by Lynn Kostoff
She was going to die. It was an absolutely simple and absolutely brutal fact that resisted any qualifier. You were alive. Then you were dead. Croy had a gun with bullets. Corrine didn’t.
She was going to end face-down on the table next to Sonny Gramm.
She glanced over at the sideboard.
Maybe, she thought.
Croy waited by the chair, patient and polite as an usher.
“When you shoot me,” Corrine asked, “does it have to be in the back of the head?”
Croy thought for a while. “I guess not,” he said. “There are a lot of other places I could shoot.”
“Could I have a drink before you do?” Corrine took a step toward the sideboard. “Just a small one, ok?”
Croy started to say something about the time. Corrine made a half-turn toward the sideboard and the purse she’d left setting on its top.
She threw out her arm, grabbed the dangling strap, levered her hips, and swung.
Corrine realized at the last moment she’d forgotten to compensate for Croy’s height.
The purse sailed over his head, missing his face by at least a half foot.
Croy, on the move, grabbed her free arm and forced her into the chair. He put one hand on the back of her neck, keeping her head bowed until he caught his breath.
“Keep still,” he said.
He was standing directly behind her. Corrine remembered one of the last things she’d told her mother before she’d dumped Corrine on her grandparents and Bradford, Indiana.
I never asked to be born.
The pressure on the back of her neck began to ease, and a moment later, Croy’s fingers were gone.
Without thinking, Corrine threw back her head. She refused to die with it bowed.
The gun suddenly clattered to the floor, and Croy let loose a long howl, animal-like it its intensity.
He was still doubled over when Corrine made it out of the chair and scooped up the .38.
She stepped back. The gun was in her hand, but she had no idea what had happened for it to end up there.
She was still alive. It didn’t make any sense.
Croy put his hand on the back of the chair and straightened. His cheeks were wet. He cradled his jaw and began crying harder.
“My toof. It my toof. It hurts.” He bent his head and spit, the saliva thick and tinted pink and red, then lifted his head and wiped at his eyes.
“Aspirin,” he said, voice clear again. “My jaw’s burning, and the big tooth in back hurts. Just like when I was at the cabin.”
Corrine lifted the .38 and shot Croy in the chest.
She went over to Sonny Gramm and pulled his upper torso off the table and back into a sitting position and then had to hunt down a dishtowel for the blood on her hands and forearms after she went through Gramm’s pockets for the keys to the Mustang.
Croy was lying in a tight fetal position facing the baseboard. She spotted a black cell phone clipped to his belt and took it, then picked up her purse and dropped the .38 inside.
She stood for a moment, looking around the room. She still had Croy’s cell phone in her hand. It was useless, she realized. There was no one to call for help.
Slow down and think, she told herself. There was still a chance she could salvage a future from everything that had gone wrong tonight. It wouldn’t be easy, but it was possible. She needed a clear head and a little time.
Wayne LaVell would assume she was dead. That was an edge right there. She’d have surprise on her side. Corrine figured that LaVell, being LaVell, would go out for a meal and drinks after leaving Gramm’s so that Balen and he could firm up strategies for dealing with Sonny’s heirs.
That gave her enough time to get to LaVell’s motel and be waiting for him when Balen dropped him off. If things went her way, she could still close the door on April Rayne and Phoenix.
There would be no need to then go on and kill Raychard Balen. With LaVell dead, Raychard Balen would quickly revert with his customary expediency to acting out of self-interest. Given what she and Balen had on each other now, Balen was too compromised to retaliate or pressure her. He’d have no real leverage. He couldn’t implicate Corrine without doing the same thing to himself, and Corrine would make sure it stayed that way by retaining him as her lawyer.
In fact, Corrine decided, Raychard Balen could start by helping her dispose of Sonny Gramm’s and Croy Wendall’s bodies later tonight.
First though was the matter of killing Wayne LaVell. The rest would follow.
Corrine shouldered her purse and left the carnage of the dining room. The house had an odd feel to it, as if it were full and empty at the same time. She listened to the ceiling fans hum and whir.
Corrine checked the time and detoured to the first-floor bathroom. She was washing up when she heard the footsteps. Then, a second later, the doorbell. Once, twice, three times, the chimes overlapping.
Next came the knocking, steady and expectant.
Corrine slipped out of the bathroom, glanced down the hallway to the foyer, and moved quickly back to the dining room. She’d try to outwait whoever was there. She rested her shoulder against the wall and closed her eyes for a moment, trying to remember if LaVell and Balen had locked the front door as they’d left.
The doorbell again. Then more knocking. Over and over. A muffled voice.
She’d slip out the kitchen door. Hide in the dark of the backyard. Wait. Eventually circle around to the front of the house and the Mustang.
Now, Corrine thought, pushing herself off the wall and turning to cross the dining room. She’d only taken a couple steps when something grabbed at her chest and squeezed.
There was a pink smear on the floor near the baseboard and a couple of matching smears on the wall above it, but nothing else.
Croy Wendall was gone.
So were the .22 Pathfinder and the line of bullets in the middle of the dining room table.
Corrine told herself to move. Something. She had to do something. But it felt like the air in her lungs had solidified.
