by Joshua Corin
Then she saw Gary.
Gary didn’t see her. Gary’s eyes were fixed on the ceiling fan. The ceiling fan was not moving, but neither was Gary.
A pair of French doors led to the rest of the house. More specifically, they led to a recessed den. Xana unzipped her way into the back porch and checked Gary for a pulse. Nothing. Then she stopped mid-crouch—and listened to the voices from inside the house.
Walker: “So what is this, McFly? Huh? You and your girlfriend break into a man’s house, steal his phone, lure me out here…and you don’t expect me to kick your ass? You’re not going to get to sucker punch me twice, asshole.”
Unknown female voice: “We don’t want anyone else to get hurt. We just want to know who else you and Officer Hoyt are working with. Then we can all sit down and talk it over and reach a solution.”
Walker: “Is Gary even home? Hey! Gary! It’s Walker! They got you locked up in the basement or something?”
Unknown male voice (probably Ross Berman): “Walker, please. I’m begging you. Don’t make her mad. Please.”
Walker: “Don’t make her mad? What about me, dipshit? What about my anger, McFly?”
The damn fool was going to get himself killed. Xana peered past the parlor toward the foyer by the front door. Ross Berman and an attractive woman in a jumpsuit. Jessabelle Rothstein, most likely. Their backs were to her. They were a good twenty-five feet away. Xana unshouldered the garden hose, gripped the sprinkler end, and thought back to the last western she’d seen.
This was about to be awesome—or awful.
Chapter 44
It had been Ross, not Jessabelle, who had stolen Gary’s phone to text Walker Berno, but the message he eventually sent was very much not the message he’d intended to type. He was still on the Astroturf floor of the back porch when he first got the idea. About ninety seconds had passed since the woman of his dreams had pincushioned Gary Willard, and Ross knew he needed an exit strategy before he too ended up punctured to death.
“I had to do it,” Jessabelle explained after drawing a long sip of sweet tea. “He knew too much.”
Never mind that Gary wouldn’t have told anyone. Ross didn’t bother offering up a reasoned argument. One couldn’t reason with a psychopath. Or a bully. Some of whom were psychopaths. He had tried, in his younger days, to talk his way out of whatever beating Walker and his cohorts were about to administer. He had tried to befriend them, and when that didn’t work he had tried to outwit them, and when that didn’t work, he had appealed to their basic sense of logic. Demonstrating dominance over someone who would never, ever pose a threat was simply illogical. Demonstrating dominance over someone whom you had already dominated? Why bother? They had to see their efforts as meaningless, right?
But that was the thing about bullies, Ross learned. The journey, so to speak, was the destination. They didn’t punch to win. They won each time they punched. And kicked. And flicked. And wet-willied and wedgied and taunted. McFly! Hey, McFly! They got others to call him that. His teachers didn’t call him that, but they must have known. And they never lifted a finger to help.
Only Phillip ever stood up for him.
What would Phillip do now, given these circumstances? Would he lie here on the grassy floor, an arm’s length from a corpse, and scream like a swaddled infant? Yes, there was a crazy woman standing another arm’s length away, but would Phillip let her do whatever?
Phillip would do something. He would punch.
Metaphorically, of course.
“I’m trying to protect you,” Jessabelle said. “Unless you want to go to prison. I don’t think I’d do well there. And who would look after my kids? I’m a protector. I’m a mother hen. Is his daughter in fifth grade or sixth?”
His daughter? Why in the holy hell did this banshee want to know what grade Gary’s daughter was in? Was she going to send her an age-appropriate condolence card? Had she gone so far around the bend that—
Oh.
Jessabelle was going to kill her too.
Ross grabbed at the Astroturf with his fingers. The plastic scraped against his palms. He pushed himself to his knees and then used the table to help him the rest of the way vertical. All the while, Jessabelle watched him. She was waiting for his answer.
The knife was in the pocketbook. He could attack her before she got to it. He could push her to the floor and strangle her.
He had a history of violence.
