What Doesn't Kill Us--A McKenzie Novel

by David Housewright

  Herzog made a gimme gesture with the fingers of his hands.

  “Either that or you gonna be just another brother killed by the po-lice,” he said.

  Jamal slowly released the woman. Jenna collapsed to the floor of the porch and crawled away. Shipman shouted at her.

  “Stay down, Jenna,” she said. “Stay down.”

  Jamal set the gun in Herzog’s hand. The big man glanced at it, recognized it as a .32 caliber Walther, and thought it was probably the same gun Jamal had used to shoot me; that forensics could match it to the bullet they took out of my back easily enough. Herzog could hardly believe that Jamal had kept it. You never keep the gun.

  “You just ain’t cut out for the thug life,” he said.

  “What am I going to do?” Jamal asked.

  “Nothing. You don’t say nothing. You don’t even tell ’em your name. Me and Chopper know people. We’ll send somebody t’ help. ’Kay?”

  “Thank you.”

  Herzog turned and walked back down the porch steps. Shipman and Harry surged forward.

  “Put your hands on your head, put your hands on your head,” Shipman chanted.

  Jamal dropped to his knees and did what he was told.

  Herzog approached Bobby who was still standing in an Isosceles Stance and aiming his Glock at Jamal.

  When he reached him, Herzog held out the Walther. Bobby came out of his stance and took the gun.

  Herzog stepped past him and started walking back toward the van.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Bobby asked.

  Instead of saying what was on his mind, Herzog just kept on moving.

  * * *

  While Jamal followed Herzog’s advice and remained silent, Jenna King couldn’t stop talking, which was fine with all the law enforcement personnel that had descended on her house. Under the Federal Rules of Evidence, “excited utterances” were admissible in a court of law.

  Jenna explained how she had met Jamal and became emotionally dependent on him. She explained about Charles and how Jamal had shorted his company. She explained about the night I was shot. She even gave a brief tutorial on opioid addiction.

  “I sprained my ankle while jogging,” she said. “The doctor gave me OxyContin for the pain. I followed the prescription the first day, one tablet every eight hours, and then did the same the second day. I didn’t take any the third day. The fourth day my ankle ached a little bit when I tried to run prematurely, so I took more pills. The same the fifth day. And the sixth. And the seventh.

  “I understand addiction. Sixty percent is genetics; the body is predisposed to become addicted. The other forty percent is psychological. The brain wants what the brain wants. It wasn’t like when I was on coke, though. I didn’t take opioids for the rush, for the high. I took them to make the pain go away. Once I was hooked—I would try to go a day without using. That’s what they teach you. One day at a time. Only I would become physically ill. My body would feel as if I hadn’t eaten in three days. I went back to my doctor, partly to get off the drugs but also partly to stay on. His response was to hook me up with Jamal. I should have quit right then and there; book a room in a chemical dependency clinic. Only you can’t defeat your demons if you still enjoy their company. My family didn’t know anything about this, of course. People who are addicted to opioids can still hold down jobs; they can meet their responsibilities; maintain the appearance of stability at work and home. Until they can’t.”

  Yet while Jenna talked up a storm, Bobby told me later that at no time did she incriminate herself; at no time did she utter a single word that could be used against her. It was always Jamal this or Jamal that.

  “I was told that Jenna King is the smartest person in the room,” I said, “no matter what room she happens to be in.”

  “I believe it,” Bobby said.

  * * *

  Detective Jean Shipman was feeling a little depressed when she finally left the crime scene. She had been there first, she reminded herself. Yes, Bobby and the others eventually turned up at Jenna King’s house, but she was the one who knocked on the front door; she’s the one who broke the case. It was her cuffs that were wound around Jamal Brown’s wrists.

  She took pride in that. Only not a lot. Discovering who had shot me and why and then bringing him down hadn’t given her nearly the satisfaction that she had hoped for. She didn’t believe the case had tested her skills. It never gave her an aha moment.

