American PI

by Jude Hardin

  I left a little rubber on the pavement as I took a right out of the parking lot and headed for the PEAK house.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I was low on gas, so I stopped at a service station with a convenience store attached to it and pumped out twenty dollars’ worth of regular unleaded. When I walked inside to pay, I glanced down the potato chip aisle and noticed some shirts for sale on a rack. I needed one. I’d used mine to apply pressure to Shelby’s bleeding buttocks, and all I had on now was the tank top I’d been wearing underneath it.

  The gas station T-shirts were $3.99 each. Some of them were knockoffs, unauthorized versions of shirts sold at concerts back in the seventies and eighties. There was one that said Colt .45 from a show we did in Baton Rouge in 1986, but the only size they had was small. I settled for a plain black one, extra-large. I took it to the register and paid for it and my gasoline and left the store. The shirt was too big for me, but I wanted something that would cover my revolver when I slid it back onto my belt. It would be perfect for that.

  It was dark by the time I got to the fraternity house. The gravel lot behind the building was full, so I had to find a place on the street to park the Caprice. It took a while, and I ended up squeezing into a place three blocks away. I pulled out my cell, thinking I would give Laurie a call and let her know what was going on, but the battery was dead. I tossed the phone into the glove compartment, strapped on my .38, climbed out of the car and started walking. On my way, I passed a couple of guys going in the same direction. I figured they were students, Everett’s age or maybe a little younger. One of them wore a University of Florida football jersey, the other a blue polo.

  “Kind of hard to find a parking place around here,” I said.

  “There’s a party at the PEAK house,” Blue Polo said. “Nine kegs and a live band.”

  Football Jersey chimed in with a vulgar, demeaning, misogynistic reference to the young women they were expecting to be at the party. I didn’t know how accurate their assessment was, but they made it sound as though the night would undoubtedly evolve into a wild, drunken orgy. It reminded me of what Laurie had said about the Phi Epsilon Alpha Kappa fraternity. In my book, these guys were rejects for sure. Not only from every other fraternity on campus, but from the human race.

  They got me thinking.

  If my little girl hadn’t died in the plane crash, she would have turned fifteen this year, just a couple of years away from starting college herself. She was my baby, and every young woman going to the party at the PEAK house was somebody’s baby too. Every one of them had someone who cared about them, someone who would be horrified by what Blue Polo and Football Jersey were talking about. Someone who would happily wring their necks for saying such things.

  Kids grow up and they develop an interest in sex, and that’s the way it should be. It’s natural. It’s why we’ve survived as a species. But to me, at that moment, Football Jersey and Blue Polo seemed like some sort of predators. They were out for one thing, and one thing only, and I couldn’t just walk on by without giving them an earful from the daddy inside me.

  “You guys need to remember that your mothers were young women at one time too,” I said. “And maybe you have sisters, female cousins, whatever. Think about them, and then think about a couple of mouth-breathing, tongue-lolling, slimeball losers following them around as if they were dogs in heat.”

  The insults I’d hurled at them didn’t seem to register. That’s how stupid these guys were.

  “Anybody touches my sister, I’ll kill them,” Blue Polo said.

  I stopped in front of him and faced him down. “Just remember,” I said. “Someone feels the exact same way about every girl you’re going to talk to tonight. Think about that and try to show a little respect.”

  I turned and walked on ahead, hoping I’d planted at least a tiny seed of conscience into their pea brains.

  When I got a little closer to the fraternity house, I could hear that the band had already started playing. I walked around to the front of the building and mounted the porch, wondering if I was doing the right thing. Technically, I’d signed off on the job of finding Everett Harbaugh. His parents weren’t paying me anymore. I was running on my own dime now.

  Not that the money was ever the most important thing. Everett had seemed like a fine young man during our brief encounter, and I’d found myself genuinely caring about what happened to him. Still, some people might have said that I didn’t have a horse in the race anymore. That the police and the FBI were more than capable of bringing this to a conclusion—satisfying or otherwise—without my help.

