Murder Mile High

by Lora Roberts

  I sat for a few moments, trying to compose something that would express everything I felt in a few non-revealing words. In the end, I just thanked him for his message and repeated that I hoped to be home soon.

  As soon as I was finished, Amy confronted me. “Are you really in danger, Aunt Liz?”

  “No. I don’t know anything. I’m as mystified as everyone else is.”

  “You know about—Tony,” she said, pronouncing his name hesitantly. “You read that file.”

  “Yeah, but the police know that, too. It’s no secret.”

  “Right.” She seemed relieved.

  I stretched. “Well, Barker’s already in the bus, so I’m headed that way, too.”

  “This once, will you sleep in here?” The pinched look was back around Amy’s eyes.

  “I’m just as safe in the bus.” I didn’t believe that anyone would be after me—what would harming me accomplish? But if anyone was so deranged as to wish to harm me, better that they didn’t go through Amy first.

  It was cold outside and seemed darker than usual. Barker had stopped whining. His head was still out the window, his ears pitched forward to something down the street that claimed his attention. He barely looked at me as I walked toward Babe.

  I opened the side door to climb in, and he was out of it like a shot, dashing down the street toward whatever he’d been watching—probably a cat, maybe even a raccoon. I grabbed the leash out of the bus and set off in pursuit, whistling to him. I didn’t want to yell, for fear that Renee would deprecate any commotion I made.

  The streetlight at the corner was out, and Barker was close to invisible, like a dog in camouflage streaking through the darker shadows where trees overhung the sidewalk.

  Halfway down the block I figured I was far enough from Andy’s house to yell. “Barker!”

  He checked momentarily, turning back toward me. I saw his eyes shine, and his happy doggy smile. When I came closer he pranced away. I dangled his leash temptingly, but a dog who’d been without exercise as long as Barker wasn’t going to give up a run for a tame walk on a leash. He circled coyly toward me, then his head came up again, alert. Once more he dashed toward the corner.

  A big catalpa tree threw darkness over the corner. I thought I could see a figure standing in the black heart of the shadow. Barker disappeared into that blackness, but my steps slowed.

  “Barker! Come!” I heard a whine from the shadows, and I could dimly see a few white spots that I assumed were my dog. Then he cried out sharply, as if someone had kicked him.

  I hurried forward, unable to leave him to whatever threatened him, even though I knew it was foolish. The only weapon I had was my Swiss army knife in my pocket. I wrapped the leash around my hand a couple of times, its heavy hook swinging free.

  My eyes were growing used to the darkness. I could see the moving shadow of a person, standing under the trees, stooping actually. I heard the clink of Barker’s chain collar and his soft, puzzled whine.

  Just as I got under the tree, Barker jumped up, bounding at me, uttering sharp barks of distress. His approach took me off balance, and in that instant someone slipped behind me and wrapped an arm around my throat. I felt cold metal on my temple.

  “I blew poor Maud’s head off,” a voice whispered in my ear. It was familiar somehow, but not recognizable. I remembered Leonard Tobin, talking about poor Maud. “I’ll blow yours off, too, if you don’t do just as I say.”

  I turned my head a little, and the arm around my neck tightened. “Don’t try to see me or you’re dead,” it warned.

  I tried to nod. Barker seethed around my feet, and I was torn between the hope that he would trip the person holding me, and the fear that it would cause my death.

  Then something roared around the corner, and bright lights pierced the shadow. Brakes squealed, and a white pickup truck swerved across the sidewalk. I felt the arm around my throat slacken. Impelled by some atavistic impulse for survival, I threw myself forward, lashing out behind me with my improvised leash-whip. A sharp crack and a smothered cry answered my movement. With a clatter, something fell to the ground. And Byron Fahey jumped out of his pickup truck, his face contorted in a scowl.

  Chapter 28

  So it wasn’t Biff who’d been threatening to kill me—who had killed Tony and Maud. Even so, Barker wasn’t glad to see him.

  “What’s going down here? You partying, Auntie?” Biff’s sneer was in excellent shape. It distorted his features, colored his voice.

