“I suppose I should let you go, then. I mean, all you did was fire your gun in a movie theater at someone. How many times was it that you fired? Five? Six? That’s a hell of a message you were sending.”
Witten stared silently at Mullins, then broke his gaze. “Yeah, well, he dove down and started coming after me. When I saw he had a gun, I figured it was on.”
“And on it was. And on it was.” Mullins stretched out each word as if each were its own paragraph. He inched a bit closer. “I went through your wallet. Your driver’s license says you live in Newburgh. That’s an awful long way to come to watch a movie.”
“I heard good things about this place.”
Mullins moved within a foot from Witten. “Let’s you and I stop playing games here. You are going away for a very long time, that I can assure you of. However, the ultimate length of your upcoming vacation has a lot to do with whether or not you decide to cooperate with me. I’m tired and, honestly, not in the best of moods. But most of all, I’m angry. Hell, I’m half tempted to get back in my car, drive home, have a shot or two of whiskey and let my friend Derek here do what he wants with you. Far as I can tell, he’s only a few more elbows to your head from finishing you off.” Mullins stood, shot Derek a quick smile. “Yeah, maybe that’s what I ought to do. Hired scum like you aren’t worth the paperwork and the expense demand on the public to send you to prison.”
Witten grumped out a small laugh. But when he felt the intensity of the stare Mullins was giving him, his face grew tight and any remaining laughs were slammed back into his chest. “Listen,” he said, his voice taking on a slight whistling sound. “I swear I was paid to show up and send a message. That’s all. Things got out of hand here.”
“Sounds like you’re ready to talk to me,” Mullins said. “Am I interpreting you correctly?”
Witten nodded his head. Whoever he was and whatever he had agreed to do in the theater was quickly revealing itself to be beyond whatever severity his character possessed. As he nodded his head, heavy tears began to pool and collect in the bottom of his eyes. “I ain’t never been in prison before.”
“You’re not going to like it,” Mullins snapped back. “What was the message you were hired to deliver to Cole?”
“To get out of Ravenswood.”
“Who paid you to deliver that message?”
“It wasn’t that lawyer Cole said before. That Randall guy. It wasn’t him.”
“I did not ask you who didn’t pay you to deliver the message,” Mullins said. “I asked you who did pay you to deliver the message.”
“I don’t know the guy’s name,” Witten said. He was pleading now, his voice having lost all of its edge and defiance. “And I ain’t never done work for this guy before. I don’t know how he found me.”
“So this isn’t the first time you were hired to deliver a message?” Mullins asked.
Witten paused and when he answered, his voice was hardly more than an apologetic whisper. “No. It ain’t my first.”
“So the fact you haven’t been in prison, tells me either you’re still new to the message delivery industry or are damn good at your occupation. Which is it?”
A look of confusion whipped across Witten’s face. He seemed to resolve whatever internal conflict he was battling with, and said, “Maybe I’m just lucky?”
“Your luck just ran dry.”
Derek took a step closer to Witten. “What happened to the guy I was supposed to meet here? John Mather. What happened to him?”
“I don’t know anything about any John Mather,” Witten replied. “All I know is I was paid a grand to drive up here, take a shot or two at you, then get the hell out of the area. If you didn’t see me and start all this shit, I’d be halfway home by now.”
“The man who contacted you, did you ever meet face to face with him?” Mullins asked.
“I only work by phone. Makes things easier for everyone.”
“When were you first contacted?”
“Around two this afternoon.”
“This guy call your cell?”
“Yeah, and then he paid me a little extra to drop my cell in the Hudson. He told me to buy two burner phones and to call him when the job was finished. Gave me an extra five hundred dollars for the inconvenience.”
“You have the number still?” Mullins asked.
“Yeah.” Witten paused a beat. “You gonna ask me to call him now, ain’t you?”
“That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
After spending ten minutes detailing exactly what he wanted Witten to do, what to say and how to say it, Mullins dialed the number on Witten’s burner phone that he had scribbled on a torn-off edge of a napkin in his wallet, put the phone on speaker and waited for the call to connect.
