Murder on the Rocks

by Allyson K. Abbott

  I don’t know how long the blackness lasted but when I next became aware of my surroundings, they confused me. I saw moving light and shapes; I heard musical tones, discordant noises, water splashing, and human grunting. After pushing myself up into a sitting position, I tried to focus and sort out the synesthetic manifestations from the real ones. I tasted blood and felt the very real pain of a split lip. I realized the grunting and splashing sounds were coming from people who were struggling nearby. At first I thought maybe they had fallen into the crater, but as I felt the nearby doorway and oriented myself, I realized the sounds were coming from behind me, from beyond the secret room. Also behind me was a beam of white light on the floor spinning around and around, creating a strobelike effect.

  As the beam washed over the walls I saw I was in a tunnel of some sort and that there were two men locked in a struggle. With the next flash of the spinning light I recognized the men. One was Riley Quinn, the other was Gary Gunderson, and they were wrestling over what looked like a gun. Darkness then light again, just in time to see the gun get knocked loose and skitter off into the shadows to my left. The spinning flashlight was losing its momentum, and then one of the men kicked it and the light went out completely.

  In the ensuing darkness, I heard the two men continue to struggle. I became certain that the explosive noise I’d heard earlier was the sound of that gun being fired because I could smell the sharp tang of gunpowder in the air. It triggered tiny hot spots on my skin, a sensation I remembered from when my father used to take me to the shooting range, and I used the strength of those tiny burns like radar, crawling and groping around on the floor until my hand settled on the cold metal of the gun. I grabbed it and ran my hands over it, familiarizing myself with the piece. Then I aimed it in the general direction of the two men and yelled into the blackness.

  “I have the gun and if you two don’t stop, I will fire it!”

  My voice echoed inside the concrete tunnel and my threat had the desired effect. The sounds of the two men struggling ceased, and all I could hear was heavy breathing from them both. I tuned into the sound of that breathing as best I could to try to determine where the men were. My best guess placed them both in front of me, one on the left side of the tunnel, which I estimated was about six feet wide, and one on the right.

  I heard Gary’s voice coming from the left side. “Mack, are you okay? Did he hit you?”

  The question stymied me. Did who hit me? Then I heard Riley’s voice.

  “Mack, don’t let Gary near you. If he comes close, shoot him.”

  I started to say I would, but then Gary spoke again. “Mack, don’t listen to him. Riley’s the one who had the gun. He’s the one who was going to shoot you. I saw him aiming at you when I shone my flashlight in here. That’s why I leapt at you and knocked you down. If I hadn’t, you might be dead.”

  My mind immediately dismissed such a ridiculous claim. Riley wouldn’t hurt me. Hell, my father had assigned him the job of watching over me. I shifted my aim more to the left so that if I was forced to fire, I’d have a better likelihood of hitting Gary rather than Riley. Just to make sure, I said, “Riley, stay against the wall.”

  “I will, Mack. Thanks.” His voice seemed closer, but I couldn’t tell if it really was, or if the acoustics inside the tunnel just made it sound that way.

  “Mack, don’t listen to Riley,” Gary pleaded. “Please, you have to believe me.”

  “Why should I, Gary? You’ve lied to me right from the start.”

  “Only about the prison thing and I told you why,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d keep me on if you knew I’d done time. And I swear to you, Mack, I didn’t commit the crime.”

  Riley scoffed and said, “Yeah, nobody in prison is ever guilty.”

  This time I was certain Riley was closer. I got to my feet and feeling behind me with one hand, I backed over the threshold into the secret room, hugging the wall and keeping the gun aimed down the middle of the tunnel.

  “Ginny knew I was innocent,” Gary went on, speaking fast and sounding desperate. “That’s because her son knew who had really done the crime. Unfortunately his word wasn’t enough to get me exonerated, but it was enough for Ginny to talk your dad into giving me a break by offering me a job. He thought it best to keep my past a secret so it wouldn’t bias people against me.”

