by Peter Telep
Johnny wrenched the shotgun out of his brother’s hand. “You’re done. We’ll see if they got your bird, then we’re going home.”
Daniel averted his gaze. “Look, I’m sorry I swung around. I shouldn’t have, but I knew I could get him.”
“I thought you didn’t want to hunt.”
“Changed my mind. Come on, I didn’t mean to ruin this for you.”
Johnny pursed his lips, thought it over, then tossed back the gun. “You do that shit again and I will stomp a mud hole in your ass.”
“I won’t.”
Johnny glanced at the GPS. “Rookie’s already got your bird and coming back. I’m glad I’m alive to see this.”
“Yeah, that’s the first quail I ever shot,” said Daniel.
Johnny snorted. “I’m being sarcastic.”
“I know, Johnny. And you know something?”
“What?”
“I like the way they feel... these man pants...”
* * *
Johnny bagged two more birds before they returned to the truck. Daniel missed an opportunity to shoot another because he had hesitated, but that was just as well. He was much calmer now, his rage gone cold like the early evening air. They were both shivering as they packed up the truck and headed out, the sun now eclipsed by the treetops.
“I’m glad we did this,” Daniel said.
Johnny cocked a brow. “Really.”
“Yeah, I feel better.” Daniel glanced out the side window. “I’ve been ignoring you for years, Johnny. But you’re right. It’s time for me to step up to the plate. I wish dad were here to see it.”
“Next thing you’ll tell me, you want to buy a pistol and have Willie teach you a few things.”
“Maybe I do.”
* * *
They drove in silence for the next fifteen minutes until they reached Daniel’s Acadian style home at the end of a cul de sac. It was an impressive country shack with four bedrooms, three baths, gabled dormers, and a wraparound porch. Behind the house lay acres of woodlands that unfurled like a mottled green carpet into the Big Shakey Swamp. Daniel and Reva had done very well for themselves. Her BMW was parked in the deep shadows spanning the paver driveway, and Daniel’s Lexus was in the garage, since Johnny had met him at the house.
After pulling up, Johnny said, “If you guys want to come back to my place and grab some dinner...”
“No, I’m tired, Johnny. And I still have to go over some final grades.”
“All right, then.”
Daniel gave Johnny a weak grin and climbed out of the pickup.
And there it was again—a definite shift in his appearance, his head held higher, his gait longer and more purposeful. Once he mounted the porch stairs, Johnny backed out of the driveway. As he rolled the wheel, he noticed that Daniel had gone in but had forgotten to close the front door. From just inside the darkened home a pair of figures clutching each other crashed into the door jamb, then the taller, who was wearing a black balaclava over his head, dragged the shorter—who was Daniel—back into the house. Johnny was already throwing the truck in park and leaping out. He grabbed his SIG 1911 Ultra from the door pocket and wrenched the .45 from its holster.
Johnny made it across the driveway in three breaths, up in the porch in two, and was slicing past the door when a pounding of boots echoed from the back of the house. He squinted toward the main foyer, where the man with the balaclava was just turning a corner. He wore dark clothes and a backpack hung from his shoulders. Johnny could not get a shot and started after him. However, a groan to his left drove him into the formal living room, where Daniel lay on the floor, clutching his chest.
Torn between chasing the assailant and tending to his brother, Johnny swore in frustration. He banged a light switch and gasped. Daniel had sloughed off his jacket, and his blue UNC sweatshirt was now turning a deep red. He was bleeding out fast from what Johnny assumed were multiple stab wounds.
Johnny’s gaze alternated between the foyer and his brother lying in agony. He reached for his smartphone and realized it was still charging inside the truck. He dropped to his knees, shoved his pistol into his waistband, and then rifled through Daniel’s jacket pockets. He found his brother’s phone and dialed 911. He put the call on speaker and set down the phone. After tugging off his own jacket and sweatshirt, he lifted Daniel’s shirt and grimaced at the four puncture wounds. He applied pressure with his own shirt as Daniel tried to talk.
