by Matt Coyle
“Nice speech.” Dixon shifted his gaze to Bob. “You get it?”
Bob pulled something out of his coat pocket and set it on the glass coffee table.
The Raven Arms twenty-five-caliber pistol.
“Don’t worry, Midnight’s fine.” Bob’s face was still flat, but there was a flicker of humanity in his eyes. “You may not remember this, Rick. When we were having a few drinks the first year you worked for me, you told me the combination to your gun safe was your dad’s birth date. You told me some of your fondest memories as a child were your dad teaching you how to shoot and you wanted to always remember those good days. You said the trust and confidence he showed in you was his way of showing love. You were right. He loved you more than anything in the world.”
“That’s real sweet, Bob.” Dixon scowled and shook his head. “He’s going to see his dad soon.”
“How much does Phelps’ daughter know?” Bob’s tone was fatherly like the one he’d sometimes use when I worked for him. I guessed he was trying to make my last few minutes on earth as pleasant as possible under the circumstances.
“Just what I told Detective Sheets. I’m sure Detective Dixon has already filled you in.” I stared at Bob, a man who I’d once respected like I had my father as a kid, and snapped off each word. “She doesn’t know Dixon killed her father because he was going to turn him and you in. Or that Detective Davidson killed the investigation. Or that you tried to set up my father for the murder. He beat you on that setup but you had plan B and it worked.”
“If it matters, Buzz Davidson killed Phelps and set Charlie up with the gun.” Bob shot a glance at Dixon and rested his eyes back on me.
My stomach settled and my breath came back to me. I didn’t want to die, but a whisper within me had been preparing me for an early death for years. The time of my death was in the hands of others. The terms were in mine.
“Why was the gun a setup?” I wasn’t stalling for time. Nobody was coming to my aid. If I was going to die tonight, I needed to know the last truth about my father’s broken life.
“You believe him about Phelps’ daughter?” Dixon looked at Bob. “We shouldn’t take any chances. We’re almost clear.”
“You telling the truth about the Phelps girl, Rick?” Bob asked.
“She’s a grown woman now and she gave up caring about who killed her father a long time ago. She’s moved on. I haven’t.” I stared at Bob, man to man. No pleading in my eyes. “Tell me about the gun.”
“Let’s move this along, Bob,” Dixon said.
“He’s got a right to know.” Bob picked up the .25 off the table and looked at it. “The gun was an accident. Turned out to be a gift to Dixon here and Detective Davidson. Your father was starting to ask questions about Phelps. He showed me the ledger. He was starting to put things together. Anyway, the night of my bachelor party for wife number three, your dad and I got a call about a woman who found a gun in the attic of her deceased father’s house. We caught the call and picked up the Raven Arms twenty-five-caliber pistol. Your dad, of course, wanted to run ballistics on the gun when we got back to the Brick House to see if it had been linked to any crimes. I just wanted to get to my bachelor party and convinced him to wait until morning.”
Bob smiled the smile that had won him legions of friends and dozens of girlfriends. It bounced off me.
“Anyway, I made a joke at the party about how anal your father was wanting to run the gun instead of going to the party, and Dixon and Davidson saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. They stole the gun out of the trunk of our cruiser and waited for the right time to kill Phelps and frame your father. His prints were on the gun. I never touched it, and Buzz used gloves. Charlie ruined it by covering someone else’s shift when Mr. Father and Son-in-Law thought he was home alone without an alibi. You and your sister and mom were up in Northern California for Thanksgiving. But Charlie blew their frame and they had to come up with a plan B.”
I remembered the trip. The first one without my dad. He and my mother hadn’t been getting along. He must have been already carrying his suspicions about Bob after talking to Phelps’ daughter. I hadn’t wanted to go on the trip. I didn’t want to leave my father alone. I wished I would have been strong enough to hold onto that sentiment later when he really needed me.
“Plan B being the ledger you framed him with. Was it your word against his with the brass, Bob? Did you lie to them like you did to all your ex-wives and girlfriends? You’re good at it.”