She forced her fingers to unzip the purse. The .38 lay right inside the opening.
Corrine listened for Croy Wendall.
But what she heard instead was the sound of the front door opening and then Ben Decovic’s voice, not muffled anymore, as he called out, identifying himself, and called out again, telling Sonny Gramm he had something important to ask him.
FIFTY-NINE
BEN DECOVIC WENT NO FURTHER than the foyer. The unlocked front door bothered him. The same with the silence that had been the only response each time he called out.
He was sure someone was in the house. He’d heard a muffled thump just after he’d stepped inside, the kind of noise that arose from someone accidently bumping something and quickly righting it before it fell.
The problem was he couldn’t tell which part of the house it came from or who might have caused it.
Sonny Gramm himself was part of the problem. Gramm had made it amply clear on each of Ben’s visits what he thought of the police, and his paranoia, justified or not, over Wayne LaVell’s influence and power had notched that sentiment to dangerous levels, especially if Gramm had been drinking.
Ben had no great desire to die at the hands of the man he was trying to help. Or at the hands of one of the series of revolving-door bodyguards Gramm hired and fired.
Of course, there was also the possibility he was looking at something else altogether. Another breakin. Or worse.
He gave it one more shot, hollering out his name, throwing in his badge number, and asking that Gramm respond. “That’s all,” Ben added. “Just let me know you’re here and all right, Mr. Gramm. I’ll leave then. I need to know everything’s ok.” Ben waited, then went on. “I have some information for you. A good lead. You don’t want to talk right now, that’s fine. I’ll call you later. For now, just let me know you’re all right. Then I’m gone. I promise.”
Nothing. Just the creak of a ceiling fan from one of the ground-floor
rooms.
Ben backed down the foyer and out the front door. He hesitated, then reached back inside and turned off the porch light and stepped outside again, staying close to the wall and taking the radio off his belt.
He was on shaky ground here. The permission to leave his patrol sector had never been officially granted. Ben had left the I-Hop and driven straight to Gramm’s farm assuming that permission would come through at any time. It hadn’t.
He tried again to play it by the book. He called in to the county but was told, as he had been earlier when he asked for a ride-along to Sonny Gramm’s farm, that the sheriff and his deputies were still out with the Fire Department and EMS people trying to deal with the effects of the three wildfires that had yet to be brought under control. Ben then asked the dispatcher to patch in another request to the Magnolia Beach police and one to the state police for backup. The dispatcher said she’d do what she could, but reiterated that the wildfires had everything and everybody jammed up.
From inside the house, a heavy thump, followed a few seconds later by the sound of glass breaking.
Ben unholstered his Glock and stepped inside for a preliminary look.
The foyer opened onto a living room. All the lights were on. Further down the hall, a bathroom off to his left. In the living room, there were pieces of paper attached to a rocking chair, three lamps, one of the windows fronting the porch, and an end table. Nothing, beyond that, looked out of place. Across the room was a partially opened door that looked like it led to a hallway that paralleled the one opening from the front door and foyer.
The house became more cluttered the deeper he went in. More slips of paper taped to furniture. The lighting less bright. A lopsided and unwieldy déjà vu dogged him. Ben glanced at his watch. Still no sign of backup. With his luck, it would turn out to be Carl Adkin. The evening had begun to feel like a rerun of the ambush in the parking lot of the Passion Palace early in March.
Ben forced the thought from his mind. No distractions, he told himself. Stay focused and in the moment.
A pair of French doors opened onto the dining room. A wadded piece of paper lay on the floor below a large antique mirror.
He smelled before he saw that shots had been fired. Ben edged to the wall next to the right panel of the French doors and lifted the semi-automatic, counted to three, and swung the door open, stepping into and then stepping back from the opening.
When he leaned against the wall again, he’d taken the image of Sonny Gramm with him, Gramm sitting upright at the dining room table, the shoulders of his shirt soaked red, the silver-gray pompadour and most of the top portion of his head gone.
The image hung before Ben’s eyes until he blinked it away.
He went for his radio with his free hand, his finger already stabbing for the transmit button, Ben glancing at the mirror as he brought the radio up.
A smudge of movement in its lower corner.
Ben dropped the radio, turning, as the door on the other side of the living room was thrown back against its hinges. Then a dark figure in an even darker rectangle of doorway and two shots, both rushed, one slamming into the mirror, the other burying into the wall next to Ben.
He aimed at the center of the rectangle, got off one shot.
He heard the stutter of footsteps, a pause, more footsteps, then nothing.
He scrambled for the radio, ID’d himself, gave the code for emergency assistance, the address, and broke contact without waiting for a reply.
From the rear of the house came the sound of glass breaking.
Ben moved quickly into the dining room, circling the large oak table and coming up behind Sonny Gramm. He stopped next to a sideboard, its top cluttered with bottles. In front of it were the fragments of a smashed cell phone. Ben glanced at the back of Sonny Gramm’s head, at the empty glasses on the table, the spray of blood fanning the oak.
The door next to the sideboard was halfway open. On its other side someone was counting in a chant-like rhythm.
Ben glanced at his watch, then moved to the doorway.
