Second Guessing

by K. J. Emrick

  I’m embarrassed to admit she’s right. That’s exactly what I was thinking. I wasn’t going to tell her that, but… yeah. I didn’t see her as a person. I saw her as one more problem stepping through my life, one that I was hoping never to see again. Maybe she didn’t deserve that.

  Maybe I’ve got a few flaws of my own to work on. What I need to do right now is balance everything she’s told me with what we know already and try to see a solution to…

  Wait a minute.

  “Amelia, what did you just say?”

  “What, that you didn’t see me as a person? That’s not an accusation, Sid, and please don’t misunderstand me I really am here to apologize to you. You’re like the thirtieth person on my list and I just wanted to say I’m sorry…”

  “No, not that part, before that.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  I ran the words back through my mind. Yeah. There it was. “Never mind. I think I know who’s behind this.”

  “You… what are you saying?”

  I know I need to answer her. After all, she’s my client and she’s paying me to find answers like the one I’d just stumbled across. There was a lot of information in that story she just told me. Like what she said about her sister. That made me believe Barbara was a good suspect after all, just like Chris had thought. She resented Amelia. Not just for her fame and her fortune, but because Amelia represented the girls who pushed her daughter to suicide. She maybe even blamed Amelia for that death. There’s lots of reason to believe a woman committed this crime. Barbara could have done this all as revenge.

  But then there was that one other thing Amelia said. That one detail that I think definitely points me at the killer. If I’m right.

  And I think I’m right.

  I grab my cellphone from its charger where I’d put it when I got home, tapping out a quick text message to Chris while Amelia is still asking me what I meant.

  I mostly ignore her and as I put the phone down onto the table, I know there’s going to be a knock on the door.

  Future-sense can be annoying when you’re trying to have a conversation like this and it interrupts you with a knock that hasn’t happened yet.

  Knock-knock.

  “Stay here,” I tell Amelia. “Have another beer, maybe. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  She nods her head and picks up one of the cloth napkins Harry had laid out for us to dab at her eyes. She wouldn’t need her disguise now. I’m sure none of her fans would recognize her standing there, crying at my kitchen table, exposed to the world in a way she’s probably never been before.

  While I’m going over to the door I’m feeling out, trying to see ahead into the future to find out who’s out there. I have to wait until I’m three seconds from opening the door, of course, but that doesn’t stop me from trying.

  I can see myself putting my hand on the door.

  I can see myself opening it up…

  With a loud POP like the sound a balloon makes when it bursts, Harry appears next to me in a haze of smoke. The scent of freshly cut flowers is strong enough to make me gag. He always comes and goes with that smell lingering on the air, but this time it’s overwhelming. It’s almost as if he came flying out of his rug, in a rush to get to me. His face is pinched with anxious concern. Something’s wrong.

  He’s reaching for me, grabbing me by the arm, trying to pull me aside from the door. “Sidney, no. Come away. Come away now!”

  “Harry, what…?”

  Gunshots. I hear them in my mind three seconds before they come through the door, right into my apartment.

  Bang. Bang, bang, bang.

  BANG.

  Chapter Ten

  I knew the killer would have a gun. I knew that from what Amelia had told me. I should have known the killer was going to follow her here. It’s too much to explain right now but it was all right there. I should have been prepared for this.

  Well, in a way… I am.

  Lean to the right.

  The bullet went by my shoulder by an inch and embedded itself into that half-wall behind the oven.

  Roll… pull Harry with you.

  Two shots go right over our heads. One shatters a glass I left out on the sink top.

  Crawl. Crawl on your belly, crawl to the kitchen, crawl… crawl!

  My gift speaks to me, telling me what to do to avoid what’s coming. I can see it all, but gunfights are the definition of chaos, and while I’m watching the path of one bullet there’s another, and another, and I can only see so much.

  We need to get to cover. The kitchen is the closest we’re going to find.

  My handgun is in the bedroom because I put it away in the closet like a good girl when I should have just been a lazy slouch and left it in my purse. I’m going the wrong direction to get it… but the right direction for my shotgun. It’s in the tall cabinet, right there in the kitchen.

  Moving on all fours, I can feel Harry pressed close behind me, using his large body to shield mine. Can a genie survive being shot? He can handle a hot bread pan straight out of the oven without getting blisters, but does that mean he’s invulnerable? I have no idea what the limits to Harry’s magic are. Maybe bullets bounce off him like he’s Superman.

  Or maybe he’s just as mortal as I am. Right now isn’t the time to test that one way or another.

  In the kitchen we find Amelia hiding under the table, curled up into a ball with her arms wrapped around her head. She looks up at me, and then at Harry, and her eyes got so wide I was sure they would pop out of her face like a cartoon character.

  “Who is this?” she asks, her voice way too loud and pitched way up high with fright. “Why is there a guy in your apartment? Who’s shooting at us? What is going on?”

  “Too many questions,” I tell her as another shot pierces the solid oak door and crashes into one of the cabinets. “Answers later, right now you just stay where you are, got me? And be quiet. Don’t make a sound. Can you do that?”

