But from where I was standing, it looked as if the Hummer’s front bumper was snugged up tight against the back wall of the garage. The only way I could see the front end was to scoot in there and get a quick look. It was a tight fit back there, and since the garage lights were off, that corner was pretty dark—clearly, a job for somebody who was four foot ten, weighed less than a hundred pounds, and had eyes like a cat. I wished briefly for a flashlight, then decided that there was probably just enough light to see what I was looking for. If I made it snappy, I could be in and out in less than a minute.
Or maybe not. I took a step to my right and peered down the Hummer’s length. The dark tinted side and rear windows made it look even more deliberately intimidating, and the damn thing was so wide that it took up more than its share of floor. There wasn’t much more than eighteen inches of clearance between its right flank and the unfinished garage wall. I eyed the space and made a calculation. I’m not exactly skinny, but I’m reasonably limber and athletic, one of the benefits of spending hours every week in the garden, spading, raking, and pushing wheelbarrows. If I sucked it up, turned sideways, and sidled in, I might be able to make my way to the front of the vehicle before I had to breathe again. I looked again. Yes, I could probably do it. But should I?
And there I was, squarely impaled on the horns of a dilemma. My heart was racing fast, I was primed to spring into action, but I was frozen in place. My adventurous self, the part of me that loves taking chances and thrives on risk, wanted to get in there, get out, and have the job done with so she could prance off to Sheila with the results. Easy peasy, I could hear her saying. Piece of cake. No problemo. Go for it, girl, right now, before Burgess shows up and asks you what you think you’re doing on his property.
On the other hand, my cautious, lawyerly self was hanging back, shouting, You’ve gotta be kidding! Haven’t you ever heard of trespass, for Pete’s sake? You want to get disbarred, you freakin’ idiot? Get the hell out of here this minute, before Burgess shows up and calls the cops!
But if Burgess had damaged the right front end when he used the Hummer to ram Kelly, he wasn’t going to call the cops. No, of course not. He was going to come after me with whatever weapon he had handy. A tire tool, a crowbar, a gun.
Yeah, a gun. And the hell of it was, he would be legally justified in damaging or killing me, and at the thought, apprehension twisted in my gut. My plan for this little midday venture, vague as it was, had not included trespass. Strictly speaking of course, I was trespassing on Burgess’ property just by walking up his drive. But I hadn’t seen a No Trespassing sign, and anyway, people—delivery guys, meter readers, tax appraisers—walk up driveways all the time. That could be more or less overlooked, whereas entering Burgess’ garage and poking around among his prized sporting possessions was an entirely different matter. My lawyerly self understood what the media calls the castle doctrine all too clearly and was calling it to my attention, just in case I’d forgotten it. Also cleverly called the Make My Day law, it permits a homeowner to use deadly force to defend his property and gives him a free pass if he kills the intruder, even when the intruder is unarmed. If Burgess wanted to shoot me, he’d get away with murder. Happens frequently in Texas, and when it does, the gun lobby stands up and cheers.
However.
Kelly was already dead, and if this guy had killed her, I didn’t want him to get away with her murder. Ignoring my apprehension and dropping a gag order on my lawyerly self, I darted a quick glance around. There was nobody in sight. I glanced up. Nobody on the deck, either. I stepped quickly to the left and put my hand on the hood of the Porsche. Stone cold. I told myself that Burgess likely had another vehicle—most doctors have at least three, don’t they? He and his car were out somewhere tooling around Pecan Springs, doing the kinds of things that doctors do on weekday mornings. All I needed was a minute to get in, a minute to look, and a minute to get out—three minutes at the most. And then I could tell Sheila that this orange monster was the vehicle that had struck Kelly’s Astro. Or wasn’t, as the case may be.
With this calculation, I could feel my risk-taker self flexing her muscles, breathing deep, taking charge. I put my clipboard and cap on the driveway and stepped into the garage, sucked in my stomach, turned sideways, and began sidling between the Hummer and the wall of the garage.