Johnny shushed him and said, “I got you, Dan. I’m here. I got you.”
“I’m sorry, Johnny. It’s my fault. I should have...” Daniel coughed and could not finish. His teeth were outlined in blood.
The 911 operator repeated her question for the second time. And then a third. And then she threatened to send over a police unit if no one answered. Johnny finally did, but he could barely speak. When he was finished, he regarded Daniel, whose eyes had gone vacant.
At that Johnny raced out toward the family room, where the sliding glass door had been pulled open. He stomped across the back porch and slowed to gaze across the woodlands, the pockets of darkness deepening between the trees.
He returned inside, where he spotted Reva lying on the kitchen floor, her waist-length hair splayed across the tile. She, too, had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest, while her arms and hands bore the cuts of an intense struggle. With her ashen face and blank eyes she was like an eerily beautiful porcelain doll that had fallen from atop a little girl’s bookshelf. Just above her, the kitchen drawers had been tugged open, and iPods and iPads were missing from the charging station. Johnny jogged into the master bedroom, where he found more of the same: drawers pulled and searched, Reva’s jewelry box empty and lying on the floor.
He hustled back to the front of the house, passing through the front door. He returned to his truck and seized his smartphone. A few seconds later he reached Josh. It took several attempts to get the entire sentence out: “Get the boys over to my brother’s house right now.”
“What’s going on, Johnny?”
“Just get here!”
As he started back for the house, he began to hyperventilate. By the time he reached the living room, where the wood floor was now a sea of Daniel’s blood, he could no longer stand. This was not one of his Marines who had gone downrange. This was the boy who was afraid to fight, the boy who shuddered as the old man had come up the stairs, the boy who wanted to become a sheepdog despite his lifelong fear. Johnny crawled over to his brother and cupped Daniel’s head in his hands.
Some time later, the police arrived and were prying him free, asking him questions that seemed detached, reverberating from someone else’s nightmare. There was only one voice that meant anything now.
It was 1968, and the old man was leaving for his second tour in Vietnam. Johnny was a small boy taken out for a ride and given his first lecture on manhood: “Being a man means that when I’m not home, you are in charge. You protect your little brother. You protect your family. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
Chapter Four
“My brother was great at hiding things from the old man. One time we stole some Playboys, and we had them all over the house. The old man never caught on. Dan was always the brains behind those operations, and he knew how to keep a secret much better than me.”
—Johnny Johansen (FBI interview, 23 December)
Within a few minutes, Daniel’s house became a grim spectacle of flashing police lights and thrumming diesel engines that drew neighbors onto their driveways where they stood, rapt, clutching their throats. The police tape went up, the streets were cordoned off, and the WSFX-TV news crew was held at bay near the end of the block. It was a scene ripped from someone else’s memoir, not Johnny’s.
Fortunately, Johnny knew a few members of the Holly Ridge Police department, since they often shot with him at the outdoor range adjacent to the local VFW hall. The responding officers found their shooting pal alone, bare-chested, and covered in his brother’s blood. The police chi
ef himself, Dennis Schneider, a retired Navy senior chief petty officer who also frequented the VFW, had abandoned his dinner to get down there.
The crime scene investigators and forensic team were already in the house. Johnny sat in the passenger’s seat of an F-150. The truck belonged to one of the detectives, Paul Lindquist, a hefty man in his fifties with the long sideburns and bushy mustache of a Wild West bartender. As Johnny gave his statement, Lindquist’s expression teetered between a sympathetic pursing of the lips and a sudden narrowing of the eyes behind his bifocals. Johnny had already submitted to a blood-alcohol test and had allowed the police to search his truck, so long as they were careful with the dogs. His story would have to be verified, of course, and he understood that. As Lindquist slowly and methodically raised questions, Johnny struggled to answer. Moments from the hunting trip flashed like lightning in his mind’s eye, while Daniel’s voice boomed: “I’m the sheepdog now!”