“I don’t want you to die thinking your father was a saint, Cahill,” Dixon jumped in. “We each pitched in five grand and planted fifteen grand in an envelope in his personal car, but he found it before Internal Affairs searched the car and he never turned it in. So, he had a little grift in him, too.”
“You should have checked my desk when you stole the gun tonight, Bob. The envelope is in my desk drawer. He never spent the money.”
Dixon shrugged his shoulders, but the color left Bob’s face.
“You should have just killed him the night you killed Phelps.” I stood up and looked at Bob. “He would have died a hero instead of a broken man. You killed him one day at a time for nine years. And then you had the balls to come to his funeral. Did you spit on his grave while no one was looking?”
“Sit down, Cahill.” Dixon shoved his gun in my ribs. “Or I’ll turn this white living room red.”
“No. Make Bob do it. Make him pull the trigger this time.”
Pain exploded in my head and the white living room turned black.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
I OPENED MY eyes. Pounding head. Liquid dripping into my right ear. Blood. Mine. Arms locked behind me. Hard surface under me. Exposed beams above me. Garage. I moved my hands to try to free them. Plastic cut into my wrists. Something under me crackled when I moved. Plastic. To make the cleanup easy.
“Bring your wife and Buzz out here.” Bob’s voice. Behind my head somewhere.
“They don’t want to see this.” Dixon. Out of sight. Maybe in the doorway from the garage to the house.
“You all voted. He has to die. We all have to be here.”
“Shit.”
Footsteps walking away, then dying. I rolled over and faced Bob.
“How did you get here, Bob? You saved my dad’s life in Vietnam only to kill him twenty-five years later. One day at a time. Then you let the world think he was a dirty cop.” I tested the flex cuffs around my wrists. No escape. “He once told me my sister and I owed our lives to you for Vietnam. I guess you’re reclaiming half that debt tonight. You used his loyalty to break him. He could never betray a brother in arms, but you did.”
“He repaid that debt more than once in Vietnam.” Bob stared at the ground. The ruddy hue trained from his face. He looked his age for the first time since I’d known him. “He saved everyone in our PBR at least three times, but he never forgot the one time I saved him.”
“How many people do you think your partner in there can kill before you get caught? Phelps. Armstrong and Ketchings. Me. Do you think Jules Windsor has figured out that alerting you to the shell casings in my dad’s safe deposit box would put a target on his back?”
“He doesn’t know anything about the Phelps murder. But he’s dirty, just like us. We found out he was laundering money for Phelps and the mob. He’s been in our pocket ever since. He knew we’d framed your dad, so when you came snooping around he figured he’d better call us. But you’re right, he might start putting things together.”
“What happened to you, Bob? There used to be some good in you. I’ve seen it.” I worked my way to my feet. The blood rushing from my head staggered me, and I bumped against the SUV Gina Dixon drove up in the day I questioned her father.
“That good is long gone, Rick.” Bob smiled the saddest smile I’d ever seen. “Talk time is over.”
He stood by the open door to the house looking inside. The button to the automatic garage door opener was next to his arm. I willed him to push the button
. He didn’t move.
Voices rolled in from the house.
“Is this really necessary?” Gina’s voice.
Dixon came through the door first, gun out.
“Get back on that plastic.” He pointed his Sig Sauer at my head.
“Fuck you.” My terms.
The inside of the garage exploded. A chunk of Dixon’s head bounced off the white SUV. His body crumbled to the ground. A scream muted under the gunshot ringing in my ears. Bob turned toward the open door. Gina knocked over her father trying to run away. Another explosion. She flew three feet and landed in the hall. Still. Davidson crawled toward her in panicked slow motion. Bob walked into the house and stood over him. Another gun blast. A red mist hung in the air, then vanished.
I charged toward the door and banged my head on the garage door opener. The door clanked upward, and I ran toward it. Suddenly, it reversed direction. I dove at the closing gap. No hands to break my fall. I landed on my chest. My chin slammed off the concrete as my head banged against the closed door.