It was a tighter fit than I had thought, and there wasn’t much wiggle room. I felt something sharp—a protruding nail, probably—grab at the back of my jacket and hold on tight. In an attempt to get loose, I rotated my shoulders, pushing my chest against the Hummer, until I heard the cloth rip and yank free. But I was too out of breath to curse the tear in my favorite jacket. By the time I reached the front end of the orange beast, I had broken out in a cold sweat and was sucking in big gulps of air.
Unfortunately, I had been right in my first assessment of the difficulty. The front bumper was smack up against the back wall of the garage, and the corner was so tight that there was no room to bend over and get a good look. What’s more, the Hummer was such a hulking monster that it blocked any light that might be coming in through the open garage door.
But even in the dimness, I could see that the right orange bumper extension undeniably hung loose. I could wiggle it with my fingers. When I bent over and reached around with my right hand and ran my fingers lightly across the end of the upper part of the bumper, I felt a noticeable crease. And then my fingers caught the sharp edge of a broken fog light, and I was sure. Jessie had said that in addition to paint flecks, Sheila’s crime tech had picked up shards of glass and reported the possibility that a headlight had been broken in the collision. If the glass turned out to be a chemical match for the broken fog light, that would put the Hummer at the scene of the crash. A defense attorney might try to dance around that one when the case came to trial, but jurors like forensic testimony. The prosecutor would no doubt call this a humdinger.
I straightened up, mentally applauding my clever little joke. There was more than enough evidence here to justify a search warrant—and Sheila should tell her guys to look for running shoes while they were at it. The prosecutor would be delighted to get a match to the muddy print on the carpet in my cottage bedroom. Added to the paint flecks and the glass shards, that would pretty much clinch a charge of vehicular manslaughter, which would be upgraded to vehicular homicide if the prosecutor decided he could tie in Kelly’s evidence of hospice fraud. It probably wouldn’t be the first time that Medicare fraud proved to be a motive for murder.
But now that I had seen what I came to see, it was time to get the hell out. It was too tight a squeeze to turn around, so I reversed direction and began to sidle toward the rear of the vehicle, hoping I wouldn’t get snagged on that nail again. But I had managed only three or four crabwise steps when I heard a loud click. I felt a spurt of fear and froze, turning my head, trying to track the direction of the sound. A second later, there was a raucous electronic buzz, and with a clang and a rattle, the garage door began to descend.
The door was coming down! My heart was thudding in my chest and my breath was ragged. My first thought was to make a quick break for it and try to dive down under the descending door. But I was jammed tight between the Hummer and the wall, and there was no possibility of a quick break. That door was coming down fast. In an awful, blood-freezing instant, I realized I was imprisoned here, in a killer’s garage, pinned like a bug behind the killer’s road hog.
And that wasn’t all of it. That door had not decided to come down all of a sudden and all on its own. Somebody had flicked a wall switch or was operating the remote gizmo that raised and lowered it. Which meant that somebody—most likely Burgess—knew that I was here. He had seen me through a window maybe, or I had triggered some sort of silent alarm in the house when I entered the garage. He was figuring that I was there to hot-wire his Hummer and make off with it.
This conclusion was immediately ratified by the sound of a dog barking. A dog
with a deep, gruff, snarly voice, the kind of voice that belongs to a big dog—a Doberman or a German shepherd or a pit bull. Well, of course it would be a big dog. Burgess wouldn’t want go tooling around town in his giant burnt-orange Hummer with a Peke or a mini-poodle riding shotgun. That wouldn’t be cool.
But while Burgess might know I was in his garage, he didn’t know where in his garage I was, exactly. The lights hadn’t come on yet, and with the door coming down, the only light came from the row of windows near the top of the door. The garage was plunged into thick, oily-smelling twilight. I had two choices. I could stay where I was, sandwiched and helpless, an easy target the minute Burgess turned the lights on and he and his dog started looking around for me. Or, in the few seconds of darkness left, I could—
I took three crabwise steps back to my right again, back to the Hummer’s massive front end. I had no plan, not even half a thought. I was acting purely on an instinct to move, to get out of a jam. I jacked up my right leg, wedged the toe of my loafer into the corner of the bumper, and heaved myself up on the Hummer’s orange hood, which flexed and popped a little under my weight. Flattening myself on my belly, I squirmed across the hood and dropped to the concrete floor on the other side of the vehicle, awkwardly and hard.
