The Obituary (Jefferson Morgan Mysteries Book 2)

by Ron Franscell

  Over the past ten years, the FBI and ATF estimated the Fourth Sign and its revolutionary offshoots had grown from penny-ante militants to a cancerous cartel more heavily armed and with better intelligence resources than most National Guard units.

  Was Comeaux out? Not likely.

  But was his name invoked by a sympathizer, someone who might have been connected to the fire at McWayne’s mortuary, someone who wanted Morgan dead?

  That was chillingly possible, Morgan knew.

  “Can I use your phone?” he asked Peggy. She shoved it across the desk.

  He called the Perry County Sheriff’s Office and told Trey Kerrigan everything, how Rachel Morgan had disappeared mysteriously five hours before, how he thought it was linked to the fire, how he should post a guard at Cowper’s hospital room.

  And the abductor’s only message, one intentional and personal name: Comeaux.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The blood-smeared western sky spilled along the brink of the horizon, seeping slowly beneath the earth where it peeled back at the edges. A summer sunset in Wyoming was silently violent, a death that could not be prevented.

  Morgan sat alone and quiet on the back porch at Mount Eden, the cordless phone, a bottle of Percocet pain-killers, and his mother’s fading wedding portrait spread across his lap. His body wanted to sleep, but his fevered brain — abetted by his troubled heart — conspired to keep him awake, if not alert.

  Rain was coming. He could smell it, but the unseen storm hadn’t yet gathered. When he was a kid, his father told him how to know it would soon rain. Crickets chirped louder, the leaves on trees moved even if no breeze blew, chickweed closed up. But tonight he knew it because he could smell the impending freshness of it.

  He’d showered when he got home and changed out of his smoky clothes, but his nerves remained raw. He called The Bullet to make sure it had beaten the Post Office deadline, and it did, barely. The afternoon had been filled with the usual press-day nuisances, like Bob Buck of Bob Buck Buick, who always wanted to change his ad two minutes after it went to press and peevishly announced he would not pay for any outdated advertisements.

  Sitting now on the wide porch, barefoot and indolent, Morgan had only enough vigor to keep his eyes open, to watch the sun collapse behind an unseen ocean, and to imagine the unimaginable heartbreak the dark might bring.

  But he couldn’t fall asleep.

  After supper, Claire and Colter had gone up into Mount Eden’s tower, where Old Bell Cockins had so often sought refuge with his books and his endless horizons. Claire understood, without a word, that her husband wanted to be alone. The tower was cooler in summer because its open windows channeled the gentler upper winds unroiled by the surrounding forest. It also seemed safer, a sanctuary with a view for miles in every direction. Maybe they’d sleep when the sun went down, and dream pleasant dreams.

  Having grown up in such twilight, walking in forests and vast mountain meadows where only a few square feet of soil had ever been touched by a human sole, Morgan knew the tragic rhythms of this place, where majesty and menace inhabited the same landscape. Places where a little boy could be alone with his dreams were also places where he could be lost forever, never found.

  You can’t step in the same river twice, his father once told him when he was very young, and you can’t stop, or even slow down, a sunset.

  Morgan couldn’t get his mind around the inevitability of sundown, then or now. Or fathers and mothers who must eventually die. It was certainly foreseeable as long as there was an Earth to rotate itself away from the sun, and it was undeniably recurrent. What Morgan couldn’t imagine was something else, something like being dead, where sunsets and sunrises and the smell of fresh-turned earth no longer existed. Those things just stopped in a very intimate way for the unlucky dead, and were therefore not inevitable forever, just inevitable for now.

  His mother has disappeared.

  He stood accused of a crime he couldn’t deny.

  Someone wanted him dead, and his friend already lay near death.

  He was haunted by a murderous ghost.

  His faith had evaporated, in his wife and whatever affable spirit created sunsets.

  His beloved son hadn’t heard his father laugh in days.

  And now his braised skin smoldered as the pain pills wore off, so he glided his sweaty, ice-filled glass of Jack Daniels across his cheek.

