Competition Can Be Murder

by Connie Shelton

  “We better get to the hospital,” Drake said. “Brian’s condition isn’t good. Meggie, you don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”

  “I do,” she said. “I wouldn’t relax at home, not knowing.”

  “Lock the office. We’ll all take the van,” he said.

  I hugged him again as she walked away. “I know this is selfish,” I said. “But I’m so thankful it wasn’t you.”

  “Probably just sheer luck,” he said, holding me tightly. “I don’t think that sniper cared which he got. He tried for both of us.”

  Chapter 42

  The emergency room bustled with activity. Drake inquired at the desk about Brian, and was told that we couldn’t see him yet.

  I’d just asked about Richie Campbell, when a pretty, red-headed woman approached the desk.

  “I’m Karen Swinney,” she said breathlessly. “My husband was brought here.”

  Drake turned to her. “Karen, I’m Drake. This is my wife, Charlie.”

  Karen’s creamy complexion was marred by red blotches. Her workout attire suggested that she’d been at exercise class when she got the call. Her flame-red hair was pulled back into a ponytail and a headband circled her forehead. When the woman at the desk told her she couldn’t see Brian yet, her face crumpled.

  “Sit over here with us,” Drake said, guiding her elbow.

  She allowed herself to be led to a chair beside Meggie, where she stared in disbelief at a point in the middle of the room. Drake started in gently, telling her what had happened so far. Since it was the stuff I already knew, I quietly excused myself to go check on the situation with the Dunbars.

  Richie was in another cubicle, where I found him lying on an exam table, an IV in his arm and a neat row of stitches under his jawbone. His color looked a hundred percent better although dark circles made his eyes appear that they were sunken into deep pools.

  “Cut missed that main artery by mere centimeters,” Robert said, coming to my side. I hadn’t seen him in the corner.

  “What were you boys thinking?” I asked Richie.

  His eyes closed and a tear slid from each, running sideways to his short sideburns. “Dunno. Stupid, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “Boring summer . . . just thought it’d be fun to watch em squirm.” He wiped at his eyes and pushed himself up a little higher on the bed.

  “Why didn’t you just run off and join the circus? Why put your family through this torture.”

  “Wasn’t meant to be torture,” he responded, more fire showing in his eyes. “More like a scavenger hunt.”

  “But you didn’t need the money—what was that all about?”

  He shrugged. “Lewis wants to get into a good college. Alasdair—he’s itching to get out, travel, do some adventures. Me? Dunno.”

  “And Janie? Was she in on this? What was she getting out of the deal?”

  “She wasn’t part of this,” he said, raising his voice. “Don’t blame her.” His gaze skittered away, fixing on the floor. “Guess she’ll get nothing but a quick abortion from it.”

  I heard Robert’s gasp. I turned to see that his face had gone somewhat gray. Poor man, he was learning a few new things about his grandson tonight.

  “Where are the rest of the family?” I asked Robert. “Have they been here?”

  “Talked to Sarah awhile ago,” he said, dragging his eyes away from Richie’s prone figure. “Told her only what you see here—doctor says the boy can go home in a little while, after they get a bit more fluid into him. Didn’t go into the rest of it. Guess that’s for later.”

  “Well, I’ll leave you to it. I’ve got another emergency here in the hospital,” I told him. “One that, unfortunately, is more serious than this.”

  I turned to walk away and nearly collided with a man who’d just come around the edge of the curtain. Ian Brodie was standing in my path.

  Chapter 43

  He gave my bloodied clothing a startled look, then turned his face to Robert.

  “Sorry to intrude, sir. I just heard about the boy.”

  I stepped aside and saw Ramona behind him, just the other side of the curtain divider.

  “Brodie? Why—” Robert sputtered slightly. I knew he’d held firm to the idea that Ian had something to do with Richie’s kidnapping and was having a hard time assimilating his appearance now.

  “I’ve returned the lambs, sir,” Ian said. He shifted from one foot to the other, twisting his knit cap in his hands.

