First to Find

by Mark Gessner

  "Look up there you shithead!" she said, covering her breasts and pointing to the torn and bloody figure dangling from the underside of the highway 360 bridge. "Call the fucking police!"

  Chapter 51

  March 9

  GETTING INTO JAVA BITCH'S place had been difficult. He'd had to shunt the alarm and break a window. He had to move fast.

  He couldn't find anything in her place that showed what they knew. He looked through her desk, rooted through her computer, even paged through her email to see if there was anything. Nothing. Nothing except a post-it note on the monitor with a local phone number, red hearts doodled around it. That would be the other meddler then.

  He pulled up a search engine on her computer, punched in the phone number, then wrote down Kurt's address. Who the fuck are these people? he thought.

  Chapter 52

  BREAKING INTO KURT'S PLACE was easy. The guy lived in an older neighborhood with lots of tree cover, and he'd left his back door unlocked. The killer didn't waste any time finding the office bedroom and the computer desk. He shuffled through a stack of papers sitting on top of a pile of trinkets and dirty dishes. The guy was a fucking slob, but what's this? His eye was drawn to a name on a computer printout half buried under a pile of bills, assorted jewelers screwdrivers, and a Rubik's cube:

  DATE PLACE URINE DOG BODY

  12-15 MT TAMALPAIS Y Y Nelson

  12-26 HARRISON VALLEY N Y McChasney

  (reward $75K)

  01-15 SCHAUMBRG Y Y Chorzempa

  (reward $5K)

  02-27 AUS/ST.EDS PARK N Y None

  02-17 SUNSPOT NM Y N Lexton

  (accident?)

  02-17 AUSTIN/CITY PARK N Y None

  Shit. Somehow this slob had tracked him. But how? What was ST. EDS PARK? It was obvious this guy was some kind of bounty hunter, since he'd carefully tallied up the reward amounts.

  Just then he heard a key turn in the front door lock.

  Chapter 53

  JUDI ROLLED ON TOP of Kurt, straddled his hips, and pinned his shoulders to his bed. She clawed at his shirt, hiked it up around his neck, got it stuck on his arms, and then fumbled at the buttons on his shorts. Kurt wriggled the rest of the way out of his shirt, and let it fall to the floor by the bed.

  Nipper had seen this type of activity before and knew that it never involved him getting to lick knees or rest his head in anyone's lap, so he'd gone off in search of Pokey, who was going to be getting some canine company whether she wanted it or not.

  Kurt interrupted Judi's unbuttoning long enough to pull her polo top off over her head. He flung it across the room toward the dresser.

  "Hold on a sec..." she said. She rotated away from Kurt, then slipped her holster out of the waistband of her shorts and carefully set the gun on the nightstand.

  Kurt reached up behind her and pulled her toward him, simultaneously ticking off the three metal fasteners behind her bra. She pushed up and away, freeing her breasts. She slipped her bra down her arms, growled lightly through clenched teeth, then dug her nails of both hands into the skin on his chest.

  "Ouch, whoa there, that hurts," he said, levering her arms away. They wrestled and kissed. Kurt unbuttoned her shorts. She rose to allow him to slip them off over her hips and she kicked them off the rest of the way, then lay on top of him, gazing into his eyes, stroking his hair.

  Peering through the crack between the closet doors, the killer held his breath. His luck had changed. At first he'd been surprised and trapped. He tried to hide in the computer office but the closet was jammed with books and computer boxes. He'd slipped down the hall to the next bedroom and found room in that closet. The two meddlers hadn't wasted any time getting to the bedroom. He'd pressed himself deep into the closet when he heard them enter the room, but soon he realized that they were vulnerable. He had found a baseball bat stacked in the back corner of the closet, along with a catcher's mitt and some other dusty sports equipment. The bat was sweet, a nice old-fashioned vintage wooden Louisville Slugger. Heavy, solid, smooth. Not like the newer lightweight aluminum bats. He choked up on the grip a bit and waited for his chance. He wanted to take out the bounty hunter first. He could deal with the Java woman later, slowly. Had to wait for his chance.

