by Al Nussbaum
yourself?”
I shrugged and held my hands out, palms up, in a gesture of helplessness. “Not much I can say, Officer. I guess that’s the way it looked to Mr. Anderson. I may have cut in a little too closely when I passed him, but that isn’t what caused the accident. Without thinking I slammed on my brakes to keep from hitting a deer, forcing Mr. Anderson to ram into me. That’s how it happened.”
Anderson’s head jerked in surprise and in the light from the police cruiser’s headlights I could see his eyes narrow.
“Does that seem plausible to you, Mr. Anderson?” one of the troopers asked.
“Yes...yes, I suppose so,” Anderson conceded.
I don’t know what was going through Anderson’s head, but I was hoping they wouldn’t go back up the road, looking for skid marks, because they wouldn’t find any.
Right then the wrecker from an enterprising salvage yard pulled up. The driver must have been monitoring the police frequency and overheard the troopers call in our position when they first spotted us.
I got the guy to pull my car out of the fuel-filled ditch, but told him I preferred to leave it where it was until after I had notified my insurance company. He tried to give me a sales pitch about it costing me more if he had to make a special trip, but I stood firm. I didn’t want my car locked in some salvage yard where I couldn’t get to it. Anderson hired him to drag the sports car off the turnpike, and that seemed to satisfy him. He could handle only one car at a time anyhow.
So, as the wrecker pulled away, towing the red sports car, Anderson and I climbed into the back seat of the cruiser and were taken to the state police barracks to fill out an accident report.
I asked the trooper to return my papers so I could have the information they contained for the report. He handed them over without hesitation. He had swallowed my version of the collision.
Anderson, on the other hand, kept giving me sidelong glances as we stood at a long counter filling out the reports. He couldn’t figure out why I had lied, and the puzzle had him worried. I handed out a few sidelong looks myself, but only to get his address from the form he was filling out. I didn’t speak to him. There would be time for that later, and there had to be a better place.
When the state police were finished with me, I went to the nearest town and rented a car. I returned to the turnpike and my wrecked car. I removed the license plates, then took the panel off the inside of the door on the passenger side. In the space where the window mechanism should have been, I had a submachine gun with a folding stock, a silenced .22 caliber automatic, a set of emergency identification papers, and enough hundred dollar bills to buy a good lawyer or rent a bad judge.
I stopped a mile down the road just long enough to bury the Utah license plates. I tore up the phony driver’s license and registration and dropped them into the hole, too. In this age of computers, the collision made it certain they would be exposed; however, if the authorities didn’t actually have the plates and documents, they’d have to no way of knowing how authentic they were, or of trying to trace them to their source.
I made Anderson’s address my next stop. He didn’t have a home – he had an estate. His rambling, ranch-style house was set in the middle of thirty acres of imaginative landscaping. I followed a winding driveway and pulled up in front of the house just as a pink dawn was breaking.
Anderson opened the door without waiting for me to ring. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.
“Of course,” I replied, causing the satisfied smirk to slide from his lips.
There was an awkward pause, then Anderson invited me in by stepping backward a few paces. “Come to my den,” he said. “We can talk there. My wife and the servants are asleep.”
Once the door to the den was firmly closed behind us, I took out my silenced pistol and pointed it at his head. “You have cost me a lot of money,” I said. “How much cash to do you have in the house? I don’t want to kill you over money.”
“You know, don’t you?”
“Of course I know. If you didn’t want to be found out you should at least have picked a car that was headed in the other direction.”
He frowned. “I didn’t think of that.”
“You should have. No one smashes up his car the way you did without good reason. It only took a few seconds to realize you did it to hide damage sustained earlier. You’re the one who hit the young girl and kept going. You were probably drunk, but sobered up in a hurry. Then, knowing they’d be watching for the damaged car at all the exits, you decided to get some damage you could explain.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police?”
I ignored his question and asked one of my own: “Are you going to make me kill you over money?”
He seemed to take notice of the pistol for the first time. “I thought you’d want money. I have all my ready cash in that box on my desk.” He gestured to it. “If that’s not enough I can sell some stock certificates and have more for you in a week or two.”
I didn’t bother to look into the box. “That’ll be enough,” I said. Then I killed him with two shots in his heart.
I didn’t kill him over money. I was thinking of the young girl hanging from the telephone pole. That seemed like reason enough.
###
If you enjoyed this story, please spread the word and consider writing a review. You are welcome – and encouraged – to share it with your friends. More about Al Nussbaum, as well as his friend and mentor, Dan J. Marlowe, can be found at albertnussbaum.com where you will also find an excerpt from the biography of Dan J. Marlowe by Charles Kelly entitled Gunshots in Another Room: The Forgotten Life of Dan J. Marlowe. You are also invited to connect online and to register for a monthly book giveaway.
Twitter
Facebook
Free Book Giveaway
Preview of Marlowe biography