Yesterday's Echo

by Matt Coyle

  Stone walked out of the living room to the entrance of a hallway that shot off to the left of the foyer. He stopped and looked back at me when he realized I hadn’t followed. Luke blocked the exit to the front door. If I broke now, I figured my football instincts could get me past an injured tough guy I’d already beaten once before. I’d have room to maneuver in the open foyer. If I followed Stone into his office, the hallway walls narrowed retreat.

  “Are you coming, Rick?” Stone gave me the teeth. “You didn’t come all the way up here just for the view, did you?”

  Stone was right. I still had a grand jury waiting to indict me on Monday. I’d come to get information that could keep me out of prison. If I ran now, I couldn’t stop until I hit Mexico.

  I walked out of the living room and followed Stone down the hall. Luke limped behind me. Photographs of Stone with major and minor celebrities covered the walls. Homage to his casino days in Las Vegas. There wasn’t a single picture that didn’t have an autograph on it. But there were no portraits of Stone with a wife or son.

  The hallway led to an office at the far end of the house. A window panoramaed around the entire left side of the room. The view matched the one in the living room. Luke stopped outside the office and closed the door behind me.

  “You should feel privileged, Rick. No one is allowed in my office.”

  I didn’t feel honored, only wary.

  Stone sat down in a wingback leather chair behind a large mahogany desk. A picture frame sat directly in front of Stone, facing him. Maybe it was the one photo of someone close enough to him that a signature wasn’t required. He motioned me to one of the two white-cushioned chairs that were on my side of the desk.

  Stone opened a desk drawer and pulled out a thick letter envelope. He placed it next to a laptop computer in front of him and steepled his hands.

  My muted phone vibrated my thigh in my pocket. It would have been rude to answer it when a man was about to offer me a wad of cash.

  “I’m sure you’re aware of the grand jury impanelling Monday. Fifty thousand dollars could go a long way toward securing an adequate attorney.” He smiled. “Or give a jump start to someone who needed to leave town in a hurry.”

  I wasn’t surprised that Stone knew about the grand jury. He had ears everywhere and fingers in every pocket. Maybe he’d been feeding the police information about me. That I’d broken into Adam Windsor’s storage locker. Tightening the vise on me so I’d give him what he wanted and then hope to survive the courts or flee.

  I pulled the tiny flash drive of Angela Albright’s misdeeds out of my pocket and tossed it across the desk to Stone. He picked it up and plugged it into his laptop. The back of the laptop separated me from Stone and what he saw. I’d already seen it. A dark past best forgotten.

  Life came into Stone’s dead eyes. But the hard end of life. Pain. He moved his eyes over to the picture frame facing him then back to the computer screen. The pain pulled deeper. The only other emotions I’d ever seen in his eyes were malice and contempt.

  I almost felt sorry for him. He looked up from the computer at me and I saw the eyes of a wounded predator. Then I felt sorry for myself.

  “I take it you’ve seen this?” The smooth superiority was replaced by unhidden shame.

  Stone ashamed of a tryst with a onetime hooker? It didn’t add up. Were the eyes of the person in the photograph facing him adding to his shame?

  “I didn’t get any pleasure from it.” The truth.

  “Where’s the rest?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I want Windsor’s computer, all other flash drives, and any original videotapes.” Barely concealed anger pushed the shame out of his voice. “And the birth certificate.”

  Good. I’d gotten under his skin and knocked him off his cool control game. Time to push harder and see if any truth spilled out. “You mean Louise Abigail Delano’s birth certificate?”

  “Yes.” Angry reptilian hiss. His eyes again shot toward the photograph in front of him and then back at me.

  Stone might have once been a Vegas boss, but he’d make a crappy poker player. His eyes were a tell. The photo in the frame facing him was a picture of his daughter. I’d bet the fifty grand in the envelope in front of him on it.

  “You mean your daughter?” I grabbed the picture frame and flipped it around.

  Angela Albright smiled up at me.

  Maybe I’d been wrong about the identity of his daughter. I heard a desk drawer close and looked up.

  The gun in Stone’s hand told me that I’d been right.

