I Kill Rich People: New Edition Released 11/27/14

by Mike Bogin

  Below them was the biggest house Owen had ever seen, with gables and domes, garages and multiple guesthouses that were each big enough to fit three of his house inside. The ’copter swung down toward the circular driveway, spinning toward the south lawn. He expected it to land and tightened himself for a jolt that didn’t come. Instead, Gonzalez was obviously listening to something through his headphones. Gonzalez pressed the right earphone tighter to his ear and shouted something into the microphone attachment. Owen had only sound suppression headgear. No communications system. Gonzalez was nodding repeatedly, so he obviously understood whatever he had been told. He then retrieved an AR-15 rifle from where it was strapped along the helicopter fuselage. When the door opened, Owen could see the first helicopter where it had landed on the lawn less than one hundred feet away.

  Inside that first helicopter, the people aboard were trapped by the most intense aggression that Owen had ever witnessed. A huge black-and-bay-colored German shepherd, teeth bared and gnashing like a shredding machine, bounded seven feet high, slamming its snout against their windows. Just for a moment, its black face and brilliantly white teeth glanced toward their helicopter. Their pilot pulled back in reaction, lifting another ten feet off the ground.

  Gonzalez dropped the magazine out from the rifle, glanced up into it, and then slammed it back into place with practiced precision. His thumb snapped off the safety simultaneously as he took aim.

  Al turned away. He had no love for German Shepherds, but he couldn’t watch this. His knees bounced up and down as he waited for the rifle’s report.

  For a long moment, Gonzalez sighted, shifting the M-16A3 from fully automatic firing to semi-automatic for greater control. At that range, the .223 caliber bullet would pass right through soft tissue and might easily ricochet off the metal fuselage. Gonzalez needed to time his shot. He took a deep breath, exhaled, then fired just as the dog’s paws dropped to the grass.

  Owen felt the pressure release from the gas-operated weapon, but heard nothing through his headphones. The first shot knocked the dog onto its side, yet the animal still attempted to raise itself again. Gonzalez pulled the trigger three more times, each shot tearing through the majestic creature and lodging deep enough into the lawn that one of the shots cracked a PVC sprinkler pipe ten inches below the surface.

  The thought struck Owen that he had been cozy in his bed twenty minutes earlier and now he was racing with adrenalin and about to jump out from the helicopter with Gonzalez. He reached back and took hold of Al’s mushy hand to help get him down. Gonzalez was still carrying the rifle at his shoulder.

  Matthew Turner climbed down from the first helicopter. Owen could see that Turner was pointing behind Gonzalez toward the water. The dead dog’s guts were torn open. Its long pink tongue extended out from the motionless jaws. Owen turned away and looked back, too, toward a second dog that stood with its legs spread in a wide protective pose next to a naked male body with silver hair. Her stance and clenched teeth were warning them to keep away.

  Gonzalez shook his head. “The hell I will,” Gonzalez shouted, refusing Turner’s order to shoot the second dog. Turner attempted again to take hold of the fixed carry handle before Gonzalez wrenched it away, refusing to release the rifle into Turner’s hands. “She’s not attacking. She’s doing her job.”

  Al came alongside Owen and removed his headphones.

  The second shepherd stood her ground. It took fifty minutes for Nassau County Animal Control to arrive with pepper spray and snare poles. Within that time, Nassau County PD had also arrived. They had driven out via the Expressway, turning north for Cove Neck and the thousand-foot-long driveway leading up to the palatial home belonging to the dead man, Brian Keaner, former CEO of NYBC, Chairman of the Board and senior shareholder.

  Jerry Keaner, the fifty-three-year-old son, lived two-and-a-half miles south. He left his wife and kids there and drove himself in his SL65 convertible to the estate when Nassau PD contacted him. He called the dog trainers from the car in order to get the secret word so that he could call off the female.