Damn! As I came down, my right foot hit something on the floor. It was loose and round—a tennis ball, maybe—and my foot skidded out from under me, giving my ankle a quick, sharp twist. The pain shot up my leg to my knee, and I leaned against the vehicle to take the weight of it and bit my lip to keep from crying out.
But there wasn’t time to think about my ankle or let myself feel it, even. The dog was still barking, louder now, and at any moment a door might open and the animal might come rushing out. Bending over, crouching low, I hobbled the few steps to the driver’s-side door, reached up, and pulled the handle, praying that it was unlocked. It came open. I planted a foot on the running board, grabbed the steering wheel, and used it to haul myself up and into the driver’s seat, thankful that the interior dome light hadn’t come on. I didn’t want the noise of a door slam, but I pulled it shut until I felt it latch, then groped for the door lock, found it, and pushed it down. There was a satisfying clunk as all the doors locked. I was still imprisoned in Burgess’ garage, but at least I was locked in his Hummer, where he might not think to look for me. And if he did, he might not see me, because the windows were darkly tinted. What’s more, he probably wouldn’t shoot me through the window. He’d be too concerned about damaging his damn vehicle. Of course, he might have his key fob in his hand, poised to push a button and unlock all the doors. But he might not, in which case I’d be safe while he went to get his keys—for a few minutes, anyway.
I don’t know what I was expecting the inside of a Hummer to look like, but it wasn’t this. It didn’t feel a whole lot roomier than your everyday SUV. The dash was a rather ordinary display of dials and buttons and a GPS screen—obviously, the hulk’s appeal was in its exterior size, rather than its interior appointments.
But I didn’t linger to look. The front two bucket seats had a wide console between them, and I scrambled through, thinking that I’d feel a whole lot safer, and be a whole lot harder to find, on the floor in the rear. I landed on my hands and knees.
I was in luck. Burgess must have been using his Hummer to haul his hang glider or surfboards or maybe just his big dog, because he had stripped out all the rear seats to create a large cargo space. The floor was covered with a wall-to-wall rubber mat and littered with cardboard boxes, plastic crates, tools, and coils of rope. I spotted a lug wrench and picked it up, thinking that, if worst came to worst, I’d have a weapon.
And then, along one side, I saw a heavy dark green canvas tarp, not neatly folded but bunched up. Dragging the lug wrench, I crawled under the tarp, pulling it over me on the theory that if he couldn’t see me, he couldn’t shoot me. The tarp must have been used on some sort of recent marine expedition, because it was damp and it smelled like fish. Very much like fish—and something else. Fresh marijuana, and a lot of it. I had hit the evidence jackpot today. From the smell of it, I was sharing my hidey-hole with a substantial quantity of high-potency weed.
Scrambling into the Hummer, I’d been too juiced with adrenaline to notice my damaged ankle, but the minute I lay still, it began to throb so painfully that it brought tears to my eyes. I was shaking, too, both from the pain and from a half-nauseous what’s-next excitement. And from anger—at myself. I’d gotten into this dangerous fix because I wanted to know whether the Hummer bore evidence of a hit-and-run. But I hadn’t stopped to think, as I should have, that my presence as an intruder might compromise the evidence and make it inadmissible. Instead of scoping out the vehicle myself, all I’d had to do was trot back down to the street and telephone Sheila to report that I had seen an orange Hummer, owned by a man who had a compelling motive to put Kelly Kaufman out of business. She would have recognized the urgency, politely excused herself from her lunch with the mayor, and gotten a search warrant. She would be on her way right now.
And then, as I lay there, mentally kicking myself for being such an idiot, I heard Ruby’s words in my mind. “It’s dangerous,” she had said. “Don’t go in. Don’t go through that door!”
Door. Garage door. I gritted my teeth. Damn it, Ruby had been right! There had been a door, and I had ignored her warning and the admonishments of my lawyerly self and had gone right through it. The door had closed behind me, and now I couldn’t get out. I would be in deep, serious trouble if I were found.