“You know what was one of the first lessons I learned about parenting?” she asked him. “I never would’ve known it if I hadn’t done it myself, but it’s true wisdom. Want to hear what it is? I’ll tell you what it is. Wisdom shouldn’t be worded. You’ll have kids one day, maybe. It might come in useful. OK, here it goes: Sometimes, in order to clean a baby, you need to get the baby really messy. And I don’t mean the kind of mess that babies excel at creating themselves. For example, if a baby does a runny number two in his diaper, after you throw away the diaper—far, far away—and after you take a handful of wipes and clean up the baby’s bottom, you’re not done. A runny number two, especially if it’s been floating there awhile, could lead to diaper rash. So you need to powder him up. Their skin is very sensitive and it’s not like they’re going to take care of themselves. And God help you if both of them need a change at the same time, because they won’t cooperate, but you need to do what you need to do. Even if it makes them cry. Even if it makes them scream. You know best. Do you understand?”
Ross glanced down at the pocketbook. Maybe he could reach for the knife. Or the Mace.
“It’s a metaphor,” she continued. “Except it’s not a metaphor, because it actually applies to real life, so it’s not just a metaphor. But that’s why I had to do what I did to your friend. That’s why I have to do what I’m going to do to his daughter. They’ve made a mess here. They saw things they should never have seen. Sometimes it takes a mess to clean a mess. I want you to understand. Tell me you understand.”
“Why does it matter what I think?”
“Because whether you believe it or not, I do like you, Ross. Not in the way that…well, you know…but as a person. When you were younger, you were forced through a gauntlet and you could’ve given up and instead you came out the other end and now you help others. I guess I can relate—or want to relate, at least. So your approval…it means something to me. In fact—”
But at that moment, Gary’s phone rang.
His ringer was the opening bars to Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”
“Check who it is,” commanded Jessabelle, so Ross bent down, reached into his dead friend’s pocket, and withdrew his iPhone.
It was Gary’s wife. Of this Ross was mostly certain. The name on the screen read MRS. GARY.
“Should I answer it?”
Mrs. Gary decided for him. The phone stopped ringing.
That was when the idea formed in Ross’s mind with crystalline clarity. He had to contact Walker Berno. All the avenues of his life had been leading up to this moment, and to him contacting Walker Berno. It was Hegelian in its elegance. When presented with a turning point in history, the thesis (Ross) required collision and/or collusion with its antithesis (Walker) in order to form a synthesis and thereby achieve progress. And so, just as Luke Skywalker could only defeat the Emperor with the aid of Darth Vader, so too Ross had to enlist Walker in order to defeat Jessabelle. Because he wouldn’t be able to get the knife in time. Or the Mace. He was too unlucky. Too clumsy. But if he texted Walker with Gary’s phone and told him that he needed to come over, then together they could right the wrongs of the world.
And Ross even knew the perfect excuse for going ahead with his scheme without raising Jessabelle’s suspicions.
He said flat out, “I should contact Walker.”
“You should?”
“We’re going to be waiting a while. School doesn’t get out till three, I think. And Walker is part of this mess. We’re going to have to take care of him eventually. Why not now? Invite him over. H
e doesn’t live far. Unless he’s moved.”
“Well, I’ll be damned…” Jessabelle lit up with elation. “You’re right, of course. Call him—no, text him. With Gary’s phone. Pretend to be Gary.”
“That’s the plan,” Ross replied, scrolling through Gary’s contacts, hoping to find the one he wanted. Walker’s phone number certainly wasn’t going to be in his phone. Ah, there it was. Thank you, Gary, for not locking up your phone with a password. In death as in life, a kindly mensch. And now, in death, Gary would text his old acquaintance Walker Berno and advise him to hightail it over—with his bat—because it was time for them to take out the wicked witch of the South.
And Ross would have succeeded too, had the wicked witch not found the need to peer over his shoulder.
“Sorry,” Jessabelle said. “I’m just so excited!”
So Ross did the best he could. He didn’t mention the bat, but he did emphasize that this was an emergency.
