The Verdict on Each Man Dead

by David Whellams

  Guns.

  Jackson rushed to the front door, then halted. “I don’t have a sidearm with me. My vehicle is parked in your drive, Henry.”

  Henry, right behind him, said, “Mine’s right outside, but there’s no weapon in it. There’s a .45 in my bedroom.”

  “My service pistol is in the trunk,” Jackson said. “If we can get to it.”

  “Then that’s the call,” Henry said, and moved closer to the door.

  Jackson raised a finger in caution. “It has to be me. It’s fingerprint activated.”

  Henry looked back at Peter, who shook his head to show that he had no weapon either. Desperation electrified the air. Peter forced the decision, commanding, “Go, Jackson. The explosion was at the back. But your car is in Henry’s driveway, so work on getting in the front. Mohlman and I left the door unlocked, but Joan may have secured it. If it’s Vyne we’re dealing with, his men will have machine pistols, so seek cover every step of the way. Watch for Phil. Henry and I will come in from the desert side.”

  Peter understood that Jackson might jettison caution and speed to his wife. A frontal assault would make him extremely vulnerable unless Phil was there to back him up; Peter counted on the veteran detective making the right tactical decision. In any case, it would be essential to launch a simultaneous, offsetting attack at the rear to relieve the pressure at the front.

  Jackson disappeared out the door.

  Peter was their natural leader, the one among them who knew most about killing. But a counter-assault would be futile without guns. Peter ran through shock tactics they might employ. He considered the pros and cons of hitting the panic button on someone’s car keys but — there was often a note of farce in a gunfight — realized that the keys to the F-150 were back at Henry’s. Mohlman and Jackson were already working their way up the street. Where did that leave a B team consisting of two unarmed cops?

  Tynan seemed to have fallen silent, but when Peter turned he wasn’t in the room. “Tynan?”

  The Mormon Elder returned cradling two shotguns on his forearms and gripping a box of shells in each hand. “What, you didn’t take the tour of the gun room in the basement?”

  Peter stared at the weapons, momentarily confused. Why did I think Tynan was a pacifist? It appeared that neither gun had ever been used, yet both were expensive, top-of-the-line. Peter took the heavy, matte-finish Remington Versa Max and quickly racked the 3.5-inch shells that matched it. When it came to shotguns, Peter was inclined to maximum bang and shock-wave destruction. Henry adopted the lighter 12-gauge Ithaca pump.

  “Henry, you ready to go?”

  No answer was expected, none offered. Henry was out the back door. “Stay here, Thomas,” Peter said.

  “No, Chief Inspector. I know the terrain better than any of you.”

  “You’re unarmed.”

  “It’s a big gun room.”

  Peter’s mobile chirped at the same instant that another shotgun blast resonated from the rear of Henry’s house, and weirdly through the phone line as well.

  Henry leaned back into the doorway. “I’m going ahead.”

  “Joan?”

  She whispered, “Peter, they’re trying to get in the back. The glass is down. There’s blood spattered everywhere around the door.”

  “Get out the front.”

  ‘No. Someone’s trying to break in there too.”

  Peter stayed calm, estimating the best line of retreat for the women.

  “Wanda?”

  “We’re together. We’re okay.”

  “The front door’s not locked.”

  “We locked it.”

  “Go to Henry’s bedroom.”

  Peter worked through the only possible last-stand scenario. The women had maybe five minutes before Phil and Officer Jackson — What’s his name? George? — made it to the front, and another couple of minutes for Henry to reach the patio. “Go to the bedroom! There’s a Colt .45 pistol under the bed. There’s a safety, a small lever on the side of the gun. Switch it to off. Now, when you shoot, keep shooting. Use the whole clip if you need to. It’ll kick and it will be loud. Don’t shoot me, Jackson, Phil, or Henry, Joan. We’re coming. You can be sure we’ll announce ourselves and the shooters won’t. Shoot any triggerman who turns the corner.”

  “Gotta go, Peter.”

  “Is Wanda beside you?”

  “Yes. We’re peachy.”

