The instinct of looking down to avoid issuing a challenge and provoking a confrontation, slowly melted away as Arabell’s mind worked to place the familiar face. Recognition dawned, and she looked up at him again, noting the abrasions on his features and the faint dusting of red clay around his hairline. The John Doe from her ward, broken out by a band of thugs. When they locked stares, his face was blank with eyes blinking over an agape mouth.
But then he turned toward Justin, and his lips narrowed and eyebrows knitted. He reached inside his shabby jacket with his right hand and lumbered in his wide gait toward the dining room. Justin sat up straighter, squaring back his shoulders, and remaining seated. But this wasn’t a contentious city board meeting.
Arabell pushed herself back from the table and half rose to scream, “Justin!”
Bruno’s hand came back into view gripping the antique kitchen knife, as his legs powered him forward with widespread arms. Justin tried to rise but was too late leaving him trapped by the table. Bruno tackled him around the shoulders, the chair tipping and then splintering under their combined weight. The thug’s right arm came down hard on the table’s edge, flipping it over and covering the men in dried flowers and sugar packets.
Arabell yelped as a table leg caught her in the shin and she fell off her chair to become entangled in the legs of the waiter. He fell down beside her as the nearby businessmen jolted to their feet. She tried to rise, flailing against the body partially on her and pushed him aside hard. Another chair was knocked over as her husband grappled his assailant on the floor. Arabell struggled to her feet, seeing the knife flash toward her husband’s neck and his two-handed hold on the thug’s wrist the only thing stopping its downward motion, and then fell to her knees as she tripped.
The waiter wiped cream from his eyes, making little effort to get up. The businessmen approached in their suits and ties, compelled to come forward but faltering once within three steps as they tried to decide what they should do.
The blade slowly came down, Justin’s arms failing to keep it at bay. Even against both hands and Bruno’s recent injuries, Bruno was much stronger than he was and much heavier with gravity on his side. One businessman circled about behind, feet shuffling uncertainly with leather soles on hardwood, in an attempt to grab Bruno’s arm. With his reaching stance, however, he didn’t have the leverage to hold back the thrust.
The point of the blade made contact on the left side of Justin’s neck where it joined the torso. Bruno squirmed forward, getting his body above the knife’s hilt to drive it home. The first businessman continued pulling at Bruno’s arm, interlocking his fingers about the bicep and pulling backward. The other businessman managed to grab the offhand, and the two of them together managed to begin pulling Bruno off the councilman.
Justin lay flat on his back, the knife protruding just above the collar bone in a rapidly expanding crimson circle. The waiter, using Arabell’s overturned chair for a handhold, pulled himself to his feet and shook his head side to side to clear it. She fully arose as well, following the younger man toward Justin’s side.
“No!” she shouted, but was too late.
The waiter had knelt down and pulled the knife out. It was an honest effort to help, but the blade’s movement sliced vessels within the body and its removal from the wound opened more of a path for her husband’s vitality to leak away. She grabbed the table cloth, rapidly wadding it up into a bundle to put direct pressure on the wound.
“Call 911, damn you!” Tears flowed down her face.
Bruno struggled to his feet, going with the men who each had one of his wrists. In the squiring and twisting, one lost his grip and slipped to a knee. The thug turned toward the other one, putting a hand on the man’s face. While fingers groped at the eyes, his powerful arm gave a shove, and the man lost his grip like his partner and fell backward to a sitting position on the floor.
Bending down, he took the waiter by the hair and the belt at the back of his pants. He lifted, grunting as his unhealed injuries protested the strain. But the waiter was skinny, and Bruno raised the young man over his head like a barbell.
The thunderous booms came from the entryway behind Bruno, and Arabell flinched at the reports to see torn fabric fly from the thug’s chest and pelt her face with wet bloody droplets. He lurched, the waiter slipping off his extended arms to land across the upturned table’s edge. Another shot sounded, and Bruno looked down at another exit wound. His arm bent to reach toward it, to touch it, but his eyes crossed and rolled as his knees buckled before his fingertips made it.
The girl from the front deck stood just ten feet behind him, shaking arms outstretched holding the small revolver in trembling hands. She fell slowly to her knees, lowering and then dropping the gun. Then she curled up in her blue blazer to grab her knees and cried.
Arabell yelled at the shocked businessmen, “Would someone please call 911!”
They looked at each other and then started hunting about for their phones. She had already turned away, using all her weight to put direct pressure on the gushing wound. She lowered her lips to his and kissed him, backing away to give him a sad smile.
Justin’s eyes softly blinked, and then the light slowly faded away.
CHAPTER—31
Larry Turner smiled from where he sat on the stairwell steps with a cardboard box between his boots and gave a friendly wave as the young blond girl walked her bike through the sidewalk entryway. Like he’d asked her to, she wore jeans and a pair of brand new steel toed boots. The pavement was largely deserted outside and only an occasional car went by this early on a Saturday morning. Across the street, the bank’s automatic teller machine was seeing the most shadow.
“You must be Holly. I’m Larry,” he said rising and extending a hand.
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Turner.”
