Three Shot Burst

by Phillip DePoy

  He sighed. ‘All my old friends are dead.’

  ‘You said,’ I answered him. ‘So I’m giving you a second – or is it third – chance to do the right thing. Help us out. Let the kid and John Horse go, and let’s talk to the DEA. It’s your best play.’

  He lowered his gun. ‘Yeah. I guess.’

  He inclined his head, and Lena and John Horse came into the light. John Horse was grinning like the village idiot. Lena just looked mad.

  I headed their way.

  ‘This is all going to work out,’ I said, partly to myself. ‘We’re going to contact the DEA, they’re going to tell us where Ellen Greenberg is, you get a new life; everybody lives happily ever after.’

  That exact second a shot rang out. Fidestra went down. I ducked, trying to figure where the shooter was. Lena dove toward Fidestra, got his gun, rolled and came up behind one of the machines. John Horse didn’t move or stop smiling.

  ‘Foggy?’ a voice called out.

  ‘Baxter?’ I answered. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘Doing?’ he snapped. ‘I’m saving your ass. I shot the man with the gun.’

  ‘No, damn it.’ I rushed to Fidestra.

  He was lying on the floor with his eyes open, staring up at the high ceiling.

  ‘Pigeons,’ he said.

  An ambulance came. Other policemen came. And then Ironstone Waters came, along with Crew Cut.

  Fidestra probably wasn’t going to live. Baxter had shot him in the heart.

  Baxter sidled up to me after a while.

  ‘Two of my guys ate those donuts you were afraid of, by the way,’ he said. ‘They’re fine. What was that all about, with Cass?’

  He looked at me like I was two kinds of stupid. Then he shook his head and walked away.

  Of course Cass hadn’t given Baxter anything wrong. Because they were on the same side. I felt a little stupid for telling him about the poison thing in the first place. So I wasn’t about to say anything more to Baxter.

  Something was way off. It wasn’t a coincidence that he shot Fidestra right when we were on the verge of a deal to make things better. And he’d called Ironstone. And Cass hadn’t dosed his donuts.

  Unfortunately, that only made my paranoia itch in a different place. It was a little insane of me to think that Cass had tried to poison me. It was more likely that the butter she’d smeared on the English muffin was bad or some other God-awful germ was loose in the kitchen. Even if Cass was in league with David Waters, it was very hard to see her as a drug baroness and a small-town Borgia.

  In the middle of such reverie, John Horse was suddenly beside me.

  ‘Are we about finished here?’ he asked.

  I turned to look at him. ‘I’m confused.’

  He nodded. ‘I understand. Let’s go.’

  ‘Go where?’ I asked him.

  He leaned close to me and whispered, ‘Don’t you think it’s time for Lena to see her sister?’

  My head snapped back. ‘What?’

  He shrugged. ‘I thought we might go over to Mister Redhawk’s digs, pay him a visit.’

  That was all. But it was enough.

  ‘Hey, Baxter?’ I called out. ‘The kid’s had a rough day. Can I take her home now?’

  He was standing close to the place where Fidestra went down, talking with Ironstone, and looked my way. Ironstone said something and then Baxter answered me.

  ‘Sure. Just back to your place, though, right? No more trips. And come by my office after you drop her off. I got paperwork, you know.’

  ‘I might get her something to eat first,’ I said.

  Lena heard. She had been standing alone, absenting herself from the hubbub. She wandered over.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked. ‘I’m not really hungry.’

  ‘John Horse thinks we ought to pay another visit to Mister Redhawk.’ I looked her right in the eyes. ‘It’s about Ellen.’

  She stared. She started to speak, but then she read my mind and stayed quiet instead.

  We were in my car two minutes later, headed toward the fancy townhouse where Redhawk made his urban nest. It was the same seating arrangement as when we’d gone to see Ironstone, Lena in the other seat and John Horse contorted like a pretzel behind us.

  ‘It’s been a strange day,’ he said, laughing.

  ‘Tell the truth,’ I concurred, ‘I’ve felt strange since I came out of my coma.’

  ‘Some people have hallucinations after they wake up from a long sleep like that,’ John Horse said softly.

  ‘What?’ Lena asked, turning his way.

  ‘Hallucinations,’ he repeated. ‘It’s possible that Foggy has seen some things that weren’t really there.’

