by George Wier
“Maybe.”
“Got your key?”
“Nope.”
“You want your swords and armor and shit, we’ll have to cut the lock off.”
“Let’s do it,” Shelby said.
Sheppard disappeared to find his bolt cutters, leaving Shelby standing alone before the locked storage shed door.
Quinn might expect him to run, to get as far away as possible. After all, what fleeing suspect would stick around? At the moment he would be going through a list of Shelby’s family, friends and any other contact he could think of, and he would have a squad of men hitting the addresses of each one if the list was long—which it wasn’t. By now Quinn would be talking to Rachel.
Squire gave a little yelp.
“This should do the trick,” Sheppard said, returning with three-foot long bolt cutters. Shelby stepped back, making room. One smooth clip and the bolt was undone.
“Cake,” Sheppard said.
Shelby removed the dead lock and slid the door open. The two boxes bore a thin veil of dust. Seven years.
“What’re you thinking?” Sheppard asked.
“I’m not sure. I don’t think so well these days.”
“A man with nothing to lose and no plan is a dangerous thing.”
Shelby nodded. His eyes came to rest on the jutting hilt of a sword, the one item among all of these that didn’t fit well in a standard box.
“Hold this one, will you?” Shelby asked, handing off the pup to Sheppard.
“Yeah.” Sheppard said, taking the dog.
Shelby reached for the hilt and pulled the weapon loose.
“Neat shit,” Sheppard said.
“Yeah.” Shelby hefted the blade and turned it about in the dying sunlight behind him. “Neat shit.”
“You gonna tell me the story?”
“You still got that old coffee pot? And that fifth of bourbon?”
“It’s a newer coffee pot. But yeah, it’s the same fifth. You can have as much as you like. I’ll just need you to leave enough to keep me tempted.”
“Haven’t touched a drop, have you?” Shelby asked.
“If I had, I’d be dead right now. I assure you.”
“Yeah. Here, help me with these boxes.”
Sheppard already knew everything there was to know about the Holloway killing. Shelby’s few friends tended to shy away from the subject. “We won’t re-cross stony ground,” Quinn would sometimes say. Stony ground. Shelby never let Quinn know that every time he said it, it brought to mind images of a cemetery.
They were in Sheppard’s office. Squire had taken to his new post by curling himself into a ball in front of the closed door. The door was locked and the sign was turned around. Shelby regarded it for a moment as he listened to coffee perking and tried to remember if he had ever mentioned to another soul where he had trained in his martial arts. No one that he could recall. Sheppard’s was his go-to place. Shelby had been mildly surprised that it still existed.
Sheppard took a seat in his squeaky office chair, opened the bottom drawer of his city-surplus desk and pulled out a fifth of very old Bushmills single malt whiskey and handed it to Shelby.
“Criminy. This stuff is from 1948!” Shelby said. “It would be a crime to drink this.”
“Well, you’re running from the law, right? So be a good criminal and drink. I’ve always wanted to open it, but never had the nerve.”
Shelby studied Sheppard for a moment, and the man met his gaze, unblinking. That decided him. He reached across Sheppard’s desk, took his letter opener and neatly split the seal around the neck of the bottle. The lead Bushmills seal was there. Shelby gave the cork a wrench with his right hand and the cork popped free. He sniffed the alcohol.
“Nice. Want to smell?”
Sheppard shook his head, leaned back in his chair and propped his feet up on his desk. “So,” he said. “Start talking.”
Shelby talked. He spoke of years of solitude and not wanting to leave the house, of desperate phone calls to the city pleading with them not to cut off his electricity when he didn’t have enough money to pay the bill. He talked frankly of visits from his one friend from the old days, Quinn Thompson, and ruminations about Rachel and women in general. He never once mentioned the stuff of his nightmares—of Aiden Holloway and the last fleeting seconds of his brief life, or of the senior Holloway and his little visit. Sheppard had already heard those stories. And then, finally, once he had a full cup of coffee spiked with seventy year-old whiskey in his hands, he got down to business.
