American PI

by Jude Hardin

  I never got my hand on the letter opener. Instead, I found something cold and hard and heavy, something that almost seemed custom made to the contours of my hand. It wasn’t big, and it wasn’t small. You could have housed it in a peanut butter jar. I picked it up, saw its blurred shape with my peripheral vision. I’d noticed the piece before. It was a cast iron elephant with an antique copper finish, a coin bank being used for a paperweight. At least that’s what it was to most people. To me, at that moment, it was a first-rate skull buster.

  I slammed the elephant’s rear legs into the back of Patterson’s head, just behind his right ear. I couldn’t really see his eyes or the expression on his face, but I felt his fingers go slack, followed by the rest of him. He went limp on top of me, dead weight, his traumatized brain no longer controlling his body movements or—based on the warm wetness suddenly spreading over my right thigh—his bladder.

  I unclenched my teeth, turned my head to the side and spat out a thick salty wad of blood and skin and snot. I retched and hiccupped and dry heaved a few times, and then I shifted my weight and rolled Patterson off of me. He tumbled to the floor in a heap.

  My first thought was to call 911. All three of us needed medical attention. There wasn’t a landline in the room, but I figured Patterson had a cell phone. Mine, unfortunately, was back in the car with a dead battery.

  I slowly rose from my position on the desk, my lower spine wrenched from bending backwards and my right arm still practically useless from the pounding it had taken. I knelt on one knee, but before I could reach over and check Patterson’s pockets for a phone, a voice from behind me said, “Don’t move.”

  It was Everett. He had my gun.

  “Be careful with that,” I said. “It has a hair trigger.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do, Colt. I’m calling the shots now.”

  We were both talking loudly, practically shouting in order to be heard over the band. Everett’s face was covered with blood, as was the front of his shirt. He looked like something out of a horror movie.

  But he had the gun, so he was indeed calling the shots.

  “I have a question,” I said. “The other day when you came to my place, how did you know—”

  “That you were going to be drunk? That you would pass out on the table?”

  “Yeah. How did you know that?”

  “I didn’t. My mother has a prescription for a tranquilizer. I dropped one in your drink while you weren’t looking. It makes you really sleepy, especially when you mix it with alcohol.”

  “You poisoned me,” I said. “You could have killed me.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  I gestured toward the young man on the floor.

  “Your friend needs an ambulance,” I said.

  John Patterson looked even worse than Everett Harbaugh. Way worse. His nose was dangling loosely to one side, and there was a dark red puddle under his head. He was pale, and I couldn’t tell for sure if he was breathing or not.

  If I had been forced to guess, I would have said that he wasn’t.

  “He’s dead,” Everett said. “Anyone can see that. You and I are going to walk out of here together. We’re going to drive to the airstrip, and you’re going to fly to Mexico with me. Then I’ll let you go.”

  “You’re taking me hostage?” I said. “That’s not what you want to do at this point. Really, it’s not. There’s still a chance for you, Everett. You might have to spend a few years behind bars, but you’re young enough to rebound and make a life for yourself when you get out.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I heard what John Patterson said. He was the one who killed Stephanie Vowels. I’ll testify to that in court. You might even get off with probation. On the other hand, if you—”

  “Just shut up, man. If it wasn’t for you, John and I would have been out of here by now. Just shut up and let me think for a minute.”

  He scooted over to the armoire on the left, the one he’d been hiding in. He opened the door, pulled out a backpack, unzipped it and extracted a laptop computer. He plugged it in and turned it on and waited for it to boot up. Once it was ready, he typed something, waited, typed some more and waited some more. The revolver was on the floor beside him.

  “Well?” I said.

  “It’s there. The money’s there. Let’s go. We’re going to take John’s car. Reach into his right front pants pocket and get his keys.”

  I reached into Patterson’s right front pants pocket and got his keys. I could feel the warmth of his flesh through the lining. He was still warm, but I couldn’t tell if he had a pulse or not. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing.

  I was hoping to find his cell phone, although I’m not sure what I would have done with it if I had. Maybe I could have palmed it without Everett noticing. Then, at some point, I could have secretly called for help. Maybe. Anyway, it wasn’t there.

  I turned back to Everett.

  “Everyone knows you’ve been missing for a while,” I said. “How are you planning on getting out of this house without anyone seeing you? Have you thought about that?”

  “Everyone’s in the party room. They’re all drunk.” He paused. “But you’re right. I shouldn’t take any chances.”

  Everett stood. He was a little wobbly, and his eyes weren’t tracking properly. He seemed confused for a few seconds, but then he snapped out of it. He reached into the armoire on the right and pulled out a werewolf mask, the kind you can buy at any costume shop. It was a scary thing, a fierce snarling monster with coarse black hair and yellow eyes and fangs dripping with blood. I was pretty sure it had shown up in my nightmares a few times when I was a kid.

  “Nobody’s going to notice that,” I said, sarcastically.

  “It’s John’s mask, from last Halloween. Everyone knows it’s his. He puts it on at parties sometimes, just goofing around. He and I are about the same size, so if anyone sees me walking out, they’ll think it’s him.”