  Chapter 54

  "WE DON'T HAVE TO do this, you know," she whispered, pulling back.

  "What?" he asked, unbelieving.

  "We don't have to do it if you don't want to. I'm not forcing you or anything."

  "Uh, yes we do," he said, pulling her close and then rolling over on top.

  The killer burst out swinging, a great overhead swing like a rail worker driving a sledgehammer down on a spike. Kurt heard the door and was already moving sideways and turning to face it; the swing only half-connected, the blow glanced off his head and struck mostly shoulder. Stunned, unconscious, Kurt collapsed onto Judi. From the other bedroom, Nipper woofed out an alarmed bark and came running.

  Judi had spotted the swinging of the closet door out of her peripheral vision and instinctively reached back for the nightstand just as the Slugger was glancing the side of Kurt's head. As Kurt collapsed on top of her, she extended the weapon toward the attacker, wrapped her finger around the trigger and squeezed. She had no time to line up the sights. As it rolled away, Kurt's body interfered with her arm, so the shot went past the killer's head, high into the wall above the closet door.

  The killer felt the copper-jacketed hollowpoint slug flick his ear as he was raising the bat for another swing. He didn't hear anything. No one in the room heard anything. The sound of the gun was a cannon shot. The killer didn't wait for the second shot. He leapt out the bedroom door, dropped the bat and ran outside. Nipper gave chase to the threshold, then trotted back to the bedroom.

  It had taken Judi five minutes to locate the phone before she could call 911. She couldn't find a phone anywhere. She checked the bedroom, the kitchen, the office. Nothing, not even a cordless handset. Kurt didn't have a fixed phone line. There was only an empty phone jack in the kitchen where a normal person would have hung a telephone. She had to find his mobile. She'd left her own mobile back in her apartment, not wanting to be interrupted by business while out spending time with Kurt. First she tried Kurt's pockets, but it wasn't in there. She rolled him over, checked his face. He was still breathing. He had a little trickle of blood from his ear. She was shaking, still gripping the PM9 in her right hand, her trigger finger properly and safely extended along the barrel. Then she remembered that he'd dumped out his keys, wallet, and other pocket stuff on the counter as he came in the front door. She found the mobile there, flipped it open and punched 911, all the while looking around to see if the attacker was gone.

  "Sprint PCS, what city please?" said the mobile operator.

  "What city? --Austin!" she yelled. Why don't they know this?

  "One moment please," said the operator.

  "Nine-One-One, what is your address please?" asked the 911 operator.

  "I'm --we've been attacked, my boyfriend is unconscious, please someone help!" said Judi.

  "What is your address?" asked the operator.

  "Address?" asked Judi. Why don't they know this? "I don't know the address! I'm at my boyfriend's house, um, on --by the dam, Lake Travis, uh, shit, wait, I think he's got a bill here or something, please hurry, he's been hit." Judi had no idea what Kurt's address was. She had to sort through the papers on his desk to find an envelope with his address on it. She read the address to the operator.

  It only took the sheriff seven minutes to send a car to the house, since they only had to come up from the station on Hudson Bend, a few miles away.

  Deputy teddy bear pulled his notebook out of his back pocket, scratched the back of his flat-top, and began writing. His mirrored shades poked out from his front shirt pocket. The paramedics had loaded Kurt onto a gurney and wheeled him out the front door and into the ambulance. He had a concussion, some cosmetic damage to the ear, bruise on the shoulder, nothing major, but he was unconscious and that
was a concern. He was lucky the bat hadn't connected squarely with the back of his head or it could have been much worse.

  Judi gave the sheriff a description of the attacker, as best as she could remember. The description wasn't enough for a composite sketch but at least they had a general description. Her ears were still ringing from the gunshot; she was still shaking.