  Sheriff Trey Kerrigan, once Morgan’s best friend and now his tormentor, had deputies scouring the county for Rachel Morgan. But her abductor had a three-hour head start, and they might have crossed any number of borders by now. Not just county and state lines, but … Morgan didn’t want to think how far it might have gone. His imagination was unnecessary; in twenty years on the Chicago crime beat, he’d seen what happened when desperate, sick men crossed certain thresholds.

  The bloody, guttering light of the dying day had saturated the ground beneath his feet, and he was sinking. He only wanted to sleep, to escape the inferno in his brain and on his skin.

  Blood chugged behind his eyes and deep in his ears, roaring like a locomotive under steam. He popped two Percocets and washed them down with whiskey to anaesthetize the ache of it, but it stung his raw lips.

  The phone chirped in his lap and he snatched it up quickly.

  “Morgan,” he answered.

  “Jeff, this is Trey.” The sheriff’s voice betrayed no urgency or good tidings. “Just checking in. We’ve got nothing right now. We have a witness who thinks your mother might have gotten into a green SUV with a man, but she’s not sure. We’re alerting surrounding counties and states, but … well, I’ll keep you posted. Meantime, keep this line open in case the kidnapper tries to call.”

  “So you got nothing?”

  “For now.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Jeff, you need some sleep. It’s been a long day. It might be a long night. I’ve got Cecil Box watching your place all night, so Claire and Colter will be safe. I’ll call in the morning if something doesn’t break tonight.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Jeff?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t worry,” Kerrigan said. “If she’s out there, we’ll find her. Be with Claire and Colter tonight, and be safe.”

  Morgan didn’t say goodbye. He just clicked off and closed his eyes. If she’s out there. He knew she was out there, and Kerrigan knew it, too. What the sheriff really meant was if she’s still alive.

  The thin light passing through the veil of his eyelids swirled as tears spilled into that airless space between his eyes and the rest of the world.

  The bleeding sky drained to corpse blue, then decomposed to black while Morgan slept.

  When he awoke sometime near midnight, disoriented and bleary, it was as moonless and silent as a grave. The only light shone from the Milky Way. Sleep had made him groggier, uncertain for a moment where he was.

  The absence of wind left him cold. He’d grown so accustomed to the soughing of the trees and the tinkle of wind bells at night that the quiet made him uncomfortable.

  No lights shone in the house, either. Through the veil of waking, he could make out a glittering swath of stars above the silhouette of forest to the west, away from the lights of town.

  Then a star, tiny and blue, jiggled below the ragged shadows of the pine forest. Less than a hundred yards away, just this side of the woods, it quivered for a second, changed direction, then disappeared again. Morgan rubbed the fog of sleep from his eyes, but the light — too low, too blue and too erratic to be a star — had vanished.

  He watched the spot for a minute, maybe two, never blinking. His skin prickled as he leaned forward across the porch’s whitewashed baluster, bracing his chin against his forearm, trying to peer inside the bowels of night. The dry air stung his wide eyes, but he dared not miss the ghostly light if it appeared again.

  Instead, the light found him.

  Not the blue light, but a pinpoint of laser-red that flitted like a neon mosquito acros
s the back of his hand and seemed to disappear beneath his chin.

  Morgan lurched sideways along the rail, spilling out of his chair as the garden window behind him disintegrated, a split second before he heard the muffled fup of a high-powered rifle. He scrambled on his belly along the porch, desperately seeking cover, but redwood chaise lounges and clay flower pots hadn’t been placed there to save his life. He dove off the decking and crouched behind a rain barrel, his hands and knees bloodied by slivers of broken glass.

  The second and third shots thumped close together into the water-logged oak staves, and Morgan heard water trickling fast from the other side of his hiding place. When he saw the deadly speck of the laser sight dart across the dark opposite wall, he knew the shooter must have a night-vision scope with laser targeting, mounted on a semi-automatic sniper rifle.

  Whatever it was, and whoever was shooting at him, it was no deer rifle, no midnight plinker spotlighting skunks.

  Then he heard the screech of the screen door at the far end of the porch. It was too dark to see anything, too quiet to know if there was anything to be seen.

