Moving Targets

by William J. Reynolds

  Shoving the gun into my coat pocket, I took a hike around the Chevy, decided a dead taillight was nothing to a man who’d been driving around all day without a windshield, and decided to get the hell out of there before a Good Samaritan—or a cop—stopped. I was having enough trouble believing what I had just been through without having to try and sell someone else on it. This sort of stuff happens all the time in books and movies, but not in real life. Not in my real life, anyway.

  But as they say, there’s always a first time.

  I slid behind the wheel, slipped the gun from the zippered pocket of my parka, and returned it to its hidey-hole. I got the Chevy turned around, took the curve around the west side of the campus, and headed north to Hamilton Street, four blocks from Decatur. I drove very carefully and very thoughtfully, my head filled with green T-birds and license plates and fat women and anonymous messages scrawled on car hoods. And the image of a young pretty girl named Kate Castelar. The picture went with the other components the way bowling shoes go with a wedding dress.

  I found a place to park on Decatur and gazed up at my second-floor apartment. Pitch-black. Jen was still out; if she had come home and gone to bed, she’d’ve left on the light over the stove. She always did.

  Have you ever wanted something badly, almost desperately, and yet known with complete certainty that you’ll never have it? That’s how it was with me and Jen. Under the heartsickness I felt because I knew she would soon be gone was the duller but deeper pain of knowing there was no resolution, that our situation could never be any other way as long as we were who we were. And if we were anyone else, would we feel the same about each other?

  It was much too late and I was much too cold to work that one out. I locked up the car and headed up the icy steel-and-concrete stairs to my apartment, dreaming of dreaming, of renewing my acquaintance with my pillow, of knitting up the ravell’d sleave of care, or at least sticking a safety pin in it. But the telephone was making noise as I opened the door. According to my wristwatch it was 1:20. I had been on the go for over twenty hours and I wasn’t sure I had the energy to lie down. Correction: I think I had just enough juice left to smash Mr. Bell’s invention into about nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand bits of plastic and wire. The only thing stopping me was that the phone now belonged to me.

  I watched the thing for a little while, but it didn’t look like it was going to knock it off any time soon. After I had satisfied myself that mental telepathy doesn’t work—not with machines, at any rate—I sighed and shrugged off my parka. One of these days I’ll learn to let ringing phones lie. But not tonight, obviously.

  I lifted it and spoke to Mike Kennerly.

  “Finally,” he breathed harshly over the wire, which is a hell of a greeting at any hour of the day. My internal disk drive started whirring, trying to locate an appropriate rejoinder, but before it could, Kennerly’s voice rushed on excitedly: “I want you to get over here right away. I’m at the Castelars’. Vince spotted Walt Jennings here not an hour ago.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Someone in the past fifteen hours had removed the blockage from the end of the long driveway. I pulled in and followed it as it curved around and ballooned out behind the house.

  Every light in the place was on, and if that’s an exaggeration it’s a small one. I shut off the engine and looked at my wristwatch. Two thirty-seven a.m. That’s the one that comes in the middle of the night.

  I got out of the car just as the back door opened and three figures silhouetted against yellow light from the kitchen stepped onto the enclosed porch. I could hear the old spaniel yap; he thought he was going for a walk. I stood near the car from the sheriff’s department, my hands crammed into the furry pockets of my parka, and waited for the three to cover the twenty feet between the house and the cars parked behind it.

  They stepped into the grayish light of the yard lamp mounted high on a pole near the point where the drive began its southward curve. Kennerly, Vince Castelar, and Knut, the sheriff’s man and my erstwhile dancing partner from nine hundred million years ago, or perhaps it was just this morning. Knut was doing the talking. He was giving sage advice on keeping doors and windows locked, but he quit when he drew close enough to make out my features. He offered me a smirking grin, or perhaps it was a grinning smirk.

