Shadow Soldier (The Gunsmith Book 2)

by C. K. Crigger

  He could tell me he wasn’t frantic, but I didn’t have to credit every word he said.

  “No,” I said. “But thanks to what’s-his-face on television, I think I know how to find him.” I was rushing into the kitchen as I spoke, snatching my car keys off the counter.

  “What are you talking about? Boothenay, where are you going?” Dad followed me into the kitchen, moving pretty fast for an elderly man.

  “The old folks’ home,” I said over my shoulder, already clattering down the outside stairs. “A man lives there who knows about the gun.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The Mustang roared to life. I backed out of the garage, chirping the tires when I down- shifted and took off. The Bethany Home was only a mile or so, but I felt pressured to hurry, as though there wasn’t a moment to lose. In a classic example of acting before thinking, I soon discovered the front door locked up tight. Only then did it occur to me the place might be closed to visitors at this time of night.

  Such a minor detail wouldn’t stop me, I decided, driving around to the side and checking the parking area. There was only one other automobile in the lot, a big SUV with vanity plates that indicated it belonged to a physician.

  Good, I thought, getting out of the car. If there’s some kind of emergency going on, maybe nobody will notice I’m here. Or care. I had too much on my mind to waste any sympathy on the poor soul ill enough to require a house call from a doctor.

  Of course, there was no directory anywhere that I could find. A moot point anyway, since I had no idea what the man’s name might be.

  The thing is, with no one at the front desk and no one in sight down the corridor to the right, how was I to find my interrogatee? If I’d known who I was looking for and which room was his, I could have walked in and murdered the man with nary a soul the wiser.

  I heard noise, identified it as a television blaring, and followed the sound. Maybe I’d get lucky and find the old gent off by himself.

  According to the sign outside, this facility wasn’t a full service nursing home. It provided assisted care only. This meant people were supposed to be able to navigate on their own and, one would suppose, not be entirely gaga. Right.

  I found the sitting room. The only occupant stared at me out of vacant blue eyes when I spoke and, as though my appearance frightened him, stumped off with his walker. Now the room was empty. Not knowing where to go, I stayed put and soon was rewarded by the appearance of a white-haired lady who smiled like I was her long lost grandchild when she saw me. The contrasting attitudes of the two old people were rather startling.

  “Do you know—” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” she interrupted in a tweety-bird voice. “I know everyone here. What’s his name?”

  I must have looked and sounded like a fool. “I’m afraid I didn’t catch his name. We weren’t actually introduced, I’m sorry to say. Um, let’s see, he’s old.”

  “We’re all old here.” Her eyes crinkled, laughing at me.

  As any person with half a brain might have guessed, all it took for Miss Marie to steer me in the right direction was a short description.

  “Oh, you’re looking for Will Mueller. Willie, I call him. He lives on the second floor. I’ll warn you he’s a little withdrawn. I’ve tried and tried to be friendly, but he doesn’t want to respond. I think he may be mentally ill. What do you want with him, hon?”

  I answered something—I don’t remember what.

  Will Mueller? The name had a false ring to it; one I heard in a way different from the senses most people use.

  As I swept up the flight of stairs, I wondered if this doubt had shown on my face because the tweety-bird lady’s questions had been persistent. Five minutes I’d wasted in fobbing off her curiosity, all when I was in such a tearing hurry.

  Oh, God. Please let Caleb be home by now.

  But he wasn’t. I knew in my bones that he wasn’t.

  Taking a deep breath, I tapped on the brown painted door marked number twenty-one. The sound was tentative, apologetic, so I knocked again, harder this time. My knuckles ached under the shock.

  “Where are you, you old fart?” I whispered to myself, holding my jaw rigid. “Open the damn door.”

  I heard boot heels thudding on uncarpeted floors. Not a put-your- feet-up, wear-your-slippers-after-supper kind of guy then. He opened the door and stood blocking the way, barring sight of his room from my prying eyes.

  A tall man made taller by his boots, I felt as though he were towering over me, menacing in his height.