  With his face beet-red with exertion, Keaner rushed the animal control officers who were midway across the back lawn, then shirt-tackled a female animal control officer, throwing her onto her back in the mushy grass. The second officer dropped his pole and noose before he pulled his pepper spray.

  “Use it, motherfucker,” Keaner dared him. “Use it and I’ll sue your ass! These are Schutzhunds. Five-hundred-thousand dollars for the pair. What goddamned motherfucking moron killed that dog?”

  Al watched the Keaner’s antics without comment. The son had not even looked toward his own father’s body.

  Along with Gonzalez, Hurwitz and Owen walked through the scenario. “Nassau PD tells me that there are security cameras along the driveway. According to Keaner’s security, a two-man 24/7 detail, they didn’t see anything.”

  Owen shifted his attention out toward the body on the dock as the female German shepherd dropped into a prone position and allowed the animal control officers to slip a muzzle over her snout.

  Why wasn’t Al already doing the obvious? Owen wondered. Let’s get the sat photos and track him down!

  But there wouldn’t be any photos. Even the DOD could not afford storage for that much data. High-density urban areas, nuclear plants, and select security installations could be under constant surveillance. That was it. The rest was just a product of Hollywood imaginations.

  Cameras all along the roadway, more cameras at the gate. “He came by boat,” Owen said. Eamonn used to tell him, “Have fun. Don’t drown,” before he and Mikey set off on their boating adventures.

  “A small boat can pull up anywhere along the bank and be hidden from view. Anything with a low draft, an inflatable, for instance, would be easy.” He and Mikey used to pull their ten-foot skiff with its five-horse motor up onto beaches and play like marines, creeping close to the big estates and daring each other to tag the houses before they ran back to the boat.

  Riding their bikes out Roosevelt Avenue and then up to Flushing Bay, across from the airport, they had kept their boat alongside Fulmer’s Machine. He and Michael collected bottles for the recycling money, a nickel apiece, to pay for the gas.

  Nobody would let a kid pull up a boat onto a private beach nowadays, Owen realized. People like Keaner had paid too much money for shoreline. They wouldn’t let somebody else’s kids share it for free.

  Out at the end of the dock, the younger Keaner continued making calls, turning away from his father, who was being photographed by a Nassau County PD staffer. Owen stared back at the dead man’s home. All Callie wanted was a regular house of their own. He couldn’t even give that to her and to his own kids, while this one guy had that palace. “Billionaire” was just a word outside of his life; Owen had never given much thought to what money like that really meant. But here he was, ogling that expanse, and his mind couldn’t absorb that just one person could own anything so huge.

  Owen and Gonzalez walked along the high tide mark that was topped by shore vegetation. There they found signs of someone having taken a prone position along the grassy edge. Owen spotted the marks of disturbed sand from something being pulled up to shore. The wide and shallow imprint made it as a flat-bottomed boat beamy enough to carry a motor in back. A person could lie low inside one of those and go unseen by anyone, especially if he had arrived before sunrise. They did not speak together, just silently observed and took it all in.

  Gonzalez found a flat stone and skipped it across the water. Five. It was good therapy after shooting the dog. His second skip ran out further. Eleven. Owen hunted for his own stone, found one, and ran it out to eight jumps. The major was taking off his vest, preparing to go at it for real, when Keaner rumbled down from the end of the long dock like an elephant, waving his arms and screaming. “Hell no!”

  A white coroner’s office Ford Econoli
ne van had driven around the side yard and was moving slowly across the acres of lawn in the direction of the body with Nassau County PD waving them in.

  “Get off the lawn, assholes,” he screamed. “Respect other people’s property, why don’t you!” He yelled down to Owen and Gonzalez: “Instead of skipping stones, how ’bout you schmucks get these dipshits off my lawn!”

  The major spotted it when he turned around. A brass shell casing that had flipped open-end down into the sand— .762 mm. Gonzalez pointed it out to Owen as Nassau PD stood on the dock with their backs turned. Owen quickly slipped off a shoe, pulled away his sock, and reached through the sock to pick up the casing.