“I’m surprised the jump didn’t kill you,” Sheppard said.
“It should have,” both men said together, and each found a reason to smile.
“How do you figure the gun into this?” Sheppard asked.
“I can’t. I can’t wrap my meager wits around it. Ballistics is a separate department. Those people know their stuff. There’s this one lady who has been there since Methuselah was a pup, and I would bank on her findings any day. If she says the bullet came from my gun, then it had to.”
“Only you haven’t been out of your house, and your gun hasn’t been fired in over ten years.”
Shelby nodded and swished coffee and whiskey through his teeth.
“Yeah.”
“Well, there’s one question you haven’t asked me,” Sheppard said.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a little trick I learned a long time ago whenever I would run into some red tape dragon or a problem with no solution. It worked one time with a Judge Advocate General who was going to feed me to the dogs.”
“I’m dying to hear it,” Shelby said.
“The question you have to ask is, ‘If you were me, what would you do?’ But, you’re too polite to ask it.”
“No I’m not. I assure you. Let me prove it to you. If you were me, what would you do?”
“That’s better. Okay, first, I would find out how a gun that didn’t fire a bullet killed a man you haven’t seen in over a decade. Second, I would find out who has it in for you, that is, aside from that kid’s father.”
Shelby nodded. It was the closest anyone had come to broaching the subject with him in a very long time, apart from the geezer in the pet store.
“I know,” Sheppard continued, “that those boxes over there are the kid’s stuff. It seems to me the old man wouldn’t have given it to you unless he was trying to bury his son, once and for all. I’m pretty sure you can cross him off the list.”
“I don’t have any enemies,” Shelby said.
“Hmph. What you have is your head in the fucking sand and your ass in the air with a target painted on it.”
“Thanks.”
Sheppard raised his cup of coffee. Cheers.
“Okay,” Shelby said, “so how am I supposed to find out anything if I’m running from the law?”
“Rephrase that.”
“Sorry. Um...what would you do?”
“If it was me, and I was too fool-headed enough not to hop on a slow boat to Singapore or the Gobi Desert or something, then I would change my looks. I would blend in. I’d be right underfoot and working the network and finding out every damned thing I could. That’s what I would do.”
“Blend in. Work the network.” Shelby glanced down at Squire, who lifted his head and shivered. “I need to find some dog food.”
“Got a sack of dry in the closet. K-9 died a year ago. Maybe the food is still good.”
“Thanks. Got a place for me to bunk?”
“Just the do-jo. It’s yours. You’ll have to fix the shower. The hot water doesn’t work.”
“Where do you bunk down these days?” Shelby asked.
“I got a little house in the old neighborhood. I’d invite you, but you’d stick out like a sore thumb, and the next thing you know you’d be riding downtown again in the back of a police car.”
“Or the trunk.”
“Or the trunk.”
“Thanks, Sheppard. I appreciate it.” Shelby tossed off the remai
nder of his coffee.
Sheppard pushed the bottle toward him. “Have some more. Skip the coffee, if you want to get any sleep tonight. Just drink this. But not all of it.”
“We thrive on temptation, don’t we?” Shelby asked.
“You haven’t been tempted by anything in a long time. Maybe that’s what you need. Tell you what, tomorrow we’ll spar. Feed your dog, take a cold shower and get some sleep tonight. I’ll bring you some clothes and supplies in the morning. Meantime, be thinking.”
“I don’t believe I’ll be able to stop doing that. Not for a minute.”
Sheppard nodded. “All right, it’s starting to get dark. I’ll lock the gate on the way out.”
“What do I do if somebody tries to break in?”
“Haven’t had a break-in in a long time. Not much to steal. But, if that does happen...don’t call the cops. Handle it, then call me.”
Shelby chuckled. “Same number?”
“Yep. What are you going to do with that?” Sheppard pointed to the boxes of armor and weapons.