  “You just keep turning up like a bad penny, don’t you.” His voice was as flat as the farmland surrounding us. He carried his enormous flashlight, though it was extinguished, and as he spoke he brought the business end of it up in a lazy arc that ended in the palm of his left hand, where he slapped it a few times. A Freudian analyst could have made something of him and his big black lamp.

  “Always invited,” I answered noncomittally. I didn’t feel the need to strain my little gray cells, as Hercule Poirot calls them, to concoct an alienating wisecrack. The guy already didn’t like me. Besides, maybe he thought he was just being clever. “You keep pretty long hours yourself, don’t you?”

  “Night shift. Twelve hours. Eight to eight.”

  “That puts you right in the middle of all the excitement then,” I said, for want of anything better. I moved my eyes toward Vince. “At least, I hear there’s been some excitement.”

  The boy’s blond head bobbed in the semilight, but it was Kennerly who spoke. “Like I told you on the phone, Jennings was here, prowling around the place, not two hours ago.”

  I looked at my watch. Ever notice how you do that whenever someone mentions a time, even if you’ve checked, as I had, only a minute earlier? “Say—twelve-thirty?”

  “Closer to twelve,” the boy said. “I was in my room, studying. Mom and Amy were both asleep.”

  “The doctor gave Emily something to help her sleep,” Kennerly supplied.

  “Well, I thought I heard something at the front of the house,” Vince resumed. “I went and looked in on my mom and my sister, but they were both sound asleep.”

  “And then the dog started acting peculiar,” Kennerly interjected. I looked at him. His eyes were alight and he was having trouble standing still. He was as hopped up on excitement as the kid was. I smiled at him. “You were here too, then?”

  Only a little of the wind left his sails. “The dog?” I said to Vince.

  He nodded. “He’s been acting weird all day, you know, but then he started sort of whining and shifting around kind of, real restless. I asked him if he had to go out and he got all excited. Then I heard the noise again, sort of a thump against the front of the house. I went into Kate’s room and looked down from the window. I could just see someone messing around in the bushes by my dad’s study window.”

  “Jennings?” I said.

  “Maybe,” Knut said, and Vince was quick to jump on it. “Maybe, shit!” His voice rose and thinned with the emotion of it. “What do I have to do to get people to take me seriously?” He turned back to me. “I ran down the stairs, turned on the outside lights, and ran out onto the front steps. He looked up, just for a second, but it was him all right. Jennings. I saw him clearly.”

  “Then what?”

  “What do you mean, ‘then what’? Then he ran off.”

  “Ran? On foot? Which direction?”

  “South.” He pointed.

  “Did you chase him?”

  “I wasn’t exactly dressed for it,” he said sarcastically. “I was in my robe and slippers. And—” He looked at Knut, who was looking at me. “Well, he might have had a gun.”

  “What about the dog? I don’t mean did the dog have a gun, I mean did the dog chase him?”

  Vince shook his head. “I wouldn’t let him. Same reason—I didn’t want him to get shot either.”

  “You made a great target, standing out there on the steps with the light behind you,” Knut said derisively.

  The kid looked down and hunched his shoulders in the thick pea coat he wore. “I told you, I didn’t think of that then.”

  I said to Knut, “It seems funny that he’d run off to the south. You’d think he’d have
his car on the road right out front, which is—what, west?”

  “It seems funny he’d come back here at all,” Knut said with a significant glance toward Vince, who ignored it. “But if he did—”

  “It was him,” Vince insisted.

  “—he probably parked down the road a ways so no one’d hear him coming up to the house. Why he’d come up to the house in the first place—why he wouldn’ta’ stayed hid till the weather broke and he could make a run for it—that’s what I don’t get.”

  “I told you that, too,” Vince said exasperatedly. “He killed my dad, he probably killed my sister, and now he’s going to finish off the rest of us, too.”

  “Now, Vince—” Kennerly began.

  “Then why didn’t he just go ahead and do it last night when you were all asleep and he didn’t have the cops looking for him?” Knut countered, not doing a very good job of keeping the annoyance out of his voice. He snatched off his cap and shook away the snow that had accumulated on it. “Naw, I tell you, kid, someone was here, all right—the tracks in the snow outside the window prove that—but Jennings? I doubt it.”