  An anxious moment passed and then Morgan froze.

  “Daddy?”

  It was Colter’s voice.

  “Go back, baby!” Morgan shouted.

  Colter whimpered. Morgan could make out a ghostly outline of his six-year-old son in the doorway, stock still.

  “Go to Mommy! Go!”

  But Colter didn’t move. Those three, maybe four seconds, were a slow nightmare.

  Suddenly, the flimsy screen-door frame ruptured into flying splinters, and Colter screamed, frozen in place colder than a fawn in an open-season crossfire. The sniper had turned his attention to the child.

  As if the dream had suddenly flown into hyper-speed, Morgan flew across the deck, crouched low. He lunged at least a body length, his torso between his son and the assassin. His desperate momentum carried them both back into the house, sliding across the kitchen’s tile floor until they collided with the refrigerator.

  Colter wanted to scream in horror but he couldn’t catch his breath. Morgan quickly ran his hands over the child’s trembling body, praying his fingers wouldn’t slide into the warm, slick wetness of an open wound, or the nauseating softness of torn flesh. There in the dark, lying on the cold, safe floor with Colter, Morgan could see the boy’s wide eyes, frightened and pooled with tears. He was unhurt.

  He scooped Colter to his chest, and keeping below the level of the windows, he carried him quickly to the tower. Claire met them halfway up the shadowy stairway, half-asleep and scared.

  “What’s going on?” she whimpered as Colter fell into her arms and clung to her. “I heard Colter crying and … oh my God!”

  “Go back upstairs and lock the door,” Morgan demanded. “Don’t turn on the lights.”

  “They don’t work. I already tried. Power’s out.”

  “Shit. Just get down in the window box, behind the couch, anything. Don’t open the door for anyone except me. Go!”

  “Jeff …”

  “Go!”

  Back downstairs, Morgan picked up the hallway phone, but it was dead. He slumped against the wall. Blood pulsed through every part of him, and he felt the prickling sting of glass shards in his bare feet and between his fingers. He tried to remember where he’d left his cell phone. The bedroom dresser? The bathroom counter? The kitchen table? The car? His mind raced but went nowhere.

  His father’s guns were under the bed upstairs, but were of no use. Even before Colter was born, he’d locked all their triggers, wrapped them in old sheets, and hidden a few boxes of ammunition inside the trapdoor that led through the closet ceiling into the attic, well above the reach of most curious children. He prized his father’s guns and hoped to teach Colter to shoot them one day, but right now, there was no time to arm himself, even if he could find the tiny brass keys to the goddamned trigger locks.

  And the kitchen, with its wide windows and floor covered in broken glass, might as well have been a thousand miles away. Knives or cleavers were too far.

  He cursed his vulnerability.

  The dark enveloped Morgan. No starlight, no moonlight, not even the pathetic luminosity from the distant lights of Winchester helped him see what might be at arm’s reach, what benign household item might become a defensive weapon against a relentless and invisible sniper with night-vision. A table leg? Colter’s bronzed baby shoes on the mantel? A dead phone?

  Fuck.

  His breaths shortened, quick and insufficient, as he slid along the oak floor to the hallway, close to the front door. The cold tile just inside the door, where snow boots and muddy shoes were always shed, was empty — except for Colter’s baseball bat, still waiting for the moment Dad would suggest a game of catch in the yard. In Morgan’s hand, it was light enough to slap one-handed, soft-rubber grounders to a six-year-old, but much heftier than a blackjack.

  Then, over the sound of his own breaths, Morgan heard the tinkle of a wind chime on the back porch. In a windless night, it could only mean someone was close. Morgan was in a kill zone that had suddenly shrunk from a hundred meters to ten.

  Morgan scuttled through the dark hall and backed up against the wall beside the kitchen door, bat high, back elbow up, ready to swing for the fences. Both hands wrapped around the bat’s handle until his sweaty fingers overlapped. He held his breath and felt the cool trickle of sweat down his spine.

  What was left of the splintered screen door creaked. Slow, deliberate footfalls crunched across the broken glass on the smooth tile. They came closer to Morgan’s hiding place … then stopped.

