by Nora Kane
“You sure?”
“Even if you’re not, you ever heard about the twenty-foot rule? Hell, we ain’t but ten feet apart.”
“That’s a load of bullshit. Cops who like shooting dumbshits like you made it up so they could kill more jackasses. I could drop you if you were two feet away.”
“I doubt it.”
“You want to try me?”
Unfortunately for Margot, he seemed to be seriously considering it.
“You should at least make it fair and back up the whole twenty feet,” a familiar voice said from behind Mr. Oliver.
He turned his head slightly to see Mal standing in his living room.
“How’d you get in here?”
“Some asshole kicked in the back door,” Mal said as he drew a chrome Colt Python .357 from behind his back.
“She wouldn’t let me in so I did what I had to do,” Oliver said, as if they cared why he’d kicked in the back door.
“Do you think you’re twenty feet away from me?” Mal asked him.
Mr. Oliver wasn’t sure how to answer.
“You can walk away or leave in a bag,” Mal told him. “Either way, you’re leaving.”
Again Mr. Oliver looked like he was going to leave, but then he held his ground saying, “Either you idiots know who Harry Lee is?”
“What does that have to do with me shooting you in the face?” Mal asked as he thumbed back the hammer on the Python.
“I’m working for him.”
“He hire you to go beat on your wife?” Margot asked.
“I’m not beating on my wife?”
“She just locked herself in the bathroom for fun?”
“Okay, we’ve had some issues. It happens, but that’s not why I’m here. If that’s what you’re worried about, I’m not going to hit her or anything.”
“Then what are you here for?” Mal asked.
“Harry’s business and if you two know what’s good for you, it will stay Harry’s business.”
“I haven’t heard anything that makes it less likely I’m going to shoot you in the face,” Mal told him. “Are you getting the hell out of here or not?”
“You can’t just shoot me.”
“I can’t?” Mal said. “Even if I do get in trouble, which I won’t, you’re still going to be dead while at worst I’m going to have to answer some questions.”
Mr. Oliver stared at Mal a second and then looked back to Margot. “I’m going.”
“Good,” Margot said as she stepped aside so he could walk out, “don’t come back.”
“Next person Mr. Lee sends probably won’t be as nice,” Mr. Oliver said before he walked off into the night.
After he was gone, Ms. Oliver emerged from the bathroom. She looked rattled and scared, but it appeared Mr. Oliver had been telling the truth when he said he didn’t hit her.
“You should have shot him,” she said to Margot.
“Maybe, but murdering people isn’t really my thing.”
She looked back at Mal. “Why didn’t you shoot him?”
“Murdering people isn’t my thing either.”
She didn’t look like she believed him but didn’t say anything.
“What would Harry Lee want with you?” Mal asked.
“I don’t even know who that is.”
“Mobster, runs contraband through the docks.”
“I’m a clerk at a convenience store that wishes it was nice enough to be a Seven-Eleven, why would some big-time mobster want to talk to me? Even better, why would he send a loser like my husband?”
“All the high-quality thugs were busy?” Mal asked.
“He’s dropping names thinking it would impress you guys. It’s what he does. He’s never met Harry Lee.”
Margot nodded; Ms. Oliver was probably right, but something still felt wrong.
“He asked about the kids,” Margot said.
“Yeah, sometimes he likes to pretend he cares.”
Margot considered pressing her on it, but it didn’t feel right to interrogate her after she’d had to lock herself in her own bathroom to avoid a beating.
Instead, she asked, “Are you going to be okay?”
“Yeah, can you wait a few minutes to make sure he doesn’t come back?”
“Of course.”
“Speaking of my kids, I’m guessing you didn’t find Sean.”
“I didn’t.”
“Did Steve have any ideas?”
“I didn’t find him either. I’ll keep looking though. If it’s been twenty-four hours, you can file a missing persons report.”
“Will that help?”
“It can’t hurt.”
“Do you mind if I go sit down?”
“Of course not.”
After Ms. Oliver left the two of them in the front hallway, Mal said, “Maybe I need to get going. I don’t think she’s very high on males in general right now. You should stay though. Even if he’s not coming back, she looks terrified. Plus the lock on the back door really is broken.”
“I was thinking I’d do just that. Thanks, by the way. I didn’t want to have to shoot him.”
Mal shrugged. “Glad I could help.”
“Do you think it’s possible Harry Lee sent him here?”
“Unlikely, what would Harry Lee want with a couple of punk kids?”
“They might have witnessed a murder. Maybe it was one of his people doing the killing.”
“Not impossible. Sounds like it’d be good for everybody if someone found those kids.”
“I plan to keep looking, even if they don’t know anything.”
“Me too,” Mal said as he went to the door.
“Hey, when you were on the phone, you said you had two things you wanted to tell me. What was the second one?”
“I wanted to tell you...if you wanted to go get some drinks, maybe even something to eat, I’d be buying.”
“You wanted to ask me out?”
“Yeah, though I’m not sure I could have topped an evening of facing down a wife-beating thug.”