  Robert’s face registered absolute confusion.

  “My wife, sir, she made me . . . uh, she made me see the error of me ways. I might disagree with your politics, sir, but it don’t give me the right to take your property.”

  I glanced at Ramona’s face. A tiny smile of pride flickered there, until she noticed I had seen it. She blushed, pink with embarrassment.

  “The lambs,” Robert finally said. “Well, thank you for returning them.” He stretched out a hand to the other man.

  I stepped outside the curtain and faced Ramona. “You made him come all the way down here to say this?”

  “Well, we went to the castle first. Had the lambs in tow. I told Ian he had to face up to this. Mrs. Dunbar, she told us what had happened with the boy and that it might be late before Mr. Dunbar got home.” She shrugged. “This wasn’t easy for Ian, but I knew it would be even harder in the morning.”

  “Look, I’ve gotta go,” I said. “But I’ll stop by soon.”

  She smiled and squeezed my hand.

  Down the hall, I walked into the waiting area to find a doctor in messy scrubs facing Drake and Meggie and Karen.

  “I’m so very sorry,” he said.

  For an instant it felt as if the air had gone out of the room. Then Karen’s wail pierced the air.

  “No—”

  We all felt it. That Brian was gone had to be impossible. We’d just eaten lunch together. He and Drake had just flown back from the rig. Drake’s lower lip trembled and he pulled on it with his teeth. Meggie covered her eyes with her hands and sobbed.

  Chapter 44

  In the way grieving people tend to do, we clung together. From what had looked to be a long night in a hospital waiting room, we’d suddenly gone to having nothing at all to do. The bustle went on around us but we stood like a tiny island, waves of noise crashing over us. The doctor offered to show us to a quiet room for a few minutes peace, but Karen shook her head. “Home,” she said.

  Drake slipped an arm around her shoulders and guided her toward the door. I pulled some tissues from a box on a small side table and handed them to Meggie, then led her to follow Drake. My mind couldn’t seem to go beyond one tiny, mundane thing after another. The reality of the big picture was still too much to accept.

  Thank goodness for Drake’s calm presence. He led us out to the van, safely buckled the ladies into their seats, and drove through the quiet dinnertime streets of Inverness to Brian and Karen’s cute stone house with its tiny garden out front. It was the only residence on the street that stood in darkness.

  Karen moved automatically, finding her keys, switching on lights, plucking Brian’s discarded jacket from the back of a chair and hanging it in the closet. Meggie and I couldn’t seem to think what to do. We perched at the edge of the sofa like birds ready to take flight at any minute. I felt as though I could neither sit still nor do anything useful. Drake offered to make dinner or go out for something but no one wanted anything. Finally, we settled around the dining table with coffee.

  “I have to know what happened,” Karen said. She sat with her hands wrapped around her mug, drawing warmth from it more than actually consuming it.

  “I don’t exactly know,” Drake told her. “I’m sure the police will investigate fully. Brian and I had taken off together from the rig, just before sunset. We were in radio contact, just shooting the bull, commenting on the beautiful evening.”

  I wanted to ask whether there’d been trouble out at the rig but I held off.

/>   “I was in the JetRanger, slightly ahead of Brian. We’d been in the air about thirty minutes or so, and he radioed a weird call. Sounded like a curse word or something. I didn’t get it and asked him to repeat. That’s when he said, ‘Oh my god, I’m hit.’ ” His voice caught and he took a long sip of his coffee. “I said, ‘Say again? Hit?’ and he told me something had hit him in the shoulder or the chest.”

  Karen’s face had gone white.

  “You don’t need to—” Drake said, squeezing her forearm.

  “No, please tell me.”

  “Well, we were over water, no place to set down for at least fifteen more minutes, so I just kept talking to him. He insisted he could make it to the airport. He was getting pretty fuzzy by the time we saw the runway lights, and I talked him through the landing.” He faced Karen and took both her hands in his. “I’ve never seen a guy do anything like it. He kept that aircraft under control and made a near-perfect landing. I don’t think he gave in to the pain until he saw the ambulances.”