  She nods her head, shaking all over, and closes her eyes up tight.

  Still on my hands and knees I move over to the tall cabinet and open the door on one side. I push the broom out of the way and pull out my Mossberg 500 Tactical. Lightweight, minimal recoil and loaded with 20-gauge rounds. It has a pistol grip on the forearm for maximum stability and rapid cycling after each shot. This is the perfect weapon for home defense. When I bought it and stored it away, I wasn’t really expecting to have to defend my home. It was just here in case something went wrong someday.

  Well, looks like someday is today.

  I like to tell people that this shotgun isn’t exactly legal for me to use. The truth is that Detroit has no problem with its residents owning long guns like this one. They just don’t like you walking the streets with them for obvious reasons. Not like my legally permitted, concealed-carry handgun. The one that’s in my bedroom. The one I can’t get to.

  That’s okay. The shotgun will do just fine.

  More gunshots tear holes through the door and break things in my apartment. One ricochets off the floor and I have no idea where it went. One manages to hit the empty bread pan on the top of the stove with a load ping and send it tumbling across the counter.

  You know that thing they do in movies where they count the gunshots and then they know when the shooter is out? Yeah, well, that only works when you know how many bullets they had to begin with. I don’t have any idea how many rounds the shooter out in the hallway has. For all I know, he’s loaded up like Rambo.

  Time to end this.

  I have to move out in the open, to where I can see the door, to get a clean shot. Harry’s telling me to stop, to keep back, stay behind him, and I wish to God he’d just stop because this is my apartment. Amelia is my client. Harry is one of my best friends. Nobody gets to shoot all that up without me fighting back.

  Besides. One of these bullets could ricochet through my bedroom wall and kill Spot. Nobody hurts my goldfish.

  Rolling over on my back, feet
toward the door, knees up, I aim the shotgun through my legs and rack a shell into the tube. And fire.

  The thunder of it going off inside my apartment makes my eardrums pop. The round is birdshot, filled with eighty-seven lead pellets. It might not have the stopping power that a slug would, or even buckshot, but there’s a reason why I use birdshot. Even when you’re defending yourself in your own home, you’re accountable for every round you fire. Whatever I hit is going to be my fault. I want something that’s going to stop the killer at my doorstep, not something that will keep going through though the walls of my neighbor across the hall.

  Apartment walls are thin, but four layers of sheetrock—two from my apartment wall and two from my neighbor’s—are enough to stop most of the pellets. Any that do manage to go that far won’t have enough velocity left to do more than sting someone’s ass.

  The silence after the gun blast is deafening. For the longest time, nothing moves. I keep the gun aimed. The seconds start to pile up into minutes.

  “Did I get him?” I ask, just speaking out loud to hear my own voice. “Is it over?”

  The gunshot that cracks through my door is my answer. And the next one. And the next.

  Roll left.

  Wait here.

  Crawl…

  The bastard out there was just waiting for me to say something to know where to shoot. I gave myself away. Stupid. Very stupid.

  Harry pulls me back behind the half-wall, over by the table with Amelia. “My lady, we have to leave,” Harry says, pointing out the obvious. “This is not safe.”

  “That door is the only way out.” I rack the shotgun again and the empty shell casing goes flying off to the side. “There’s no fire escape on this side of the building. If we jump out that window, we’ll kill ourselves from the fall. Amelia, call the police. Call 911.”

  I see her out of the corner of my eye but she’s not moving. She’s scared to death. I can’t dial and shoot at the same time and right now, I need to shoot.

  Using the corner of the half-wall as cover I lean out and aim the shotgun at the splintered wood of my door, and shoot.

  The hammer falls with a click. The chamber is empty.

  Oh, crap.

  Then I remember. I went target shooting, and I was going to reload when I got home, but I didn’t have any spare shells and I was going to buy them last week and I didn’t because I was low on money. That means I had one shot left and I just used it.

  I’m out.

  Oh… crap.

  Someone in the apartment building must have heard the shots by now. They must have called the police. There’s a chance we can last until the patrol cars get here. I mean, the average response time of the Detroit Police is ten minutes, but there’s a chance we can hold out. There’s also a chance that the person with the gun in my hallway will get tired of shooting blindly through the door and break their way in to get a closer shot.

  There’s no time to see which it’s going to be. We need to get out of here, right now.

  “Harry,” I whisper to him, but then he’s right there next to me, his arm around my shoulder, still trying to shield me from the shots. “Harry, I need your help. I need to make a wish.”

  He holds his fingers up together, ready to snap. “At your service.”

  I have an idea. It’s just kind of crazy. “There’s a house at 1148 Jacob Street in Hamtramck. A yellow house with boarded up windows,” I add in a rush. I don’t know how much detail he’s going to need to find this house so I’m giving him everything I can remember as fast as I can. “Red mailbox. Metal railing around the stairs. We need to go there. Can you send us there?”