I rolled over onto my back. Blood dripped off my chin. My head throbbed and the pain in my chest made it hard to breathe. Bob stood over me. Two of him vibrated in my eyes. The vibration settled into one.
Dixon’s blood pockmarked Bob’s face and right arm. He held a gun down on me. My gun. The one he’d taken off me when he entered the house. The gun used to kill Dixon, his wife, and her father. I wondered how Bob would spin it. Would I die a hero or a villain? However he played it, the story wouldn’t work if he shot me with my own gun. As loud as the gunshots were, they were contained inside the garage and the nearest house was over half a mile away. Nobody heard the gunshots. Nobody called the police. Nobody was coming to save me.
“I’ve been preparing for this for a long time, Rick. I knew this day would come.”
“To kill me and blame it on someone else? Why? Wasn’t my father enough?” I inched my back up the garage door into a sitting position. With my hands cuffed behind me, I had no defense.
“I didn’t know they were going to murder Phelps. On my daughter’s soul.” Bob squatted down like a catcher. Sadness in his eyes.
“What would you have done if you’d been first on the scene? Take the gun like my father had or let the frame stand?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
The humanity in Bob’s eyes evaporated and he stood up. He still loosely held my gun on me. I wanted him to shoot me with my gun and have to explain it to the police. It was the only revenge I had.
Bob raised the gun. I waited for the chance to tell my father I was sorry. For doubting him. For letting him drown alone in his sorrow. For not being at his side when he died. Tears welled in my eyes. For not trusting my father’s blood.
Bob cocked his wrist. And pointed the gun barrel at the rafters. Pulled the ejector rod and spun the cylinder. The spent shells and unused bullets clattered down on the concrete floor. Bob spun and stepped over the body of Detective Dixon and walked toward the door into the house. He stopped next to the garage door button, pulled out his pocket knife, and severed the wires. He turned and looked at me.
“I’m sorry.” Then he went into the hallway strewn with the bodies of the people he’d murdered and closed the door behind him. Twenty seconds later I heard a car start in the driveway and calmly pull away.
I scrambled to my feet and ran to the door into the house, spun around, and tried the knob with my cuffed hands. Locked. I searched the garage for clippers or a knife that I could maneuver to cut the plastic cuffs off my wrists. Nothing.
My cell phone was in my pants pocket, but I wasn’t limber enough to move my cuffed hands from behind my back to get at it. I looked down at the crumpled body of Dixon. His wife was dead inside the house. She wouldn’t be able to call the police when he never came home. Someone at LJPD would start looking for him sometime in the next day or two. I could scream all I wanted, but no one would hear me. I’d have to listen for the mailman with my ear to the garage door all day tomorrow when the blow flies started to collect on Dixon’s shattered head and lay eggs.
I looked at Dixon again and then at his wife’s SUV parked next to his fallen body. I squatted down over his body and found his right pant-leg pocket with my hands. Keys inside. I worked my right hand into his pocket and grasped the key ring. I fingered the key ring with my left hand. Two key fobs and three loose keys. I stepped over Dixon and backed up to the door into the house. I maneuvered each of the three loose keys and tried to fit them into the slot in the doorknob behind my back. None fit. Either Dixon didn’t have a key to his father’s house or the garage door required a different key.
Didn’t matter.
I pushed the buttons on one of the key fobs and heard a car alarm chirp outside. Shit. I pushed the button on the other fob. Lights flashed on Gina Dixon’s SUV and the locks clicked open. I ran to the car and spun around and opened the driver door behind my back, then stepped up into the seat. I pushed my nose against the ignition button and the car turned on. I put my foot on the brake, then grabbed the shifter on the steering column with my teeth.
Reverse. Foot off brake. Pound gas peddle. Collision. I banged off the steering wheel, but not hard enough for the airbags to go off. My injured chest throbbed, and I could only take short breaths. I looked in the rearview mirror. The garage door stood in place. I kept steady pressure on the gas. The garage filled with exhaust. The garage door stayed in place. Another minute or two and I’d probably die of carbon monoxide. Maybe I should just wait for the mailman.