  But Bradley Harbaugh had mentioned something over the phone, something that had sent a chill up my spine. That bit about Everett’s favorite food combination. It was probably nothing, but I had to check it out.

  There was a cluster of young men standing out on the porch, mingling and talking and trying to look thoughtful and sophisticated. They wore khaki pants and expensive designer polo shirts and topsiders, almost as though it was some kind of uniform. They all had disposable red plastic cups in their hands, and some of them were smoking cigarettes. As I approached, they looked at me as if I’d just climbed out of an alien spaceship.

  I didn’t belong there. I was about two decades too old.

  “I’m looking for John Patterson,” I said.

  “He’s up in his room,” one of the guys said. “Studying. On a Friday. What a geek.”

  The others laughed.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I opened the door and walked inside. A bunch of people were milling around in the front room. Again, everyone was carrying a drink. It was mostly guys talking to guys and girls talking to girls, but I figured that would change once the alcohol kicked in.

  I climbed the stairs and navigated the hallway to room 212. I knocked. Waited. Knocked again. The peephole darkened. I stood there for a few seconds staring at the knob, expecting it to turn. Nothing happened. I cupped my hand around my ear and pressed it against the door, but the band was still playing and I couldn’t hear anything.

  I waited until the song ended, and then I listened again. I heard voices. Male. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but I could tell that there were two of them, that it wasn’t just John Patterson talking to someone on the phone.

  The band started playing again. They’d cranked the volume up a notch. They were even louder than before. I knocked a third time, and when it became obvious that nobody was going to answer, I pulled my revolver from its holster and used my shoulder as a battering ram. Like a detective in an old black-and-white movie might have done, back in the day when men were men and doors were props.

  It was an overly aggressive move, but I’d been through a lot in the past couple of days and I didn’t feel like pussyfooting around. I knew that Patterson was in there, and I knew he was trying to hide something from me. Otherwise, he would have answered the door—which, in this case, was definitely not part of a movie set. It was solid and heavy and built to keep fire and Nicholas Colt on the other side of it. After the painful first impact with my shoulder, I decided to give my foot a try.

  The lock popped and the door swung inward.

  John Patterson was sitting on one of the beds. He was holding a shotgun, aiming it at my chest. It was an antique single-barrel, probably another family heirloom that had been passed down for generations. Personally, I would have been afraid to shoot the thing. I would have been afraid that it might blow up in my face.

  “Drop your gun and close the door,” Patterson said.

  I dropped my gun and closed the door. I didn’t have much of a choice. The shotgun might have been old, but the barrel was long and fat and menacing and pointed right at me. If Patterson decided to squeeze the trigger, that would be all she wrote. BLAMMO! I would be cut in half.

  “Where’s Everett?” I said.

  “Where do you think he is?”

  “I think he’s hiding inside one of those armoires. The same place he was the fi
rst time I came into this room.”

  “I guess you think you’re pretty clever, don’t you?” Patterson said.

  “What can I say? I get lucky sometimes.”

  “How did you know?” he said. “How could you possibly have known?”

  “I didn’t until just a little while ago, when Bradley Harbaugh mentioned the significance of Everett’s favorite food combination. There was a bag of corn chips and a can of root beer on the desk when I talked to you Wednesday, as if someone had been sitting there snacking. At the time, I assumed it was you. But it wasn’t. It was Everett. He’s been here all along, hasn’t he? He was devastated when he heard the news about his mother using a sperm bank to get pregnant, and he was furious with her for not telling him sooner. And when you think about it, who wouldn’t be angry about something like that? Everett’s whole life had been a lie, in a way. He was pissed, and all that rage kept simmering inside him until it reached a boiling point. He wanted to get his mother back, somehow, to get revenge on her for keeping the big secret for so long, so the two of you tossed some ideas around, and you cooked up this little kidnapping scheme with a twenty million dollar ransom. Everett knew his mother was good for the money, and he knew she would pay it to get him back safely. How am I doing so far?”