  “If you’re so innocent, why have you been hiding?” I asked him.

  “Because it’s pretty clear the cops think I killed Ginny and I already know that innocent people get convicted. I don’t want to go back to prison again, Mack, especially for something I didn’t do.”

  “Then why are you here now?”

  “Because I don’t want to spend the rest of my life running and hiding, either. That’s no better than being in jail. I came back here tonight to see you and that cop, Duncan, to tell you the truth, and to beg for my job back.”

  “Duncan is a cop?” Riley said. He sounded unnerved by the revelation and I wondered why. Was it simply because he was angry like the others over being duped? Or was it something else?

  “Yes, Duncan is a detective investigating Ginny’s murder,” I said. “He has the cops looking for you, Gary.”

  “Let them find me. I didn’t kill Ginny. I’ve got nothing to hide and I’m not going to run anymore.”

  Something in the tone of his voice rang true and my mind registered it with a thick, solid line of blue. And then I leapt to another, bigger question. “Gary, how did you get in here tonight?”

  “I walked in. The bar door was unlocked. I thought you were still open and might need help with the power being out. I saw the door to the basement was open so I grabbed one of the bar flashlights and came down here.”

  I recalled my argument with Zach and how he’d stormed out of the bar, leaving me behind to clean and pout and contemplate what had happened. And in the midst of my angst, I’d completely forgotten about locking the front door. But if Gary had come in through the bar’s front door, how had Riley gotten to where he was in the tunnel?

  “Don’t listen to him, Mack,” Riley urged. His voice was very close now and it created jagged red lines like lightning bolts that fell in front of me. The sight of them made me back up a few more steps as I hugged the wall of the secret room. “It seems pretty clear he killed both your dad and Ginny, and no doubt he’s behind all these other problems you’ve been having with the missing money, the stolen bottles of booze, that dead rat . . .”

  “But why?” I spent a second trying to summon up a rational motive for Gary to do all those things, but then my mind zeroed in on what Riley had just said.

  “I don’t know, Mack,” Riley said. “I’m guessing he wants to drive you out for some reason.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Gary snapped. “To what end? It’s not like I gain anything if Mack closes down. If anything, I lose the one job someone was willing to entrust to me, a job I like and I’m good at.”

  “Your goal is to cover up the fact that you’ve been stealing from Mack and her father ever since you started your job,” Riley countered.

  “I haven’t stolen a single thing from Mack or her father!”

  “Think about it, Mack,” Riley said. “He probably used the stolen bank deposits and those missing bottles of Grey Goose to feed his drug habit.”

  I froze, both figuratively and literally as an icy sensation raced down my spine and my fingers and toes grew cold. My mind scrambled, going back through all the discussions I’d had during the past week. The missing bottles of liquor were something I’d just discovered when I started my third quarter inventory last week. And the only person I’d told was Duncan. So how did Riley know about it? I was sure I hadn’t mentioned it to him, but had Duncan said something?

  “How did you know about the missing liquor, Riley?”

  He hesitated for a second or two before answering. “You told me.”

  “No, I didn’t. I told you about the watered-down stuff but I didn’t tell anyone about the high shel
f bottles that went missing.”

  “Trust your gut, Mack,” Gary said, and his words were punctuated with a bright flash of lightning that lit up the basement behind me.

  Enough light from that flash flowed into the secret room and the tunnel beyond it for me to catch a brief glimpse of Gary and Riley. Gary was still back in the tunnel about fifteen feet away, but Riley, as I suspected, had closed the gap between us and was just on the other side of the door, maybe four feet away.

  As darkness descended once again, I spent a millisecond realizing that if I had seen the men, they most likely had seen me, too. I debated whether or not I had the guts to pull the trigger and then I heard and felt the rush of someone coming at me. I thought it had to be Riley and I dropped my arms hoping I wouldn’t hit anything vital. But that minor adjustment was all it took to doom me. Riley hit me and shoved my arms sideways so that the gun no longer pointed straight ahead. My finger pulled the trigger and a shot rang out with a loud bang, pinging off the concrete. The sound echoed painfully inside the room and once again my synesthetic manifestations went wild as I wrestled Riley for the weapon. Afraid of firing off another wild shot, I slid my finger away from the trigger. Then I heard a groan that made me fear my efforts were too late.