The next twenty-two minutes took hours. Gary’s body seemed to form a sort of gravity well. Both Ross and Jessabelle continued to return to it, to sit beside it, and look upon it. Ross, who had grieved so much for Phillip, just didn’t have anything left for Gary. It wasn’t as if they had been best buds. Gary had been a victim of circumstance more than anything else.
Then came the doorbell. Ross and Jessabelle pulled away from the corpse on the porch and moved toward the front door. At the last moment, however, Jessabelle stepped aside and gave Ross the honor of inviting Walker in.
“He’s going to be so surprised,” she muttered, beaming.
In the end, they all were surprised. Walker, by Ross’s appearance here; Ross, by Walker’s appearance in a wheelchair; and Jessabelle, when the working end of a garden sprinkler, along with a yard of rubber hose, smacked her in the back of the neck.
“Ow,” Jessabelle replied, and with a glare in her eyes she brought her pistol up and around toward Xana.
Chapter 45
Well, shit.
Xana put her hands up and, thinking quick, replied, “Careful. You can’t kill me.”
“True, but this gun can.”
“No, I mean—ha, that’s cute—my name is Xanadu Marx. And you’re Aaron Solo’s ex-wife, right?”
Xana darted her gaze to Ross and Walker.
Help me, her gaze encouraged.
But neither gentleman saw fit to attack the woman with the pistol. Perhaps they were conflicted. Was it chivalrous to attack one damsel to rescue another? Or perhaps both gentlemen, having been violated in the past, were now averse to risk. Or perhaps they simply didn’t care.
And so Xana was on her own. As always.
“Listen,” she said to Jessabelle, “I know you have a contract out on me. You shoot me now and you’ll be depriving someone else of their, uh, justice. So how about you put down your gun?”
Jessabelle did not put down her gun. Instead she shut one eye and took careful aim, just as someone undoubtedly had once taught her, and thank God for that because it gave Xana enough time to leap back behind the furniture on the back porch. The gun still fired, except the bullet, rather than nestling inside Xana’s left lung, zipped through one of the back porch’s windows, leaving a hole the size of a dime.
Xana knew she had only a few seconds before Jessabelle would march forward, come within point-blank range, and take another shot. Only a few seconds to find a way out of this mess. Only a few seconds to…
She got an idea.
But she needed time. More than a few seconds.
“Jessabelle,” she said, “is this what your sons would have wanted?”
“You shut up,” growled Jessabelle.
Xana grabbed the bong off the table and the metal flask from the floor. “I’m just saying. You killed Gary. You’re about to kill me. That’s a hell of a legacy you’re leaving behind.”
“You think you can play the high-horse card with me? I’ve seen your list of sins, Miss Xanadu Marx. You’re a stain. You expect me to feel guilty about cleaning up a stain?”
Was there still some alcohol left inside the flask? Yes! Xana emptied out the bong water and replaced it with most—but not all—of the remaining alcohol. Rum, by the smell of it. And now all she needed was some dry paper and whatever lighter Gary used with the bong and she’d have herself a makeshift Molotov cocktail and—
And she could stop because there was the tip of a Glock touching the top of her scalp.
“Go to hell,” Jessabelle said.
Then the front door opened and in walked Gary’s daughter, Nanita, home from school.
Chapter 46
Oh, the Spring Street precinct was busy that afternoon.
In Interview Room #1 sat Xanadu Marx, ex-FBI agent.
In Interview Room #2 sat Ross Berman. Having refused an attorney, mumbling something to the effect of “What’s the point?,” Ross was on page two of his confession. All the while his left eye pulsed with bruising. Walker had clocked him good with an elbow. This was, of course, shortly after Walker had launched himself from his wheelchair like a feral cat and tackled Ross to the floor of the Willards’ foyer, which was shortly after Nanita had entered the foyer, distracting Jessabelle long enough for all hell to break loose. Ross, who had been mentally and emotionally stunned by the sight of Walker’s infirmity, now became physically stunned as well. He had no memory of how the fight ended—one of the cops had said something about that, but it hadn’t made much sense. Aside from the shiner on his left eye, Ross also had bitten his tongue and felt a definite soreness in his balls. A righteous beating from Walker Berno. Just like old times. And Walker Berno was probably out celebrating his latest victory, drinking and smoking with his buds.
