Riders on the Storm

by Ed Gorman

  “Of course.”

  She didn’t seem curious about why I didn’t use the phone in the living room.

  I kept my voice low.

  “She’s in terrible shape, Mary. I don’t think she should be alone. Would it be all right for her to stay with you tonight?”

  “Of course. God, I can’t imagine what she’s going through.”

  It took a full fifteen minutes to persuade Karen to spend the night at Mary’s but finally she agreed. And finally, still expressing second thoughts, she put some things in a small blue canvas bag and we went out to my car. Where she expressed third thoughts before actually getting inside.

  On the way to Mary’s she said she was acting like a child and that was undoubtedly why I was treating her like one. Then she kind of sank into herself and said she was so tired she could barely keep her eyes open.

  I made sure that Karen was in the safe and comforting presence of Mary and then I was in my car and speeding away.

  25

  ONE LIGHT BURNED IN THE VICTORIAN HOUSE THAT STOOD silhouetted in the moonlight, all turrets and gables and broken roof lines. The light was on the first floor front where the waiting area was.

  I saw all this as I stood next to my car, which I’d parked half a block away in a residential neighborhood just now bedding down for the night. I didn’t want to announce my visit.

  I kept to the shadows cast by streetlights and heavily leafed trees. Now would be an inconvenient time for Foster—or any of his force, for that matter—to show up because I had my forty-five jammed down the beltline of my trousers.

  I walked wide when I got to the cross street where the Victorian lay. There were no other houses or buildings on either side of it for half a block or so. I didn’t want anybody to see me approaching, though with the upstairs apartment lights out I wasn’t sure anybody was home. I went down half a block and then walked back using a long windbreak of pines as cover.

  In back of the Victorian was an asphalt parking area for clients. On the far side of the lot was a two-story garage. Using a side window, I could see that two cars were there. This didn’t necessarily mean they were home. They were social people. Friends might have picked them up for the evening.

  Then, my eyes adjusting to the gloom of the garage interior, I saw the two outsize suitcases standing next to the trunk of the smart black Oldsmobile.

  I looked up at the dark windows on the back of the house. I wanted to be sure no one was watching me.

  I went in through the side door of the garage. Smells of car oil and the mown-lawn scent from a small riding mower. I walked over to the Oldsmobile. Two dark traveling bags were laid across the back seat. I walked around to the trunk. The lid was a quarter open. Another traveling bag. The suitcases on the floor would be set in there and the traveling bag spread across them.

  I wasn’t looking at a vacation; I was looking at an escape.

  I walked to the front of the car, opened the hood and took care of something. Then I closed the hood and left the garage.

  I stood in the shadows of the terra cotta walls. The Oldsmobile undoubtedly belonged to Randall. The other car was a sleek red Mustang and had to be Lindsey’s.

  I eased the forty-five from the top of my pants and proceeded to the back door. As I’d hoped, it was unlocked. There would be a few more things to pack and take along.

  Four steep steps leading to the interior.

  Six steps before I could see well enough to know that I was in a storage area of some kind.

  Ten steps to a door that opened on the familiar layout of the Shepard psychology practice.

  They had both worked several intense years to build this practice and win it an admirable reputation. Now all that was left was furtive flight.

  I walked as quietly as I could down the corridor of offices, the only light coming from the street. I listened for any sound that might tell me where they were but there were only the weary griefs that old houses, no matter how well you refurbish them, make late at night.

  When I reached the front I stood in the light I’d seen when I’d been standing next to my car. I was so used to darkness by now the light had a garish, almost obscene cast to it. A coat tree and a rubber runner for when winter came and a large closet door. And then, just out of the light, the reception desk and the furnishings for the clients.

  I turned around and started toward the staircase that led to their apartment upstairs and there she was waiting for me. I could have stepped on her hand but by sheer luck I didn’t. It was flung away from her body like something discarded.

  Once again my eyes needed time to pick out detail in darkness.

  I got down on one knee to look at her more carefully, shoving the forty-five back into my beltline.

  A relaxed evening at home. Jeans and a Joni Mitchell T-shirt. Tiny bare feet. This was “April,” better known as Lindsey. He’d wanted to exult over her with me but he’d known how I would respond if he told me that he’d fallen in love with his shrink. In the last letter of his I’d read, he’d referred to her as “trapped in the Victorian age.” He’d obviously meant the house she shared with her husband.

  The good doctor had shot her in the forehead twice. He hadn’t taken any chances. The eyes reflected the horror. The body had begun to foul itself.

  “The first time I ever saw her, she was fourteen years old. And I’ve been obsessed with her ever since.” Then, “I want you to stand up with your arms straight in the air. You’re not a very good burglar, McCain. I watched you the whole time you were in the back yard. I know you’re carrying a gun. So I want the arms straight up in the air. Do you understand?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  And I did. Before I could get to my own gun he could blow the back of my head off.

  I stood up the way he’d told me to.

  “Now take your gun out slowly and put it between the spindles on the stairs. You’re an intelligent man and I assume you want to live. So be very careful.”

  At most times I would have found his clothes amusing. The professorial air had evolved into Western clothes. A dark shirt with white piping, tight jeans, and what appeared to be real lizard cowboy boots.

  “You’re looking at my clothes. I don’t like them, either. One of the ways I tried to keep her interested was by following trends. I’m a piss-poor cowboy, wouldn’t you say?” Then, “Now the gun, McCain.”