“You make it sound like this was a date.”
“Was it?”
“No, but call me tomorrow.”
“I’ll do that.”
Margot re-joined Ms. Oliver in the living room. She was sitting on her couch crying.
“I’ve got nowhere to go,” she said. “He’ll keep coming back.”
Margot remembered what Shaw had told her earlier in the day and asked, “What if I had a safe place you could stay?”
She thought about it a second and then said, “What about the kids?”
“They could go too.”
“But I don’t know where they are. They might come home and I wouldn’t be here.”
“I could wait for them at least for tonight. Tomorrow I could put out a BOLO report and then every cop in town will know to look for them,” Margot said, even though with what happened at the shot house, the BOLO was probably already out.
“I don’t have money...”
“It’s not about money. It’s about being safe. Let me make a call.”
Chapter 4
By the time Shaw got there, Ms. Oliver was starting to have second thoughts. One look at the back door her ex-husband kicked in convinced her a night somewhere else wasn’t such a bad thing. Even though she really didn’t know Margot that well, she decided she trusted her enough to leave her in the house waiting for the kids.
Margot couldn’t decide if she really wanted Mr. Oliver to come creeping back or if she really wanted him to stay away. The part that wanted him to come back wanted to put a bullet in his head. The other part knew that, just because he might have it coming, didn’t mean it was the right thing to do.
It was probably a good thing the Olivers didn’t keep any alcohol worth drinking around the house because when she was wired like this, it was easy to overdo it trying to calm herself down.
She couldn’t fix the lock on the back door, but she found some rope and tied one end on the door handl
e and then opened one of the cabinets and tied the other around the wood piece separating the two cabinets. It wasn’t thick enough to stop someone determined to break in, but no one would be getting in without getting Margot’s attention.
She was trying to think of a way to get her mom into Shaw’s safehouse when exhaustion caught up with her and she dropped off to sleep sitting on Ms. Oliver’s sofa.
She slept a lot heavier than she intended to, but she still was able to wake up when she heard someone messing with the back door followed by voices coming from the backyard. When she opened her eyes, she could see Ms. Oliver’s security light in the back had been tripped and was doing a good job illuminating the small backyard.
Margot was up with her gun in hand in time to make out a kid’s voice saying, “Why won’t our key work?”
An older voice replied, “The key works fine, someone messed up the door.”
“Maybe we should just be getting the hell out of here,” another voice said.
Margot figured two of the three were the Oliver kids. The other one sounded like it could be a teenager, so maybe Steve brought a friend along.
“Hey,” Margot said, “is that Steve and Sean?”
The third voice whispered, but not quiet enough that Margot didn’t hear him say, “They’re at your mom’s house, dude, we need to get out of here.”
“Listen, don’t run. I’m a friend of your mom. Do you remember the lady police officer who came to your house about a month ago? The one with the blonde hair?”
“Yeah,” said one of the older kids—Margot assumed Steven.
“I’m her. Your mom asked for my help finding Sean.”
Another loud whisper, “Is that, like, the hot cop you told me about?”
Margot smiled. Being the ‘hot cop’ didn’t seem like such a bad thing.
“I’m going to open the door and let you guys in, okay?”
“Where’s my mom?” Sean asked.
“Somewhere safe. Your dad came by and there was some trouble. I’ll get you there, but first, come inside. Okay?”
Three voices replied with an ‘okay’ back.
“Okay, give me a second,” Margot told them as she started untying the rope by the sink. “I rigged the door because the lock was broken.”
“Hey, someone’s out here,” Sean said.
Margot finished untying the rope and hurried to the door.
She opened it and saw the three kids, Sean in the front and the older two behind him. She could see Steve had an old shirt wrapped around his arm.
“Are you hurt?” she asked as she pointed at the arm.
“He got shot,” the third kid explained.
Steve nodded. “It grazed me. I think it’s fine, still hurts though.”
“I bet it does. Get inside,” she said as she peered over them.
Sean was inside when a shot rang out. The friend jerked like he’d just been shocked and then pitched forward, falling on his face. Instead of following his brother inside, Steve went to his friend.
“Get down,” Margot ordered as the next volley of shots hit the house.
Steve curled into a ball beside his dead friend as Margot pushed Sean deeper into the house.
Margot wanted to return fire, but she had no idea where the shooter was and firing blindly into a residential neighborhood seemed like a good way to create collateral damage. All she could do was get low as well.
As another volley hit the house, Margot told Sean, “Turn out the lights.”
She got on the floor and leaned out the door enough to draw a bead on the security lights and shot both of them out as a few bullets struck the house about her head.
“Stay low and get in here,” Margot said to Steve as the shots stopped. Without the lights of the house or the porch light, they were having trouble finding a target.
Steve was about to bolt for the house when Sean screamed, “They’re coming in the front.”
Margot left the back door and reached the front hall as someone blew out the lock and kicked the door open.