In Interview Room #3 sat Henry Hoyt. The cop too was confessing, although not the whole truth. No matter how hard his colleagues Officers Aguirre and Reeves prodded him, he refused to disclose what he knew about Xana’s imminent assault. “We had an agreement,” he repeated. The other details he was glad to share. He asked repeatedly about his wife.
She sat in Interview Room #4. Every so often, Dotty’s arms would twitch. She sat alone.
In Interview Room #5 sat…well, nobody really. Certainly not Walker Berno. Walker Berno was in the morgue.
This was Xana’s recorded testimony to Officer Vance on what happened:
“When the girl came in, I grabbed Jessabelle by her hair and yanked her down. No way was I going to let her shoot a kid. I managed to retrieve the gun from her hands. That was when I splashed her in the eyes with the rum from the bong. I mean, I wasn’t going to let it go to waste.”
“You’re a true hero.”
“By now, Berno and Berman were going at it like…no, strike that. Walker Berno was going at Ross Berman and Ross Berman was just sort of taking it. I think he was still conscious because I heard him saying something. But Berno had it in him to kill Berman and so I tucked the gun in the back of my pants and pulled him off and he took a swing at me, but he was on the floor and my face was beyond the reach of his right hook. Instead he punched air. That was when Berman shot him. He must have lifted the gun off me. Berman shot Berno once in the back.”
“And Jessabelle?”
“She must have escaped out the back while I was dealing with the chuckleheads by the front door. How’s the girl?”
“Nanita Willard?”
“Yeah.”
“About what you’d expect.”
“I hope not. I tend to have low expectations.”
“Then like I said. About what you’d expect.”
After her sit-down with Officer Vance, Xana found Detective Konquist at his desk, writing up his report.
“I got to tell you,” he said, “the minute you walked in, Special Agent what’s-his-name—”
“Buttplug.”
“OK. Special Agent Buttplug walked out. Seems he’s allergic.”
“Now, that’s a world I could live in. Where every douchebag kick-ass fuckup had to keep their distance or risk coming down with hives.
Can you imagine? Instead we got this world.”
“This world’s not so bad. We got French fries and Ray Charles.”
“I got bad news for you,” said Xana. “Ray Charles is dead.”
Konquist waved her nonsense away.
“Where’s your better half?”
“Rounding up Aaron Solo and about a dozen computers.”
“You think they’re going to find anything?”
“I think they’re going to find Aaron Solo and about a dozen computers. But if you’re asking me if I think they’re going to find a smoking gun or any incriminating evidence or the current whereabouts of his ex-wife…I think you’d be better off asking a Magic 8 Ball.”
“What about Berman?” she asked. “Does he know who’s after me?”
“He says he doesn’t.”
“Do you believe him?”
“Ask me again on a Sunday.”
Xana nodded. “Mind if I speak with him?”
“Only if you mind me being in the room when you do.”
Ross Berman was on the fourth page of his confession when he was greeted by Detective Abe Konquist and former FBI Special Agent Xanadu Marx. He flexed and unflexed his cramping left hand. They sat down across from him.
“Do you know who I am?” asked Xana.
He shook his head.
“I’ll give you a hint. You’ve seen my name on a list.”
He said her name.
“Got it in one. We met, briefly, a few hours ago. You were getting the piss beaten out of you by a paraplegic.”
Ross’s voice was very small, like a nervous child’s. “He used to beat me up so many times. So many times. I once tried to count and I couldn’t. And I never deserved it. Today was the first time I deserved it.”
“Yes. I saw the video. What you did. You really lost control.”
“Now, isn’t that funny. When I attacked him…I think I was trying to gain control for the first time in my life. But you’re right. Do you think I’m a bad man?”
“I think you did a bad thing,” Xana replied. “God knows I’ve done my share.”