“What took you so long?” the gravel voice sounded through the cheap, tinny speaker on the burner phone.
“Complications,” Witten said. “But the message was delivered. Took longer than you told me it would. Fucking Cole brought heat with him and came after me. Ended up bashing each other up outside the theater. He’s down but he ain’t dead. I checked.”
“Excellent.”
Mullins, Witten and Derek stood quietly, waiting for the voice on the other side of the call to say something else. When nothing sounded but silence for a stretch of ten to fifteen-seconds, Mullins nodded towards Witten.
“So, um, is that all or do you need me to do something else?”
Again, a pregnant pause was all Witten’s question received.
“You still there? Hey, I can do more shit than just sending a message, you know?”
Silence.
“You gotta tell me what you want me to do with Cole now. He ain’t dead, like I said, but he’s gonna wake up in a few minutes and…”
“Why don’t you ask Investigator Mullins?” the gravel voice boomed through the speaker phone, “He is standing right next to you at this very moment. Ask old Frosty what you should do with Cole.”
Witten’s head lurched backwards and his body began dropping straight down to the pavement before Mullins or Derek heard the sharp, high report of the distant shot. Mullins responded immediately, releasing his hold of Witten and bolting in a zig-zag pattern into the woods. Derek, more shocked and less trained than Mullins, took an extra second before things registered. Derek spun, crouched over and bolted towards the back of the strip mall. As he darted away from the now dead Gene Witten, Derek heard a high-pitched buzzing whipping quite close to his ear. A second later, when he was less than ten feet from the back wall of the strip mall, he felt a strong tug on his right jeans pant leg. The tug was so strong that he tumbled forward in an effort to regain his balance and ended up diving around the concrete rear wall of the strip mall. As he bolted back onto his feet, Derek checked for the cause of the tug he felt and noticed a small hole, in and out, in the right leg of his newly purchased Levis.
“Son of a bitch,” he said. “Too damn close.”
He watched Mullins disappear into the woods forty-five feet away from where he was standing. Derek couldn’t be sure, but it looked as if either Mullins had taken on a pronounced hitch in his gait or the hitch only revealed itself when he was running. Though he was charged with adrenaline, Derek counted no more than three shots that had been fired. One made it smoothy out of Witten’s brains. The second nearly took the right side of Derek’s head off. And the third shot tore a hole, small as it may be, through a brand new pair of jeans. If Mullins did indeed have a hitch in his giddy-up, Derek was fairly certain it wasn’t caused by a bullet.
Derek felt too exposed, despite being out of the assumed line of fire. He drew his .38 from the holster tucked against the small of his back and readied himself for the shooter to come skulking around the corner of the building at any second.
“Pistol versus rifle,” he thought, then accepted the fact that if a shootout was to take place, his jeans wouldn’t be the only thing to have holes punched through. He needed to get behind something or, better yet, i
nto something. The woods, and the presumed safety they promised, were thirty-feet from where he stood. He charged at once, angling his path to take him further behind the strip mall, around a six-yard dumpster before diving head first into the woods. He military crawled through the overgrown grass and didn’t stop until he was fifty-feet into the woods.
Derek braced himself behind a thick tree, listened and watched.
At first, all Derek could hear were the sounds of traffic and the slight rumble of bass oozing out of the theater. Then he heard the treble-laden sound of a radio voice squelching something. Derek knew Mullins had contacted the dispatcher at either the nine-one-one call center or at his trooper barracks and someone, preferably a whole lot of someones, would be ripping down the street, lights flashing and sirens screaming, any second now.
Derek recognized the distant wobble of a siren, breathed a heavy sigh and stood, still shielding his body from the assumed position of the shooter. His legs were shaking both from the flood of adrenaline and from having squatted for an extended time. A few seconds after hearing the sirens, Derek heard Mullins calling out to him.