  Just before Joan killed the connection the next shot came, the noise weirdly reverberating in Peter’s ear.

  Peter learned about the plight of the women from Joan after it was all over. They had strolled up the road in the dark, Wanda’s bright white dress and Joan’s white blouse allowing them to find each other in the near-pitch darkness; a glow from the kitchen in Henry’s ranch house provided a pinprick beacon. They hardly spoke, taking in the perfect summer air. Dodging around the three dusty vehicles in the laneway, they went in by the unlocked entrance.

  Joan proceeded to the kitchen and took a carton of whipping cream and a glass bowl from the fridge. She set up the mixer. Wanda knew all about Theresa Pastern’s illness and death, and there was a note of sadness and respect between the women as they acknowledged that they were working with things Theresa had once valued. Wanda took a chilled bottle of Chardonnay from the fridge rack. Joan later surmised that the noise of the mixer might have masked the intruders’ approach to the patio. She heard something in the background, she later said, or maybe she was alert to omens, for she glanced over to the patio door and spied a gloved hand slowly reaching towards the latch.

  She didn’t know whether Henry had locked the glass door.

  He had.

  The hand withdrew. She hissed at Wanda, “Get down on the floor over here.” Both hunkered down, the bar shielding them from the patio entry. A roaring blast assaulted Joan’s eardrums, and a cracking of glass seams recalled to her the groaning of a ship. She peered around the bar to see what hell was coming after them. The shotgun charge had crinkled the panel but not quite blown it open. The glass had held, but the pane certainly wasn’t shatterproof. She peeked around the bar once more but couldn’t see beyond the starred window. A small hole had opened near the top of the frame. The next shot would bring it all down.

  “Out the front!” Wanda breathed. She still held the wine bottle.

  “Careful,” Joan, in front of her, answered. “They must be there, too.” She scrambled towards the vestibule, trying to remember how thick the oak entry door was. She grasped the phone and fumblingly called Peter’s cell; meanwhile, Wanda ran past her and turned the door lock. The women pivoted from the door to keep a line of sight on the patio, waiting for the crescendo that they knew was coming.

  “Joan?” Peter said.

  Just as Peter finished his instructions, the second blast came, incredibly loud. Joan was mesmerized as red liquid spattered the entire pebbled sheet: a gout of blood and tissue expectorated through the hole at the top of the patio-door panel.

  After a phony-war pause of no more than fifteen silent seconds, the glass crumpled like a discarded garment. Joan clutched the phone set in her hand. Beyond the patio threshold, a man lay motionless, dead, what remained of his head pointing towards her like a spilled amphora. The world beyond his corpse was stygian black.

  Following Peter’s orders — it was reassuring just to hear his calm voice — Joan put the phone on its cradle and the women ran beyond the bar and through the kitchen into Henry’s room. Joan fished under the bed for the clunky pistol and began to search for the safety catch. To her amazement, Wanda gently eased the Colt from her hand, flipped off the safety, checked the chamber, and positioned herself prone in a firing position on the rug, pointing the muzzle at the bedroom door. She righted the wine bottle.

  “George and I do everything together.”

  Phil Mohlman went everywhere armed, a sweltering night at
a barbecue no exception. He bore no grudge against Cammon and, as his harsh-tongued Boston mother would say, his stamping out of the house was only “physical anger.” He had calmed down, but his leg ached constantly; the healing had been slow, and being Irish, he was inclined to letting the pain darken his moods. It was also his nature not to complain to anyone about his pain. He wasn’t a cynic, despite his reputation, and he liked Pastern, Cammon, and young Jackson, so he prepared to return to Tynan’s in a chastened mood. He wouldn’t have admitted that he wore the ankle gun because it added just the right weight to his leg, suppressing his limp.

  From experience he located the gunshot precisely. Like Cammon, he instantly understood that Vyne had come for Henry and Peter, although it would be a paranoid bridge too far to think that Phil himself, or Officer Jackson, was on his hit list. There was an error, he judged: Vyne should have backed off when he saw the parked vehicles, one of them obviously a police-issue sedan. Vyne’s poor judgement told him two things: this monster was committed to revenge, and he had brought enough help to overcome more than two cops. All of this he was certain of from the single shotgun blast.