“I have no idea, but you’re looking at all of my worldly possessions.”
“Aside from your keen intellect?” Sheppard asked, and smirked.
Shelby nodded.
CHAPTER FIVE
Anyone watching the old woman as she made her way around along the line of rose bushes beneath the high stone wall, pulling those buds that had given up their petals during the recent rainstorm so that more could grow, would have dismissed her as no more than what she appeared to be; an old woman well into her retirement years and enjoying the gloaming of life while the sun was still in the sky. They would have been dead wrong.
A long shadow fell upon her, and she turned.
“What is it, Sully?”
Sully was not merely tall; he was two heads and two shoulders above most anyone else. She had loved him once, long ago, but that emotion had been so much flame with no real heat, best snuffed out before it could get out of control. Her mother had seen to that. Even though she was twenty years in the grave, her presence abided—here in the rose garden, under the veranda, and particularly in the house. Sully hadn’t set well with the old battleaxe. It was a good thing she was dead.
He had been a basketball player in the old days. It was 1960, and he had come over from McCallum High School in North Austin to play against the William B. Travis High School Rebels. She was a cheerleader then, and was instantly smitten by him. At one point he had been fouled and wound up sliding out of bounds right beneath her, her smooth, bare legs to either side of him, the back of his head on the floor, looking up at her in surprise. She knew he was looking up her knee-length skirt, and then his eyes met hers and he smiled and said, “Howdy, Miss.”
She helped him to his feet and he went on to score his free-throw. It was the hottest, sexiest moment she had ever experienced in her life.
After the game she saw him at the Pig Stand, off of South Congress Avenue, the local hamburger and soda joint and the nightly hangout for the kids from Travis, a mile away. Sully was sucking down a strawberry malted through a straw when his eyes tracked lazily toward Lily and fell upon her. She almost collapsed onto the parking lot. He pushed his butt up off the truck of the car he’d been leaning against and walked over to her. They started asking each other a million questions and the conversation became a rapid-fire of question, answer, counter-question, counter-answer-leading-to-another-question, and so on. In it, he admitted to her that he was the chief instigator of his team’s senior prank; that of burning a large letter M onto the front lawn of Travis High two days before. He’d done the dastardly deed in the middle of the night with a can of gas and a book of matches. She told him that was the damnedest thing she’d ever heard, and he laughed. The conversation between them ended abruptly when he pulled her behind the Pig Stand near the grease barrels where the two of them began making out. The encounter was so impromptu and so hard and fast that a quick end had to be put to the coupling lest she end up going all the way right there with people talking trash right around the corner. Lily began hitting and him and pushing herself away from him, which was an impossible situation because he was holding her up in the air and had her against the back of the brick structure, where she could feel her hair becoming entangled with the coarse brickwork. He set her down, laughing at her, and at first she was visibly upset, but after a few seconds, as she realized he didn’t understand the gravity of the situation—either he couldn’t understand or he didn’t care, which amounted to essentially the same thing—she began laughing as well. It was the initial cement that started them off down the road together. They were a flash in the pan; she all the seriousness, him the joking fun, and together they were a volatile chemical mixture that somehow worked. Sully left that night with her phone number.
He called her one evening during summer break three weeks later, ostensibly to talk to her about her college plans. They made a date out of it. When he brought her home that night, the couple was met at the door by one of her mother’s bouncers from the Kitty Klub. A nasty fight ensued in which the bouncer, a rough, solidly-built goon, had to be taken to the hospital and given a dozen stitches for his troubles. After that, regardless of what happened between them, Lily knew she would keep Sully around. The man was unstoppable.
Now, completely bald and in his early seventies, he was no less the powerhouse he’d been then. Sully had been a constant in her life since those long gone early years, even the brief ten years when Ben, Lily’s husband—one of the few men of which her mother approved.
“Miss Lily, it’s about Rachel.”
“What about her? Has she called?”
