by Vicki Delany
Smith heard footsteps cross the floor, the sound of a door closing. There would be no help from that quarter.
“Four-Two,” Caldwell said. “Secure the street.” The radio transmission was full of static. People who weren’t used to it couldn’t make much sense of it. Hopefully, Bassing wouldn’t be able to either.
“Get up,” Bassing repeated. He gave the bat a kick, and it rolled across the floor. Out of range.
“My ankle really hurts, Charlie. I think it’s broken.”
“Use the other one.”
She put all her weight on her right leg and, gripping the back of a chair for support, pulled herself upright. She stifled a groan of pain.
He waved the gun at her. “Out the back. Move.”
“Please,” she said, her voice cracking. “Let me go, Charlie. I’m sorry if I’ve upset you.”
The sneer broadened. “Damn right you’ve upset me. Now you can make me happy. Before we settle the score.”
“You won’t be able to get away. They’ll be searching for me, everywhere. Look, I’ll tell them the house was empty when I got here. Is that your girlfriend, Charlie? She’ll back me up.”
“Girlfriend? Hardly. Just another junkie bitch who, with a little persuasion, will do anything for a fix. No different than you, Molly, except power’s your fix, isn’t it? Well I’ve got the power now, so shut the fuck up and move. Plenty of time to talk later.”
Her eyes filled with water. “Please, Charlie, don’t hurt me.” She felt her body deflating, getting smaller. Her shoulders hunched and she dropped her head. “I’m sorry Sergeant Winters arrested you. I asked him not to.”
His face tightened with anger. A vein throbbed in his temple. “After I’ve sorted you out, that fuckin’ bastard’s next. Move!” He screamed the last word.
She stepped away from the chair. Her leg buckled and she gave a small, high-pitched cry as she pitched forward. Instinctively Charlie reached out with his free hand and grabbed her arm. “Goddamned useless bitch, can’t you even walk straight.”
She pulled her collapsible baton from her belt and extended it with a flick of the wrist. Knowing her fate would be decided here and now, that there would be no second chances, she brought it down, putting every last bit of strength she could find into the hit. The baton crashed into Charlie’s gun arm. She twisted out of his grip. He yelled, in pain and surprise, letting go of her, but didn’t drop the weapon. Smith pivoted on her left leg and brought her right foot up to smash it into his knee cap. He howled as his leg gave way and he dropped to the floor. The gun went off. She heard the bullet strike the wall. The woman in the bedroom started to scream.
Bassing swung the weapon around so it pointed at Smith’s chest. She had only one chance left, do it now or die. Praying that the Kevlar vest would give her sufficient protection, she closed in. Before he could fire again, she brought the baton down with both hands, going for the spot she’d hit before. It connected. Screaming abuse, roaring with pain, Bassing fell to his knees and dropped the weapon. The gun skidded across the floor. No choice but to turn her back on him. She swooped on it, fumbled for it, put her hand on it, closed her fingers around it, felt for the trigger. Got it. She swung around to face him.
Charlie Bassing’s face shone with rage and sweat; his eyes were so full of hate they scarcely looked human. While she scrambled for the gun, he’d managed to grab the baseball bat and pull himself to his feet. He stood there, swaying but upright. His eyes were black pools in a red face. Spittle ran out of both sides of his mouth. He held the Louisville Slugger high, as if he were about to hit a home run. He gasped around pain. “You fuckin’ bitch.”
He took a step toward her.
Molly Smith fired at the same moment John Winters came through the door.
Chapter Thirty-two
Meredith Morgenstern ran for the phone. Her hair was wrapped in a towel and she only had half of her face made up. She glanced at the number display as she answered. Area code 416—Toronto.
“Ms. Meredith Morgenstern, please.”
“Speaking.”
“Ms. Morgenstern, good morning. This is Daniel Levenstein from the Toronto Planet. I’ve been reading the piece you sent us on the late Rudolph Steiner and his wife.”