  I quelled an errant tremor and cleared my throat before I could force out words.

  “Mr. Mueller?” The name felt as false on my tongue as it had to my ear. “My name is Boothenay Irons. I spoke with you earlier, if you remember.”

  He took a breath, pinching the wrinkles around his nose and lips deeper into the hard planes of his face. The door opened another foot.

  I’d knocked on the right door no matter what he wanted to call himself, though, because he knew what I needed to learn.

  “Come in,” he said, his voice like blocks of granite rubbing against each other. “I’ve been expecting you.”

  “You have?”

  He shrugged. “Or someone like you. I always knew the day would come. I had it pegged the jig was up the minute you stopped me this afternoon. What gave me away after all this time?”

  I frowned at him over my blade of a nose. “Gave you away? I think you have me mixed up with someone else, Mr. Mueller. I’ve come about the gun.”

  He went very still, frozen almost, and almost as hard as the ice. “What gun would that be, sis?”

  The frog was back in my throat. “The 1911.45 Colt auto you threw in the river. And then tried to find again.”

  He must have been seventy-five or eighty-years-old, but if there was anything wrong with either his hearing or his understanding I couldn’t see it.

  “And how would you being knowing about that?” he asked.

  I said, trying to make a joke of it and take some of the edge off my reply, “Oh, ve haff our vays.”

  Holy smoke! You’d have thought I stuck him with a cattle prod by the way he jumped.

  The next thing I knew, he’d grabbed my arm, yanked me into the room and slammed the door shut. I didn’t have the same sense of the paranormal power I’d felt this afternoon, but he wasn’t too shabby in the purely physical department either. I could guarantee I’d have bruises the next morning.

  Although, at the moment, I wasn’t positive I’d live to see morning. I was tolerably sure he planned on murdering me, if the look on his face was anything to go by.

  “Ow,” I ventured, rubbing my arm, though he let me go as soon as I was inside. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Mentally, I was chewing myself out for letting him get between me and the door. Since the closest thing to a weapon I had was the set of car keys dangling from my hand, I made a fist around the little electronic entry gadget and poked the key itself between my fingers. I’ll aim for his eyes if he goes for me, I thought, trying to plan ahead.

  “That crack you made,” he said, glaring down at me. “About the Germans. What did you mean by that?”

  “What Germans?” I took up a fighting stance, keys ready.

  Weirder and weirder. In the publications Dad received from various senior organizations, senile dementia was a phrase I’d noticed mentioned fairly often.Was Mr. Mueller in the throes of a flashback to WWII? Or was he simply insane?

  I hunched a shoulder. “Good grief, it’s only a figure of speech. We always hear how the Germans used to be pretty good at finding things out. And from what I understand, not terribly particular as to the methods they used.” Fortunately, I hadn’t had to torture my sources in order to find Mueller; ten dollars had been enough incentive for Jase and Austin to talk.

  “Oh, yes,” Mueller said, suddenly less driven. “They were very good at finding things out. A long time ago.”

  Something in his words made me
think he knew German expertise all too well. Still, I relaxed a little and quit pinching my key in quite such a white-knuckled grip.

  “All I want to do is find out something about the history of the Colt, Mr. Mueller. I don’t mean to cause any you any trouble or, since I know you tried to get rid of the gun, bring back painful memories. I assure you, I wouldn’t be asking except for a very great need. But any information you can give me is desperately important.”

  “Painful!” Mueller snorted. “And desperate! Figures.”

  His stare bored into me for a moment, then he gestured toward a chair, one of a pair of Moroccan red leather wing chairs. “Sit down, sis. First you’re going to tell me what’s what and then, if I decide to talk about the Colt, you’ll listen on my terms.”

  I peeked at my watch. Caleb had been missing for two hours. I wasn’t any too keen on it, but I guessed I’d listen to this old duffer half the night if necessary, since he was my only lead in tracking Caleb into the never-never. I sat, perching on the edge of the seat like a bird with its wings only half furled.

