Moving Targets

by William J. Reynolds

  “Yeah,” Banner said, turning toward the sheriff. “How come your guys didn’t find her there before, if they checked the place out?”

  He cleared his throat but I spoke. “Don’t take it out on him; she wasn’t there. Vince situated her here, in the garage, in the back seat of Jack’s Mercedes.”

  “Christ,” said the sheriff. “She could’ve froze.”

  I shook my head. “The garage is heated. Odd as it sounds, Vince wouldn’t’ve endangered her. Everything he did, or most of it, at any rate, was motivated by love. A distorted love, true, but love nevertheless.

  “In fact, the reason he spiked my coffee—not that anyone seems too concerned about it—was to make sure I’d be sawing wood when he slipped out to check on Kate. She told me he did that several times a day and a couple of times at night ever since he locked her up over there. Which he did after he knew you’d inspected the place.” I looked at Banner. “By the way, I thought you were double-checking that place for me.”

  She looked at the sheriff, who coughed gently. “We were going to get on that today.”

  “Yesterday would’ve been better for the girl,” Banner upbraided.

  I said nothing. It was true. But I was selfish enough to be glad to have played the hero after all, to have had the chance to charge up on my noble white steed—all right, my banged-up red Chevy—and rescue the fair damsel. Kate had been kept in the upstairs bedroom of the other house. The room was empty except for a flowered mattress and a thermostatically controlled electric heater, placed beyond her reach. She was handcuffed by the ankle to a radiator pipe, and only that foot and the top of her head was visible beneath the heavy unzipped sleeping bag she had wrapped around her—a bag identical to the one I’d borrowed the night before last.

  When I woke her, when she identified me and the significance of my identity flooded into her mind, she cried. I held her. It was almost worth the cracked rib, the torn ear, the new set of bruises and abrasions on top of the old sore muscles, the lost sleep, the dashed expectations and accumulated frustration.

  What am I saying? It was definitely worth it.

  The morning faded into afternoon and the snow beyond the dining room windows continued. We agreed that Vince could’ve easily driven the Blazer over the blockage at the end of the driveway the night he killed his father, run the gun to the Jenningses’ for us to find the next day, and masked his tire tracks with a little spadework. We decided his insistence that Jennings had killed Kate owed as much to his confused mental state as to his desire to stir up still more antipathy toward the fugitive. We disagreed about his plan for reintroducing Kate once she’d “come around”: I said he must have had a scheme, a kidnaping story the born-again Kate would go along with, something to tell the cops. Banner was more of the mind that Vince was crazy and that was that. She speculated that Vince would eventually have had to kill Kate, too—perhaps even “for her own good”—once he realized that she never would see the light.

  Eventually, when she got tired of hearing the same record over and over again, she kicked me loose and went to see about getting Vince transferred to a city facility. I got while the getting was good. The snowstorm hadn’t let up any, and it was uncommonly dark for three in the afternoon.

  The roads were becoming impossible and impassable by the time I arrived at Koosje’s place not quite two and a half hours later. I breathed a sigh of relief as I burst into the lot and glided into what might have been a parking space. Every time I paused to clear freezing snow from my windshield wipers I wondered if I was going to be able to get moving again. Every time I began a turn I wondered where I might end up. Every time I stopped for a light I wondered if the numbskull behind me was going to be able to stop.

  It’s a winter wonderland, all right.

  I locked the car, got my gym bag and a sack of supplies out of the trunk, and slogged through knee-deep drifts to Koosje’s building.

  “I was getting worried,” she said when she shut her door behind me. “When we left the farm, you said you had one errand to run and then you were going to come here and get snowed in with me. I was beginning to think you decided to spend the night in a ditch instead.”

  “A couple of times it looked like it.” I handed her the paper bag. “Provender. I found a liquor store that hadn’t closed yet.” I handed her the canvas bag. “My getting-snowed-in-kit. It pays to be prepared.”

  She took the things away and I peeled off my wet coat, hat, and boots. The apartment was warm; it smelled wonderful. A Streisand record played softly. A fire glowed on the TV.

  Koosje returned with a pair of glasses filled with beer. “This was your errand? You risked your life and a fantastic dinner for beer?”

  “Not just beer, but Grölsch. You should like it; it comes from Holland. Anyhow, that was not the errand of which I spoke. I had to do something about the damage inflicted on my poor old car.” I tasted the beer. It was grand—full, smooth, leaving a slight cereal flavor on the tongue.

  “Couldn’t a new windshield have waited? You’ve been driving blind for three days.” She tried her beer and made a face. “Strong. Speaking of your car: You never explained to me why Vince smashed it up, and how he knew where it was to smash. Did he know you were going to the college?”