  “I saw h—”

  “I assume,” I cut in, since Vince and the deputy had been down that road once or twice already, “that there were footprints in the snow in front of the house.”

  “Yes, there were footprints in the snow in front of the house,” Knut said mockingly. “The snow was all tramped down under the window; so what?”

  “I don’t mean under the window. I mean footprints leading to and away from the house, to and from where Jennings—or whoever—left his car.”

  Knut’s head was bobbing like a toy dog’s in a rear window before I was halfway through. “We followed them. We may not be big-city cops out here, but we’re not stupid. They went off through the trees south of the yard, then cut across the corner of the field on the other side, and on to the road. The road’s covered with tracks from cars and trucks and other equipment running up and down all day, so that’s no help.” He shoved the cap back over his close-trimmed hair. “The way I figure it, someone read about Castel— Mr. Castelar’s murder, or heard about it on TV. They thought this’d be a good time to bust in and see what they could get away with.”

  He looked at me with challenge in his eyes. Maybe I’m getting old or maybe I was just tired, but it didn’t seem worth the effort to rise to the bait.

  Knut sneered triumphantly and hoisted himself up on his toes half an inch or so. “Well, if you gentlemen don’t have any more questions—” We gentlemen glanced at one another. None of us was in a big hurry to keep him around. “All right, then. I’m freezing my tail off.” He walked around the front of his car to the driver’s side, stopped, and pointed the end of his flashlight at Vince. “Remember what I said about keeping them doors locked.”

  “They were locked,” Vince said in the singsong of someone who knows he’s not being heeded.

  “Yeah. Well.” He opened the door and threw his cap onto the seat. For the first time he seemed to notice my Chevy parked next to his patrol car. He looked it over then looked at me. “This your car?”

  There were only three cars parked behind the house, and only three of us, including Knut, who didn’t live there. But I let it slide. “Yep,” is all I said. Yes, I must be getting old.

  “State law says the driver must have an unobstructed view of the road. I could ticket you for driving a car that’s in this condition.”

  Well, maybe not that old. “When did you see me driving it?”

  He gave me that squinty Dirty Harry look again, slammed the gigantic flashlight through a leather loop on his overloaded belt, and got into the car, making sure we all heard him slam the door.

  “Why do you do things like that?” Kennerly wondered mildly when the car door had shut.

  “Everybody needs a hobby.” Knut backed out from between my car and Kennerly’s, swung around in a wide curve that nearly brought him into contact with the fat pole the yard light was rigged to, then roared off down the driveway churning snow and gravel. His tires didn’t squeal; tires don’t squeal on unpaved roads, except on television. But I was surprised he didn’t turn on the siren.

  We turned almost simultaneously toward the house. Three minds with but a single thought: thawing out.

  We were in the soft warmth of the kitchen, struggling with boots and coats and the dog, who was glad to see us, before I asked if Banner had been notified. Kennerly threw his coat over a peg and said, “I took care of that before I came out. Rather, I called the station and spoke to the night commander, since Banner was off duty. He didn’t think it was necessary to bother her at home, since Vince had already called the sheriff. The sheriff’s department is to automatically notify OPD if they turn up anything pertinent to the homicide investigation.” His eyes strayed toward Vince, who was patting the dog and talking to it the way you talk to a dog. “But it doesn’t look like they did.”

  Vince looked up, his lips twisted into a sardonic imitation of a smile. “What you mean is they didn’t believe me.” He stood and faced me. “Knut said I was so worked up that I’d’ve said my own mother was Jennings if I didn’t get a good look at her. Do you believe that?”

  “Sure,” I said. “It sounds like his sort of original thinking.”

  “And I did get a good look at him,” he insisted. “Look, come here—”

  I followed him through the kitchen, through the dining room, and into the living room, Kennerly dogging my trail, the dog dogging his. Vince led us to the front door. He yanked it open and the cold muscled into the room; then he bumped open the frosted-up storm door and stepped onto the small concrete stoop.