  Muldoon’s

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Adrenaline squeezed sweat out of my scalp and vacuumed a hole in my stomach.

  “You overplayed your hand, Cahill.” Hard stare. Rage on a strained leash. Light from the desk lamp glinted off the Kimber .45’s stainless-steel slide as Stone pointed it at my chest. “You could have walked out of here with a pocket full of cash. Now—”

  My flat face belied the fear raging through my body. Metal-work on the picture frame bit into my death-gripped hands. Sweat trickled from under my arms down my sides. I willed my muscles to relax and tried to slow my breathing.

  “You pull that trigger and the tape of you and Angela in the sack goes viral, along with the proof that she’s your daughter.”

  I was all in on a bluff. Time to see who was the better poker player. All I had riding on it was my life.

  “I didn’t take you for a blackmailer, Rick. Murderer maybe, but at least an honorable man.” He squeezed his eyes down on me. “Fifty thousand dollars wasn’t enough for you?”

  “I don’t want a dime from you. Whatever you and Angela did behind closed doors is your own business. I’m just trying to stay alive and out of prison. I leave here alive and you can have everything.”

  Stone studied me with predator eyes. A trace of humanity bubbled up in them. He set the gun down on the desk. I let out a breath.

  “Adam Windsor was human detritus.” His eyes drifted over my shoulder like he was looking at the past. “I let him run some women and drugs to my high rollers in the casino. Then I found out he was pimping his own wife, Melody. When I took her away from him and got her straight, he tried to get even.”

  Stone as hero. Saving women from prostitution. Even the ones he’d arranged to work in his own casino. I kept my eye on the gun six inches from his hand and listened to more of the legend.

  “He must have come across Angela’s mother while plying his trade. Betty had tried to blackmail me when she first had Angela. She spiraled from drugs to depravity and I never saw her or the child again for another twenty years. Then Adam Windsor came into my life.”

  His eyes rolled to my hands holding the picture of Angela. I set it back on the desk, facing him. The hurt was deeper now. He locked onto the photo and the pain that he’d inflicted upon others throughout his life leaked from his eyes.

  “So, after you took Melody away from him, Windsor shows up with a new girl for you to try out and secretly tapes you with her.” I shook my head. “Angela.”

  Stone had probably never talked to anyone about the darkest period of his life. Nine years with the guilt, humiliation, and anger boiling silently inside him. I knew how he felt. I tried to sympathize with the man who’d turned my world inside out and now held my life in his hands. I tried to stay alive.

  “How did you find out?” I asked.

  Stone measured me for a moment. His sharp gray widow’s peak aimed at me in place of the gun. I didn’t know if he read sincerity in me or just wanted to finally spill his guts after so many years of swallowing them. Maybe he knew he could unburden himself to me and I’d never live to tell about it. Whatever his reasons, he finally spoke.

  “When Windsor brought Angela to me, I’d only intended to bed her once. My normal practice with a new girl.” His usual rich baritone, tight in his throat. “But once I’d been with her, I didn’t want anyone else to touch her. The next week a videotape of us in bed arrived
in the mail. He’d somehow planted a camera in my bedroom. Then a copy of the birth certificate of Louise Abigail Delano arrived. My daughter. I thought Louise’s mother was up to something again. I wasn’t smart enough to put the pieces together. A photocopy of Louise’s driver’s license came next. Angela’s picture was on it. She’d changed her name since the license, but she was still my daughter. My biggest failing as a young man had been ignoring her existence and then this—”

  Stone’s shoulders sagged and his eyelids drooped. He’d aged a lifetime since he’d first sat down at his desk. I slid my eyes to the gun. His hand was six inches from it. The desk was at least four feet wide. I was a foot back from that and seated. Geometry wasn’t in my favor. I needed to find another way out.

  “Did Angela find out?”

  “No. And she never will. I cleaned her up and got her out of Las Vegas, off to San Diego. And now she’s made something of her life. I won’t let it be ruined.”

  “So Windsor blackmailed you.”

