Jessie Black Legal Thrillers Box Set 1

by Larry A Winters

  “Drive away!” Kristen said.

  “I’m asking you nicely,” Earl said. “You look like a nice kid. You don’t really want to hurt anyone, do you? Put down the gun.”

  “Kristen, listen to the—” Earl’s eyes snapped to Jack’s and he shook his head. It took Jack a moment to realize Kristen did not know he was a cop. As far as Kristen knew, he was a harmless taxi driver. If only that harmless taxi driver could maneuver closer to her....

  Jack said, “We haven’t ... uh ... paid him yet.”

  Kristen’s eyes found Jack’s and he almost recoiled from her hateful stare.

  “Pay him and tell him to drive away.”

  Jack reached slowly into his back pocket, withdrew his wallet. He held it up where Kristen could see it.

  “How much do we owe you?”

  Earl didn’t miss a beat. “Eleven ninety-five.”

  Kristen watched warily as Earl began to walk around the taxi.

  “Where did you get that gun?” Jack said. Her gaze snapped back to him.

  “From a friend,” she said. “You meet a lot of interesting people in a mental hospital. You should know that.”

  Ramsey sniffed. “Do you smell something?”

  “Shut up.” Kristen jabbed the gun harder against his temple.

  Earl cleared the side of the taxi. Something in his walk must have triggered an alarm, because the girl said, “Stop there.”

  Still too far away to rush her. Earl gave Jack a look, and he cursed silently. This was about to get messy.

  “Kristen,” Jack said, “please put the gun down while you still can.”

  “Or what?”

  In a smooth, rapid motion, Earl drew his gun from its concealed holster. “Drop your weapon now!”

  Kristen’s eyes popped wide with surprise, but she kept the revolver against Ramsey’s head. “Do you even know who this is? He killed my parents!” She looked from Earl to Ramsey and her face twisted. “Admit it. Admit it!”

  Ramsey pressed his lips together.

  She cocked the revolver.

  “Drop the weapon now!” Earl said.

  “There’s a fire.” Ramsey spoke as if oblivious to his peril. His nostrils twitched.

  Kristen snarled at him, looked like she might actually pull the trigger, but before she could, Ramsey brought his elbow up and slammed it into her stomach, driving the wind out of her. Then his hand flew up, slapped the gun from her grasp. It landed in the snow with a soft thump.

  Earl charged forward and kicked her gun further along the curb, then—keeping his own gun aimed at her—opened the passenger-side door and leaned into the taxi. He popped the glove compartment, and retrieved a pair of handcuffs.

  “You’re in a lot of trouble, girl.”

  Ramsey looked at Jack. “I need to go.”

  “What? Go where?”

  He didn’t answer. He ran.

  “Christ Jesus.” Earl fastened the handcuffs to Kristen’s wrists. “Normally I would secure your hands behind your back, but given the circumstances”—he shot Jack a reproachful look—“I think cuffing you in the front will be good enough.”

  Kristen’s eyes locked on Jack. “How can you live with yourself?”

  “No matter what you think, Frank Ramsey is an innocent man. If you’re lucky, he won’t press charges against you. It would certainly be within his rights to—”

  Earl turned on him. “Shut up or I’ll cuff you, too.”

  “But—”

  “I said shut up.” He leaned into the car and withdrew a walkie-talkie. “Guess I can turn this on now, since I don’t need to play taxi driver no more.” Clicking a button, he said, “Earl here. No sense staying silent—”

  The noise that burst from the walkie-talkie sounded like pure pandemonium.

  Jack saw his own fear mirrored in Earl’s face.

  Something had gone wrong.

  65

  Frank Ramsey realized, as he pounded over the snow-crusted street, that he had not run—really run—in over a year. He had learned to live in boxes. His cell, the exercise cage, the stall in which he learned to shower handcuffed. He had forgotten what a pleasure it was to stretch every muscle and fly. Even on this slushy surface. Legs pumping. Arms pistoning. Lungs burning as he sucked the frigid air down his throat.

  Free.