  While she was driving back to the Griffin Building, Shipman heard the sound of a bell coming from her cell phone. It told her that she had just received a text. She accessed it at the first stoplight.

  The text had been sent by Officer Kyle Cordova of the Northfield Police Department.

  “U up?” it read.

  The question made Shipman shake her head. It was still early evening after all.

  She replied when she was caught at the next stoplight.

  “Your seduction skills are sorely lacking,” her text read. “But since you asked, yes, I’m up.”

  IN CASE YOU’RE WONDERING

  I wish I could say that when I finally opened my eyes for good I was gazing into the lovely face of my wife. Or Lilly Linder. Or Kate Beckinsale playing a nurse in Pearl Harbor. Instead, I got a male nurse who thought a three-day-old beard looked good on him. He shined a bright light into one eye and then the other, felt for a pulse even though a machine was counting my heartbeats for him, and said, “The doctor will be with you in a moment.”

  This had been the fourth time I had come out of the coma by my count. The first time, I woke with complete clarity about where I was and what had happened to me. I sat up and looked around the room; even saw Nina sitting there, before falling against the bed and drifting back to sleep. The second time, I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, my vision was blurred, and I had no idea where I was or why. The third time, I was convinced that all of the doctors and nurses were attempting to kill me; that even the room fixtures and machines that surrounded me were encouraging me to die. Then there was Dan—Dan being the name of the male nurse and with all due respect to him and his profession, goddammit!

  This is not the way it would have happened in the movies, my inner voice told me.

  Dan was correct about the doctor, though. Lilly Linder was by my side less than ninety seconds later, and Nina, too, who took my hand, kissed it, and pressed it against her cheek.

  “I can’t leave you alone for a minute, can I?” she said.

  Lilly was intent on conducting a bunch of examinations then and there to test my mental status, cranial nerves, individual senses, motor function, and reflexes. She wanted to know where I fit in something called the Glasgow Coma Scale. Apparently, I scored high.

  I have to say, though, I didn’t care much for her bedside manner. She asked “What’s your name?”

  “Is that a trick question?” I answered.

  “Do you know who you are?”

  “It depends. What have you heard?”

  Lilly whacked me on the shoulder.

  “And you wonder why somebody shot him,” she said.

  “Wait. Somebody shot me?”

  “It’s a long story,” Nina said.

  * * *

  Once Lilly deemed that I had recovered sufficiently enough to receive visitors, damn I received a lot of them—Bobby, Shelby and the girls, Erica after she completed her exams, Harry, Greg Schroeder, Riley and Mary Pat Brodin-Mulally, Mason Gafford, Emma King, Herzog, and to my great surprise, Chopper, who despised hospitals. I even received a call from Heavenly Petryk who was purposely vague about where she was at the time and what she was doing. They all helped filled in the blanks for me. Including Detective Jean Shipman, who was surprisingly forthcoming about her role in all of this—at least I was surprised. ’Course, she kept calling me “hotshot,” which was infuriating. “So, how are you doing, hotshot?” And I kept calling her “Jeannie,” which seemed to annoy her, too. “Pretty good, Jeannie, how are you?”

  Despite w
hat she had told Marshall Sohm about Gerald King’s disappearance not being her case or her jurisdiction, she felt compelled to take her supplementals to Lieutenant Rask at the Minneapolis Police Department and tell him what she had learned. She was a cop after all and her instructors were correct—you can’t choose the victim.

  Rask hadn’t known that Jenna was pregnant when he conducted his first investigation or he might have done things differently, he told Shipman. As it was, DNA testing—remember that? DNA testing proved that Emma was, in fact, Gerald and Jenna’s daughter and that Jenna, Charles, Porter, and, yes, Dave Deese, were her half siblings. Rask confronted Jenna with the findings. Jenna was outraged yet also unruffled. She admitted that her father had raped and impregnated her. She suggested that’s why he abandoned the family; why he ran away rather than take responsibility for his crime. I remember saying “Good for her” when Shipman told me that part of the story.

