by Tim Green
"We're with Detective Brinson," Madison explained, pointing back to the lieutenant's car as she rolled down her window. "Police business."
The guard went back to Brinson's car and after a moment let them pass. At the house, Chris and Madison pulled into the driveway and waited for Brinson to haul himself out of his Caprice.
"You first," Brinson said at the door. "I don't want to violate anyone's Fourth Amendment rights," he added sarcastically.
Chris gave Madison a look. She dangled the key and just as sarcastically said, "I have my client's permission. Do you want another signed consent?"
Brinson gave her a grumpy snort. They walked into the house and Madison fell back behind the two men. The lights were on just as they had been.
"This is how the door was," Chris said, pointing to the open slider.
Nothing had been disturbed and Brinson wondered what kinds of things he and his men could have missed. Although he was skeptical, the notion of an equivocal death investigation interested him.
As if reading his mind, Chris said, "How thoroughly did your men go through the place?"
"Nothing," he said. "I just had them sweep for a note and photo the place up."
"Could we have someone dust this slider for prints?" Chris said.
"Tomorrow we can," Brinson told him.
"And the bottles?"
"Tomorrow."
The three of them stood there in a cluster.
"Well," Brinson said. "Investigate."
Chris nodded. "If someone assaulted Clark, they could easily have come in through this door. He was drinking, obviously, and his response would have been dulled. He wouldn't have even seen them coming. It was dark out and the lights were on in here."
Chris looked at Brinson to see if he was buying any of it. His face was still stony with skepticism.
"There would have been a fight," Brinson said. "Even if he was drunk, you don't just take out a guy like that, even with two or three guys."
"That's why the table's smashed," Chris said.
"Yeah?" Brinson said, pointing to the beer bottles lined up on the coffee table. "Pretty neat-looking scuffle."
"Maybe they straightened up?" Madison suggested.
"Let's see what else we can find," Chris said, getting down on his hands and knees and poking under a chair. He brought out a bottle.
Brinson rolled his eyes.
Chris moved on to the smashed table and examined the jagged edges carefully.
"Probably broke it in a fit," Brinson suggested.
Chris ran his hand under the table, looked up, and said, "This looks more like someone was thrown down on it. The wood is splintered on the underside on either end. Can we have your techs check this glass for fibers and hair?"
"Sure," Brinson said flatly.
Chris felt underneath the couch and his eyes lit up.
"Look at this!"
He held up for them a large gold medallion. Dangling from it was a thick gold chain that had been snapped in two. Sizable diamonds glittered at them in the lamplight.
"Zee," Madison said.
"Look!" Chris said, rising and triumphantly pushing the medallion toward Brinson's face.
Brinson frowned, then scowled as he eyed the medallion, then said, "This. . . this is something."
"There's someone out there!" Madison said, abruptly pointing through the opening in the glass doors.
Brinson and Chris wheeled toward the glass. Chris flipped a bank of switches on the wall and the pool area was ablaze in white light. Brinson had his gun out, and he slid through the open doors in a crouched firing position. Chris followed with his own gun.
"By the tree!" Madison said, but by the time Chris and Brinson looked there was nothing but shadows.
? ? ?
When Zee saw the woman pointing at him he panicked. He heaved himself back up into the tree just as the lights went on. His eyes shot back to the house. He'd seen them through the glass holding up his medallion. He was on the verge of attacking when he was discovered. The sight of two drawn guns made him retreat instinctively into the tree, where he hugged its large trunk twelve feet up, hiding his bulk from the men below. From his perch he clenched his teeth and thought as hard as he could. His head hurt. So did his neck. If he dropped down out of the tree with his gun blazing, he'd be lucky to make it out of there alive. Alive. His head swam. He wanted to stay alive. Before it seemed like the money was worth dying for, but now that didn't seem right. The medallion, the money, none of it meant anything if he was dead. It meant even less if he were captured and put in jail. If they saw him, he'd fight it out. If they didn't. . . Zee waited patiently, listening as the two men worked their way through Clark's backyard. When he heard their voices recede into the house he scrambled down and dropped quickly into the darkness of the neighbor's lawn. Quietly, and looking back to make sure he wasn't being seen, Zee began to run.