  ‘Because of the coma?’ she asked.

  ‘Because of the world,’ I lamented. ‘Maybe I’m a little off my game, but you have to admit that this entire situation has been discombobulating.’

  ‘Discombobulating?’ She stared at the side of my face as I drove. ‘This is the word you want to use?’

  ‘It’s a perfectly good word,’ I insisted.

  John Horse laughed.

  Moments later the three of us were in the elevator going up to Mister Redhawk’s palatial penthouse.

  ‘Are you going to tell me what this is about?’ Lena whispered.

  ‘I don’t know what this is about,’ I answered her. ‘It was John Horse’s idea.’

  She turned to him. ‘I would like for you to know that I don’t think of you as a real person, exactly. I think of you more the way I thought about the characters I worked with at Disney’s place – the fictional characters.’

  He smiled. ‘That’s a great compliment.’

  The elevator doors opened.

  Mister Redhawk was standing right there. He’d known we were coming.

  ‘John Horse,’ he said.

  ‘Is everything ready?’ John Horse asked.

  Redhawk nodded.

  ‘Let’s go, then,’ John Horse said.

  We all headed for his living room. There were three other Seminole men seated on the sofa. I figured them for tribal elders. One was in the typical blue jean jacket and flannel shirt; the other two were in business suits – expensive business suits.

  John Horse sat down on the hearth, very close to the fire blazing in it.

  Lena and I hung back. I wasn’t certain what to do, and she was following my lead.

  ‘It’s time,’ John Horse said.

  All the Seminoles nodded.

  John Horse looked at me.

  ‘Ironstone Waters has been a problem for a long time,’ he began. ‘Come on in and sit down and let’s talk about him.’

  I took one of the overstuffed armchairs, Lena took the other one. Redhawk remained standing.

  ‘Ironstone was always a wayward person,’ John Horse went on. ‘He built up his businesses without regard for the council and he took advantage of some of our young men. He indulged his broken child, David, and that became a problem too.’

  ‘We let it go on too long,’ Redhawk said plainly.

  John Horse smiled. ‘And then Lena came. I don’t say that it was right for her to kill David, but killing him woke us up.’

  ‘All right, first,’ I interrupted, ‘Lena didn’t kill anybody. Lena’s gun killed him. It’s a special kind of weapon—’

  ‘Relax, Foggy,’ John Horse said, smiling. ‘What I’m saying is that we’re grateful to her for making our path clear. It’s now inevitable that we will deal with Ironstone. Something we should have done years ago.’

  ‘And I suppose you know that Ironstone has policemen on his payroll,’ I said.

  ‘Baxter,’ Redhawk answered. ‘And Porter, the other detective. He’s in Miami right now. He’s paying a visit to an insurance company there.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be the Escalante Insurance Agency, would it?’ I asked, but I already knew the answer.

  ‘I’m taking care of it,’ Redhawk said.

  I had no idea what that meant, but his
voice was weirdly reassuring.

  ‘Look,’ Lena exploded, ‘I’ve had a very difficult couple of days, including being kidnapped and witnessing a murder! I was promised that someone had news about my sister. So start talking!’

  From the dark recesses of a room somewhere else in the house came a woman’s voice.

  ‘Quiet out there,’ she said sweetly. ‘I’m trying to put Ester to sleep.’

  Lena shot out of her chair and screamed, ‘Ellen?’

  And suddenly there she was, the girl from the photo and not the girl from the photo: Ellen Greenberg, red hair, still carrying baby weight, but clearly kin to Lena.

  Lena flew across the room and landed so hard in Ellen’s arms that they both almost fell down. They were both crying and talking and laughing all at the same time, completely incoherent.

  I was up too, staring at Redhawk. ‘You had her here all this time?’

  He was offended. ‘No. I just found her.’

  ‘Where?’ I demanded.

  ‘You were on the right path,’ he answered me. ‘We would never have found her if it hadn’t been for you and the girl. Ellen was in Lake Wales.’

  ‘You found her in Lake Wales?’ I shook my head. ‘I’m not sure that I believe that.’

  ‘She disappeared from Fry’s Bay about six months ago,’ he said, as if it were an answer to my disbelief. ‘She stayed at the Three Tee Pees for a while, then she moved to the Saddlebag Lake Resort. That’s where we found her.’