  As I did what he said, his self-mocking tone gave way to melancholy. “If you’re curious, her mother brought her to me when she was fourteen. I fell in love with her that very first day. I didn’t care about anything but her. I had to put her in institutions three times before she was sixteen. She had an older brother she’d slept with since she was eleven and she believed she was in love with him. Her parents hadn’t done anything about it until they finally came to me. By the time she was fifteen she’d come to be in love with me. I protected her as she’d never been protected before.”

  “And you were sleeping with her of course?”

  “You have a way of being very ugly, McCain. Lindsey said the same thing about you.” Then, “My loving her saved her. I made sure she finished high school with good grades and I saw her through college. We lived together all that time. Her parents had divorced and she despised them. The only trouble we had was when her brother secretly contacted her and she sneaked off to spend a weekend with him. Then everything started all over again. Fortunately I have an inheritance to rely on. I paid her brother quite a lot of money to never contact her again. I told him that if he ever tried, I’d have him killed. He believed me.”

  My gun now residing on the staircase, I began to wonder if this was his confession before he decided to kill me.

  “So she was never on her own; and when she fell in love with Will Cullen and promised to marry him, you realized that this time she’d be gone for good.”

  “Oh, you don’t think this was the first time, do you? I made the mistake of putting her through college so she could be a psychologist like me. We’
d have a husband-and-wife practice and everything would be fine. But three different times she started sleeping with clients. Two of them happened to be married, so when I confronted them they agreed not to say anything. They wanted to save their marriages. One was single and he blackmailed me. I had to dig into my inheritance again. He had nothing to lose and he could have destroyed us. They’d all had backgrounds like hers; they’d been seriously molested. She identified with them. I always kept a close eye on any male she dealt with who’d been molested.

  “Cullen was a war victim. I didn’t think he was a prospect for her but I was very wrong, wasn’t I? After the last one she promised that she’d never do it again. But she not only did it again, she fell in love with him. When I found out I started wondering how I could get rid of him. When I heard about the argument he’d had with Steve Donovan I saw my opportunity. I started following him around and the rest was pretty easy.

  “But just a few hours ago she said she was going to call you and tell you everything, including that she was sure I’d killed Donovan. Then she told me that she hated me and he was going to leave his wife and that they were going to move from Black River Falls and get married. The other ones she’d slept with, she never talked about being in love with them. I think she believed she was healing them in some way—and healing herself as well. But this—”

  He stopped talking and then he shot me twice.

  For a second there was no pain and then there seemed to be nothing but pain and the blindness of injury, confusion and rage. I’d been hit just below my left shoulder and my right ribs.

  I fell to my knees and then I fell to the floor.

  Running; he was running hard through the house. He obviously assumed I was dead or soon would be anyway. Running. The back door opening and slamming.

  I knew I wouldn’t be conscious much longer. I needed to grab on to the lowest of the staircase spindles and somehow pull myself up. To my feet. The idea burned in my brain with the fever of a brilliant immortal thought. Of course. Get up and somehow make my way to the closest office.

  It took three tries to get on my feet and what seemed like two or three hours to make it to the receptionist’s desk and the telephone and even then when I got to the desk the first thing I did was fall across it and bang my chin hard against its surface.

  But somehow the phone got in my hand and somehow I told 911 what had happened.

  And just before I passed out I had the pleasure of hearing Randall Shepard trying to start his car. Grinding and grinding and grinding.

  But he wasn’t going anywhere.

  Not without a distributor cap he wasn’t.

  26

  I WASN’T ABLE TO ATTEND STEVE DONOVAN’S FUNERAL. I WAS IN the hospital. The docs were optimistic about my full recovery. As bad as being shot had been, my military accident had been much worse. I was surprised that I didn’t have the headaches that had followed the crash. It was a damned nice surprise.

  Kenny showed up a few times, as did Foster. My mom and sister called frequently. Two days into my stay I saw on the TV that Niven had passed. I wished I’d known him in his younger days. If even half the stories were true he would have been a hoot to have hung out with. And learned from.

  I thought about Donovan some. He was the good-bad person most of us are but he’d taken his good-bad to epic size. He’d been a brave soldier and sometimes a generous man but I would never understand why he forsook Al Carmichael for a psychotic Anders.

  As for Will and Karen, who knew? The only certain thing was that he’d need to find another psychologist.

  I drifted in and out of sleep. Half the time I woke up I saw Mary sitting in a chair next to my bed smiling at me.

  I remember one time she said, “You’re a hero all over again. You’re all over the news.”

  That wasn’t what I wanted to hear so I didn’t fight sleep this time. I dove deep into it.

  The time I woke up just as they were bringing me my tiny, tiny dinner I got the best news of all, except the news that I was going to live, of course.

  Mary said, “I just heard the news on the radio. There’s a new poll. Senator O’Shay is eighteen points behind.”

  I laughed with the same boisterous pleasure I’d once reserved for Bugs Bunny cartoons. Eighteen points behind. There was, after all, a God.

  THE END

  RIDERS ON THE STORM

  Pegasus Books LLC

  80 Broad Street, 5th Floor

  New York, NY 10004

  Copyright © 2014 by Ed Gorman

  First Pegasus Books edition October 2014

  Interior design by Maria Fernandez

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Available.

  ISBN: 978-1-605-98625-8

  ISBN: 978-1-605-98716-3 (e-book)

  Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company