  “Clever. But you’re still never going to get away with it. You should give yourself up now, before it’s too late.”

  Once again ignoring my advice, Everett grabbed some things from the armoire. He tossed me a clean shirt and a clean towel and a bottle of antibacterial hand sanitizer.

  “Wipe that shit off your face,” he said.

  We both wiped ourselves off and put on fresh shirts. Everett put on a lightweight jacket as well, and then the werewolf mask. I pulled a blanket from the bed and draped it over Patterson’s arms and legs and chest. I could see now that he was breathing, but he didn’t look good. I figured he might be in shock, and that he would die soon if he didn’t get some medical attention.

  Everett was leaning against the armoire, not looking very spry himself.

  “Take a look at your future,” I said, nodding toward Patterson. “That’s going to be you if you don’t surrender to the police.”

  Everett shook his head. “Let’s go.”

  He was holding the revolver inside his jacket pocket. I opened the door and stepped into the hallway, and he followed. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that he was using the wall to steady himself.

  Before we proceeded, he made it clear that he would shoot me in the back if I tried anything.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I had no intention of getting on an airplane and flying to Mexico with Everett Harbaugh. He’d said that he would let me go once we got down there, but I doubted it. I figured there were more accomplices in this scheme. The pilot, for one. Maybe he was a freelancer, just in it for a one-time payment. A hired hand. Maybe he didn’t know anything about anything. But, whatever the case, he was doing something illegal, and he knew he was doing something illegal, and he wouldn’t want me around to potentially identify him. So there was the pilot, for sure, and Everett probably had a helper—maybe more than one—on the ground in Mexico, a person or two to get him off the continent and on the way to the Philippines. People like that aren’t keen on letting hostages just walk away. They might let me go—
out in the middle of the desert, or five thousand feet over the gulf. No thanks.

  I decided to make my move on the staircase. I thought it would be my best chance to make it out of this thing alive. There were a lot of young men and women in the house, and even though most of them were drinking and dancing and comfortably oblivious to everything but each other, I figured there was at least a chance that a few of them would come running if they heard a big boom. Especially one as big as my Smith and Wesson .38 caliber revolver would make for them now that we were closer to the party.

  Surely the noise from a gunshot would attract some attention. Plus, Everett’s balance wasn’t a hundred percent. He probably had a concussion from when I clouted him in the forehead with the butt of the gun. So I figured the staircase was going to be my best bet, the best location to attempt an escape. The trick, of course, was to not get shot and killed in the process.

  Everett and I made it to the landing. I gripped the banister with my left hand and started my descent, nice and slow. If Everett had been smart, he would have stayed a few steps behind me. But he wasn’t smart. He was careless and inattentive at a time when he should have been on high alert. He knew I didn’t have eyes in the back of my head, and he knew I couldn’t hear anything because of the band. So he probably didn’t think much about keeping a safe distance. But if he’d been paying better attention, he would have realized that I could see his distorted reflection in the blades of the stainless steel guillotine mobile dangling overhead. I could see that he was close behind me, well within reach.

  When we got to the middle of the stairwell, I did a quick one-eighty and grabbed his right wrist with my left hand. The gun discharged, blowing a fat hole through the pocket of his jacket and luckily not through me. He pulled the trigger again and again and again, but I had his hand pinned against the railing on that side and the bullets plowed through the sheetrock. I hoped they didn’t hit anyone on the other side of the wall. But I didn’t think they would. The angle was wrong. I figured they would bore through the front of the house and whiz on out to the yard at a harmlessly high trajectory.

  Everett kept pulling the trigger until the bullets were gone, and then he tried to do to me what I had done to him. He tried to pistol whip me. He managed to wriggle out of my grip, and then he pulled the gun out of his pocket and raised it and came down hard, but I was able to duck to the left and avoid the full impact of the blow.

  I avoided getting my skull bashed in, but the gun’s hardwood handle nearly amputated my right ear. That’s the way it felt at the time, anyway. Blood trickled down my neck, and a constant ringing filled my head. Like an alarm at a firehouse. I tried to shake it off, but the bell kept clanging. I figured another hit like that would put me down. I couldn’t let that happen.

  I was dazed, and it took me a few seconds to realize that the band had stopped playing. I grabbed Everett’s wrist and slammed his hand against the wall, and the gun flew loose and wheeled end-over-end down the steps.

  I glanced downward. A crowd had gathered at the bottom of the staircase.

  Someone down there shouted, “Hey! That old guy’s trying to kill John Patterson.”

  The old guy being me, of course, and John Patterson being Everett Harbaugh. Everett’s trick with the mask was working.

  I got Everett in a headlock. He, in turn, started punching at me wildly, trying to add a few broken ribs to my list of injuries. Neither of us was very steady, and I thought for sure we were going to tumble down the stairs together and break our necks.

  But we didn’t.

  A stampede of footsteps galloped up the wooden risers, and I felt at least two sets of hands grab me and pull me away. They forced me back up to the landing and pinned me on the floor. A young man with a beard and a bunch of sharp things in his ears knelt down and got in my face.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “Nicholas Colt. I’m a private investigator.”