  The sheriffs deputies took the bat, they took Kurt's list of murder victims, they put Judi's PM9 in a plastic baggie and took that too. A sheriff's office technician traced the exit path of the bullet through the wall and found it embedded in a joist up in the attic. He dug the slug out of the wood and bagged that as well. Evidence.

  Judi was driven to the Travis County sheriff's office in the back of their squad car. Officer teddy bear wasn't sure what the charge was, but a gun had been fired. Someone was going to the station, dammit.

  Judi called her corporate attorney, who knew a good criminal attorney, and with some legal crank-turning, the sheriff let her go a few hours later. The sheriff confiscated the gun though, and her lawyer couldn't convince, threaten, or bribe them to let it go.

  Visiting hours at the hospital were over by the time she got out of jail, so even though she really wanted to see Kurt, she went home. She discovered the broken window and the evidence that her place had been ransacked. Shit. The last thing she wanted to do right now was to call the cops again, and she couldn't stay here. She drove to her Jester store instead and spent the night on the couch in her office. Nipper spent the night at Kurt's.

  Chapter 55

  IN THE MORNING, JUDI called the sheriff and told them they'd probably find more evidence in her apartment. She suspected that the attacker had ransacked her place. How he found her, she had no idea, and she was getting tired of this.

  Visiting hours weren't until after lunchtime, so on the way to the hospital, Judi stopped at the gun shop up in Round Rock and bought a new pistol. She considered getting another PM9, but she figured she'd probably get the Kahr back once the cops were done with it, and she didn't want to end up owning two identical pistols. So she bought a Glock 30, a forty-five caliber compact semiautomatic pistol with a polymer frame, similar in operation to the PM9 only larger and quite a bit thicker. She was still shaken from last night's attack and wanted a round with a bit more stopping power than the nine millimeter she'd fired last night. The Glock also held eleven rounds, compared to the PM9 which could hold seven, or at most eight with an extended magazine. The Glock was only slightly harder to conceal, but with the help of the shop owner, they found a decent leather inside-the-waistband holster custom-fitted to the Glock, and when she lowered her polo shirt over it, it disappeared. Perfect.

  She filled out the yellow legal questionnaire and handed over her concealed carry permit, which would let the dealer skip the FBI background check. She also purchased two boxes of Federal Hydrashok hollow point cartridges, and some tritium night sights, which the dealer was happy to install on the spot. The dealer also demonstrated an auxiliary high-precision sight that fitted neatly inside the recoil spring, and she was sold.

  She handed over her Visa card. It came back over a thousand bucks lighter. The store owner suggested she pop into the range, which was empty, and fire off a magazine or two to test the weapon, and he'd throw in a bag of range ammo for no extra charge. She accepted the offer. She wanted to get to the hospital to see Kurt but she didn't feel safe carrying an untested weapon. Besides, the nurses wouldn't let her in for another hour anyway.

  She was happy to see that she could still hit the ten-ring from fifteen yards. When she switched on the auxiliary sight, she put a tight group on the bullseye from twenty-five yards. She loaded up the two ten round mags with the Hydrashoks, racked the slide, popped the magazine back out, thumbed in the eleventh round, then holstered the Glock.

  She washed her hands, waved good-bye to the clerk, then walked out of the store, a reassuring weight hanging on her right hip.

  Chapter 56

  JAMIE AND FRANK MET the park rangers on the lake under the Pennybacker bridge. The rangers had been citing a young ski boat driver for creating a wake in a residential cove. When they got the emergency call from dispatch, they let the lucky driver go and blasted a one-eighty turn out of the cove at full speed, spraying the driver with frigid lake water and creating an even bigger wake that rocked the boats in their moorings and swamped the shore. They pulled their official Park Ranger speedboat alongside Frank and Jamie in the Sea Ray in less than five minutes. They radioed directions to the paramedics before pulling their boat up to the edge of the cliff under the bridge. One of the rangers jumped over to the rocky shore and scaled the ironwork.

  What he saw when he climbed up the beam would star in his nightmares for the rest of his life.