  “Mack, I’ve been hit,” I heard Gary say off in the distance.

  Another bolt of lightning gave me a flashing view of my surroundings but the only thing I registered was the cold, ugly expression on Riley’s face, a side of him I’d never seen before. And with that glimpse into the darker side of his soul, I knew with agonizing certainty that he was behind everything that had happened.

  In the last flash of light I saw that the two of us had moved in our struggle so that Riley now had his back toward the water-filled hole in the middle of the secret room. Angered and desperate, I wrapped my left leg around Riley’s right, summoned up all my strength, and shoved him backward as hard as I could. My efforts weren’t enough to push him over, but they were enough to make him step back with his left leg to try to balance himself . . . except he found no purchase because he had stepped into the hole. As he started to fall I pulled my hands out of his grasp, bringing the gun with me. I heard splashing and saw several beams of light bouncing around inside the room. At first I thought the light was one of my synesthetic manifestations but then I realized I could see Riley standing in the water-filled hole, sputtering mad, swiping water from his face.

  “Mack? Are you okay?”

  It was Duncan’s voice and seconds later the secret room filled with bouncing beams of real light from a couple of flashlights. I aimed the gun at Riley, though my finger was far from the trigger and my hands were shaking so bad, I doubt I could have hit him.

  “It was him,” I told Duncan, staring at Riley. “He’s the one who’s been behind all the stuff that’s been happening and I’m betting he’s also behind Ginny’s murder.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Riley snarled. “It’s that cretin who’s responsible.” He pointed through the doorway into the tunnel where Gary sat slumped down along the wall, his hands on his gut, blood oozing from between his fingers.

  I turned toward Duncan with a pleading look and saw that Jimmy was with him. “Gary needs help,” I said. “Call an ambulance. And please hurry.”

  As Jimmy got on his cell phone to make the call, Duncan approached me carrying his gun in one hand, a flashlight in the other. The gun was pointed toward the floor but I could tell he was wary and ready to use it in a heartbeat if necessary. Jimmy had followed and he had a flashlight aimed into the room, too. As Jimmy finished his call for help and tucked his cell phone back into his pocket, Duncan handed him his gun and said, “Keep an eye on both of these guys.” Jimmy kept the flashlight and the gun aimed in the general direction of Riley and Gary. Duncan closed the distance to me by skirting the wall and reached out to take the gun from my hand. I released it and let my arms drop to my side. Duncan made sure the chamber was clear and then tucked the gun into the waistband of his pants. When he turned to take his own gun back from Jimmy, I turned as well, to head for Gary.

  Duncan stopped me by grabbing my arm. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Gary is hurt. He needs help.”

  “He’s a wanted criminal, and a suspected murderer,” Duncan said keeping a tight hold on my arm.

  “He didn’t kill anyone,” I said without hesitation. “And he saved my life.” I shrugged Duncan’s hand loose and hurried over to Gary, kneeling down beside him. “Help is on the way,” I told him, rubbing his shoulder. “And I’m sorry I didn’t believe in you.”

  He gave me a wan smile. “I’m not sure I would have believed me either given the circumstances.”

  “I’ll make it up to you,” I promised. “Starting with your job. If you still want it, it will be waiting for you.”

  “That’s a deal.”

  The power came back on and, moments later, people began appearing. Duncan directed Riley to crawl out of the water hole and once he had, a uniformed policeman cuffed him. Riley glared at me, looking angry but defeated. Paramedics arrived and as they hurried toward Gary, I warned them about the water-filled hole in the floor. They managed to skirt it safely by sticking to the wall and at some point someone taped off the area of the hole using crime scene tape and sawhorses from my basement.