  How easy it would be to just keep running. Run until he reached the grid of the city and then disappear. No one could stop him. The jury had found him innocent. And the cops? The lawyers? He owed these people nothing—these people who had stomped his life to dust. Fuck them.

  Midway through a quiet intersection, the blazing house appeared on his right.

  He staggered to a halt, his breathing ragged. It was the Dillard house. He could see that plain enough. And he was running again—running up Overlook Lane, toward the house—even before he realized what he was doing.

  The fire drew his eyes until he was running almost blindly, his field of vision narrowed to the flames poking through the windows, the smoke billowing into the night. The fire had begun upstairs—he could see that right away. It was a bad one, too. No carelessly forgotten cigarette had caused this one. Some sort of explosive.

  Cops swarmed the lawn, but no firefighters had arrived yet. Ramsey grabbed the closest man. “Anyone inside?”

  The man nodded, his face sweaty and frantic. “Three people in the foyer. One upstairs. The one upstairs is dead, we think, but—”

  Ramsey pushed past him, and the familiar crush of heat engulfed him. It was only going to get worse when he went inside.

  And he was going to go inside.

  You don’t owe them anything!

  Someone had left the front door open. Before he reached it, he dropped to the ground and rolled. The snow soaked his hair, his khaki pants and wool coat, but he knew the sogginess would not last long.

  The moment he charged inside, a mist surrounded him as his clothes steamed. He covered his face. Flames seared his knuckles and the backs of his hands. Through the spaces between his fingers he saw three people on the floor, half buried in rubble that had come down from the upper story.

  One was a man he didn’t recognize. His head was caved in, and blood and brains steamed on his corpse. The other two were still alive. Jessica Black and Mark Leary.

  He stopped, but only for a second.

  “Come on!” He grabbed the prosecutor’s arm, but she resisted him.

  “We’re stuck, and Leary’s leg is broken!”

  Ramsey cursed. If he had his gear—fire retardant, a suit, an axe—digging them free would take only minutes. But with his bare hands?

  Forget them.

  How many nights had he fantasized about killing these two people? The man who had arrested him for a crime he didn’t commit and the woman who had prosecuted him for it and recommended the death penalty.

  Let them die.

  He dropped to his knees. Thrust his hands into the pile of rubble.

  “Can you get us out?” Jessie said. A coughing fit doubled her over.

  He put a hand on her back, pushed her down. “Keep your face near the floor. More air.”

  The pile consisted mostly of plaster chunks from the ceiling, but a few wooden beams had fallen as well. These had landed on Black’s legs. The jagged edges had jammed into her calves. Trying to yank her out would shred her legs to bloody ribbons. Next to her, Leary looked like he’d gone into shock. Ramsey had seen it before. Loss of fluids caused the blood pressure to drop, not enough blood reached the brain, and the victim fainted. Ramsey leaned over him, studied the blue tinge of his lips, the moist gleam of his skin. Fuck. “How long has he been out?”

  “A couple minutes.”

  “Brace yourself. This is probably going to hurt.” He pushed his hands into the pile again and gripped one of the larger beams. Sharp spears of broken wood popped free of the meat of Black’s calf. She screamed. He grabbed another beam, pulling until his arms throbbed.

  Outside, the wail of sirens approached.<
br />
  “Thank God,” she said.

  He ignored her. The second beam had stabbed deeper into her leg. He grunted, pulled, but the other end of the beam had jammed into the pile of plaster and would not budge. He turned to that side of the pile, grabbed chunks of the crumbling white plaster, threw handfuls of it across the room. The beam slid half an inch out of her leg. Ramsey grabbed it and yanked it the rest of the way out. She screamed again.

  He ran back to the door and sucked in a lungful of air. Two fire engines and a police car swerved to a stop in front of the house. He held up his arm, two fingers extended, until he’d caught their attention, then he returned to the lawyer and the cop on the floor.

  He pulled Jessie Black free of the debris, the ability to lift an injured person returning to him as if he’d never had a break from his profession, and carried her.

  “Frank Ramsey—is that you?” Bryan Tomko leaned over him, wiped his face with a wet cloth. “Holy shit.”