  The room stank of cigarettes. An odd collage of items hung from brass cup hooks screwed into white painted walls. The walls were stained yellow from nicotine. Everything else in the small room was scrupulously clean, his furniture gleaming with polish, and over in the corner, the cover on his bed pulled military taut. He had a thirteen-inch television, although most of the available wall space was taken up by double-stacked bookcases. A desk held a serious supply of paper and pens with a chair pulled out from the knee hole. He’d been writing when I interrupted him.

  Reassured by what I saw, I settled more comfortably in the chair. He sat opposite, lighting a smoke with a kitchen match that he shook out and tossed in an ashtray shaped like a rubber tire. He held the cigarette with the lighted end cupped in his hand. I wondered if he ever burned himself.

  “Please, Mr. Mueller,” I said, growing impatient with what I was beginning to think a waste of time. “If you could please tell me about the gun, how old it is, where you got it, things like that, I’d be extremely grateful. I’d be willing to pay something for the information,” I added, thinking he might be strapped for money.

  “What is a gun to a young woman like you?” He drew in a lungful of smoke, his cigarette glowing. He ignored my offer of payment. “Why would you be interested?”

  “I told you before, Mr. Mueller. I’m a gunsmith,” I said, as if that should answer all his questions. “And I’m more than interested. It’s imperative I learn everything I can about the Colt.” If he really had any of the power I thought I’d detected, maybe that would be explanation enough.

  “You really are a gunsmith? Damned funny occupation for a woman, if you ask me. But why do you need the information so badly? Why did you come looking now, after all this time? You’re too late, sis. The gun is gone⏤and good riddance.”

  I noticed the car key sticking out from between my fingers and caught it back in my hand. “Actually, it isn’t gone,” I said. “The gun is in my possession.”

  He jerked erect, and I saw when next he drew on his smoke that his hand shook ever so slightly. “Then why come to me?”

  “You know about the gun, and what it can do.”

  “Do I?”

  “Oh, I think so. I do, too. Some.” I took a breath. “I need you to tell me the rest.”

  He was quiet, except for the air chuffing in and out of his nose. Expressions flashed across his face in such rapid succession I couldn’t read any of them.

  “Why?” he asked finally.

  I sighed. “Because someone I care about is missing. The Colt can help me trace him.”

  His leather chair creaked as he sat forward and said, “You’re little more than a girl. A pampered, protected young woman who’s had everything in the world given to you. What do you know of war—of fear?” His eyes, examining me, were bitter and disillusioned, terrifying in their intensity. Intensity? No. Or maybe not just that. His eyes looked older than God.

  But he was not God, or even god-like. If he had been, he’d have known I knew more of death and fear than he could imagine.

  “Tell me about the war,” I said. “I want to understand.” I wondered what he saw in my eyes. An intensity equal to his own? At least equal to his own? More, because whatever had caused his Colt to become permeated with a history of pain and despair, the immediacy of his story was buried in time. If it was possible to change what had happened to Caleb, I had to do it now.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m not going to pretend I’ve endured the same things you have. I realize I haven’t. But at the same time, I have had some rather strange experiences of my own. Now, so has the person who, of all the people on this earth, is most precious to me. Can you guess how this came about?”

  I hoped we could both stop beating around the bush and get on with rescuing Caleb. That Mr. Will Mueller might reject my plea never entered my mind.

  “I know what you are—or what you think you are.” He stubbed out the cigarette with an abrupt motion and sat back in his chair, his fingers laced across his belly. I noticed his fingers were stiff and tense.

  “Maybe it’s true,” he added. “Hell. I’m too old to care who knows what anymore. Keep your secrets. I don’t want to hear anyone else’s troubles. You want to learn about the Colt, sis? I’ll tell you about the Colt.”

  A shiver passed over me. For a moment I felt as though I’d been touched by ghost fingers. No, on second thought, I didn’t want to be told. But I had to have this information, which was another thing entirely. Oh, God. A human being is so driven, sometimes, by their love and by their duty.