Willie, Corey, and Josh reached the house before the streets were cordoned off, but Elina was delayed at one road block. She had tried to call Johnny twice, finally sending him a text while he was busy giving his statement. He hated that she was out there alone, sitting in her car after learning that her brother-in-law and sister-in-law had just been killed in a home invasion. Lindquist said he would call back and allow her to pass through.
Chief Schneider approached the truck, his eyes full of sympathy. Johnny lowered his window. “I’ll share a few things,” he began. “Because if it was me, I’d want to know right away, too. But don’t you repeat this to anyone. Not yet, anyway.”
“Thank you, Dennis.”
“They already found the knife. He dumped it as he ran off the back porch. We’re pretty sure it was taken from the kitchen, since there’s an empty slot in the holder. Hopefully they’ll get something from it. Got some boot prints out back and out yonder heading off toward the swamp. Rubber boots. I’m willing to bet they’re the same size prints we found at the Cottages. Jewelry and electronics missing, maybe some cash, we don’t know. Trust me, we’re not ruling out anything, but so far it looks like a burglary gone bad. He hasn’t killed anyone till now. I doubt the perpetrator was armed, which is why he grabbed one of Dan’s knives. Sometimes these things escalate.”
Johnny’s breath shortened. “This whole thing ain’t right. This guy would’ve seen Reva’s car in the driveway. He would have known someone was home.”
“Not necessarily,” said Lindquist. “If she only had a few lights on, he could have thought the house was empty. Maybe he figured they’d gone out to dinner.”
“All right, so he comes in, Reva confronts him, and he kills her,” Johnny said. “Why does he stick around?”
“We don’t know yet how much time passed,” Lindquist pointed out. “Autopsy might help with that.”
“Even if it’s two minutes,” said Johnny. “That’s too much. But anyway, he’s finishing up when Dan opens the front door. Why doesn’t he run? Why does he have to kill my brother?”
“I don’t know, Johnny. Maybe it was just a reaction. Instinct. We’ll find out.”
Schneider added that he would keep the barrier tape up even after they were finished. This would buy Johnny more time to have the place cleaned before he allowed his nieces back into the house. The forensics people had used contrasting black and white latent print powder as well as fluorescent red on the textured and brushed stainless steel surfaces in the kitchen area. All of that would have to be wiped away. The waxed wood floor would clean up well, and the ceramic tile in the kitchen area was not porous but a section of grouting was permanently stained. Schneider had the number of a local tile guy who was a master at matching grouting. While this was morbid business and not something Johnny wanted to contemplate so soon, it was an important consideration. He would spare his nieces the sight of their parents’ blood.
“Now if you don’t mind, we’ll send you home,” said Schneider. “Get showered up. Take more time to think about it, see if you can remember anything else. Then you come back down to the station so we can go over it just once more. You have the boys drive you. I don’t want you behind the wheel of a car. And who knows, by then I might have some more.”
“Roger,” Johnny said. “But I need to call my nieces and let them know.”
“You do that. And on behalf of the entire department, we’re very sorry about your loss. I know you could use something to believe in right now, so I’ll promise you this: we will catch the man who did this.” Schneider squeezed Johnny’s shoulder and headed back up the driveway.
Johnny faced Lindquist. “I need to make a private call.”
Lindquist reached for his door handle. “Take as long as you like. And Johnny, just one more thing. You think someone would want to kill your brother or his wife?”
“No way. Daniel didn’t make waves. People liked him. He was always winning awards at the college, best teacher of the year, that shit.”
“What about Reva? She have any issues at work?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did they have any marital problems?”
“No. I mean just the usual that everyone has.”
“I got the feeling while you were talking that you thought this was planned. Somebody wanted to kill your brother and his wife and make it look like a burglary.”
“I’m not sure.”
“You said you hadn’t talked to your brother in nearly a month.”
“That’s right.”
“So you don’t know if they made enemies.”