  I shook my head and swallowed. “I didn’t know myself until I went. But it wasn’t Vince’s handiwork on the car. About the only crime he didn’t commit.”

  “Then—I don’t get it.”

  “By process of elimination, Robin, and some educated guesswork, we come round to that unflinching public servant, G. Knut, sheriff’s deputy.”

  She smiled and dropped herself next to me on the couch. “You’re kidding.”

  “I told you: I never kid, unless I’m joking, and I’m not. It dawned on me this morning when the sheriff said Knut was in the doghouse. I had guessed that he had neglected to tell Banner about Vince’s supposedly seeing Jennings because he wanted to make the arrest himself. That’s why he pooh-poohed Vince’s claim so adamantly, too. Meanwhile, I have this mental picture of him driving up and down the heartland all night, hoping to run down Jennings and get his picture in the World-Herald.

  “Well, that was about as far as he could go toward keeping OPD out of ‘his’ case. But me … he already was un-fond of me after our first encounter, and I’m sure he didn’t want any competition from a private cop. So he made a forceful and very graphic suggestion that I abandon the case.”

  “He followed you.” Koosje was delighted.

  “He did. He was coming off duty just about the time I came on the scene, he went back to the station, changed, got his own car—a big red Dodge truck—and picked up my trail when I left the Castelars’ sometime later. He must have followed me around all day, looking for an opportunity to do … something. He didn’t have a clear-cut plan in mind; what he did had that spur-of-the-moment feel. He didn’t have a hammer, so he tried to smash the windshield with that phallic symbol he totes around, that aluminum flashlight. The paint was some old stuff he had left over in the back of his truck.” I drank beer.

  “So your errand …”

  “Oh, that. Well, it seemed to me only fair that Knut make good on the damages. So since I was in the neighborhood, and I doubted I’d ever get out that way again, I looked him up in town and stopped by to suggest he make restitution.”

  “And did he?”

  “No. He laughed at me—and was I relieved. ’Cause I’d already slashed all four of his tires, plus the spare, in anticipation of his refusal.”

  “You—are—insane,” Koosje laughed.

  “He’ll be heading for work in”—I studied my wristwatch—“oh, with this snow, maybe only another hour or so. And I figure, with the weather and everything, he should be able to get a service truck out there … oh, middle part of next week, say.”

  “Won’t he be mad?”

  “I hope so; that’s the point.”

  She hid her eyes and shook her head and said, “Oh no” several time
s.

  I emptied my glass and stood.

  “If you need another one,” Koosje said weakly, “take mine.”

  I took her glass. “What I really need is a shower.” I looked down at her and wiggled my eyebrows. “I might need some help in there; I’m pretty banged up, you know.”

  “Sorry, you’re on your own. I’ve got to keep an eye on the stove.”

  “Yeah, sure, a few hours later and everyone forgets you’re a hero.”

  Koosje had one of those massaging shower heads; I stood under it quite a while. It was no substitute for a full night’s sleep, but it was doing a creditable job of unkinking the knots and washing away the effects of the past few days. Vince Castelar would never stand trial, I knew, but that was no longer my concern. Let the cops, the lawyers, the shrinks, and the judges sweat that one. I was more worried about the girls, but Koosje had been hopeful—especially about Amy, now that we knew what had been at the root of her problem. I counted that as a victory; it was a hell of a lot more important in my book than a murder conviction.

  I limped out of the shower, dried myself, wiped fog from Koosje’s large plate-mirror, and looked at myself, distorted, in the watery glass. Not too much the worse for wear, externally, at least, and those scrapes and bruises would heal. Elsewhere, deeper, I could still probe and easily find the pain, that ache of longing, that would take a good deal more time to dissolve. But Koosje would help. A lot. And as for Kim Banner—well, I don’t suppose either of us knew at that point. As we’d said all along, we’d wait and see. It wasn’t as if I’d given Koosje my private-eye fraternity pin or anything.

  “Hell,” I told my reflection. “When did I get so dynamite with women?”

  It had no answer for me, so I shrugged off the question, lathered up with a bar of hand soap, found my razor, and began to shave. I moved slowly, carefully, from the base of my neck up my throat to the edge of my beard, back and up, back and up.

  On my fourth pass my reflection and I exchanged glances. “What the hell,” we said simultaneously; and I went ahead and got rid of the silly, scruffy thing.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  William J. Reynolds, a native of Omaha, has been a magazine editor, an advertising and marketing executive, a college instructor, and a communications director, as well as the author of a number of books, short stories, magazine articles, and poison-pen letters. His début detective novel, The Nebraska Quotient, was nominated for a Shamus Award by the Private Eye Writers of America. His novels have been published in five countries and in three languages. Reynolds and his wife live in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.