  Stalnaker had survived almost a week of expansion and contraction under the 360 bridge. He was broken, bloody, dehydrated, starved, and near death. A skeleton. Turkey buzzards had smelled death on him a few days ago and had taken turns casually pecking bloody beak-holes in his face, legs, arms, and chest. His left eye was gone, in its place a crusted red hole. The buzzards had pulled a thick painful strip of flesh off his calf muscle, which hung down and twisted in the breeze, trapping biting flies on the sticky surface of its bloody coagulation like some ghastly pest strip. The bridge hadn't crushed him. It had restricted his breathing, but that hadn't been enough to do him in.

  Count Rodchenko would have wagged his long vampiric finger in a gesture of disapproval. The student hadn't done his homework. The 360 bridge, a suspension bridge, had a smaller coefficient of expansion than the other highway bridges and the expansion was not sufficient to crush a man. Add to that Stalnaker's state of dehydration at the time of his abduction, and subsequent loss of blood. He literally shriveled so that he didn't fill the gap any more. He'd slipped out of the gap and hung suspended from the ropes for a day.

  Stalnaker was too weak to scream, and after the water came rushing into the lake, he heard the boats and jet skis buzzing underneath. He'd put his hand in his pants pocket, closed them around his keys, and waited, semi-comatose. He knew that young boaters often congregated under the bridge, drinking beer and partying in the shade of the bridge by the boat ramp. Many times he'd stood in the conference room at Digital Fabrication Systems and watched the boaters zipping by on the lake far below, as he intimidated his subordinates and ruled over endless meetings. He planned to drop his keys on the first boat that would get near. Then he'd be rescued. If he missed with his keys, he'd have another chance later with his wallet.

  The plan worked, but it had taken two days before someone got close enough.

  Chapter 57

  March 10

  THE HOSPITAL HAD TYPED the sign on a three-by-five index card and taped it to the glass inside the front door:

  PURSUANT TO SECTION 30.06, PENAL CODE (TRESPASS BY HOLDER OF A LICENSE TO CARRY A CONCEALED HANDGUN) A PERSON LICENSED UNDER SUBCHAPTER H, CHAPTER 411, GOVERNMENT CODE (CONCEALED HANDGUN LAW), MAY NOT ENTER THIS PROPERTY WITH A CONCEALED HANDGUN.

  She stopped.

  Shit.

  The sign wasn't strictly legal. The wording looked correct (it had to exactly match the wording given in section 30.06 by law) but it had to be in letters at least an inch high and also, she was pretty sure, in Spanish. But she couldn't remember if hospitals were a special case or not. Let's see, schools?--No. Churches?--No. Courthouses?--No. Racetracks?--No. Hospitals?--Can't remember. Stupid gun control laws. The handbook that she had to memorize was fifty pages of legalese describing places and conditions where it was okay and where it was not okay to carry a concealed handgun, and the penalties and affirmative defenses and defenses to prosecution and Class A misdemeanors and felony this and felony that, until she was more confused after reading than before she started. And the simple fact remained that no matter where she carried the gun, whether to racetrack, church, school, airport, or hospital, she wasn't going to use it to commit a crime. No criminal was going to respect that sign, no crimina
l memorized that booklet, why did she have to?

  She turned and walked back to her car, then thought, this is silly. I'm not a criminal, but I know for sure there is a crazy bastard out there who just tried to kill me and/or my boyfriend. Fuck it. It's concealed. I'm going in. She knew the penalty was severe and that she could very likely do time and lose her concealed handgun license. But this was life and death. She would go in.

  She passed by the registration desk to find Kurt's room number. There were a couple Austin cops standing around, filling out paperwork. She tried not to look nervous. She glanced down at her watch, then sneaked a look past it to her hip to see if the gun was poking out of her shirt. It suddenly felt like a concrete brick jutting out from her waist. She was sure it was completely obvious to everyone including the cops, but no one saw it, and the cops would certainly have arrested her if they did.