  ‘What resort, now?’

  ‘It’s new – two brothers bought up a bunch of land a couple of years ago so they could go fishing at the lake. Sold campsites. Ellen was hiding out there.’

  I started to say about ten things, then turned to Ellen and Lena.

  ‘So, Ellen,’ I began, somewhat foolishly, ‘you look different from your picture.’

  ‘You dyed your hair,’ Lena said softly.

  ‘I also have some of the heft that Ester gave me,’ Ellen said. ‘Pregnancy makes you large, apparently. And I’d already put on a couple of dozen pounds since I left home.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I need your story, Ellen Greenberg. We can talk about weight gain later. How about if you tell me and your sister where the hell you’ve been.’

  ‘And what the hell’s going on,’ Lena added.

  ‘Right,’ Ellen said. ‘Right. Let’s sit down. It’s really quite a story. May take some time.’

  ‘No,’ I complained, ‘I’m not patient enough for your version of War and Peace, and I don’t want the abbreviated story that Mister Redhawk is trying to hand out. So let me tell you what happened, what I’ve figured out, and you can correct me if I go wrong.’

  Lena stood back from her sister. ‘I’m with Foggy. We’ve been through a lot, and I really need to get to a few punch lines.’

  So I started.

  ‘You blew into Fry’s Bay about a year ago,’ I began, directly to Ellen. ‘You ran afoul of David Waters. He gave you a shot, gave you a boink, and, in the end, gave you a baby. Right so far?’

  Ellen looked at Lena. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Foggy Moscowitz,’ Lena said. ‘The Jewish Lone Ranger. From Brooklyn. Let him have his say, and I’ll bet you he’s ninety-eight percent right.’

  ‘Well,’ Ellen said, ‘he’s right so far.’

  ‘I’m with Child Protective Services,’ I assured Ellen. ‘I’ve been watching out for your wayward sister.’

  ‘Oh,’ Ellen said. ‘Well, somebody certainly needs to do that, apparently.’

  ‘Not really,’ Lena objected.

  ‘To continue,’ I interjected, ‘You were in a daze for a while, part drug-induced, part devil-may-care attitude as described by Mister Redhawk. The hippie world is over, by the way. But I digress. Since you’re Lena’s sister, my guess is you have brains, so one morning you realized what was going on. You were in a world that was very wrong, you were pregnant, and things were about to get worse. I’m also guessing this is around the time that David began throwing his imaginary weight around and thinking he could take over the drug world from the Columbians.’

  Ellen nodded her head. ‘I have no idea how you know all this, but you’re right. I took a break from David for a week or so, found out I was knocked up, kind of sobered up, and ultimately realized what had happened to me. David Waters got me into a drug thing that I couldn’t get out of. And I was pregnant. I was scared. Then I got mad.’

  ‘Then you went to the cops,’ I surmised, ‘but you’re smart enough to realize, after you talked to them, that they weren’t really going to help you.’

  ‘Wrong.’ She smiled. ‘I went to the hospital. And because there’s a special providence that watches over idiots, I was lucky enough to meet Maggie Redhawk. She got me straight.’

  ‘Wait.’ I turned to Redhawk. ‘You said you didn’t trust any governmental agency, but Maggie is a different story. Wait.’

  I rubbed my forehead.

  ‘What is it, Foggy?’ Lena asked.

  ‘Go on,’ Ellen said, ‘you’re putting all of this together pretty well.’

  ‘I’ve had all the pieces,’ I said a little vaguely. ‘I just now started putting them together a little. Maggie was mad about what David did to you.’

  ‘I was mad about what David did to me,’ Ellen said.

  ‘You both decided to get even,’ I went on. ‘Maggie got in touch with the DEA. She put them onto you.’

  Ellen looked at Lena again. ‘He’s really good at this.’

  ‘He hasn’t even started yet,’ Lena assured her sister.

  ‘They recruited you,’ I said. ‘The DEA convinced you to keep on with David, get all the information that you could. You became a DEA agent.’

  ‘And it was working,’ she said, ‘until David got even more crazed and decided he could take over the world. We got a visit from a really bad Cuban named Fidestra.’