And then, close by, I heard a door slam. The dog barked twice and then growled, loudly, and—through an opening in the tarp—I saw the garage overhead lights come on. I shrank back farther under the tarp. The dog’s barking was louder now, and imperative, a Eureka! bark. He was just outside the Hummer, and I guessed he’d caught my scent. Mine or Winchester’s. I’d found one of my loafers in Winchester’s bed that morning. He doesn’t chew, but he’d given it a good licking, inside and out.
A moment later, someone—it had to be Burgess—tried the driver’s-side door. He found it locked and muttered a short, sharp “Damn it.” Then he raised his voice, and said savagely, “I know you’re in there. I have a gun, and it’s loaded. If you don’t want to get hurt, you’d better unlock the door and get out, right now.” He paused, and his voice took on a jagged edge. “And if you don’t come voluntarily, I’ll get my keys and haul your ass out. Which is it going to be?”
I was silent, trying not to move. But I had noticed that he hadn’t said, You just hang tight while I call 911, which is what any normal person would say to a locked-in intruder. Of course he wouldn’t call the cops. He was thinking of the Hummer’s front-end damage, not to mention the fresh stash of pot hidden in the rear. He wouldn’t risk inviting the police anywhere within sniffing range of this vehicle. And he wouldn’t turn me over to them, either, since I’d be sure to rat on that marijuana.
Which left an alternative I didn’t like to think about, and my grip tightened on the lug wrench. I doubted that he was used to shooting people, so he might be a little slow. And he wouldn’t expect me to come out swinging. Maybe I could take out his kneecap before he tightened his trigger finger.
He waited. Then, when his threat didn’t produce any immediate results, he took a different tack. “Hey,” he said, softening his voice. “Hey, there. We don’t have to make a big freakin’ deal out of this, you know. It’s just a little misunderstanding.” His tone was more gentle, inviting, enticing. “All you have to do is open the door and come out so we can talk. Okay?”
If I didn’t know about Kelly—and about MacDonald and the Medicare fraud and the stiff penalties and decades of prison Burgess faced if he was convicted—I might have been persuaded. But I did know, and I also knew that the minute I stepped out of the Hummer, this man would shoot me dead and claim his right to defend himself and his property under Texas’ castle doctrine. He’d get away with it, too.
There was a moment of silence. And then he chuckled. “Oh, I get it,” he said, sounding even more friendly now. “You’re scared of the gun. Well, sure—that’s understandable. Okay, tell you what. I’ll put it down on the floor.”
Another silence. Yeah, I bet, I thought with a sarcastic chuckle. Sure, he’s put it down.
His voice warmed, and there was a hint of a reassuring chuckle in it. “There. Gun’s gone. Out of reach. So you don’t need to be afraid. Just open the door and—”
And then my cell phone shrieked.
The police siren was earsplitting. The Hummer’s tin-can cavern seemed to amplify the sound, which rose and fell in pulsing waves of absolutely authentic mimicry. Panicked, I groped in my jacket pocket trying to shut it off. And as I pulled it out and saw that it was Ruby calling, I realized that the damn thing might be my best weapon. Letting it shriek, I pulled back the tarp cautiously and peeked through the tinted window.
Burgess lied. He had not put the gun down. He was standing beside the Hummer, his weapon raised in one hand, trying to figure out where the siren was coming from. Inside? Just outside, on the driveway? Down on the street? But it must have seemed to him that it was coming from everywhere. Caught between fight and flight, he was paralyzed. Consternation, confusion, and uncertainty were written all over his face.
And in the next moment, somebody—more than one somebody—was pounding on the garage door, pounding and shouting. Amid the voices, one stood out.
“Police!” Sheila was yelling. “Drop that weapon and open the door! Right now. That’s an order!”
Chapter Seventeen
In a thriller, of course, the suspect would have turned and made a run for it, through the house and out a back door into the dense stand of cedars that clothed Turkey Ridge. There, gun in hand and extra cartridges in his pocket, he would have made a last-ditch stand, killing a couple of cops and maybe even an innocent neighbor or two before he was shot by a hero sniper who had climbed the ridge behind him and taken him out with one improbable long-distance bullet. The killing would have avenged the victims, saved the state the expense of a trial and a lengthy incarceration, and created a razzle-dazzle, shoot-’em-up ending.
Blood Orange: A China Bayles Mystery Page 25