Margot fired three times and whoever it was stumbled back the way he came. She didn’t know if she hit him or if he decided he was an easy target and retreated on his own. She took cover by the sofa where she had a view of both the front door and the back. She had Sean get behind her.
“Where’s Steve?” Sean asked.
“He’s fine,” Margot told him, even though she had no idea if that was true or not. All she really knew was he wasn’t in the house.
She found her phone and dialed 9-1-1, just like a civilian. Unlike a civilian, she gave a badge number and told the operator “shots fired, officer in distress.”
Soon every cop not at home in bed would be descending on the Oliver residence.
Margot stayed where she was until the cavalry arrived.
Chapter 5
“There’s fresh blood on the stoop, so you definitely hit somebody,” Detective Ames said as he came into the living room, “but if you killed him, he died somewhere else.”
“Hopefully slowly and in pain,” Margot replied. “Is the other kid dead?”
“Yeah, took one right through the heart. Probably died before he hit the ground.”
“Steve?”
“No sign of him. Which might be a good thing. No kid is better than a dead kid.”
“I guess, still doesn’t feel very good. I had them all.”
“Yeah, it goes that way sometimes. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Somebody’s probably going to give you a hard time since they were potential witnesses to a murder instead of just runaways but if you went through official channels, no one would have approved of having anybody sit on the house like you did. If you hadn’t been here, they’d all be dead.”
“Looks like I wasn’t the only one sitting on the house.”
“So, you think this was about what happened at the shot house?”
“You’re the detective, you tell me.”
“I think this is about whatever happened to get someone showing up to shoot Boogie Bullfrog. I suppose Sean could tell us something, but he says he’s only going to talk to the ‘hot cop’. “I’m guessing that’s you.”
“His brother called me that. We didn’t have time for a formal introduction.”
“I’ll admit I was disappointed to find it wasn’t me.”
Margot couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. She stood up to go talk to the kid.
“One more thing before you talk to him. Do I hear you right that Mal Flynn was here earlier?”
“Yeah, he was a big help. I wish I’d asked him to stay.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure about that.”
“Why?”
“I also heard the dad mentioned Harry Lee?”
“He did, but his wife thought he was just blowing smoke.”
“Yeah, except Mal Flynn and Harry Lee aren’t names I like to hear together.”
“Why’s that?”
“Sometimes undercover guys get lost in their legend. There’s a lot of talk Flynn may have gone too far trying to get in Harry’s good graces.”
“A lot of talk?”
“Yeah, rumors. It could be bullshit, but sometimes where there’s smoke there’s fire. It's kind of weird him being here and Harry Lee possibly looking for this kid.”
“The only reason he was here is he called me when I was on the way over. If I didn’t tell him what was going on, he never would have showed up.”
“He called you?”
“He updated me on the shot house shooting and asked me to dinner.”
“Did you say yes?”
“Yeah.”
Ames shrugged. “Be careful. Like I said, it could just be nonsense. He made a lot of arrests and sometimes people get jealous. Going out with the ‘hot cop’ won’t help.”
“Enough ‘hot cop’ talk already. Let’s talk to the kid.”
Sean chose to sit in his bedroom. Even though it was almost two in the morning, an officer got him soda to drink and it s
eemed to calm him down.
Margot sat down next to him.
“Can you tell me what happened? Start at the shot house.”
“The shot house?”
“The house your brothers sometimes hangs out at. Were you there?”
“You mean Boogie Bullfrog’s place?”
“Yes.”
“They killed Boogie.”
“I know. Do you know who they are?”
Sean shook his head. “I was only there because Steve told me they had a new PlayStation and a bunch of games. He said I could come over and play.”
“So you were playing games and someone came over and killed Boogie?”
Sean shook his head. “They were going to kill us, but Boogie ran into the bedroom, and then the shooting started. Darin had a gun and he started shooting at the other guy. He didn’t shoot very well because he ran out of bullets and the other guy was still standing. We ran out the back door, but Steve got shot in the arm.”
“Why were they going to kill you and your brother? All you were doing was playing a game?”
“The storage unit.”
“The storage unit?”
“Yeah, Steve asked them if they were here because of the storage unit and the big guy with the scar said, ‘Yes’. I think that’s where they stole the PlayStation.”
“They came to kill you guys over a PlayStation?”
“It was a new one.”
Ames looked at Margot. “It’s weird and messed up, but it happens. I’ve seen people get dead over less. Hey Sean, any idea where your brother would go?”
Instead of answering, Sean looked at Margot.
Before Margot could ask him anything, Mal walked into the room. Sean looked up at him and immediately looked scared. With his long hair, facial jewelry, and tattoos, he looked a lot more like the people chasing Sean than he did a cop.
“It’s okay,” Margot told Sean, “he’s a police officer.”
Sean calmed down.
“What are you doing here, Flynn?” Ames asked.
“The shot house shooting is my case. Sean and his brother Steve are persons of interest so when I heard the kid’s name over the radio, I headed over. Plus, I was worried about Margot. I knew she was staying here.”
“It’s two in the morning.”
“I keep odd hours.”