"I ... I thought I saw something," Madison said, feeling somewhat foolish standing there beside the pool in the peaceful breeze of the night.
"Maybe you did," Chris said, even though he and Brinson had checked the bushes around the pool, slowly and carefully working in tandem as if it were something they did together every day.
"If there was someone, they're gone," Brinson said, puffing from the effort. He reached for the medallion and, taking it from Chris, said, "There's a key taped down to the back of this thing."
"Meaning?" Chris said.
"Nothing," Brinson said, "Just a key."
Madison knew from the detective's face that he was a believer.
"There was a stock deal between Conrad Dobbins and Zeus Shoes," she told him, relating the other details that Ike had revealed to Tom Huntington. "A lot of his clients made millions of dollars on options when the stock went through the roof I think that's what this is all about. I think Dobbins sent Zee to kill Annie Cassidy. They made it look like Trane, then proved him innocent, and shifted the blame to Clark. By the time Trane was cleared by the videotape, Zeus Shoes was already the biggest thing going. Think about it. No one knew about Zeus Shoes. Then the murder, the media barrage, the controversial commercial--it was all planned."
Brinson nodded. "It's possible," he said. He was businesslike now. "I'll take this and I'll call in a car to keep an eye on this place until the morning in case you did see someone. We'll reinvestigate the scene and sweep it for everything. Meantime, I'm going to go pay a visit to Conrad Dobbins and see if he wouldn't like to come in and have a little talk."
Then to Madison he said with a twisted smirk, "You may want to give him a call."
"Why's that?" she said in surprise.
"Won't you be representing him now?" Brinson said.
Madison pressed her lips together but suppressed a biting reply. "Fair enough, Lieutenant," she said with a sigh, and for the first time she saw the big cop smile.
"Just kidding."
Madison and Chris could see Brinson jawing into his radio as they followed him through the winding streets.
"I'd like to be there when they talk to Dobbins," Chris said.
"Maybe I should represent him," Madison said, glancing at Chris out of the corner of her eye.
"That's a good one, Madison."
Brinson had disappeared ahead of them as they drove, apparently in a hurry to get his hands on Conrad Dobbins. But now as they pulled up to the guard shack they could hear the loud wail of Brinson's horn. The gate was apparently stuck. Madison pulled up behind the detective and as Brinson got out of his car Chris did the same.
"Something wrong?" Chris asked.
"Goddamn guard must be sleeping!" Brinson said gruffly. Chris joined him and they made their way to the sturdy-looking brick shack.
"Shit," Brinson said at the threshold.
Chris looked down and saw a crimson pool of blood trickling out of the shack and onto the brick pavers. He, like Brinson, drew his gun instinctively. Inside, the guard lay slumped on the floor under the glare of a small fluorescent light. His throat was s
lit. As the scene registered in Chris and Brinson's minds, the night erupted in gunfire and smoke, and each of them felt a hail of bullets rip through his rib cage.
Chris spun into the fire and tried to level his gun at its source. In the darkness by the gate he could make out the large dark form of Zee behind the flashing gun. Then everything went black.
Madison saw Zee's daunting shape as he emerged from the shrubbery beside the gates like an enormous phantasm. She jumped from the car, but her scream of warning was drowned out by the shots. Zee descended on the prostrate bodies of the two men like a hungry spider and groped about them with his hands. Madison felt as if she was in slow motion, and in that oozing moment she felt her own instinct to run overcome by something deep and fierce inside her. Instead of fleeing, she moved toward the danger. When Zee saw her he spun her way and leveled his heavy pistol. The gun broke the night with an angry click and Zee flung it down, reaching behind him into the belt of his pants for the sticky knife.