  I heard a distant male voice say something about calling the cops, and then I must have passed out. I woke up two hours later, but I wasn’t at the PEAK house anymore.

  I was in the emergency room.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  They didn’t admit me to the hospital. They treated me and let me go. No broken bones, but my right arm was badly bruised and the doctor said there might be some nerve damage. She told me to keep it in a sling for a few days and to make an appointment with my primary care physician. Like any of that was going to happen. She obviously didn’t know me very well.

  A pair of FBI agents spoke to me at length while I was in the ER, and I told them everything I knew. I told them about following the wrong trail, about the Five Points Posse motorcycle gang and Shelby Spelling the ex-girlfriend. I told them about John Patterson the roommate murdering Stephanie Vowels the half-sibling in an effort to frame Trent Appleton the sperm donor. They took a lot of notes and told me they would be in touch if they needed any additional information. One of them gave me a business card with a cell phone number written on the back of it. Strictly confidential, he said, only to be used if I suddenly remembered something else pertinent to the investigation.

  I didn’t say anything about breaking into Klein Fertility. They didn’t ask, and I didn’t tell.

  “I’m assuming Everett’s in custody now,” I said.

  The one named Parker looked at the one named Sinclair. Sinclair shrugged.

  “He got away,” Parker said. “We’re still looking for him.”

  “He was supposed to meet someone at an airstrip,” I said. “From there, he was going to Mexico, and then to the Philippines.”

  “Do you know where the airstrip is?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where they were supposed to land in Mexico?”

  “No.”

  Sinclair took a sip from the Styrofoam coffee cup he’d been carrying when he and Parker walked in. He made a sour face, as if he wanted to spit it out.

  “Somehow, Everett left the fraternity house before the police arrived,” he said. “We talked to some people who’d been at the party, but nobody seemed to know anything. Apparently he was wearing a mask that belonged to his roommate, and everyone thought—”

  “That he was John Patterson,” I said.

  “Right. And it might be that some of his fraternity brothers are covering for him. If that’s the case, there’s not much we can do about it. And if he’s already left the country, we’ll probably never find him.”

  “What about Patterson?”

  “He’s in surgery,” Parker said.

  “He’s alive?”

  “He was hanging by a thread when EMS got there. They had to perform CPR in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. He’s in critical condition, but right now it looks like he’s going to pull through. We’ll be watching him closely, and of course we’ll have a slew of questions for him when he wakes up. If everything you’re telling us is true, he’s going to be facing quite a few charges. First degree murder being at the top of the list.”

  I nodded. I was happy that I hadn’t killed Patterson. It would have been ruled self-defense, but it would have weighed on my mind for a long time. I was glad he was alive, and I was glad he would be facing charges for the murder of Stephanie Vowels. When you got down to it, she was the real victim in this whole ordeal. Everything else could be fixed, or at least patched up well enough to keep on moving down the highway.

  But you can’t fix dead. You just can’t do it.

  Apparently, Everett had gotten away with accessory to murder, and he’d gotten away with twenty million dollars. I wondered what life would be like for him now. Maybe he would live like a king in the Philippines, the way he and John Patterson had planned. Or maybe he would be a nervous wreck, constantly looking over his shoulder, wondering how much longer it would take for the authorities to catch up to him, wondering if today would be the day.

  Everett was an international fugitive now, probably destined to be on the FBI’s ten most wanted list. To me, t
hat would be a miserable existence, worse than almost anything. I wouldn’t have traded places with him, not for all the money in the world.

  It was three o’clock in the morning by the time I left the hospital. I thought about calling Laurie, but I didn’t want to wake her. She probably would have insisted on driving to Gainesville to pick me up, and it just wasn’t necessary. I was fine except for my right arm. There was no reason I couldn’t drive myself home.

  I took a taxi to where I’d parked the Caprice. I climbed in and started it and drove up to the PEAK house and pulled into the gravel lot in back. Everything was dark and quiet now. No more loud music, no more drinking and laughing and mingling and flirting. No more fun of any kind. Police cars and ambulances tend to have that effect. They tend to be party poopers. I wondered about the two guys I’d lectured on the sidewalk earlier, wondered if anything I said had sunk in. Probably not. At any rate, I was happy their night had been ruined.

  I sat there and stared at the back of the house for a while. Something was still bothering me, and it had to do with automobiles. Everett’s BMW had been stolen from my lot on Lake Barkley. Someone had managed to defeat the alarm and get it out of there without being noticed. I’d been thinking professional thief all along, but there was another possibility. Someone with a spare set of keys could have taken the car. Someone Everett trusted. A third accomplice.

  Everett Harbaugh and John Patterson would have needed a fair amount of cash up front to arrange for an airplane to Mexico, and the BMW would have fetched around thirty grand on the black market. Plenty to finance their escape. Everett could have taken the car himself, but he didn’t want to risk being seen. He wanted everyone to think he’d been abducted. Patterson could have taken it, but that also would have been high risk. If Patterson had been caught, his and Everett’s room at the PEAK house would have been searched, and the whole scheme would have collapsed like a house of cards.