Her grip was warm and moist from the bike ride over.
He laughed, “Everyone calls me, Larry. I’m so glad you accepted my offer of a construction assistant.”
She looked the building up and down warily.
“I want the money for a school activity fee, and your wage is very generous. But to be honest, if Mrs. Grant hadn’t said it was okay…”
“You’re worried about how you could be worth that much?”
She nodded, holding her bike’s handlebars for a quick getaway in the face of rejection or worse.
He continued, “This building has been vacant for a longtime. The bank owns it, but their board is tired of paying taxes on it without any revenue coming in. They are selling it at auction in six weeks. I want to buy it, fix it up into affordable apartments, and then sell it to a landlord or real estate management company to manage.”
She nodded, “Where do I come in?”
“I need to know how much money it’s going to take to fix it up. A real estate appraiser is pulling records on similar buildings and what they are selling for. My profit, what it takes to buy it, and…”
“What it takes to fix it up must add up to be less than the appraiser price,” Holly finished for him.
Larry nodded, “That’s right. And the cost to fix it up is based on how much floor space there is and how square it is.”
Her eyebrows knitted together, “What’s square mean?”
“It means the room’s corners are at right angles. When I buy floor tile, the tile’s corners are perfect right angles. But most of the time, the room is not. Which means buying extra rows worth of materials and having to cut it to match. But if you don’t need it, that’s a lot of wasted money.”
“So you need to know what rooms are truly square and which ones are not?”
“That’s right!”
“But how do you tell?” she asked. But then her mind kicked in, “Wait a moment. Pythagorean! I can measure the two sides of the room with a tape measure. If I square those and add them together, they should equal the distance between the catty corners squared. And if they don’t, we need an extra row of materials.”
“You got it
! Sometimes even two extra rows. It’s a big building with lots of room and many floors needing measured. Can you work through it over the next three weeks? Make a spreadsheet on the computer?”
“Yeah, I can do that,” she said excitedly.
“Then I think we’ll be off to a good start. We both have the service for Councilman Harper this afternoon. But next weekend, you can be up and rolling,” he said and bent over to open the cardboard box at his feet. Inside was a pink plastic hardhat, emblazoned on the side with his company logo for “Turner Construction”. Also, an aluminum clipboard with a fold over metal cover to keep her notes. And finally, three polo shirts embroidered with the company logo and her name.
Although his wife left him when the boys were grown, he still knew a few things about raising kids. And foremost, it wasn’t about self-esteem, feeling good about one’s self just because. It was about self-respect, feeling good about one’s self because of achieving things that mattered to one’s self.
The police had recovered his truck, and after trashing it with fingerprint dust had dropped it at the garage. The mechanic put it back in working order in an afternoon, none the worse for wear but a few new scratches. He did construction, so who cared? And for those inconveniences he’d been blessed with a briefcase stuffed with a serious amount of cash which no one knew anything about.
He was no fool, had followed the story in the local news like everyone else. He knew his truck had been “stolen” by the same gangsters involved in the kidnapping and he felt guilty about being associated with them. It was a sin to atone for. And frankly, he’d been a bit lonely, too. Some youthful charm would do him good. Probably drive him crazy also, but even that would do his old soul some good. Give some more meaning to life, to rescue a kid that faced some daunting mental hurdles to overcome.
Mrs. Grant took some convincing, but she’d been disappointed by the laissez-faire parental reaction of Holly’s mom and stepfather to the ordeal. While grateful the school wasn’t being sued, she also knew one her students would clearly not be receiving the support she needed from home. Larry’s proposal filled a lot of that special need, and Mrs. Grant knew it.
Holly would figure it out one day. Construction estimators don’t make that much money, nor was doing numerous square calculations required. He just bumped up the cost estimate by 10% to account for waste and bought extra tiles. If they didn’t need them, he took them back if there were enough to worry about fooling with. When she did figure it out, years from now as an architect or engineer, she’d know that some old man once upon a time had cared when no one else did. The real gift wouldn’t turn out to be the wages at all, but the self-respect earned during those critical years. But that was for later.
For now, he wanted her to know someone was anxious to claim her. One shirt probably would have been adequate, but she could wear the others around campus. When they grew worn, he’d replace them. It wouldn’t hurt him to up his appearance game a bit too.
He turned toward the open door off the landing and she followed. On the polished hardwood floor were some rectangles of dust showing where furniture had recently been removed.
“This unit isn’t like the others. Someone recently fixed it up, doing up the floor and wall finishes. It’s not like all the other ratty units. I was thinking of leaving it alone. What do you think?”
“I hate it,” she declared instantly.
He shrugged. The floral wallpaper looked good to him, but his wife had never lauded his tastes. Even in the good times.
They’d rip the unit down to the studs and build it back like all the other floors.
Sergeant Jim Barker used the controls of his hospital bed to sit upright. His wounds hurt, but he felt restless. He wished he could get the papers from his desk. Marco kept coming in and encouraging him to use his PCA machine. PCA stood for Patient-Controlled Analgesia, and was a button on his hospital bed which would give him some morphine in his intravenous drip when pressed while controlling against overdoses. The staff was giving him frequent lectures about how wonderful it was to be living in the modern age and have these medications so as not to have to endure like injured people in the past had. But Barker wanted to think, so was willing to tolerate the pain. He always tolerated the pain. Barker hated such medicine.