  Still, armed with the DNA evidence and Marshall’s semi-confession, Rask was able to convince a judge in the Fourth Judicial District Court to issue a warrant stating that “you, Lieutenant Clayton Rask, peace officer of Hennepin County in the State of Minnesota, and any other authorized person, are hereby commanded to enter and search between the hours of seven A.M. and eight P.M. the above-described premises, for the described remains of Gerald King, and to seize and keep said remains in custody until dealt with according to law.”

  Rask took the warrant to the Washburn County Sheriff’s Office in Shell Lake, Wisconsin, and asked that he be allowed to use ground-penetrating radar to search Marshall and Mary Ann Sohm’s farm for the body of Gerald King. The sheriff told him to stick his warrant where the sun doesn’t shine. He had no intention of besmirching the sterling reputation of a good man and his darling wife on such flimsy, unsubstantiated, and unconvincing evidence.

  “Sohm was a veteran,” the sheriff said. “He served in ’Nam. He was a volunteer firefighter for Christ’s sake.”

  Rask revealed all of this to an assistant Hennepin County attorney who told him that there was never a chance that he would have prosecuted the case anyway given the flimsy, unsubstantiated, and unconvincing evidence.

  “Why are you wasting my time?” he wanted to know.

  “Well, I did my bit,” Rask said and closed the case.

  “Good for him,” I said.

  “You understand why I called LT, though, don’t you?” Shipman said. “Why I had to call him?”

  I told her something then that I wish I hadn’t; that I wish I could take back.

  “You’re a good cop, Jean,” I said.

  She seemed as surprised by the declaration as I was.

  “So were you, McKenzie,” Shipman said.

  Still, I couldn’t let it go at that, could I?

  “All the crap I’ve given you over the years?” I said. “I wish I could go back and do it all over again.”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Shipman said.

  * * *

  Eventually, I summoned Dave Deese to my sickbed. By then I was feeling pretty good and getting anxious to leave the hospital. Yet when he arrived I made it seem as if I had about three minutes to live, cough, cough, and he needed to do me a favor before I, cough, cough, passed on. ’Course, Deese had known me for a long time, so he stood at the foot of my bed, folded his arms across his chest, and said, “What?”

  That’s when I told him about the King family. It was a long conversation and Deese ended up sitting for most of it. What hurt was my theory of how his mother became pregnant by Gerald King. He had a hard time accepting it and probably wouldn’t have if not for the DNA evidence. He wondered aloud if his father, the man who raised him, had known the truth and decided he hadn’t. Otherwise, Gerald would have “disappeared” a half dozen years before he actually did—the quotes were DD’s.

  That’s when I hit Deese with the news about Charles King and his desperate need for an immediate liver transplant. I told him that I would have taken the tests myself to see if I was compatible even though we weren’t related because, well, that’s the way I’m wired. Unfortunately, my current state of health had made that impossible; the doctors had forbidden it. I asked Deese if he would help. He said no.

  I don’t think he was afraid of the risks associated with being a live-donor or because he was indifferent to his half brother’s plight. He wanted to punish someone for what had happened to his mother and Charles was the closest someone at hand.

  I told Deese that he wasn’t Gerald King’s only “victim”—this time the quotes were mine. He didn’t care. So, I guilted him into it, telling him that he owed me one; reminding him that I had been shot in the back and had been clinically dead for four minutes and ten seconds and yet I had been willing to help the Kings.

  Finally, he agreed to take the tests, hoping, I’m sure, that they would prove he was incompatible. Only he was compatible and that news alone was enough to convince Deese to go through with the transplant. If you know you can help save someone’s life and you don’t even try, that makes you an asshole. Deese was not an asshole. He was a “good guy” and in the neighborhood where I grew up that was considered the highest praise.