  “Different make,” Gonzalez commented. Not the same shooter, he had already decided. His shooter didn’t make mistakes. Who retrieves his casings in the dark, on a rooftop, after shooting six rounds, and then forgets to retrieve the single casing in a place like this, out in the open with nobody around? “Somebody is piggy-backing.”

  “Piggy-backing?”

  “What’s one more bullet, one more dead billionaire? Somebody figures this will get swept up into the I Kill Rich People killings and nobody looks closer to home. This isn’t our guy.”

  Gonzalez and Owen found Al and pulled him aside to show him the bullet casing. “Four shootings and not one casing,” the major reminded Al. “Now this.”

  Al’s mind moved quickly. Saturday morning. Interesting time to put a bullet into the brain of the man most associated with a major publicly traded company. The market was closed for the weekend, giving two days for the word to get out. Anyone short-selling or holding puts could make a fortune within minutes come Monday morning. That left them two days to find out who those people were. The first turn onto Greedy Way. Who else stood to make a fortune from Keaner’s death?

  Turner called in an FBI forensics team, which left Al caught between Turner and Owen, who still carried the casing. Gonzalez wasn’t saying a word.

  “Give this to your forensics guys,” Owen decided, putting the sock with the casing into Turner’s hands. “The shooter was positioned along the grass line on the bank. He came in by boat, inflatable probably.” Nothing there would bring him any closer to the real shooter, Owen knew. He needed a break. Too many bodies lately. People and the German shepherd.

  More coffee wasn’t going to help him. He just wanted to go home. Just to have a regular weekend. Tell the boys about riding in the helicopter, but not about the dog. He wanted that out of his head.

  Turner eyed Owen with suspicion, both for disturbing a crime scene and for knowing too much.

  Before Turner could frame a response, Gonzalez stepped in. Gonzalez was not about to forget Turner’s order to shoot the dog. Turner might be the gateway to his employment, but he wasn’t the commanding officer.

  “Special Agent Turner,” the major informed Turner icily, “four times our guy shot multiple victims and not one casing. Here just one shot was fired and we have the casing. Now do you think we’re looking at the same shooter? What does your vast experience tell you?”

  Turner glared, but Gonzalez returned the look three-fold until Turner turned his back to the major. After a long pause, Turner reached up his arm and circled his index finger above his head, signaling all personnel to round up. Inside two minutes, everyone other than the forensics team was back aboard the helicopters. Owen had his headphones back on and was given the chance to ride shotgun back to Flushing Meadows with the entire city and waterfront in view out the glass canopy. As they lifted off, Keaner the younger lumbered across the lawn toward the body of the bigger male shepherd, yelled something made unintelligible by the engines and rotors, and raised his middle finger in the air, flipping them off as the choppers lifted away.

  After they dropped down into the empty parking lot at Flushing Meadows, leaving Owen near his car, Owen had to phone Tremaine, mostly to tell him about the helicopter rides. Tremaine invited himself to the house for dinner.

  He got home mid-morning to a note from Callie saying that she and the boys were out at Rockaway Beach with Shelley and wouldn’t be back until dinnertime. Owen pulled wire and got new Romex feeds through to the outlets in the front room, leaving two-foot extra lengths beside where he figured the new mast would have to go to feed out to the power pole. Wire and outlets he could handle. Once he had them in place, the electrician could cut the knob and tube and install the mast and new service panel and tie in the lines. The big challenge was the kitchen. He either had to fight wires down the backsplash and rewire the dishwasher and garbage disposal or pay somebody else to do it. Either way, they wouldn’t have power to the kitchen for a couple of days.

  Better that Callie was away and not there to disapprove of him putting more effort and money into the house—they were already so upside down on it. But if they couldn’t move, why not at least make it more comfortable, he reasoned. The new A/C units were making a huge difference. They were sleeping, not lying in bed sweating.