It was a Sunday evening, five days since he crashed his cruiser into the getaway cars and received multiple gunshot wounds. He’d heard through the nursing staff that the first aid he received on scene, as well as being pulled away from burning vehicles, was why he was on this side of the ground. Nobody knew who his savior had been, and Barker thought he was much too big a man for some teen girl to drag clear.
They might have let him go home by now if there was anyone to look after him or even give him a ride. But there were no gift baskets by his bedside, no taped up get-well cards decorating the sterile walls. As best he could tell, no one had come to visit him. Not that there was anyone to come visit outside the department. And the degree of isolation he’d been feeling there the last week was purposeful. The chief’s wreck the other night was the final proof.
It aroused his interest to hear the hard shoes rapping the linoleum floor out in the hallway. Nurses and other staff, on their feet all day, wore softer footwear. The warning gave him time to prepare, to trade in a look of surprise for a greeting of disdain.
The late thirtyish man wore a gray suit, several grades up from the typical department store, and freshly polished shoes. Not fake Corfam polish, but real polish. He was a powerful looking light skinned African American with a thin, neatly trimmed mustache and close-cropped hair. His demeanor was serious, but relaxed and in control. It was the image which provided confidence to families that the government took the loss of their loved one seriously.
“Sergeant Barker, my name is Special Agent Edward Miles of the Virginia State Police.”
“You don’t look like you brought me flowers,” dead panned Barker, before sitting back against the raised mattress.
The man reached for a visitor chair and pulled it closer to the bedside without asking, apparently not rattled by the banter. Miles looked him up and down, taking in the tubes and blankets. The long pause did nothing to change the soft beeps and measurements of Barker’s heart and blood pressure monitors.
“I’m sorry not to be able to give you more time to recover before an interview, but we’re packing up to Leesburg. The captain wants us back in the office tomorrow for the regular workweek routine.”
“I saw on the news. You’ve heroically rescued the girl and the six perpetrators are dead. The FBI never got on scene. Sounds like time for the state police to pack up and leave town to me.”
“There’s pieces missing though. Friends of hers rode their horses out sometime in the morning to search. I suspect they went out a lot earlier than they let on. This redheaded girl was a real piece of work, deflecting all questions with requests for lawyers and parents being present during questioning. I’ll wrestle with that logistical problem when we learn more and can ask better questions.”
Barker knew just who Miles was talking about, and empathized with his point of view. Getting parents present would prove a challenge since they were not local. But he didn’t agree with the agent’s assessment. The young fiery Abriella Harper made him proud of Westburg.
The sergeant came back to the real topic at hand, “What can I do for you, Agent Miles?”
“The abductors who fled with the girl on foot were all found dead in a cow pasture. Shot, with a large caliber handgun. One bled out through arterial lacerations to his lower leg, consistent with dog bites.
It looks as if someone went after them in the night and tracked them down. The girl says that’s what happened anyway, but the witness was in poor shape when we brought her in. Shock and borderline hypothermia. She hasn’t been able to provide meaningful details to us which we couldn’t already infer.”
“And you want to know from me if I have any idea who this shooter with a tracking dog was and how he m
obilized so quickly?”
Agent Miles nodded, never breaking eye contact.
The recovering sergeant sifted through the swirling pieces in his mind, willing them to all fall into place. The airbag hadn’t done his head any good. Neither had anesthesia. He wanted his notebook. The dog attack in town on Bobby McFife; the dog that had never been found. The assaults on the hunt master and riding coach. He’d been on to something with the Harper’s, and then been distracted by the incident at the school. Now a stabbing at the Hunt Lodge Hotel.
Barker continued, “It sure wasn’t anyone I know or am aware of.”
Miles smiled encouragement, “There were fingerprints in the house, giving us a hit from the Department of Defense database. A military academy graduate named Kelton Jager.”
Barker shook his head, “That’s a geometry tutor who leads a study group. I talked to one of the girls and school administrators about him last week as a possible witness in an assault case. As I recall, he’s been going there for a while.”
Miles nodded with a frown and then asked, “Tell me about Animal Control Officer McFife.”
Barker shrugged, “Did you ask the Chief?”
“No one told you?”
Barker shook his head. No one had. But pictures of the mangled wreck had been on the nightly news. Without his notebook and cutoff from his normal police updates, he’d watched a painful amount of television.
“Single car crash. No alcohol in the blood. Maybe it was just an accident on a rainy night. We didn’t find a note, but they don’t always leave one. Still, the coroner says accident.”
“McFife was a dirt bag I would have fired years ago, but I’ve been blocked by the chief and union rules. Good riddance and rot in hell.
If I were you, I’d leave any do-gooder to us locals and focus more on the organized crime and corruption element. Someone wanted our city councilman dead for a reason.”
By Dog Alone: A Kelton Jager Adventure Book 2 Page 29