  Ramsey realized he was lying on his back on a gurney. “How’ve you been, Tomko?” His lips were cracked, his tongue blistered. Speaking was painful.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “You know ... fighting fires.” He reached for Tomko’s arm and leveraged himself off of the gurney. The Dillard house still smoldered, but it looked like the fire was defeated.

  Tomko laughed, at first uneasily, then with what looked like genuine happiness. He embraced Ramsey, squeezed him. “The Frank-Man’s back!”

  Ramsey coughed and patted his shoulder. The year the police had arrested Ramsey, Tomko had been a nervous rookie. The intervening time had made a man of him—his hug was as strong as a grizzly’s. “Yeah, I’m back.”

  Tomko let him go, and turned to another firefighter coming around the front of one of the trucks. “Yo, Donny, you’re never gonna believe who’s here!”

  Tomko took a step toward his friend, and Ramsey was able to see past him. His eyes met those of a man watching him from across the street.

  Woody Butler. Or whatever the hell his real name was.

  Then Woody turned, and lumbered into the gloom between the houses. Ramsey bolted after him.

  66

  Woody watched the scene, trying to gauge the effect of the bomb he’d placed in the Dillard bedroom. Paramedics tended to two people on stretchers—he thought they were Jessica Black and Mark Leary, though he couldn’t be sure—and loaded two more, their faces covered by sheets, into an ambulance. One of these was almost certainly the cop he’d shot in the back. Incapacitated in the bedroom, he would have taken the full force of the explosion. The other dead one was probably the cop who’d come running with Black when the shit hit the fan. They would all have died if not for Ramsey’s intervention, which made no sense to Woody. In his experience, psychotic murderers rarely experienced the urge to risk their own lives to rescue their enemies.

  The idea that Ramsey was not a killer, that he was actually innocent—that was ridiculous.

  Then Ramsey spotted him.

  Fuck.

  Woody turned and ran in the opposite direction of the smoldering house, through a suburban yard, past a swing-set. He could hear Ramsey pursuing him, could hear the clomps of his shoes striking the snow. Woody plunged into the woods at the back of the yard. Branches raked at his arms and face. Roots rose from the snowy floor to trip him. His fingers itched to grab the revolver from his belt, pivot, and blow Ramsey’s head off. But the man was too close, too big. What if Ramsey launched himself at him, drove Woody to the ground before he could get a shot off? He didn’t dare stop running, even to look over his shoulder. He crashed through the last of the trees and emerged in someone’s backyard.

  Close behind him, he could hear Ramsey tearing his way through the trees like an enraged gorilla.

  Then he heard other noises, ahead of him.

  “We need to take her back to the hospital.” A familiar male voice.

  “What hospital?” Gruff, the voice of a corrections officer. Or a cop.

  “Kristen’s a patient at the Philadelphia Center for Inclusive Treatment.”

  “You mean the nuthouse?”

  “I’m not going back there!” A girl’s voice, shrill.

  Woody threw his remaining energy into his legs. A car came into view—a yellow taxi—and standing beside it, three people. Jack Ackerman was looking at his watch, his expression as shifty as ever. Kristen Dillard, her hands handcuffed in front of her, scowled at the ground. And a man holding a gun watched both of them—definitely a cop.

  They turned as one to stare at him. Woody did not waste time. Panting, he yanked his own gun from his belt, aimed it at the cop, and fired. The cop’s head jerked backward and he dropped.

  “Jesus!”

  Ackerman jumped in front of Kristen. As if Woody had any intention of shooting her. As far as he was concerned, she was the only innocent party in this fiasco.

  Ackerman, on the other hand, was far from innocent. Rachel Pugh, Elliot Williams, Amber—Woody had killed all of them because of a promise made by Ackerman. And then Ackerman had turned around and set him up.

  He raised the gun to fire.

  The roar behind him made him lower the gun and run. Ramsey barreled toward him, hands bunched into fists. Woody barely had time to race past Ackerman, sliding in the snowy grass, and grab Kristen Dillard’s arm. He shoved the barrel of his gun against her ear.