Meredith rolled her eyes. What a waste of time that whole exercise had been. Not only had she been threatened if she didn’t stop investigating Josie Steiner, it turned out there hadn’t been anything to investigate. After the arrest of Diane Barton, Josie hadn’t even had the courtesy to speak to Meredith, instead made a phone call to a Vancouver paper expressing her satisfaction at an arrest in the “cowardly murder” of her beloved husband. Then she, her high-priced lawyer, and the hired muscle left Trafalgar.
This guy from the Toronto Planet, a highly popular muck-raking tabloid, must be getting his news by carrier pigeon he was so out of date.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I can’t tell you much more about that case. It’s been resolved and Mrs. Steiner returned to Vancouver.” Josie would be back, to face the charge of assaulting Molly Smith. Meredith planned to sit in the front row of the courtroom, taking it all down. Hopefully she could get a good shot of the grieving widow being led out in handcuffs. She would need something, if she was going to crawl back to Joe Gessling and beg for her job.
“I know that, Meredith. I’m calling because I like the story. It’s far too incendiary for us to use,” he laughed, “but I like the way you write. We’re looking for a new reporter on the city gossip desk. You’re an out-of-towner, so you won’t have the contacts, but we might be able to offer you a probationary position. If you’re interested, we’d like you to come to Toronto for an interview. How about next Wednesday?”
Meredith didn’t have to check her calendar to know she was free.
Chapter Thirty-three
Molly Smith placed a small plastic vase full of yellow tulips on the fresh grass. Andy’s grave was neat and tidy—Lucky came every day, to pull weeds or clip the grass around the headstone or tidy the small hosta she’d planted in the shade of a leafy maple. But mostly she came just to sit on the lawn, wrapped in silence and her own thoughts.
The sun shone hot on Smith’s bare head and the trees burst with blossoms and new leaves. Mounds of tulips and daffodils lined the pathways crisscrossing the cemetery, and the newly mowed grass was the color of emeralds. High in the branches of a cottonwood a hidden bird chirped, and the air was heavy with the welcome scent of spring.
She’d stopped here before going into work, wanting to talk to her dad about her future. Over the past weeks, she’d had a lot of time to think about the direction she wanted for her life.
She and Adam had gone to Whistler for a few days of late spring skiing and quiet nights around the fireplace. She’d considered talking things over with him, but held back. She was only twenty-seven years old, Adam was thirty-four, and she’d come to the difficult decision that, at this time in her life, building her career was more important than finding a mate. Watching her mom trying to be strong, but breaking down at Andy’s funeral, Molly finally admitted to herself that she just wasn’t able to commit herself and her entire life to Adam in the powerful, all-encompassing way her parents had to each other. She’d send her resume off to Toronto, put some feelers out to other big cities, and if she got a bite, well then she’d just have to tell Adam she needed to leave and let things fall as they may.
When they got back from Whistler, she gathered her courage and went around to the house in the woods to tell her mother she was going to look for a job outside B.C. But before she could get the words out, her brother Sam called with the news that he’d been offered a big promotion, requiring moving his family to Scotland for two years.
Smith swallowed her own words. She couldn’t leave Lucky alone, not yet.
Plenty of time in the years to come.
She’d been investigated for killing Charles Frederick Bassing, and found to be acting in self-defense. Case closed, no further action. She was seei
ng the psychologist the department used, and thought she was putting up a good front of getting over it, but in her own head she wasn’t ready to let the matter go.
Did she have to kill him? She didn’t know.
She’d gone over the scene in her mind hundreds, thousands, of times, watching it play out from every angle. What else could she have done? What else should she have done? Bassing had been armed with only a baseball bat; the autopsy showed that his right arm was broken so he wouldn’t have been able to wield the bat with any accuracy or force. The police were in strength outside; John Winters and Sergeant Caldwell were in the house, guns drawn, before Bassing hit the floor.
Charlie had been coming toward her. His ugly face still sneering, irate, full of self-justification, fury, hatred. Hatred of her, hatred of women, hatred of anyone who got in his way. In her mind she’d seen Christa’s battered body being loaded onto the ambulance, seen the rat impaled to her door, her car trashed.
No more, she’d thought, and she pulled the trigger.
“Talk to you later, Dad.” She leaned over to run her fingers across the fresh carving in the cool headstone, then straightened up, put her hat on her head, and walked out of the cemetery.
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