“I know he was trying to tell me something while we were out there. He was going to handle it himself, whatever that means. Could be something, could be nothing. But he wanted to tell me. He just held back.”
“Why?”
Johnny glanced at his boots. “It was my fault.”
“Yours?”
“He always came to me for help. This time he was trying to man up and do it himself.”
“You know, I’ve been telling my kid brother the same thing for years. He’s forty-seven and still leeching off our parents. My dad’s pushing eighty for Christ’s sake. The boy lives from one crisis to another.”
Johnny shrugged.
Lindquist continued, “Anyway, rest assured we’ll check into everything—friends, co-workers, the whole nine. I am nothing if not thorough.”
“Thank you.”
“And if it’s any consolation, your brother’s issue probably has nothing to do with this. Maybe it was just something at work. I’ll find out. This is a tragedy, and while it’s unprofessional to offer an opinion so early, I’ve been doing this for a long time. This doesn’t look premeditated, Johnny. I think your brother walked in on him killing Reva. It’s just terrible timing is all. I’m very sorry.”
With that, Lindquist got out, leaving Johnny to stare at his smartphone. This phone call would change two young lives forever. The enormity of the moment sent a tremor into his hand as he dialed.
Daniel’s daughters, Isabelle and Kate, were undergraduates at Georgia State University, where Isabelle, the sophomore, played women’s soccer, and Kate, the senior, was on the cross country team. They had received considerable scholarships, and Daniel and Reva doted on them. Kate answered in a voice that sounded painfully young. “Hey, Uncle Johnny, what’s going on? This is like so random, you calling me out of the blue.”
“Kate, where’s your sister right now.”
“They’re getting pizza.”
“All right, you sit down. I’m going to tell you something, and then you tell her. Now you’re the oldest, sweetheart, and I need you to be strong—stronger than you’ve ever been in your entire life. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir. But Uncle Johnny, you’re scaring me.”
“I know. And I’m so sorry to tell you this. It breaks my heart.”
* * *
Times like these made Willie think about his own loved ones, and he thanked God they were all right. If anything ever happened to his sisters, to Ivonne,
or to his son... Damn, he could barely entertain the thought for more than a few seconds. Instead, he reflected on how lucky he was, on the life he had built for himself, on the people who had lifted him up from the madness and frustration of war.
Back in the day, when he was still with 2nd Tank Battalion, he got into a “little trouble” (Marine-speak for pissing off the CO) and was given the option of doing a summer stint as a lifeguard on Onslow Beach, Camp Lejeune. While there, he had no choice but to gather intel on potential high value female targets. One day he locked on to this stunning blonde with a small child, but he assumed she was married. She kept coming to the beach, and Willie kept her in his sights. Through mutual friends he discovered that no, she was divorced, so he struck up a conversation and invited her to dinner. They dated for about six months, lived together for about a year, and then got married. She supported everything he did in the Corps, especially joining Force Reconnaissance, and while he was gone, she paid the bills, kept up the house, and raised their son. It takes a special kind of woman to put up with all the bullshit Marines can dish out, and it takes a wise man to appreciate those efforts and never take them for granted. While no professor of human psychology, Willie was smart enough to recognize that even those who wait also serve.
Willie and Ivonne forged on through the long deployments, the personal and financial stress, and the aches of being alone. And then, after seventeen hard years in the Marine Corps, Willie found himself at a crossroads. He had just come off a deployment, had yet to decompress, and heard through reliable scuttlebutt that he was being shipped off to Okinawa for his twilight tour before he retired.
At the same time, his father-in-law was trying to build a new business, The Sportsman’s Lodge, in Jacksonville, North Carolina. The lodge would be a premiere shooting facility equipped with a pro shop, pistol and archery ranges, and a twenty-two acre paintball course that included woods and berm areas, along with an urban environment replete with a mock city. The lodge would also offer a variety of courses, from concealed carry to women-specific to the National Rifleman’s Association basic pistol course.