  I didn’t have time to waste answering. Whirling, I saw Kyle groping on the ground behind me. His glasses dangled from one ear; the lenses were cracked from the heavy hook of Barker’s leash.

  He’d dropped the gun when I’d lashed out at him. I located it a second before he did, half-under some dead leaves at the edge of the sidewalk. I kicked it away from Kyle’s groping hand, and it skidded toward Biff.

  “What’s this?” He bent and picked it up, glancing from Kyle to me. “You playing rough, Auntie?”

  “I’m not playing at all, Biff. This guy killed a couple of people already, and now he wants to kill me. Give me the gun, please.”

  He was still being Mr. Tough Guy. “You kidding? Give you the gun—that’s a good one. You’re the man-killer, right, Auntie? Gonna shoot this guy, too, like you did your rat of a husband?”

  Kyle stood up slowly, adjusting his broken glasses on his face. “That’s right,” he said, holding Biff’s eyes with his. “She’s trying to kill me. Broke my glasses, too.”

  I could see Biff’s thought processes as clearly as if they were written on his face. Kyle wore glasses. That made him a wimp. Wimps didn’t carry guns. Therefore, I was the bad person here. Barker made up his mind by growling at him. Biff took a firmer grip on the gun.

  I fastened the leash on Barker and made another effort to communicate, trying to stabilize my shaking voice. “Biff, if you don’t believe me, I suggest you call the police. Renee will let you use her phone.”

  “Right, call the cops.” Biff was inclined to sneer again, but Kyle spoke, using a quiet forcefulness that looked good next to my shaking voice and nervous hands.

  “I think you should call the cops. Let them sort this out.”

  Biff stood undecided, scratching his head.

  “Give me the gun. I’ll keep her here until you get back,” Kyle added.

  “No!” I yelled when Biff started to hand it meekly over. By then it was too late. Kyle yanked the gun from Biff’s slack fingers.

  “Okay, over by Liz.” Kyle gestured with the gun barrel, and when Biff didn’t move, he adopted a commando stance. “Move it now, buddy.”

  Slowly Biff shuffled over to stand by me, his eyebrows pulled down in great displeasure. I thought of several names I could call him, but didn’t waste my breath.

  “This is your nephew?” Kyle glanced from Biff to me, maybe looking for some resemblance.

  “Yes.” I remembered reading somewhere that shallow breaths were better than deep ones if your head was whirling. I wasn’t the only one there who was confused. Barker, interspersing growls with whines, had his fur up, but he began sniffing Biff’s leg with great interest. The dog’s presence hampered me—he seemed so vulnerable. But then, in a funny way, so did Biff. I wondered how I could get us out of this. I sent mental telepathy to Renee, only half a block away, to call the police. If we stayed here on the corner long enough, someone would surely get suspicious and do just that. Wasn’t Eva cruising around keeping an eye on me? We should be easy to see, with the headlights from Biff’s truck trained on us.

  Kyle didn’t plan for us to stay there. “You have a nice truck,” he said to Biff conversationally. “We’re all going to get in it. You’ll drive.”

  Biff didn’t take orders well.

  “The hell I will,” he said angrily, as if the gun in Kyle’s hand meant nothing. “What’s going on here? All I did was stop when I saw my aunt playing bondage games with some weirdo. This has got nothing to do with me.” His voice cracked on
the last word, reminding me that this huge, stubble-bearded male was only a few years away from playing with GI Joe dolls.

  I shrugged when Biff directed his scowl at me. I still didn’t understand what was happening. Somehow, given the two guys in front of me, I would have expected their team affiliations to be reversed.

  “Your aunt was right,” Kyle said gently into the silence. He was getting himself in hand, smoothing back that shiny hair. Noticing his leather jacket, I wondered where the motorcycle was. “I was threatening her. Now that you’ve given me back my gun, I can keep tabs on both of you. So, you can either drive or I’ll shoot you.”

  Biff backed reluctantly toward his truck. Kyle pointed the gun at me. “You get in the middle, Liz. Behave, now, or I’ll have to hurt something you’re fond of.”

  “She don’t give two hoots about me, Mister,” Biff said. He didn’t look too good—his beefy face was glazed with sweat, and his eyes flicked back and forth like a cornered animal’s.