  Should he approach from the front or the back? He guessed that the women were still inside, retreating from both the front entry and the rear patio doors. They would flee to the kitchen, with the wet bar providing something of a barrier. They would hole up in the bathroom for their last stand. This undoubtedly was a two-pronged attack, and Phil paused to assess the risk to himself on each side of the house. Threading his way past the three cars in the driveway exposed him to ambush, and it was probably safer for Phil to go around the near end to the back and do what he could with his .38.

  But a hunch drove him to the front.

  Maybe Wanda and Joan would have time to reach the entry; in that case, they should be running out the door within seconds, and he would cover their flight. He crouched beside Jackson’s sedan just as the second shotgun explosion rolled through the house. Nothing; the women did not emerge. He heard someone cough on the other side of the drive and risked a peek across the hoods of the cars. A figure holding a MAC-10 was retreating from the door, preparing to fire into the lock. Phil wondered whether the oak slab would hold against the peppering to come.

  Leaning across the hood, Phil Mohlman steadied his two-hand grip and shot the gunman twice.

  This was a reckless move, for there had to be more of Vyne’s men in the shadows. His senses were so heightened that he could almost feel the guns turning his way, probing for him. Let them come; he was ready. He could see nothing beyond the driveway. Coppermount disappeared up the hill, and only a distant blue halogen porch light allowed him to place the house at the top of the slope. He heard footfalls behind him, turned, and almost shot Jackson.

  “The women?” Jackson said.

  “Probably inside. Door locked, I’m pretty sure.”

  MAC-10 bullets pocked the side of Peter Cammon’s truck. A second burst arced over the vehicle roofs. Phil loosed a shot into the dark.

  Jackson stepped back, stood up boldly and opened the trunk of his car. Police officers in Utah were permitted to carry their own sidearms, within limits, but Phil watched Jackson bring out a strange aluminum case from which he slipped a .45 like Phil had never seen. The young officer removed a RoboCop lens and fixed it to the gun. Phil couldn’t believe this thing met standard specs. Jackson must be a happy hunter, he thought, with all that firepower just asking to be used. If I had a gun like that, I’d look for occasions to use it, too.

  They became a team. Jackson lay down on the asphalt and waited, watching around the truck wheels. Phil’s task was to defend the doorway; let Jackson light up the dark spaces with that thing. Phil chanced a look over the hood of Jackson’s sedan and was startled when a skulking form obscured the blue halogen up the hill.

  “Twelve o’clock.”

  Jackson had already found the assailant through his scope attachment. His shot brought the man to the ground, holding his ankle, his other hand still gripping his machine pistol. Jackson stood and calmly fired into the hapless shooter’s heart. His aim was precise, with the night lens homing him in, although Phil also suspected a lot of time logged on to Call of Duty.

  Peter joined Henry in the dunes and led the trek from Tynan’s house, Henry and the Mormon cleric in tow, but when Peter turned, Tynan had disappeared. There was no time to worry about him. The sound of the MAC-10 and Jackson’s two booming shots, as well as Phil’s .38, reached them just at the moment they gained the semicircle of dim light at the patio.

  “Henry, I’m worried about Phil and Jackson. Circle to the front with that shotgun and reinforce whatever firepower they’ve marshalled.”

  “That leaves you alone.”

  “Just go.”

  Henry instantly obeyed.

  Unclear though the scale of the opposition was at the front, Peter was certain that Vyne’s men were well armed. The MAC-10s worried him most. The popular machine pistol was loud and scary, and it didn’t buck like the AK-47. Jackson and Mohlman had only their pistols. Henry’s shotgun could be the equalizer.

  He halted at the fringe of the patio. The glass in the doors had fallen, and now interior and exterior battlegrounds merged. A headless man lay across the opening. Who shot him?