  His expression sours. “I can send you and Amelia there, yes. I can not send myself there. As you know…”

  “Your rug. I know. You can’t go that far from your rug. It’s okay, big guy.” Reaching out, I put my hand on his cheek. The bullets have stopped for now, but I can’t guarantee how long that’s going to last. Seconds, is my guess. “You just send us there, and then you go into your rug. Stay there until that maniac out there is gone. I don’t want to come back and find you with any extra holes in your body.”

  He gives me a wink and just the shadow of a smile. “Only the holes I was born with, I promise.”

  “All right then. Harry, I wish me and Amelia were at 1148 Jacob Street in Hamtramck.”

  Harry snaps his fingers.

  I blink, and when I open my eyes again, I’m not in my apartment. I’m lying on the hardwood floor of an empty room, staring up at a bare light fixture. A window with a crooked set of blinds is letting in plenty of light to see the bare floor and the peeling wallpaper, and Amelia lying right beside me, still curled up into the fetal position.

  Harry just granted my second wish in this case. We weren’t in Detroit anymore. We were in Hamtramck.

  Well, technically we’re still in the middle of Detroit. Sort of. Hamtramck is one of two cities that are completely within the city limits, surrounded by Detroit on all sides. As far as I know this is the only place in the whole United States where you get this sort of city-within-a-city. So we’re within spitting distance of Detroit, but we’re not in Detroit.

  Which means I’m not in the jurisdiction of Lieutenant Baker. That’s not why I picked this safehouse for Harry to send us to, but it’s definitely one of the perks.

  Here’s another tip for my future best-selling book about how to be a good private investigator. Having an office of your own is a must, but so is having someplace to go when you don’t want anyone to find you. If you don’t want anyone to see you coming and going, then you come and go from someplace where no one will think to look for you. It also helps to have a place to hide your client for a while when someone’s trying to kill them. In this business, we call those places safehouses. This is one of mine.

  “Thanks, Harry,” I whisper, making a mental note to bring him two peanut butter milkshakes the next time I go to the Shake Shack. He really pulled my bacon out of the fire this time.

  I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t I just have Harry poof the shooter away from my door and drop them in a jail cell? Well, the problem there is that sure, I could have had my genie friend lock up the killer, but I’d still have to prove they killed Donnie Sterling. Without proof, they’d just walk free. All I’d be left with is a wasted wish.

  The only way I’m going to solve this case is by doing my job. Can’t rely on magic for everything.

  Getting up on my feet I dust off the knees of my jeans. Then I go over to Amelia and hold my hand out to her. “It’s okay. We’re safe now. Let’s go downstairs where we can talk. There’s still furniture down there.”

  She slowly untucks her head from her arms. She looks around the room. She looks up at me. “Where are we?”

  Still holding my hand out I tell her, “Hamtramck.” It’s pronounced Ham-tram-ick, although nobody knows where that extra ‘i’ comes from.

  She blinks at me again. “This isn’t your apartment.”

  “Nope.”

  “How’d we get here?”

  Yeah, that’s a story and a half. “If I said magic, would you believe me?”

  “Magic? What are you talking about?”

  Okay. I suppose that particular cat is out of the bag. There’s no way I can lie my way out of this one because I just had Harry use magic right in front of Amelia. One second there, the next second here. Hard to explain that one away with anything but the truth.

  Clearing my throat, I fold my legs under me and sit down next to her again on the bare floor. “That guy you saw in my apartment is a genie. He’s a great guy, and a friend of mine, and sometimes he grants wishes for me. That’s how we got here. I wished for us to get sent here to get us both away from the killer. You know. The one shooting up my apartment.”

  After several seconds pass, she finally pushes herself up to sit with her knees pulled up to her chest. Her expression is blank as she faces me. “You’re serious, aren’t you? You’re honestly saying a genie wi
shed us here.”

  “Well, no. I wished us here. He granted the wish though, so I guess… technically, yeah?”

  “You’re nuts.”

  “Okay, look.” I spread my hands around the room. “We’re here, aren’t we? We were in my apartment a minute ago, and now we’re here. There’s no way to explain it except magic. I have a friend, and my friend is a genie. He grants me wishes.”

  That’s a serious oversimplification. It leaves out everything else about Harry. Kind of like how Amelia was saying people only see her as a movie star, and not as a real person. Harry’s much, much more than just a genie. More than I could put into words, actually.

  “Your friend,” she asks me, “is a genie?”

  “Yup.”

  “And you made a wish.”

  “Yup.”

  “Just… poof and we’re here?”

  “Yup. Well, something like that.”

  “This isn’t some sort of prank you’re playing on me? Because of how I treated you back in school? Because if it was then I would totally understand.”

  And we’re back to this again. “Amelia, listen to me, and please hear me. I appreciate what you’re doing, going around and making things right with people from our past but you have to believe me. I don’t remember any particular bad feelings between us back then. I’ve watched you become this big movie star over the years but only because it was mildly satisfying to see someone from the old days make good. You really made a name for yourself. I’m happy for your success, really. I mean, I didn’t like you much back then but it isn’t like we were mortal enemies. There is absolutely nothing that you did to me that you have to apologize for. Okay?”