I pushed the gas pedal to the floor. Burned rubber. Exhaust. Grinding metal. Bent aluminum. I checked the rearview mirror. The garage door still stood, but had a kink in it. I jammed my foot on the brake, teethed the shifter to park, and nose-butted the ignition off.
I stumbled out of the car and saw it. The dent in the garage door had lifted a crooked gap up from the garage floor. I laid down and shimmied through.
Freedom. Fresh air. Bob Reitzmeyer in the wind.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
THE WOMAN WHO answered the door of the house a half mile from Ben Davidson’s home reeled backwards and threw up her hand when she saw me after I’d rung her doorbell with my nose.
She locked me outside and called the police. I couldn’t blame her. I liked being locked outside better than inside anyway. I waited on her front porch. The police arrived fifteen minutes later. The walk from Davidson’s house had taken me twenty minutes with my wounded leg, armless gait, and a probable broken sternum. After I directed Poway PD to the crime scene, they took me to the nearest station and grilled me for an hour until they finally ceded my wishes and called Detective Sheets.
Poway PD didn’t put out a BOLO for Bob until after Sheets arrived and vouched for me a half hour later. Bob had told me he’d been planning for this day for years. Not to kill me, but to flee the country. He was probably already on a plane under an alias off to an exotic land.
He’d saved my life and was now on the run because of it. He could have gone along with Dixon’s plan and still be living in La Jolla, bedding a different long-legged attorney every night. But he chose to save me and flee a life he could never return to. Guilt for what he’d done to my father? Genuine affection for me? I’d never know.
But now I did know that my father, broken, betrayed, and forsaken, died with the honor he lived by still intact. And I prayed I could uphold the truth of his blood.
EPILOGUE
JACK ANTON WROTE a freelance article that made the front page of the Union Trib two days after the Poway murders. It laid out the whole story, going back to the Phelps murder and cover-up. The truth about my father. A man betrayed and broken. Trent Phelps’ daughter, Tonya King, showed up at my house the afternoon the article hit the newsstands. She didn’t say much. Just cooked and cleaned and took care of me while I recuperated from a fractured sternum.
Kim visited me the first day I got home from the hospital. She sat next to my bed and held my hand. Her hand was warm and felt righ
t in my own. But I knew it couldn’t stay there. And it suddenly felt wrong.
“I’ll never be able to repay you for all you did for me … and Jeffrey.”
“We’re even. For all that you’ve done for me over the years. When it was hard and you didn’t have to.” I patted her hand, then slid mine out. I thought back on the day I broke a wooden cane over Jeffrey Parker’s shin. “I don’t remember doing too much for Jeffrey.”
“You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?”
“LJPD dropped the charges. They are now calling Dina Dergan a person of interest and are looking for her.”
They’d never find her.
“That’s great.” I meant it. I didn’t want any innocent man to be hounded for something he didn’t do. I knew the damage it could wreak. For a generation.
“I know it was you, Rick. I know you convinced them that Jeffrey was innocent.”
“I think they just finally looked at all the evidence.”
“Rick?” Kim looked down at the floor, then back at me. Her green eyes were heavy. The last few weeks had taken the sparkle out of them. The one thing I could always count on. The sparkle of optimism. I already missed it. “I know you were pretty rough on Jeffrey. Did he … did he ever tell you that he slept with Sophia?”
Kim had made her choice. She’d chosen one imperfect man who loved her over another. She was about to start a family, but doubt still clouded her joy. Parker had tearfully confessed to me in jail. I took him to be truly remorseful, but he’d betrayed the woman I loved.
“No.”
“Do you think he did?”
“No.”
Kim deserved a chance at happiness more than anything. Even more than the truth.
* * *
Moira called me the next day.
“You’ll do anything to get your name in the paper, won’t you, Cahill.” The full blast machine-gun voice. I’d missed that voice.