  “Who would do this?” It was the question on everyone’s mind, but Karen voiced it.

  “I don’t know,” Drake said. He gave her a very condensed version of the bad feelings we’d encountered from the boat operators. “I’m sure those are the first people the police will want to look at.”

  A look of steel hardened Karen’s face. “I never thought they’d go this far,” she said. “Brian didn’t either. He knew those men were trouble, but this . . .”

  “I know,” Drake said. “I know.”

  I felt eager to get him alone, to ask questions about things Karen probably shouldn’t hear. While the others talked about calls to family members, making funeral arrangements, I pondered the possibilities. There didn’t seem to be anyone other than Brankin and his bunch who would have either the motive or the opportunity to take shots at a helicopter over the sea. Helicopters, I corrected myself.

  Surely they’d fired shots at both ships. If they’d hit both, odds were good that neither would have made it back. They’d have vanished into the water and no one would have ever known what happened. A wave of goosebumps rippled over my skin.

  Chapter 45

  “Please, Drake,” Karen was saying. She stood up and went into the kitchen. “No . . . what am I saying? I can’t ask you to do it.”

  “What’s the problem?” I asked, scrambling for the vital bit of conversation I must have missed.

  She brought the coffee pot and began refilling cups automatically. “It’s the wording in that bloody contract. I didn’t like it, from the time Brian signed it.”

  I glanced over at Drake as Karen set the coffee pot down. He sent me a tiny shrug.

  “He didn’t tell you?” she asked Drake.

  He shook his head.

  “We don’t get paid unless we complete the contract. September first. We owe them two more days of flying.”

  “That’s outrageous,” I said. “It’s completely unfair.”

  “It’s the way the contract was written.” She sat down again and patiently laid it out. “It’s a ninety-day contract. We received one half payment upon completion of the first forty-five days. Upon completion of the other forty-five days, we get the balance. If we don’t complete it, nothing.”

  Skepticism must have registered on my face because Meggie chimed in. “It’s true, Charlie. The contract’s filed at the office. I remember depositing the first check when it came.”

  I couldn’t believe Brian had agreed to such a ridiculous clause, and I had to believe an attorney could make a good case against it. But then, we were in a different country and I couldn’t be sure.

  “So, if we just fly two more days,” Drake said, “the contract is complete and you get the money.”

  “Right. But, Drake, I can’t ask you to do that. I’d manage somehow,” Karen said.

  Meggie looked alarmed. She didn’t want to say it, but I’d seen a good-sized stack of invoices on her desk, accounts for fuel, maintenance, and office expenses that were waiting for payment. Without that big check there was no money to cover them.

  I nodded subtly at Drake. He had my support.

  “Karen, don’t you worry,” he said. “We’re going to do it. Come on, two more days won’t kill us.”

  The words slipped out before he could stop them. He hastily tried to cover, but the truth was that we all knew even one more flight very well could do exactly that.

  Chapter 46

  Hours later Drake and I finally found ourselves alone, back in our own cottage. We’d arranged for a neighbor to stay with Karen overnight, and we’d dropped Meggie back at her car parked at Air-Sea’s office. Drake and a mechanic had checked over both aircraft but found no damage other than the one bullet hole in the Astar’s window. One shot, so perfectly placed that it had ended Brian’s life. If the trigger had been pulled a fraction of a second sooner . . . if the helicopter had been a quarter of a mile off course . . . those millions of tiny details that make things come together in that precision confluence of time and place that we often call fate.

  We’d no sooner closed and locked our door than Drake and I reached for each other. Suddenly, we both felt the need for contact. A crushing kiss, clothing ripped away, and a desperate conjoining on the sofa—the need overwhelmed everything else. With the dissipation of the initial passion, we climbed the stairs, trailing our discarded clothing with us, where we took the time for a second union, stroking, murmuring, loving.