  “I meant the dog.” Kyle glided a step forward and snatched the leash out of my nerveless hands. He jerked the leash, and the choke collar tightened. Barker yelped.

  “I just don’t understand.” I wasn’t faking the fright in my voice. I was very frightened. But I thought the strain of trying to keep both of us in line would tell on Kyle, and work to our advantage. And I had some lame idea of making him relax his vigilance. “You were the one to kill Tony? And Maud? Why, Kyle? I never thought you were capable of something like that.”

  He held the gun with one hand while he tried to keep Barker from winding around his legs, but he was still dividing close attention between Biff’s dragging footsteps and my frozen body. My question made him hunch up one shoulder, as if shrugging it away. After a moment, he said, “Tony was just—too dangerous. I didn’t want to kill him, God knows. But the way he was going, we’d both be taken out.” He stopped short, as if he’d said too much.

  “Tony? Your ex, right?” Biff slanted a hostile glance at me. “The one my mom—”

  Kyle laughed. “Tony heard somewhere that you thought he was fucking your mom. He thought that was pretty funny. In fact, he thought it would be even funnier if it was true.” He smiled gently. “You should be glad I killed him. He might have succeeded.”

  “But why? Were you a coyote, too?”

  Kyle darted a narrow glance at me. “If I tell you about it, you’ll be dead. You know that?”

  “And otherwise you won’t hurt us? Biff will just drive us to the Dairy Queen and home again? Right. What’s the real agenda here, Kyle?”

  Biff stopped, his hand on the truck’s door. “Yeah. Why don’t you just go ahead and shoot us, punk? You’re going to anyway.” His bravado came out sounding a little thin, and it wasn’t a great way to keep Kyle occupied and talking until Eva made her next swing through the neighborhood.

  “I want to know what’s behind all this before I check out.” I tried to be genteelly insistent. Barker was straining at the leash, wanting to come and sit on my feet, like he used to when he was smaller and worried or upset.

  Kyle jerked him back, and for an instant the gun slipped in its vigilance. I darted a glance at Biff and caught his eye. He moved away from the truck, back toward Kyle. The moment had passed, but there might be another one. Maybe we’d be ready for it.

  “Damned dog,” Kyle muttered. “I should have thought of some other way to get you down here on your own, Liz.”

  “You—called Barker somehow?”

  “Dog whistle.” He jerked the leash again, and Barker cowered. He had no idea he’d been my Judas.

  “But why did you want me? I don’t know anything.”

  He almost looked uncomfortable—he wouldn’t meet my eyes. “You know the police have suspected you from the beginning, If you’d only run away, kept their attention on you—everything would have worked out. As soon as they arrested you, I was going to tell them how you’d told me you were still in love with Tony, still jealous of Maud. You would have looked good,” he assured me earnestly. “That cop who questioned me—he thought he could get a conviction with you, even without hard evidence. The only problem was, you wouldn’t run. I was—just going to get you out of town, make you look guiltier.”

  “So you were going to kill me.” I don’t know why that seemed like such a letdown. The likelihood was that he would still kill me.

  Kyle looked uncomfortable. “Just a little accident” he insisted. “You might have lived. I was going to drive you in your bus out to the Interstate. You would be fleeing, you see.”

  I still couldn’t make sense of it all. “But—why? Why are you doing all this?”

  He sighed; I could hear it over the rumble of Biff’s truck engine and the sound of the wind in the stiff catalpa leaves. “For the Anasazi, of course. I thought you’d understand, Liz. You’ve always understood about them. I found this cache of pots on government land. I couldn’t get any funding for a full-scale dig without revealing the location, and as soon as one other person knows, the integrity of the site is compromised. You know. We’ve talked about this.”

  True. But I hadn’t realized that Kyle’s fervor was homicidally strong. I said, “So that’s why you worked with Tony, bringing in illegal aliens.”

  “I needed money to finance my dig. It was good money, and didn’t interfere with my other job.” He nodded, pleased that I’d understood, but the gun still moved steadily, pointing now at Biff, now at me. “I didn’t mind those long night drives down to New Mexico with Tony. That’s when I heard about him finding you in California. He didn’t say just what happened, but he did talk often about what you deserved.”