Madison saw Chris's gun on the ground at the same time Zee brandished the blade. She dove for it as he slashed. She got the gun and sprang backward. Zee slashed again, moving toward her now. The knife ripped through Madison's T-shirt, leaving a bleeding gash in her abdomen. She shrieked and fell backward to the ground, fumbling frantically with the gun. Zee loomed over her, his dark angry face twisted with rage. He drew back his blade for the lethal blow. As it came, Madison fired up into his face and he reeled backward away from her. His gory face spouted blood. A gaping hole had opened below his eye. He came at her again with a ferocious roar. She shot him again in the chest, wincing as the hot flame lit the barrel of the gun. Zee staggered but started for her again. Again she shot him, and again. Finally his legs collapsed underneath him and the killer let out a sad-sounding groan as the life was torn from his enormous frame.
EPILOGUE:
It was the biggest game of their lives, and the Juggernauts were down by four. With time nearly ready to expire, everyone expected the unexpected. Still, even the cameraman lost the action momentarily when the Juggernauts offense ran their trademark double reverse. The quarterback rolled left and handed off" to Featherfield running right, who handed off"again to Ike Webber going back to the left. But the Miami defense was well coached. They closed in on the play with the focus and discipline of a championship team. When Ike reared back and heaved the ball downfield it was the first time anyone had seen the play. There wasn't a soul in the end zone except Clark Cromwell.
Clark pulled the ball from the night sky and knelt down in the rich green grass to pray. Around the world people watched. It was a moment that would be remembered in the same breath with names like Montana, Namath, and Franco Harris. It was football history.
Around the living room Madison, her family, and friends erupted into a raucous celebration. Madison and Cody had planned the gathering as a combination Super Bowl party/welcome- home bash for Chris Pelo. Chris, still in a wheelchair but getting better every day, celebrated with a slow smile. With his index finger he signaled Madison to lean close.
Through the din he said in a low, raspy voice, "Think of the advertising opportunities. . ."
Madison grinned at him and said, "You are feeling better."
He gave her a halting thumbs-up and opened his mouth so his wife could fill it with a salsa-laden chip. He chewed slowly and deliberately, glad to be chewing at all, glad just to be alive. Brinson wasn't as lucky. Although Chris's wounds had appeared to be the more dire of the two, the detective's heart had stopped in the middle of emergency surgery. He never knew that Conrad Dobbins and Trane Jones had gotten what they deserved, killed by Zee, the monster they had unleashed on so many others. And he never knew that Madison had exacted revenge on that same man. Chris didn't think about that. He hoped Brinson was in heaven. Maybe it was Clark praying on TV that got him thinking that way, Chris didn't know. Whatever the reason, he found himself praying for the dead cop.
Madison left Chris with his wife and his thoughts and crossed the room to where Cody was finishing off a Coors Light that, judging from the expression on his face, had somehow gone sour.
"What's the matter?" she said cheerfully. "You wanted L. A. to win."
"Just that," Cody said, gesturing toward the TV in disgust.
"What?"
"That," he said, "That praying on TV bullshit."
"Why do you say that?"
"Ah, it's all a ruse," he said. "Like God cares who wins or loses the Super Bowl. Listen to this guy. 'God was with us. We were destined to win for the glory of Jesus. . .' I don't like it."
Madison thought about that to herself. She knew Cody wasn't highly religious, but she also knew he was no atheist.
"I guess some people could find it offensive," she said.
"Religion's between you and the Man upstairs," he told her sullenly.
Madison nodded her head. "I guess I believe that too," she said. Then, pointing to the TV set and the weary but ebullient figure of Clark Cromwell as he hugged Ike Webber, she said quietly, "But I'll tell you something about that man right there . . ."
"What's that?"
"No matter what you or I or the rest of the world thinks, to him this was more than a game. And you know, after all he's been through I can't really blame him. Anyway, I guess you have to respect him . . . because that's what he believes."