  Morgan’s eyes were buggy, snagging every ion of light from the dark room, focused on the opening inches away. Sweat began to dribble down his neck, and his scalp was taut and alive. Blood thumped in his ears.

  With one more glass-grinding step, a shadow of a shadow stirred somewhere in the periphery of Morgan’s murky vision. He swung the bat and connected with something metal and leaden, not flesh nor bone. It clattered heavily to the floor.

  Morgan’s would-be assailant cursed aloud in the dark, his voice injured … and familiar.

  Before Morgan could cock the bat back for another swing, his front door imploded and several dark figures spilled into the house in ricochets of flashing light and shouting. Morgan was momentarily blinded by a powerful beam shining directly at his head from the gunsights of an M16 assault rifle.

  “Police! Get down! Now!”

  Startled but half-relieved, Morgan threw his bat into a dark corner of the room and held his hands high. The lead cop, who wore a flak vest over a pajama top, slung Morgan to the floor, smashing his face against the hardwood. Kneeling hard in the small of his back, his rifle was aimed directly at the back of Morgan’s head, ready to fire.

  Prone and pinned to the floor, with his arms cuffed behind his back, Morgan saw a police service revolver beneath Claire’s favorite wingback chair. He knew it at a glance: It was Deuce Kerrigan’s antique Colt.

  The Tac squad swept the rest of the house, finding Claire and Colter hidden in the tower, finally declaring the place clear.

  Another cop stepped over him into the kitchen, where he knelt on the floor beside Sheriff Trey Kerrigan, who cradled a bloodied right hand tightly against his chest and clearly harbored no small amount of anger toward Morgan.

  With only the light of small, fragrant candles between them, the Morgans sat on the leather sofa in their uprooted living room. Trey Kerrigan stood, checking on his investigators and still fuming nearly a half hour after the place was secured.

  “I’m sorry, but I didn’t know it was you,” Morgan told him.

  Secretly, Morgan wondered why he was apologizing for walloping a mysterious intruder moments after his family was nearly wiped out by an assassin.

  But Claire sat safely close, embracing a still-whimpering Colter, whose delicate face was streaked with tears. And he wanted to ask when Trey had started carrying a gun again. Like his father before him, Deuce K
errigan, he’d never felt the need to be armed. But as hard as it was to keep from asking, Morgan didn’t want to ratchet up the friction between himself and his one-time best friend, not at this moment.

  “And I didn’t know if you were still alive, goddammit,” the sheriff said, rubbing his forearm to get feeling back in an injured hand smashed between Morgan’s bat and his own gun. Blood seeped through the gauze where his skin had been split open by the blow.

  Kerrigan’s hand had been bandaged by paramedics while his investigators taped off the kitchen and back porch. They worked quietly in bright pools of artificial light, powered by portable generators. Power wouldn’t be returned to Mount Eden until the power company could repair a sabotaged transformer on a pole a mile away.

  Claire clutched her husband’s arm as if she’d just realized how wrong things might have gone while she hid with Colter in the tower’s window box. The silence was sobering.

  “Your deputy, Cecil, is he …?” Morgan asked quietly. He’d heard some of the cops talking in subdued tones. He knew how it sounded when a cop was down, how the usual dark humor at a crime scene turned to silence. One of the cops had called the dispatcher from the front porch but walked off into the night when he realized paramedics were treating Morgan’s flayed hands and feet just inside the door.

  Kerrigan just shook his head and looked at the floor. Morgan glanced at Claire, who bundled Colter tighter in his blanket and took him upstairs to his bedroom. She touched her husband’s cheek as she passed. Nobody said anything until she and the child were out of the room.

  “Shift changed at midnight,” Kerrigan said without looking up. “His relief radioed but couldn’t raise him. We tried his cell phone, too. They, uh, found him out at the end of the road. One shot to the right temple. Whoever it was shot him through the open passenger window, probably crept up on that side of the car. Still had a cup of coffee between his legs. Didn’t spill a drop. Never knew what hit him.”