“Cole, you in there?”
“Coming out,” Derek replied, once he realized Mullins was standing, cell phone to ear, over the body of Gene Witten.
The second Mullins saw Derek emerging from the cover of the woods, he waved a hurried hand at Derek. He ended the call he was on, then said to Derek, “You okay?”
“Fine,” Derek said. “I don’t think our friend here has to worry about going to prison any longer.” Derek shoved his pistol back into his concealed holster. “You get hurt? It looked like you were limping.”
“Old gift from an old friend,” Mullins remarked. “Took a .40 caliber to my thigh six years back. Still barks at me when I try to do something quicker than a guy built like me was designed to do.” Mullins paused and using a small, LED flashlight, proceeded to look over Derek from head to toe. “Whoever that was doing the shooting, I think he was aiming more for you. You sure you didn’t get hit?”
Derek showed Mullins the hole a bullet created in his jeans. “This is extent of my injuries.”
“When my associates get here,” Mullins said, satisfied that Derek was unharmed, “tell them exactly what happened in the theater. Tell them you called me instead of dialing nine-one-one because you felt more comfortable doing so. Tell them exactly what happened and don’t try to make up any shit story.”
“You mean to tell them the truth, nothing but the truth?” Derek questioned. “It sounds like I may be taking some heat over this thing.”
“Not at all,” Mullins said. “But I might be.”
The sirens were screaming louder and Derek could see the angry red lights dancing off the windshields of the few cars in the parking lot.
“I should have told you to call nine-one-one right away, and you know I should have,” Mullins continued. “I don’t want you to try to make up some stupid ass story to try to cover for me.”
“How much heat you think you’ll have to deal with?”
“After the scene I just left in Ravenswood and what happened here, not too much. But just tell the damn truth. Got it?” Mullins request was much more like a barking command.
Derek agreed, just as the first of many New York State trooper cruisers screeched to a halt and began to form a perimeter around him and Mullins. As troopers and plain-clothed officers moved towards them, Derek whispered to Mullins, “You gonna share what the crime scene in Ravenswood was all about?”
“If I think it is tied in with the Bo Randall case, yes. But obviously not here or now.”
“I think everything that’s going on in Ravenswood is all tied together. Just need to figure out how.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
He was mixed with both relief and anger. Relief that Witten had been silenced and anger than the Private Investigator hired by Louis Randall had not been silenced. A white-hot anger burned in him, causing yet another one of his migraine headaches to start beating its nauseating rhythm against the vessels in his brain. He fumbled through his desk drawers, trying to recall which drawer he had thrown the most recent prescription his doctor had written into. When he found the amber colored pill bottle, with its seal still unbroken, he cracked it open, shook out two or three large ovular shaped ivory pills and washed them down with a long draw from his bottle of water.
His schedule for the upcoming week was packed as usual. As he rested his head back against the soft brown leather office chair his ex-wife had purchased for his home office five years ago, he began to plan out which meetings and appointments he could cancel for Monday, Tuesday, and, if things were still not resolved, Wednesday. “Hell,” he thought. “If I don’t get this shit cleaned up, I may as well cancel the whole fucking week.”
Cole and his team had arrived in Ravenswood on Thursday evening, started with a meeting with Louis Randall that same evening. He knew what Cole had done since his arrival and went through all of Cole’s steps in his mind, desperate to find a reason for his worry.
“Arrived Thursday evening. Met with Louis Randall at The Chairman’s Club for drinks. Friday morning, went to fire department, spoke with John Mather. Heard about Bo’s mother getting silenced. Coffee with Investigator Mullins. Drinks with Lance Mahoney at that shit-hole Mahoney calls a restaurant. Visits Bo’s mother in the hospital. Drives to cinema. Doesn’t get silenced.”