  “Look!”

  Reluctantly, I stuck my head out and looked where he pointed. The lamp fastened to the house next to the door was illuminated, and in its light I could clearly see the mashed-down snow near the bushes at the window in the southwest corner of the house. And I could see tracks to and from the mess, running diagonally across the yard. It was easy to tell which were coming and which were going: a person’s heel nearly always leaves a scuff just before his foot makes the actual snowprint.

  “Very nice.” I retreated into the house.

  Vince closed the doors and doused the outdoor light. “Do you see? There was plenty of light for me to see him clearly when he looked up.”

  “Vince,” Kennerly said, “we don’t doubt you.” He looked at me. “Do we?”

  I scratched at my beard. The skin under it was dry and itchy. I looked at the dog and said, “Obviously someone was out there. No question. Vince thinks it was Jennings—”

  “I know it was—”

  “—and since he’s the only one who saw him, outside of Fido here, we’ll have to assume it was him. But Knut asked a good question, as much as I hate to admit it: How come?”

  The Castelar boy clenched his fists in impotent rage. “Have I lost my voice, or has everyone else gone deaf? It’s obvious—as I keep saying. He came to finish off the rest of us.”

  “Why?”

  He really did lose his voice, for perhaps as much as half a minute, while he stared at me as if I’d just slid down the chimney like good Saint Nick. “Why?” he finally managed. “Because he hates us.”

  “That’d be a good way of demonstrating it.”

  The kid had a rejoinder but the dog interrupted it. He emitted a low growl, then set off toward the kitchen door in a quick, albeit floppy, trot. A car’s lights stroked the living room drapes and we heard the crunch of frozen gravel on the north side of the house.

  “Someone’s here,” Vince said unnecessarily.

  By the time we got there, the back door was opening and the dog was prancing around, happier than I was to see Vince’s uncle.

  Charlie Castelar ignored the dog, ignored me and Kennerly, and said to Vince, breathlessly, “Are you all right? Is everybody all right? I was out—I got here as soon as I could …”

  “Everybody’s fine. I didn’t mean to upset you. I just left the
message on your machine because … I don’t know, because I thought you should know, I guess.”

  I looked at my watch again; and, again, I don’t know why. “Out kind of late for a school night, aren’t we?”

  He seemed to notice me for the first time, and displeasure dominated his features. “I don’t feel I have to answer to you.” He shucked his topcoat with quick, sharp movements and, seeing that the wall pegs were loaded, draped it over the butcher-block-topped island in the center of the room. Glancing superciliously at me and Kennerly in turn, he said, ponderously, “Obviously I couldn’t convince my sister-in-law to get rid of the two of you. Fine. It’s her money, and her life. But stay out of my life.” He looked at me under lowered eyelids. “I think I was more than cooperative this afternoon. But don’t press me.”

  Then he turned to his nephew. “Now what exactly is going on?”

  So we got to hear it again, from the top, and Vince managed to wrap it up mere seconds before I collapsed under the weight of boredom. Castelar voiced the eternal question—why would Jennings come back here?—and before the kid could launch into his theory again, Kennerly butted in:

  “What about Knut’s thought, that it could be someone, a burglar, thinking he could take advantage of the situation here?”

  I made a face. “Yeah … but I doubt that your common garden-variety burglar would come all the way out here unless he was very sure of some kind of extraordinary haul—you don’t have, like, lots of silver or stamp collections or artwork lying around here, do you?”

  “Dad used to collect pennies, but I don’t think they’re worth anything.”

  “Not enough, probably. And any burglar who was connected enough to unload stuff like that—in other words, a pro, not a kid raising money for his next fix—would also be savvy enough to thoroughly case the place before he started messing around with the carpentry. He’d definitely make a circuit of the house. And when he saw the light in Vince’s room he’d pack up and go home. That’s why they’re properly called burglars and not robbers.”