  I left the paramedics to their duties with Gary and walked back out to the main part of my basement. I watched as Riley was read his Miranda rights and taken away, and then saw Gary go by on an ambulance stretcher with one arm cuffed to a side rail.

  “I’m telling you, Gary is innocent,” I said to Duncan.

  “I believe you,” he said. “But we have protocols we have to follow so bear with me, okay? Right now getting him medical attention is a priority, but I promise to release him as soon as I can if the evidence bears up.” With that he walked over to the opened edge of my father’s worktable and examined the lever that had released it. “Looks like you might have been right about your Capone theory,” he said. “You found a secret room.”

  “Yes, though clearly someone else found it before I did,” I said, gesturing toward the hole. “I’m guessing it was Riley.” I could hear the voices of police officers echoing back from the tunnel on the other side of the room. A half dozen of them had gone in there soon after they arrived and so far no one had come out. “Why did you come back?” I asked Duncan.

  “I never left. I was out in my car going over the case file. I was reading through the summary of all the trash that was sorted and tagged—very boring stuff, I assure you—and I came across all the waterlogged books that were found.”

  I gave him a puzzled look. “Why would they interest you? You knew Riley had the plumbing problem and had to toss a bunch of books.”

  “Yes, and you attributed one of your synesthetic reactions to that musty smell from the wet paper. You smelled it on Riley, and you smelled it where your Dumpster had been. You said you also smelled it very strongly when you stumbled upon Ginny’s body.”

  I frowned at him, still not seeing the significance.

  Duncan went on. “I realized something was off when I saw where the books were found. Riley’s store is between your bar and the store on the opposite corner. As such, the two alley Dumpsters are equal distance away from his store and the crime scene techs seized both Dumpsters as evidence. When I was reading the list of trash the techs recorded, it said the books were all found in the other Dumpster, not yours.”

  It took me a second to digest that and finally grasp the significance. “Ah, so my smelling that musty odor by the Dumpster and Ginny meant Riley might have been there, but the books weren’t.”

  “Exactly,” Duncan said. “And then I got to thinking about Riley and how his name was on Ginny’s list of clients. So I made some calls and found out she wasn’t the Realtor who sold him the bookstore, meaning his connection to her had to have come about some other way. I remembered you telling me that Riley and your father were close friends, and how y
our father entrusted your care to him in case anything happened to him. That got me to wondering if Riley might have a key to your place. If he did, I figured we had taken care of it when we changed the locks, but I wanted you to know what I’d found out and what I was thinking, to get your thoughts on the idea. I tried to call you but didn’t get an answer.”

  “I left my cell upstairs in the bar. I had an argument with Zach and I was kind of upset when I came down here. Then I saw this puddle of water leaking out from under my dad’s old worktable. One thing led to another and . . .” I shrugged.

  “You didn’t lock the front door,” Duncan chastised, shaking his head. “I can’t believe I didn’t see Gary come in here. But with the storm raging and trying to focus on the evidence lists, I missed him.”

  “It’s a good thing you did or Gary wouldn’t have been able to get in. Riley would have shot me in that tunnel.”

  As if on cue, a uniformed officer walked out of the secret room and approached the two of us. “That tunnel back there goes into the basement of the bookstore next door,” he said. “And there’s a latch on both sides of the wall here to release the worktable, so that Quinn fellow was probably able to come and go whenever he pleased.”

  The thought of Riley Quinn skulking about in my bar at night while I slept upstairs gave me chills. I should have picked up on him sooner.

  I stepped into the secret room and skirted the wall toward the far door. There was a small pile of concrete dust and rubble on the floor across from me and another in the tunnel. Duncan saw me studying the piles and said, “It looks like the bullet that hit Gary hit the walls a couple of times first and ricocheted.”

  I nodded and then frowned as that strange, cloying sensation started spreading across my neck and shoulders. As I stared at one of the piles of dust and rubble, I caught a whiff of a familiar musty odor. Then it hit me. The smell was not—and never had been—real.