  “Pretty good,” Patterson said. “Please continue.”

  “So you came up with the kidnapping bit, but that wasn’t enough. Everett wanted the sperm donor to suffer too. You guys didn’t know his identity, but you knew the names of the other children he produced. You got all that from the Siblings Board website. When you saw that Philip Davenport had been murdered on the day he turned twenty, and that Stephanie Vowels’ twentieth birthday was coming up soon, the plan really started coming together. You guys decided to frame the sperm donor for the abduction, and the only way to do that was to frame him for murdering a couple of his other offspring. You wanted to make him look like a serial killer, methodically working his way down the list as each of them turned twenty. It didn’t matter that he would eventually be exonerated. It would disrupt his life in a major way for a while, and it would be the perfect diversion for the police, aimed at giving you and Everett plenty of time to take the money and run. And by golly, you almost got away with it. You would have, if Bradley Harbaugh hadn’t told me about Everett’s mad cravings for corn chips and root beer on the phone earlier.”

  “We’re still going to get away with it,” Patterson said. “You can’t stop us now.”

  One of the doors on the armoire to the left of me swung open, and Everett Harbaugh stepped out into the room.

  “Sorry it had to go down like this, Mr. Colt,” he said. “I really didn’t intend for anyone to get hurt.”

  “What about Stephanie Vowels?” I said. “Seems like she was the big loser in this whole deal. You drove down to Cocoa Beach, tied a rope around her neck, and dropped her off a bridge. You killed her to throw me and everyone else who might be looking for you off the trail.”

  Everett stared at the floor. He seemed to be ashamed of that one little detail.

  “You have to admit, it was a pretty cool plan,” Patterson said.

  “There’s nothing cool about murder,” I said.

  Everett looked up. “Anyway, what’s done is done. And John’s right. There’s no stopping us now. The money will be transferred soon, and we have a private plane waiting for us at a private airstrip. Next stop, Mexico.”

  “They’ll find you and extradite you,” I said. “You might be able to bribe your way through for a few years, but they’ll catch up with you eventually.”

  “Oh, we’re not going to stay in Mexico,” Patterson said. “That’s just the first leg of our trip. We have everything lined up to be in the Philippines by day after tomorrow. No extradition from there. With twenty million dollars at our disposal, we’re going to live like kings. We can buy our own island if we want to.”

  “So what are you going to do now?” I said. “Shoot me? The band downstairs is loud, but it’s not loud enough to mask a shotgun blast. And it’s going to be kind of hard to explain all the blood splatters on the wall.”

  Everett turned to Patterson. “That’s a good question,” he said. “What are we going to do with him?”

  Patterson set the shotgun down and grabbed one of the pillows from the bed. He stood and walked over and picked my revolver up off the floor.

  “Simple,” he said. “We’ll just shoot him with his own gun and leave him here. We’ll use the pillow for a silencer. I saw it on TV. Works like a charm. By the time someone comes in to check on the room, we’ll be long gone.”

  Beads of sweat dotted Everett’s forehead. He looked at his watch.

  “All right,” he said. “Go ahead and get it over with. We need to get out of here.”

  Patterson handed him the gun and the pillow.

  “I did the girl,” Patterson said. “It’s your turn.”

  Everett looked at the revolver, and then he looked at me. He swallowed hard. His hands were trembling, as was his upper lip. He wasn’t a killer. He was in this thing deep, but he hadn’t murdered anyone yet. Maybe he thought there was still hope for him to salvage some kind of life, even if he and Patterson ended up getting caught.

  “I can’t do this,” he said. “I have a better idea. Instead of killing him, we can just tie him up and gag him and leave him here. It’ll serve the same purpose. Nobody will find him until we’re long gone.”

  “We can’t take that chance,” Patterson said. “If someone does come in here before we’re off the continent, we need them to find a corpse. Not a private investigator who can tell them every detail about what we’ve done. Just aim and pull the trigger. It’s really easy. Then we can be on our way.”