His mind worked best when following a linear pattern. A timeline of events, one after another. Step by step. He found he often realized something he missed when running his mental gymnastics. Something small and easily overlooked by someone not as invested in the details as he was. But, as best as he could ascertain, and unless Witten had lied and ended up telling Cole shit he was paid not to tell, he couldn’t find a way Cole could be any closer to figuring things out than he was when he first arrived in Ravenswood.
Sensing that Cole and his black bitch of an associate were most probably still chasing their tails, only gave him a brief moment of mental respite. There were still way too many things that could explode in his face. Too many loose ends that needed some attention paid and entirely too many people with their noses where they should never have been.
He spun his chair on its coated and silent ball bearings, opened his eyes slowly and peered out at the view the floor to ceiling window behind his desk afforded him. When he had his house designed and built, he insisted that his home office have a view of the Ravenswood Public Park and Golf Course. He had bought four lots when the developers began accepting bids for land, ensuring no one could build beside his home and, most importantly, no one would be able to build so much as a storage shed that might block the view of the woods, green of the course and six scattered ponds from his office window.
The view had a calming effect on him, always had. When he was a boy, living less than two miles from where he had built his four thousand square-foot house, he and his friends spent more time fishing in one of those six scattered ponds, traipsing through the woods or learning how to hit a seven iron off the well-maintained fairways of the golf course, than they did sitting in front of a TV like most boys their age. He and his friends had found countless numbers of errantly hit golf balls in the woods, sold them back to the golf shop pro, earning enough to pay their green’s fees for most of their summers. They had discovered where the old kids, those in their junior or senior years of high school, held their beer parties, smoked pot and explored the wonderful world of premarital sex. He remembered the time (he must have been no older than seven, eight at the most), when his friend Bobby Grace found the bodies of four deer some asshole hunter had shot for fun, and how he, Bobby and a few other friends would make a point of visiting the dead deer every day during that September to see how quickly the bodies would decompose.
Bobby had insisted the bodies would last well into the next spring while Jacob Connor believed the deer would be nothing but fur and bones within three days. He remembered it was on the sixth day when the smell of
the decaying bodies was especially foul, that he spotted the dingy white scarf off to the right of the smallest deer body. He wandered off towards the scarf, partly to see why someone would have been wearing a white scarf in the woods during September, and partly to put more distance between his nose and the rotting deer carcass.
He was no further away than ten feet when he realized it wasn’t just a dirty, white scarf someone had discarded, but there was a body as well. A young girl, her face blackened and partially eaten away by forest creatures and insects, laying on her back. She was naked, as near as he could tell, and only had a white scarf tied tightly around her throat. He could still vividly picture the matted locks of the dead girl’s blond hair in his mind. Still could remind himself of the way he felt when he walked closer, and saw how her legs and one arm were hastily covered with fallen leaves, twigs and several handfuls of tossed dirt. He remembered he didn’t scream and only called his friends over after he had stood over her for several minutes. He wasn’t expecting her to move, to cry out for help or to do anything a dead girl laying in the woods shouldn’t have done. He just wanted to be alone with her for as long as he could. An errant thought crossed his mind as he stood, peering down at her, that he recognized her, but with her face the way it was, he couldn’t be sure. Something began nagging at him from the far reaches of his mind, that this poor girl, this innocent child lying still and cold in the woods near the seventeenth green, was someone he had seen before.
He pushed the thought back to from wherever it had arisen, not trusting his occasionally sporadic memories. There would be time, he thought, to figure out why she looked so familiar, but the time was not then. That day, he just wanted to be with her and somehow, help her to feel not so utterly alone.
When his friends had finally stumbled over to see what he was so interested in that he was ignoring that Bobby had jabbed a branch right up the deers ass, their reactions were more of terror than the curiosity the discovery raised in his mind. They bolted away, out of the woods, screaming for help. But he stayed behind at her side. She didn’t deserve what had happened to her, of that he was sure, and she didn’t deserve to be left alone another second. He owed that to her.
The Devil's Snare: a Mystery Suspense Thriller (Derek Cole Suspense Thrillers Book 4) Page 18