A small man was attempting to pull himself upright with the help of the door handle to the refrigerator. The effort had twisted his upper body so that he was facing Ben. The top half of his shirt was wet with blood. On the floor below his dangling right hand was a gun and shards of broken glass.
“I remember you,” the man said. “You’re the policeman.” He let go of the handle and, closing his eyes, slumped against the refrigerator.
Ben stepped over and picked up the gun. There was a slow ragged tear in each of the man’s breaths.
“I was looking for some aspirin,” he said. “My tooth hurts.”
“You’re Croy, aren’t you?” Ben said. “Croy Wendall.”
The man nodded without opening his eyes. “I think I broke a glass,” he said. “I tried to put in some water, but I kept falling down.”
Ben looked around the kitchen. He grabbed a wad of dishtowels.
“When your tooth hurts,” Croy said, “everything gets very orange, and you get thirsty.”
“Lie still,” Ben said, pressing the wad of dishcloths against Croy’s chest. “You’ve been shot, Croy. Help’ll be here soon. Lie still.”
Croy looked down at his chest and then pointed behind Ben. “Thirty-six divided by four times three take away five,” he said. “That’s the number. It’s like an echo of itself.” He paused for breath. “But it’s not the one inside me. It doesn’t echo.”
Ben glanced over his shoulder.
The feeling, again, of a lopsided déjà vu, of something not quite right.
He took Croy’s hands and put them on the dishtowels and asked, “Can you hold them and press? Can you manage that, Croy?”
Croy said, “Every gun has a number, but not every number has a gun. That’s why you need to rhyme things.”
Ben got up and stepped over to the door and looked into the dining room.
There were three empty glasses on the table. They’d been there all along, but he’d been in a hurry and assumed two because two was what he thought he was looking at.
Behind him, Croy was counting, repeating the same sequence of numbers he’d run through with Ben.
Ben was suddenly nauseous.
A .22 Charter-Arms. That’s what he’d taken from Croy.
Ben slipped out the back door. Outside, the air was still dry, but the wind had picked up, a hot steady gusting like someone running full-out. It carried faint traces of smoke from the fires to the west.
Ben worked his way toward the front of the house.
Three empty glasses, not two. He’d missed that. He’d assumed two people, not three.
Just as the adrenaline rush of returning fire had kept him from registering the sound of the two rounds that had been fired at him from across the living room.
He had found Croy in the kitchen and thought he’d been the one who shot Croy. Ben figured he’d caught a lucky break returning fire.
He had not bothered to look beyond that.
But, like a voice, you get to recognize the sound of a caliber.
The two shots in the living room had not come from a .22. Something larger bored instead, probably a .38 or .45.
He slowed as he neared the corner of the front porch. The limbs and leaves on the old trees canopying Sonny Gramm’s house were alive with wind, exposing and then hiding an immense bone-white half-moon.
A rattle of keys. A shadow hunched over the driver’s side door of Gramm’s Mustang.
A moment later, the interior light came on.
A woman tossed her purse inside, pausing in the wedge of light to put her shoes back on. She lifted one leg, her hand reaching back, then froze when she sensed Ben’s presence. The hair spilling down her back was silver in the moonlight.
“Easy, Mrs. Tedros,” Ben said. “No sudden moves.”
“You mean like this?” she asked without turning around and stepped out of the wedge of light, stopping along the side of the Mustang’s hood.
> “I told you to stay where you were,” Ben said.
“Is Croy dead?” She was still standing with her back to Ben, her hands at her sides.
“No, but close to it.” Ben paused, then asked Corrine to raise her arms, slowly, and put her hands on top of her head.
She ignored him.
The driver’s side door of the Mustang had not been opened all the way, and a strong gust of wind caught it. The door rocked on its hinges and started to close, creating a slow strobe as the interior light cut on and off when the door bounced against the frame.
“Was Croy able to talk?” Corrine asked.
“A little,” Ben said. He glanced down at his watch.
She laughed. “I don’t suppose there’s the chance we could work something between us, Officer Decovic, is there?”
“No,” Ben said. He moved a step closer. The wind in the leaves above them was distorting his field of vision. Shadows wavered and swarmed. Moonlight splashed and receded.
“I didn’t kill Sonny Gramm,” Corrine said.
“You’ll probably be ok then,” Ben said. “Buddy’ll buy you a good lawyer. Now please do what I asked.” Ben repeated his request for Corrine to slowly lift and put her hands on top of her head.
She still had her back to him.
Wind. Shadows. Moonlight. Everything roiling.
“Backup will be here any time now,” Ben said. “There’s no need for this.”
She laughed again.
“I think I’m past the point of backup and lawyers,” Corrine Tedros said.
The wind hit the car door, and the car door hit the frame and jumped. The interior light went on and off.
“Do you know what happens, Officer Decovic, if you look at anything long enough?”
Ben waited a moment before answering no.
“Oh, I believe you do,” she said.
The wind kicking in. A smear of shadows and moonlight.
“I have the gun I took off Croy,” Corrine said. “You know that, though, don’t you?”
“It’d be better all the way around if you did what I told you,” Ben said.