  “If it’s so easy, then you do it.”

  “No. You said we were going to be equal partners in this thing. The only fair way is to split the risks along with the rewards. If we get caught, I’m not going to be the only one facing a murder charge.”

  Everett stared at the gun. He was still shaking, still thinking it over. He didn’t want to kill me, but he knew now that he had to. There was no other way. Either I died and the two of them made a clean getaway with twenty million dollars, or I lived and they risked serious prison time. Maybe even the death penalty. It wasn’t much of a dilemma, when you got down to it. He knew I had to die, and he knew Patterson wasn’t going to do the dirty work this time.

  Everett chewed on his bottom lip. He was breathing hard, practically panting. He wrapped the pillow around the .38 and aimed it at my face. I heard the bullet whistle past my left ear as I ducked and rammed him in the gut with my head. As all the air left his lungs and he doubled over in excruciating pain, I grabbed the gun and twisted it out of his hand, nearly taking his trigger finger along with it. I kneed him in the groin and then hammered his forehead with the butt of the revolver, opening a cut over his left eye. Bright red blood gushed from the wound, and he fell to the floor moaning and writhing. His eyes rolled back in his head as his body convulsed and then went limp. He was out cold. Or dead, maybe. I couldn’t tell for sure.

  While all that was happening, John Patterson should have gone for the shotgun. But he didn’t. He came after me instead, which told me that the shotgun probably wasn’t even loaded. I aimed my .38 downward at a forty-five degree angle, intending to shoot him in the leg, but before I could get a round off he slammed into me and pinned me against the top of one of the desks. It was the one on the left, the one I’d sat at the first time I’d come to the room. The one with the nice leather blotter and the antique letter opener.

  Patterson had a good grip on both of my wrists. He lifted my right arm and slammed it against the edge of the desk. A searing avalanche of white-hot agony coursed through me as my hand sprung open and the gun fell to the floor. If my arm wasn’t broken, it might as well have been. I couldn’t move my fingers, not even a little bit.

  Everett still hadn’t stirred. It was just the two of us, Patterson and me, engag
ed in hand-to-hand combat, and he was on top. He had the advantage, and he was physically stronger. And my right arm wasn’t working anymore. The only thing I had going for me was experience, but that wasn’t going to be enough. Not this time.

  The only way for me to win was to fight dirty.

  And that’s exactly what I planned to do.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “How does it feel to know you’re going to die?” Patterson said.

  I ignored the question.

  “Everett needs a doctor,” I said. “He’s hurt bad.”

  “Do I look concerned? Everett’s a wimp. I hope he’s dead. More money for me. I don’t need Everett anymore. Everything’s set. I’m going to be a millionaire, and there’s nothing you or anyone else can do to stop that from happening.”

  “You’re insane,” I said. “You’re the one who’s going to die tonight.”

  He leaned over to say something, but his face got a little too close to mine and I craned my neck forward and latched onto his nose with my teeth. His eyes bulged and he started grunting and screaming like a little kid. Instinctively, he let go of my wrists and tried to force my jaw open with his fingers. As he was doing that, I felt around on the desk with my left hand, the only one that was working at the time.

  I was hoping to wrap my fingers around the handle of the letter opener. I visualized grabbing the tool and jamming it into the side of Patterson’s neck. In that scenario, a fountain of blood squirted from his carotid artery, pulsing out in arcs and showering the walls and the desk and the ceiling with dripping dots of liquid crimson. In my fantasy, Patterson backed away from me, gurgling and clutching his throat, the pressurized leak in his neck slowing to a trickle now, the color draining from his face. He staggered in a circle for a few seconds, and then collapsed to the floor beside his fallen comrade.

  That was the climactic scene playing in my head as Patterson frantically tried to pry my teeth from the ripping, crunching clump of cartilage they were clamped down on. That was the action movie version, but that’s not what really happened.