  “Not until he got out of prison.” The smug certainty returned to Stone’s voice. “He never had the chance in Las Vegas. Somehow, a big drug deal he was involved in went wrong and friends of mine on Las Vegas PD arrested him. Some of his things miraculously disappeared. Then, by coincidence, he went before a judge I knew and ended up in prison.”

  Stone flexing his influence. But it didn’t last forever.

  “But he got out last month and picked up where he’d left off.” I kept the ball in the air, afraid what would happen if it dropped. “And now the dirt he had on Angela could make him rich.”

  Windsor must have hidden the original tapes and birth certificate in the desk he kept at his father’s house in La Jolla. Maybe his father never told Adam that he’d put all his stuff in storage until after he got out of prison.

  “Show-and-tell is over, Rick.” He rested his hand on top of the .45. “Time to give me what I want.”

  “You’ll get what you want, Stone. I don’t care if you killed Windsor. What you just told me was man-to-man. It won’t go any further.” I nodded at the gun. “Trust me or don’t, but be careful with that Kimber because people know that I came up here to see you tonight.”

  “Nice speech, Rick. Are you warming up for your trial? Not very convincing. Especially since you know Melody killed Windsor, whether you helped her or not.”

  Stone had told me his deepest, darkest secrets. Why would he lie about killing Windsor now? Especially, when he still had the gun. Maybe he wasn’t lying.

  “Time’s up, Rick.” He picked up the gun and pointed it at my face. “Tell me where the rest of it is. Now.”

  “It’s in a safe deposit box at Windsor Bank and Trust.” I wished it were. “You’re going to have to wait until Monday, nine a.m.”

  “How convenient. Let’s see; dead wife. Dirty ex-cop father drank himself into an early grave. That leaves your sister in San Francisco and your mother in Arizona.” He moved his finger from the slide onto the trigger. “I’m sure if one of them bothers to clean out the box years from now, when, and if, your disappearance is ever ruled a homicide, an accident can be arranged. And I’m betting your threat of the video going viral is a bluff. You’re alone. You don’t have any friends left.”

  His finger tensed on the trigger.

  “It’s in the car down the road from your house!” The words exploded from my mouth before a bullet could from Stone’s gun.

  Stone smiled shark teeth at me and kept the Kimber pointed at my face. He reached his left hand over and punched a button on his desk phone. I heard the door whoosh open behind me.

  “Give Luke your car keys and tell him where the vehicle is,” Stone said.

  If Luke came back with the Caddy full of Windsor’s blackmail booty, I’d disappear and end up buried in a hole. Luke shuffled his injured leg away from the door towards me.

  I had one chance.

  “Here.” I pulled the keys from my pocket, turned in the chair, and tossed them to Luke. At his feet. I’d bet my life that he have a hard time bending his wounded leg down to pick up the keys. I gave him a Stone smile. “Oops.”

  I made it look spiteful, that I wanted to watch him struggle to pick the keys up. He glared at me, then looked at his father. I kept my eyes on him, not wanting to look at the gun I knew was still trained on me.

  “Rick,” Stone’s voice had a trace of irritation. Good. “That chip on your shoulder has become annoying. Go pick up the keys and then slowly hand them to Luke.”

  I turned toward Stone, ignored the gun, and gave him some attitude, showing I was still a tough guy who wouldn’t jump on command. His eyes narrowed and I got up from the chair.

  Luke stood five feet from the open door, glaring at me. I could almost feel the barrel of Stone’s gun pressing against the back of my head from across the room. I got to Luke and knelt down and grabbed the keys. Then I heard Stone’s voice.

  “Luke, shut the door.” As usual, Stone was ahead of me. But maybe not far enough this time.

  Luke started to step back as I slowly rose. I didn’t know what kind of a shot Stone was or how much he valued his son. Time to find out.

  I stabbed Luke with the keys in his bad leg as I dove behind him. He crumpled forward and a gunshot exploded in the room, putting a hole in the wall next to the door.

  Too late! I made it through the door into the hallway trailing Luke’s keening wail and the boom of another gunshot. A glass-framed photograph, shoulder high, shattered off the wall. Thirty feet to the foyer and the front door and escape. I juked to my right in the narrow hallway. My ankle gave out, and I bounced against the wall and tumbled down onto the cold marble floor while another picture frame exploded above my head.