  “Try that again and I’ll kill this bitch!” Even as he spoke the words, he knew it wasn’t a bluff. Innocent or not, he’d shoot her if that’s what it took.

  Ramsey skidded to a stop next to Ackerman. His face looked like it had been smeared with charcoal. The ends of his hairs were singed. His clothing was burned, slashed, ragged. His chest heaved with labored breathing.

  “Let her go,” Ramsey said.

  Ackerman, looking from one man to the other, nodded. “Come on, Woody. She’s been through enough.”

  Woody jabbed the gun harder into her ear. She let out a little whine. “Where is the fucking briefcase?”

  “I don’t know,” Ramsey said. “I never did. I’m not the man who took it.”

  Standing here in the cold, a seventeen-year-old girl in one hand and a gun in the other, he knew Ramsey was telling the truth. But part of him wouldn’t accept it—couldn’t accept it—because that meant that Bob Dillard’s research was just as lost now as it had been two years ago. That meant that everything he had done for Michael, he had done for nothing.

  “Let her go,” Ramsey said.

  Ackerman, no doubt thinking himself sly, was moving slowly closer to them. Woody would have laughed if he hadn’t been so damn pissed off.

  He took the gun from Kristen’s ear and aimed it at the lawyer. “You think you can lie to me, manipulate me?” He put both hands on the gun and cocked the hammer. Ackerman’s face paled to a shade slightly whiter than the snow.

  Woody’s feet slid out from under him. It was the girl—Kristen Dillard. The bitch shoved him. One of his hands released the gun to break his fall, and before he hit the ground she’d wrenched the revolver from his other hand. He squeezed his eyes closed, one cheek buried in the icy snow, and waited for her to pull the trigger.

  He opened his eyes. Turned his head. She wasn’t pointing the gun at him.

  “Don’t do it, Kristen.” Ackerman looked like he wanted to move, but didn’t dare.

  The revolver trembled in her hands. The chain linking the handcuffs rattled between her wrists. She aimed the cocked revolver at Ramsey.

  “You killed my mother.”

  “No.” He had his hands in the air. “I didn’t. I swear to God. I—”

  “Shut up!”

  Woody’s finger touched something warm and slick in the snow. He recoiled, then realized he had landed only about a foot from the body of the cop he’d shot. And that cop had been holding a gun.

  “I don’t know why you think I’m the man who did those awful things, but I’m not. I don’t know how I can possibly prove it to you. It’s t
he truth.”

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  Woody spotted the gun near the hand of the dead cop. He moved his arm slowly, pushing his hand toward the gun. One finger, two touched the cold, textured grip. He tugged the gun into his grasp.

  Ackerman saw him. “Look out!”

  Woody brought his arm up, aimed at Ramsey—

  He heard the blast of his own revolver and felt the bullet punch through his chest. The girl—the fucking girl had shot him. She stood above him, aiming his own gun at him. He could tell from her eyes—empty, like those of the more hardened inmates at Huntington—that she would not hesitate to shoot him again.

  He dropped the cop’s gun. Ackerman darted forward, grabbed it off the ground. At the same time, the look in the girl’s eyes—the jailhouse look—drowned in a well of tears.

  “It’s okay, Kristen,” the lawyer said. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

  Shoot him, you fucking spineless bitch. Shoot them both!

  She handed Ackerman the revolver without a word. Then she sank to her knees, crying. Ackerman crouched beside her, placed his hand on her shoulder.

  Ramsey approached, shoes crunching through ice. Woody stared up at him and coughed.

  Blood splashed the snow, steamed there. Ramsey leaned forward and stared at the dark patch. His expression was maddeningly blank, unreadable.

  “What are you— What are you staring at, you son of a—” Woody coughed again. More blood blasted past his teeth into the snow. The black pool actually hissed as it melted the snow beneath it.

  Then he understood. She’d punctured his lung. The goddamn weepy bitch had shot him in his chest and punctured one of his fucking lungs.

  Ramsey was staring at a dead man.

  67