  ‘We’ve met him,’ Lena interrupted.

  ‘David got his back up,’ Ellen continued. ‘I got scared because Fidestra – I don’t know, I just had the intuition that he knew about the DEA.’

  ‘So you took off,’ I guessed. ‘Went to the Three Tee Pees camp, then later to this Saddlebag place. How Redhawk found you there is still a mystery.’

  ‘I told you,’ Redhawk interjected. ‘I followed your lead. But, as it happens, there’s a Seminole busboy at the Cherry Pocket restaurant.’

  That explained it. ‘Ellen got next to him. Maybe even got him to mail her so-called love letters to David.’

  ‘The Feds were already intercepting all of David’s mail,’ Ellen said. ‘I knew they’d see the letters. I sent them as, like, a message in a bottle. I thought they’d come and get me. Only it turned out they were too stupid to figure out where I was.’

  ‘But not me and Foggy,’ Lena pipped up.

  Ellen smiled just like a big sister. ‘Yeah. You and Foggy.’

  ‘And you’ve been hiding out all this time with a baby,’ Lena said softly.

  ‘I was really scared.’ Ellen looked into the fire that was popping in the stone hearth. ‘I think David would have killed me. But now that it’s all coming down, I’ll get him. He’ll be sorry he ever messed with me, that son of a bitch.’

  She didn’t know. I looked at Lena. She nodded.

  ‘Well,’ Lena began slowly, ‘that’s kind of taken care of.’

  Ellen looked back and forth between Lena and me. ‘What do you mean?’

  Lena steeled herself and said, ‘I killed David. He’s dead.’

  ‘Just to be clear,’ I interrupted, ‘let me reiterate as I have several times before: the gun killed David. He could probably have survived one bullet. But the gun Lena had fires three at once. That’s a lot tougher to come back from: three bullets in the chest.’

  Ellen turned to Lena, wide-eyed. ‘You had Mom’s Heckler and Koch VP70?’

  Lena nodded sheepishly.

  ‘This is a family that knows its ordinance,’ I whispered to John Horse, aside-style.

 
; ‘David’s dead?’ Ellen went on, talking over me.

  Lena nodded again.

  ‘But,’ Ellen began, and then her shoulders sagged. A great moaning sigh came out of her like some demon, long possessing her, had finally been forced out of her body.

  ‘David’s dead.’

  Ellen began to cry. Lena, confused by all the emotion spilling around the room, joined her. The two sisters held onto each other.

  ‘Ester’s safe,’ Ellen sobbed.

  ‘We all are,’ Lena assured her.

  I let a little silence clarify the air before I spoke again.

  ‘Ester’s more than safe,’ I said. ‘She’s also rich.’

  Lena sniffed. ‘Oh. Yeah. The insurance policy.’

  ‘Which is a great puzzle now,’ I said to no one in particular. ‘David didn’t give a damn about his baby or the baby’s mother. Am I wrong?’

  From the darker part of the sofa came the voice of John Horse, crisp and slow.

  ‘Well, that’s probably something I can explain,’ he intoned. ‘That insurance policy was taken out by a person pretending to be David’s lawyer. She had all the necessary papers, this lawyer, and, at my instruction, took out the policy without David’s knowledge.’

  I was at a loss. ‘What? And why?’

  ‘First let me tell you the lawyer’s name,’ he said, grinning his most irritating grin. ‘It’s Hachi Tiger, a woman of the Snake clan.’

  ‘Hachi?’ I shook my head. ‘She pretended to be a lawyer?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ he said at once. ‘She’s really a lawyer. Went to Duke. Works for her aunt, Betty Mae Jumper. Who was born Betty Mae Tiger.’

  ‘Hachi is a lawyer and she’s related to the only woman who’s ever been on the Seminole council.’ I blinked. ‘And she – what exactly happened here?’

  ‘When I found out about Ellen’s baby, it was important to me that we take care of the child. I set the insurance plan in motion. I was going to take Ellen to a safe hiding place, but she disappeared. And then a little later, of course, David was killed. This has been a very confusing time.’

  ‘So the insurance policy’s not legal,’ I objected.

  ‘Oh, no, it’s quite binding,’ John Horse told me. ‘Set up through the council. Very legal. Using David’s ill-gotten money, of course.’