  I shot forward, a sprinter out of the blocks, and stayed low and fast. My ankle screamed. I stayed silent. Another painful juke. A gunshot and a burst of flaming air past my ear all at once. The foyer! I cleared the hall and made the front door in two strides. I yanked the giant brass handle, but the door held and its resistance slammed me into it. Footsteps pounded down the marble hallway behind me.

  The deadbolt! I dislodged it, threw open the door, and fled into the night. The fog swallowed me, damp gray sheets fluttering against my face as I sprinted blindly for my car. I heard footsteps behind me, then a car door slam, and an engine rev. Tires squealed. I looked back over my shoulder and saw a smear of yellow against the gray curtain. Then it disappeared and small two red blurs took its place, then faded away with the receding car engine.

  He’d gone the other way. I’d told him my car was down the street and he’d believed me. But he wouldn’t go far before he figured it out, turned around, and came back at me. The road climbed, invisible, under my feet. My ankle robbed me of speed and balance, but adrenaline kept me upright.

  I felt a void to my left and realized I’d made the connecting street where I’d parked the Caddy. It materialized through the fog, first a gold blob, then a sharp-edged rectangle. I jammed the key in the door and looked back at the intersection. No yellow smear, yet. I jumped in, keyed the ignition, and the car rumbled to life. I left the lights off and eased it through the dense night, not wanting the squeal of tires to give away my location.

  Shapes emerged as parked cars and then I hit Via Capri, the winding downhill ski run of a road that led off Mount Soledad. I risked the lights. The visibility was only marginally better than running blind. I checked the rearview mirror. The night stayed burnt charcoal behind me.

  I’d eluded Stone for now, but he wouldn’t stop until he found me. I knew his secret. His pride couldn’t let me live. I could go to the police with what I had, but their minds where already made up. They’d fit me for a cell and make the evidence fit right next to me.

  Via Capri flattened out after a long steep fall and T-boned a street that back roaded to Interstate 5. I could be in Mexico in half an hour or L.A. in two. I’d spend the rest of my life with my eyes in the rearview mirror and my back to every wall.

  There was one other
option. A long shot. I pulled out my cell phone and saw the last incoming call was from the same person I wanted to dial.

  Heather Ortiz.

  Muldoon’s

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  I checked my voice mail. Heather had left a message. Cryptic, as it was.

  “Rick. Heather. I found information that can help you. Meet me at my house in fifteen minutes.” A pause, then quickly in a hushed voice. “Be careful.”

  I pulled the Caddy to the curb and killed the lights. The call had come twenty-five minutes ago. I punched Heather’s number. After five rings, her voice mail came on and I hung up. Could this be a setup Moretti had arranged? Maybe he figured he now had enough on me and didn’t need to wait for Monday’s grand jury. Heather lures me in from the cold, Moretti gets the arrest, and she gets the exclusive story. The hushed “be careful” at the end of the message a nice touch to make it seem we were in this together.

  But she hadn’t left her address. Had she expected me to remember it from our two-year-old one-night stand? Or had there really been a reason she had ended the call quickly? Maybe her message had been real and she’d found something that could help me. Heather was my last hope to avoid a life on the run. But she might be a false hope that took away my last chance to make that run.

  I had to take the risk.

  I started the car and turned around. When we’d hooked up a couple years ago, Heather had rented a house on a side street off La Jolla Boulevard behind a Chinese restaurant.

  I took Hidden Valley Road until it dumped onto Torrey Pines Road. The fog had started to thin at the bottom of the hill. Head-lights, no longer flickering candles behind stained glass, were now visible at a hundred yards. I did the long L from Torrey Pines to Pearl to the boulevard, through the center of town and finally saw the restaurant appear through the gloom.

  I cruised past Heather’s cottage, scanning the street for police cruisers or detective slick tops. Nothing. I did a two-block circle, finally parking a couple hundred yards away, around the corner from the cottage.