  Somehow it was midnight when I pulled myself toward consciousness enough to notice the bedside clock. I realized we’d not eaten anything for more than twelve hours and the easy camaraderie with Brian over our lunch swept over me with a melancholy blow.

  “Let’s find something in the kitchen,” Drake mumbled, as if reading my mind.

  I dabbed away the moisture in my eyes and slipped on my robe. Downstairs, we poured glasses of wine and fixed a plate of cheese and crackers, which we shared snuggled close together on the couch.

  “Have we just done a totally stupid thing?” I said after the initial hunger pangs died.

  “I thought it was a totally pleasurable thing.”

  “You know what I mean. Those guys won’t stop. Agreeing to help Karen might have been really dumb.”

  “We’re going to take every precaution,” he said. “It won’t hurt anything to spend a few extra hours double-checking both aircraft. And the police already know who they need to question.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I called them and I named names.”

  “When?” I didn’t remember a minute we’d been out of each other’s sight all evening.

  “Right after I landed, as soon as I knew there’d been shots fired. That’s a federal offense here, or however they refer to it, just like at home. I called Fergus from the hospital and he told me the police and aviation authorities were all over the aircraft.”

  “And? Did they find anything?”

  “Nothing they shared with him, of course. But we’ll see. I intend to find out all I can before we put our lives at risk.”

  It was sometime around two a.m. before we settled into bed, but the gray light of dawn lightened the edge of the drapes before I finally dozed.

  I awoke with a fuzzy feeling that something was terribly wrong, the feeling that comes from a mixture of grief and alcohol. Last’s night’s events came back at me and I groaned, not wanting to start the new day. That’s when I realized Drake’s side of the bed was empty.

  I patted the cool sheets, not finding him, and forced myself to sit up, pounding headache and all. In the bathroom I splashed cold water on my face and slipped into my robe. The cottage was too quiet and the fuzziness left me as I called out and got no answer.

  Downstairs, the coffee was still warm and a note stood propped against the canister. You didn’t get much sleep, it said, so I tried to be quiet. Sarah Dunbar called and I told them to leave you alone. I’m at the hangar. See you later. Love, Drake.

  I poured a
mug of coffee and sipped it black, willing my head to clear. Everything was still too fresh—the harrowing experience of holding back Richie’s flowing blood, the sight of all the flashing lights at the hangar, Brian’s death. A dull ache pervaded my body.

  I needed to call Sarah and find out how things were going. I hoped they’d caught Alasdair and that all three boys were in for some punishment. But first I needed a shower. My stomach did a queasy roll. No, first I needed food. I scrambled two eggs and toasted a couple of slices of bread. Somewhat fortified, I spent twenty minutes in the shower where I shampooed and conditioned my hair and took the time to shave my legs. Dried, brushed, and with a touch of lipstick I felt like a new person.

  I dialed Dunworthy and was surprised when Elizabeth picked up.

  “Oh, hello, Charlie,” she said, sounding distracted. “We’re just leaving for London.” She instructed someone in the background to carry something to the car. “Here, I’ll have you speak to Mother.”

  “Charlie! I’m glad you called,” Sarah said. “Did Drake tell you I’d called? He said you were up very late, dear.”

  I confirmed it, but didn’t tell her exactly why.

  “We’ve had an eventful night and morning,” she said. “Do you have a moment to pop by? I can fill you in.”

  “Well, maybe just a moment,” I said. “I think we have a pretty full schedule for the next couple of days.”

  I hung up, wondering why she couldn’t just fill me in over the phone, but I dutifully got in my car anyway.

  “Robert’s driven Edward, Elizabeth and Richie to the airport,” she told me, once we’d settled at the kitchen counter with cups of tea. “I’d like to say things will be different from now on, but I doubt it.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “All three boys were arrested last night,” she said. “Charged with extortion, fraud, and mutilation of a corpse.”

  “Ah, I’d wondered where the severed finger came from.”