  Kyle shook his head. “It kind of made me sick, when he’d talk like that. And he was trouble in other ways, too—skimming profits, making both of us look bad to the—” He hesitated.

  I filled in the gap. “The people in charge, whoever they are.”

  “They’re very results-oriented,” Kyle assured me. “Tony was dodging them, but I wasn’t so lucky. They brought me to a—meeting, and told me Tony would have to go if he couldn’t make up the money.”

  “He wanted you to make it up?”

  “I had just managed to get together enough for an excavation permit and three months of supplies.” Kyle sounded outraged. “I told him he had one month to find the cash. That’s when he started hitting up your mom—thought that was funny, too, to make her pay. Maud, Leonard—he tried everyone he could think of. Then he stole my pots.”

  “What?” That woke Biff up. “Pot? Drugs?”

  “No.” Kyle shook his head. “The Chaco pottery from the site I’d discovered. Like a fool, I’d told him once how valuable it had become on the black market. When I found the site had been vandalized—” His lips tightened. “I knew it was Tony. Hell, he left some of his dumb imported cigarette butts there. He’d followed me, rifled my find, disturbed the layers.”

  He took a deep breath. “I was supposed to be in Cortez that night. Instead I drove to Denver, to the rendezvous point where Tony was bringing a shipment. I waited until he was alone. I knew he always carried a gun when he was working. I ran up, said someone was after me, grabbed the gun, and—shot him. Just like that. Then I wrapped him up in a movers’ blanket from the rental van so his brains wouldn’t get all over everything. I put my bike in the van and drove away.” His monotone ceased.

  “And Maud?”

  “She knew about our business sideline. Tony blabbed it all to her.” He shook his head. “He had such a big mouth. He told me about your old man waving a gun at him—that’s why I ended up dumping his body on your folks’ doorstep. Seemed like a good diversion. I called Maud the next day, to make sure she’d keep her mouth shut. She told me you were in town.” He shook his head in wonderment. “It was like the gods were smiling on me, you know? I’d put the body on the doorstep, and you turned up to take the rap.”

  He smiled at me, and I could still see that nice guy. “Maud said the police did suspect you, but she was nervous. I kne
w she’d spill her guts. After you and the cop left my place, I got on my Harley and went over to Maud’s. She was just leaving. I followed her. The gods were smiling again—she picked a route with practically no traffic. On the bike, it was easy to pull up beside her.” He glanced at his gun.

  I held myself very still, hoping he would go on. Biff had been listening, his mouth slightly open as if it were all an action movie. When Kyle stopped talking, he shuffled his feet, and instantly the gun was trained on his chest.

  Down the block, a car door slammed. Barker leaped up, facing the sound, and barked frantically.

  The leash’s jerk threw Kyle off balance an instant. Biff tackled him, and the gun went off with a deafening roar. Barker tore free, galloping back toward Andy’s house. Kyle was submerged under Biff’s big body, but I couldn’t tell who was hurt and who wasn’t. I overcame my first urge, which was to curl up whimpering on the ground in a fetal position, and edged closer to the seething tangle on the sidewalk.

  Although he was on top, Biff wasn’t moving. Kyle still had the gun—the headlights of Biff’s truck caught the gleam from its barrel. Kyle flailed, trying to get out from under Biff’s inert body.

  I did the only thing I could think of. I stood on Kyle’s wrist, trapping the gun.

  “Kid—weighs—a ton,” Kyle gasped. His wrist turned under my feet, and I lost my balance, staggering to avoid ending up in the clump. The gun came up, leveled unsteadily at me.

  “Look, Kyle. Give it up.” I sidestepped, and the gun followed me. Kyle was still working at getting out from under Biff. I couldn’t tell if the boy was dead or not, but I noticed a dark rivulet of blood making its way along the sidewalk. “You’re doomed. Someone’s calling the cops right now. Kill me, and you make it worse for yourself.”

  “It can’t be any worse.” For a moment Kyle stopped struggling, then he heaved Biff off—toward me. The boy’s head struck the pavement with a resounding crack.