  Peter had yet to use the Remington, but as another dark form crept to the door, he raised it; the gun held only three large shells, yet he knew that just one would obliterate the attacker. Before he could fire, a shotgun load erupted from the darkness and caught the black figure in the neck. He fell across the threshold, his dying body painting the floor with blood, the rest of its fluids soaking the patio stones.

  Peter didn’t dare approach the doorway until he sorted out the gunmen in the dark. He had identified the origin of the lethal flash, but he hesitated to fire back. Was the phantom shotgun shooter somehow on his side? Was it Tynan? There could be a gunman, even two, in the house already. Taking a huge risk, Peter stepped into the light, close enough to see that no blood spoiled the floor farther inside; the battle had stopped short of the bedrooms. The phone, from which his wife had called him, lay on its cradle.

  A pistol shot from the shadows nicked Peter’s left ear, drawing a spray of blood but causing no deeper damage. That qualified as a miss, he thought, but it drove him back from the doorway into the darkness. His ears rang, and blood dripped onto his trigger hand. A second shot from the same .45 produced a mortal groan off to Peter’s right. Who was this victim? Were the attackers shooting each other? This time, Peter noted the precise source of the gunfire. With neither the two women nor Henry in his line of sight, he was free to let loose with the powerful shotgun into the void.

  His Remington boomed.

  No human cry; no ballistic rejoinder.

  Peter had to get inside, but moving into the light would expose him, and so he did the unexpected: he charged into the blackness. He fired again, but only sand and chaparral revealed themselves in the flare. He tripped over a body. Crouching on the ground, still holding the shotgun, he leaned close and saw that the second round from the .45 had churned up the man’s stomach. José Mariana lay face up, eyes closed in his surrender to death.

  Peter wasn’t entirely surprised; he had seen the Escalade driving through the neighbourhood. He figured that the big Mexican had been keeping watch over the house for days, perhaps weeks, hoping to trap the killer of his boss, perhaps even maintaining a vigil from the desert wastes, like Tynan.

  Much later Peter cobbled together the sequence of events. The night of the party, the Mexican had observed Vyne’s six-man team approaching. He knew he had to act and readied himself with his shotgun. But then he had seen the two women in white come into Vyne’s range. Staying calm, he had positioned himself at the back and watched as the point man tried the latch on the patio door — Henry had locked it — and let loose a load. José waited only to verify how the gunman followed up. The second he mo
ved forward, José splattered the man’s innards across the back panel. But Vyne’s second henchman caught José Mariana as he retreated from the living room glow, and just as Peter reached the edge of the patio. A .45 round opened up the big man’s stomach and ribcage, leaving him no chance of shooting back, even reflexively.

  Peter remained by the corpse an extra ten dangerous seconds, his hand on the Mexican’s torn chest. It was all the tribute that men in the killing profession owed one another. He reloaded.

  The next explosion from the .45 in the dark, which zinged above Peter’s head, was the prelude to a coordinated move by Vyne and his gunsel. The latter provided cover while, in the lead, Vyne ran forward in a halfback’s erratic pattern, bent over, one hand tucked in as if gripping a football. His backup moved into the darkness flanking the window. He fired two poorly aimed shots outward, though they came uncomfortably close to Peter’s position.

  Peter ducked, losing his chance to fire at Vyne at the doorway. Peter rolled to one side and let loose three deafening shots with the Remington, imagining the holes he was punching in the back of Henry’s house. He reloaded with his last shells, waited for the pistol’s retort, which again missed, and fired twice at the flash.

  One more dead shooter and one shell left.

  At the front door, Henry and Phil were struggling with the lock. Henry had no key in his pocket, and he fumbled under the body of the man on the steps, the one Jackson had blown away, for the spare that should have been there. Jackson himself had disappeared into the yard next door in risky pursuit of a third gunman. (“I went after this guy who was wearing some kind of ninja shit. He was no match,” Jackson later recorded. His special scope lit up everything — Henry and Phil couldn’t resist playing with it later, before the cruisers arrived and confiscated all the weapons — and the ninja warrior became an easy takedown, so easy that Phil was tempted later to question why Jackson blew his head off.)