  Tremaine showed up right before dinner; pizzas and salad with Italian dressing from Acquista Trattoria. After dinner, Callie ran upstairs to check that the air conditioners were off before loading the dishwasher. Owen had Liam’s baseball mitt and a ball in his hand when he walked into the front room and turned off the television. Casey bolted ahead for the door, determined not to be left out while his dad and Liam had a toss.

  “You all play ball,” Tremaine announced. He had other plans, plans that included running up to Martha’s Bakery for a chocolate fudge cake.

  Casey couldn’t match strength or speed with Liam, but it was already obvious that he would be the better athlete when his time came. Where Liam was shy of the ball, standing off the plate and reaching with the bat, Casey brought his elbows and knees in tight, a compact coil sneaking close-in, ready to explode onto the pitch. Casey was already sneaking out the back door to play ball with the Dominican kids from up the street.

  Liam had suffered through a tough year. The kid didn’t talk about it anymore, but just because he didn’t say anything didn’t mean that his lunches weren’t getting taken by tougher kids or that he wasn’t being bullied on the school bus. Maybe if he spent more time with him, taught him how to box, then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad for him at school, Owen thought.

  His eyes wandered up the street as Liam wound up to throw. He knew it wasn’t the same Irish Catholic neighborhood it had been a generation before. He wasn’t blind. But he had grown up in the old house. The old television antenna was still up, rusted and useless, strapped against the brick chimney stack. He could not even bring himself to take it down because he had gone up on the roof with his dad and helped Eamonn put it up in the first place. Every inch of the house held memories. How could they leave the place to the bank?

  Callie was enjoying a rare quiet moment, relaxing with her feet up on the sofa when Owen and the boys came back in. Her program, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” was up to the $250,000 question before cutting to commercials.

  Callie greeted Owen’s entry by asking him, “If we had a million dollars, what would you do with it?”

  “Like we’ll ever see a million dollars,” Owen retorted, putting Liam’s mitt and baseball on top of the glass coffee table.

  “Really though, what would you do?”

  “I dunno. What sort of a question is that?”

  Callie stayed with it. Once she was onto something, she was a terrier. “Seriously, what would you do?”

  Owen turned a chair around and rested his chin on the back. Liam listened intently, waiting for his father’s answer. Casey couldn’t wait. “Get an Xbox 360!”

  Owen laughed at Casey’s exclamation, leaving Casey

  reddening with frustration. Parents might say they’re not laughing at you, they’re laughing with you, but he didn’t buy that.

  “First thing,” Owen answered, “I’d put aside the money to
make sure these two hooligans go to college. Then I’d get you a new kitchen. Then I’d pay off the house. If anything was left over, we’d all take a trip.” Owen reached his hand under Casey’s chin and pulled Casey close to his face. “We’d all take a trip to Rome, the capital of Italy.”

  Callie was surprised by that. “I always thought you wanted to visit Ireland.”

  “Nope. I mean, sure, I’d like to see where the family is from and all, go around the Ring of Kerry, but first I’d go to Rome. The Old Man always wanted to get to Rome and if we went there, it would be sort of like he was going, too, you know what I mean?”

  Callie chafed at the explanation. “If it wasn’t for your father, we could afford to go there ourselves, for real,” she snapped back. Her tone seared Owen.

  “Will you give it a rest? It was Dad’s house, it was his money. We used his house and his money to take care of him. It wasn’t like he planned to get sick.” Owen hated the subject, hated how it hung over them like a dark cloud, never ever totally going away.

  “We didn’t have to mortgage it in our names!”

  “Who was going to give a mortgage to a sixty-seven-year-old with Alzheimer’s? You tell me that, will you? Jaysus. We’ll be OK. Things will come around. They always do.”

  “We should just hand back the keys. Start fresh. We don’t need this pile like an anchor around our necks.”

  “Can’t we have a nice Saturday evening? For flip’s sake, Callie! We’re not giving my father’s house to the bank. You hear me? That’s not happening.”