“No, ma’am. It’s just...I’ve been monitoring her as you instructed. It seems her former husband has gone missing.”
“Shelby?”
“Yeah. He was taken in for questioning about a murder case, but he overpowered a policeman at the station and escaped.”
“What’s this got to do with Rachel?” Lily Ward asked.
“The police are questioning her. I wanted you to know.”
Lily took the handful of buds and flung them over the high stone wall, then dusted her hands off. When she turned back to Sully, her face was beet-red.
“Now you listen and you listen good. I want you to watch her real close. You hear? You follow her, but at a respectable distance. If Shelby comes around, either turn him in or shoot him. I don’t much care which. If you have to shoot him, don’t do it in front of Rachel. She loved the poor sack of crap.”
“Yes, ma’am. If she sees me, she’ll know it’s you riding herd on her.”
Lily Ward took a step toward the tall man, and he backed up. She took another step until the shadow of his head shaded her eyes from the sun.
Sully was the last of what her daughter had called ‘Momma’s Muscle.’ In years past there were three of them—she couldn’t recall the others’ names. Sully was loyal to her; the others she didn’t feel she could trust overmuch. They were unremarkable men, but for their uncanny ability to carry out her orders, no matter how ruthless. But Sully had remained with her. By God, the man was eternal. He lived in the guesthouse next to the creek and incessantly tinkered with his electronic equipment: his surveillance bugs, camera, and computers. Also, the man read bad spy novels, of all things. To look at him, it was surprising that he even knew how to read.
“Sully. How long have you worked for me?”
“Almost forty years.” He swallowed, and his Adam’s Apple bobbed up and down.
“Then you know everything you need to know about me, and about my daughter. But since you are so insistent to have clear and discreet instructions, then please allow me to give them to you.”
Sully nodded. His eyes were big, which meant he was paying careful attention.
“Good. So, you are not to be seen by Rachel or by anyone else, and especially not the police. You are not to do anything by either action or inaction that will result in harm to my daughter. You will immediately kill anyone wh
o attempts to harm her in any way. You are to report to me at least twice a day by phone to let me know what is happening. In the meantime, you will not imbibe any alcoholic beverages. You will not engage a prostitute, you will not watch a sports game, you will not so much as play a game of checkers or work one of your damned word-find puzzles. Your sole purpose in life will be to make sure my daughter is safe. Your secondary purpose in life will to remain out of my hair as much as possible and try not to piss...me...off. Please nod to demonstrate to understanding.”
Sully nodded. “Miss Lily, I need to go get my gun.”
“All right. Go. Call me late tonight. It will be your first report.”
Sully nodded enthusiastically, turned and started to flee.
“Oh, and Sully—”
He stopped in his tracks and turned slowly.
“If you fail me in any way, I will find you and I will cut your throat and feed you to the pigs out at the farm.” She sighed. “I know I shouldn’t say things like that. It’s not very proper is it? But then again, you know how much I love my daughter.”
He nodded once, turned and ran.
“Go, boy,” she whispered to his back. “Fulfill the only use for which God, in his infinite wisdom, placed you upon the Earth.”
When Sully was gone, Lily Ward turned back to the roses and continued pulling spent buds. She hummed to a hymn as she moved slowly along.
This time Aiden Holloway isn’t toting a weapon that looks remark-ably like an AR15. Instead he has a sword and a dagger, both pointed at Shelby. Also, he has a twisted, joking grin on his face.
Shelby has both of his hands around the pommel of a heavy sword. The thing feels as though it weighs thirty pounds.
He brings the heavy sword upward, just as Sir Aiden lunges. The point of the sword strikes Shelby’s breastplate and is deflected aside. Likewise the dagger makes no more than a pinprick dent in the lower portion of the breastplate—that bit of armor covering his stomach and other vitals—and falls to the floor.
Shelby brings his sword back, and then forward and down in a slashing arc that splits Aiden Holloway’s head into equal halves. The two halves flop to the side and bounce. A fountain of blood is created.
