran back to camp and came back with the camp nurse. Not long after that some emergency medical personnel or park rangers or somebody like that showed up and they sent me back to camp. It was the last day of camp—we were all leaving in a couple of hours—so I never really heard what happened to Stanley. I gave the camp administrator my story and then I packed my things and left. To be honest, I never really thought that much about it after that. I just assumed the boy was okay. I figured I’d have heard if he wasn’t. I guess that was naive of me. Why would they have bothered to contact me about it later? But I never knew something so bad happened that day.” She lowered her head. “What happened after that?”

  “The Pendletons threatened to sue the camp, then accepted what sounds to me like a criminally low settlement offer. Should have hired a lawyer. They didn’t and got only a few thousand dollars.”

  Olivia shook her head. “What about me? Why me? I wasn’t even in the clearing when he fell. I never saw them crossing that log.”

  “Maybe he blamed you for not being there, kind of like with Golding and Greenwell. His mother didn’t know for sure.”

  She thought about that a moment, then said. “Wait, what about Alison Greenwell?”

  “She actually seemed to have started it all,” Spader said. He explained how the Pendletons, during their settlement negotiations with Camp Wiki-Wah-Nee, had learned the full names of the counselors and the other kids who were in the clearing that day. When Stanley got older, he kept tabs on them all. But when he was still just a damaged little boy, he was extraordinarily determined to walk again one day. He worked and worked to recover and then one day he apparently just gave up trying. At least that’s how it looked to everyone but his mother. She had used most of the settlement money to buy a set of used rehabilitation parallel bars from Mass General and Stanley worked on them night and day, year after year, until he was finally able to walk with weak, faltering steps. When it appeared that his ability to walk had plateaued at the point where he would still need assistance of some kind, Louise Pendleton stole a pair of leather-and-metal leg braces from the hospital. For years he drove himself, behind drawn shades, to walk again, while to all the world it seemed as though he was still wheelchair-bound. Because as far back as when he was eleven years old and was just starting to have some hope that he’d regain the use of his legs one day, he’d sworn to God that if he ever walked again he’d get back at the people responsible for what happened to him.

  “My God,” Olivia said. “Two decades plotting revenge. Struggling
to learn to walk again just so he could do those terrible things. What must it have been like in his head for all those years?” There wasn’t anything for Spader to say to that, so he remained silent. “You still haven’t said how Alison Greenwell started it all.”

  “A few months ago she died of breast cancer. She left no family behind. Pendleton had been building up his strength, waiting until he felt he was physically ready, really ready, to do what he was planning to do. But then Alison Greenwell died and Pendleton decided he didn’t want to wait any longer. Michael Yasovich had already died years ago and now Alison was gone and Pendleton feared losing more of his intended victims—maybe another would die, or maybe they’d move out of state or to another country—before he got the chance to get to them. He was devastated that even two of them were dead.”

  “He sure didn’t seem to mind killing a few later, though.”

  “Actually, he did,” Spader said. “He wanted them all to live. He wanted them to live with their deformities as reminders of that day in the woods, of what they did to him. He knew he’d never get away with all this. He knew he’d be caught and his reasons for doing what he did would become known. They’d one day know why he’d done what he’d done to them. And he wanted them to live with that, to know that because of a few moments of cruelty or carelessness decades ago, they had to live the rest of their lives without feet or hands or eyes or a tongue or, in Jeff Golding’s case, his self-respect.”