  “Good.” I settled back, waiting, my eye caught again by his collection of items decorating the wall. There was an empty hook there, and I’d have bet the Colt had once been part of that collection. “Tell me, when did you first acquire the gun?”

  His cold eyes pierced me. “Oh, no, sis. The story ends with the gun. It doesn’t start there. Now, you want to listen, or you want to talk?”

  I scowled at him. “I’ll listen.”

  “In God’s truth, I don’t see why you’re interested,” he said. “This is a soldier’s tale that happened far before your time. Hell, before your father’s time.”

  Before my father’s time? I gestured, as though to indicate I already knew and said, “So, humor me. Tell me anyway. Please,” I added as an afterthought.

  “Well, I guess your reasons are your own business.” He coughed, as if to collect his thoughts. If he was waiting for me to state that business, he was disappointed.

  He started by saying, “I was eighteen-years-old when my country shipped me and the rest of my regiment off to the front. At least, it became the front two weeks later when, on a hot August morning, we awoke to find war had been declared. It wasn’t exactly a surprise, mind you. The killing that followed was the surprise, though you’ll probably wonder why.

  “One would’ve thought I’d be prepared. I’d waited for this moment my whole life after all, from the first time my mother packed me off to military school when I was seven. I was sure glory day had arrived. Time to prove my manhood.”

  “Your mother sent you to a military school when you were seven?” I hadn’t meant to interrupt his story, but somehow my mind boggled at a woman who would send her seven-year-old son away—especially to a place where the child would be taught to make war. One could almost feel sympathy for the grown man—the grown old man. Almost.

  “A much married lady, my mother, widowed at that particular moment. She preferred not to have me underfoot. She packed me off to New York every long holiday to stay with my father’s relatives.” He wasn’t looking at me, evidently preferring the view of his hands. “Those times in New York were the only happy days of my life. That’s why . . . well, never mind. But when I was sixteen she stopped sending me. The transportation company’d had an accident—hundreds of lives lost—and she feared where lightning struck once, it could strike again.”

  “Then she
did care about you.”

  His knuckles flexed. “Oh, no. Not about me personally. She cared that if something did happen to me, if I should die, the best part of her income, deriving from my father’s estate through me, would be curtailed.”

  An unintelligible sound escaped me.

  “I suppose that sounds strange to you. To me, in those days and in my class, it’s the way things were done.”

  I took a breath. The question that emerged from my mouth took even me by surprise, for I’d genuinely wanted to ask precisely what class and what days he was talking about. What I did ask was, “Had your glory day arrived, Mr. Mueller?”

  “Oh, yes. Glory day indeed. My mother had been right. I’d found my calling.”

  His tone set my teeth on edge and I remembered suddenly that I was alone in this room with him, with only one frail, old lady to know I was here. And, while he was nearly as old as Methuselah, he was still a strong man. I didn’t like him—didn’t trust him. All the pathos of his background hadn’t changed my gut feeling that he was evil, or if not evil, at least dangerous. Perhaps his mother had good reason to send him away.

  “And the killing?” My throat had dried, and I swallowed.

  “Was every bit as horrifying as I’d expected. Blood spilled everywhere . . . human screams, animal screams . . . the thunderous noise of the guns. Yes. Horrifying. But a man got used to it, after a while.” His voice was very soft. “And then it became thrilling. We had the largest cannon ever cast at our disposal. Shots carried for a hundred miles and they screamed, too, as if they were alive when they passed over our heads and smashed into the enemy. The dead were the lucky ones. Wounded men and horses lay for days sometimes before they finally died. Field medicine wasn’t much, you understand.”

  He watched me as he spoke. There seemed to me something about this sentence—something. . . veiled . . . that immediately caused my senses to prickle. I did my best to hide my reaction from him. What did he think I’d hear in the sentence? Was the mention of horses—horses?—a hint he had given me? Or was the line about the medicine the important thing? Since Caleb had been a medic in Afghanistan it could be, though how he could know about Caleb negated that idea. Perhaps dying was the operative word.