  I was proud of him. DD saved Charles King’s life and oh boy, did Charles appreciate it. Suddenly, this charismatic, billionaire entrepreneur was treating Deese as if he was, well, as if Deese was his long-lost brother from St. Paul, showering him with gifts. And he had plenty to give him, too. There had been a stunning dip in the KTech stock price when news of Charles’s condition went public followed a few weeks later by a meteoric rise when his liver transplant was deemed a resounding success on every media platform known to man, most of it orchestrated by Porter. If Jamal Brown had played by the rules, he would have made a fortune. Justus Reinfeld, too.

  It’s really too bad that shortly after Charles King had his long-delayed meeting with the Securities and Exchange Commission—held in his hospital room the day before his surgery—the Enforcement Division of the SEC charged Reinfeld and three other traders with willfully violating Sections 17(a)(1) and 17(a)(3) of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5, specifically “parking.” And that Reinfeld, who “cooperated” with the SEC investigation, settled the charges by disgorging all of his profits estimated at over $200 million and agreed to being barred from the securities industry for a period of three years with the right to apply for reentry after six months. ’Course, it could have been worse. He could have been barred for life. He could have gone to prison for a couple of years. Like Jamal. Oh well.

  Charles King’s gratitude extended to Barbara, as well. And to T. Emma and Elliot had met her during the transplant ordeal and simply adored her. Apparently, T was the unfiltered, unabashed, and utterly unapologetic role model they had been craving all of their young lives.

  Unfortunately, the rest of Deese’s family wasn’t as agreeable.

  “My aunt hasn’t spoken to me since it all came out,” Deese told me. “Not being my father’s son, it was a secret that she didn’t want revealed; one that only she and my mother had shared. I’ve tried to talk to her only she won’t talk. She won’t even tell me if my father knew anything about what happened.

  “At the same time, my other aunts and uncles and some of my cousins claim that I’m an ingrate. No, I’m not, I tell them. I’m grateful for everything. Others in my family think because of the gifts Charles had given me; the invitations to his place on Lake Minnetonka— A cousin said ‘Isn’t the Deese family good enough for you anymore?’ Some of them still refuse to believe any of the DNA evidence. Either the science is screwed up or I am; that’s their explanation. Except for T. If anything, all of this has brought us closer. Imagine.

  “Still, I’m glad to know the King family, Charles and Porter, the girls, even Marshall Sohm, although he sometimes acts like a prick. It’s hard for me to think of them as actual family, though. I suppose it’s because we didn’t grow up together; their experiences aren�
�t my experiences, you know? But they’re all very nice people.”

  This included Jenna.

  After she kicked her opioid habit, she reached out to me. She told me about her unhealthy liaison with Jamal, the whys and wherefores; how victims of sexual abuse committed by a parent—that is, incest—are forever hopping from one abusive relationship to another as if they were trying to confirm their own worthlessness; as if they were trying to prove that they deserved the abuse.

  And she told me what had transpired at her house in St. Paul that day. She was as apologetic as hell, too, only I don’t think that’s why she wanted to talk. Lieutenant Rask had buried the DNA evidence linking Emma to Gerald King and Jenna wanted to know if she could trust me to keep the secret as well. I told her that she could. I also told her that I thought her family, especially Emma, was strong enough to know the truth; that they probably already did and were waiting on her to admit it. She disagreed. I told her that at least she should seek professional help; try to heal herself. She said she already had on numerous occasions. Like many victims of incest, though, she had gone through counselors the way fashionistas go through shoes, discarding them at the slightest hint of abandonment or betrayal both real and imagined. Besides, she reasoned, she was at least as smart as they were.

  “Ask me anything you want to know about betrayal trauma theory, trauma bonding, and disassociation,” she said. “I’m an expert.”

  “I wish I could help you,” I said.

  “Why? We’re not even related.”

  * * *

  Oh, before I forget, I bought Nancy Moosbrugger a new dress. Mason Gafford told me about her, about how she had cradled my head in her lap until help arrived after I was shot. So, I bought her a new dress—a half-dozen new dresses, actually. I noticed that Gafford never left her side during the shopping expedition, but didn’t say anything.