5 Highball Exit

by Phyllis Smallman

  Clay would be home soon. I held onto that thought like a lifeline. Things would be fine when he came home. I’d be safe. That’s all I wanted now, to be safe.

  CHAPTER 50

  “You had your cell off.” Brian opened the door even before I could get the key in the lock. He was beaming at me. “Clay’s on his way home.”

  I sagged down on the chair in the foyer. “Thank god.”

  “I’m going out to the ranch for the weekend. I’m all ready to go,” Brian grinned. “You and Clay are going to need a little space and I need to go to Lovey’s Café for one of those heart-stopping breakfasts.”

  “Thanks, Brian.”

  “Do you want me to wait until Clay gets here?”

  “No, I’m safe here. No one knows where I am.”

  He came over and hugged me to him. “Just remember, I get to be the best man.”

  I looked up at him. “How is it that you always know things before I do?”

  “It’s because I am the best man. Come on, I’ll pour you a glass of wine.”

  A couple of hours later, after I’d told him all about my day, he threw me a kiss and went out to the garage. I heard the garage door go up. My phone rang as I stepped from the shower. I wrapped a towel around me and headed for my cell, already getting angry at Clay for cancelling once again.

  But it was Sammy Defino. He was calling to tell me he’d just heard on the ten o’clock news that Rob McCabe had been shot and killed in the alley behind his deli. Police were investigating but they had no one in custody and no suspects.

  Even as I listened to Sammy, even before I started crying, I headed to the bedroom for Clay’s revolver, hidden in the top drawer of the night table. I’d left it fully loaded, all six chambers. Both of those things were going against everything Clay had ever lectured me on about gun safety.

  I finished talking to Sammy, swore I’d take care, and then I dropped the phone on the bed and opened the drawer. The gun wasn’t there.

  I stared in disbelief. Had Brian taken it? He’d warned me more than once about carrying concealed, told me that more people were shot by their own weapons than by armed intruders. But surely he wouldn’t have taken the revolver.

  I smelled his aftershave. I turned slowly around. Ryan smiled at me and said, “Looking for this?” His eyes burned with a mad fire as he held up Clay’s gun, wagging it back and forth in the air. The butt of a second gun showed above his belt.

  I dove for my phone but Ryan was quicker, backhanding me across the jaw and driving me sideways into the wall. And then he hit me again. My head slammed into the drywall. Dazed, I crumbled to my knees.

  His fingers caught my wet hair and pulled me sideways and onto my back. And then Ryan Vachess was on top of me, his fingers around my throat. His face was jammed up against mine as he hissed, “I saw the boyfriend leave with an overnight bag. Going away, was he?” He laughed. “We’ll have all night. I’m going to take my time, going to really enjoy this.” His hips worked up and down against me. He was already enjoying this.

  He shoved the barrel of the gun under my chin, stopping my breath.

  “You’re going to pay for misbehaving.” He got to his feet. Standing over me, the gun pointing down at me, he kept mefixed to the floor with his foot on my chest.

  I wrapped both hands around his ankle, trying to lift it and lessen the pressure.

  He smiled cruelly and pressed harder, like he was squashing a bug.

  “How . . . ?” I gasped.

  “Oh, you’ll see fast enough how I’m going to make you pay.”

  “No,” I panted. “How . . . find me?”

  “Why do you care? There isn’t going to be another time for you to hide better.”

  I couldn’t answer.

  His lips twisted in delight. “A neat little device . . . a GPS tracker. There’s no need to follow anyone anymore. Just put one of those on their vehicle and you have them on your computer. Of course the law says you’re only supposed to put them on cars you own.” This struck him as profoundly funny.

  Still laughing, he took handcuffs from his back pocket and jangled them above me. My expression must have shown my terror because he threw back his head and howled in exaltation.

  “You and Cal, so easy . . . and that fool who just left? Earlier, before you got here, he came back from next door and punched in a code for the garage. I was watching. No problem . . . just follow the pattern, straight across the top from left to right and down one. So simple, no numbers to remember, and he doesn’t lock the door from the house to the garage. Did you know that? He just lowers the garage door. He likes life easy . . . so easy and so careless.”

  He reached down to touch my face and I bit him.

  He jerked away from me, a reflexive reaction, and I kicked out with both feet, sending him backwards over the bed and onto the floor on the other side. I heard him strike the night table, heard his curse, but I was already on my feet, already gone.

  Naked and running, a bullet sent splinters flying from the door frame as I burst into the hall. In the living room, a lamp exploded but I didn’t stop.

  Out through the lanai, bolting through the dark, I crossed the velvet grass without a plan. I just ran. Ahead of me, on the concrete walk by the sign, the long ribbon of moonlight streaking the water ended at a long dark shadow ten feet in front from me. The sinister outline rose and grew larger.

  I stood very still, a monster in front of me and a monster behind me.

  The silhouette in front edged towards me as I heard Ryan panting at my back. I spun around and started pleading with Ryan.

  “Please don’t hurt me.” Begging and being submissive was the only way to stay alive. And it was so easy to do. “Please, no pain.” I stepped sideways, away from the water.

  “Pain is only a little part of what I have in mind for you.” Inching sideways, towards the house, I edged away from thegator, while Ryan turned his back to it.

  “Bitch. I knew you were trouble the minute I walked into Cal’s office and saw you. But he wouldn’t listen. Oh, no, he thought it was all in my head.” He tapped at his head with the barrel of the gun. “But I knew I had to deal with you.”

  Slowly Ryan moved with me, circling around me, corralling me and herding me back towards the house. Now he stood between me and the shadow.

  I raised my hands in supplication. “Please . . .” I moved towards him. “Please, I’ll be good.”

  “Damn right you will.” Behind him something moved in the moonlight. “Good . . . and obedient.”

  My hands went out in supplication. Close to him now, near enough to smell him, I jammed my fists into him, driving him down to my revenge.

  He stumbled backwards, arms windmilling, but not quite losing his footing until there was a violent movement behind him. Ryan screamed. It was like no other sound I’d ever heard before.

  Thrashing on the grass and then pleading for help, his hands stretching out for me, he was pulled backwards.

  The gun lay on the ground between us. I didn’t pick it up.

  His fingers raked through the lawn as he was dragged towards the pond. At the water there was one more “Help me.”

  I watched the gator slip back into the water with Ryan struggling and screaming in its jaws.

  There was a last shriek of terror and then the gator started to roll and Ryan disappeared.

  The water was still roiling when the neighbors arrived, but only one snake-skinned loafer and the gun remained of Ryan.

  A man said, “Why didn’t you shoot it?”

  “Leave her be!” a woman said. She wrapped some rough material around me. “You can’t expect a woman to know how to do that.” Someone else suggested I was afraid of hitting Ryan.

  I gave a soft hiccup of a laugh and covered my mouth before the truth pop
ped out.

  The reality was I’d never be safe with Ryan alive. It came down to Ryan or me and I liked me better than him . . . simple self-preservation. Besides, Ryan and the gator deserved one another. The wildlife people captured the alligator the next day. I never asked what was found in its stomach. I have enough nightmares with the things I already know. And I really don’t think about Ryan too much anymore. I’ve got a bar to run.

  The End

  Author’s Comments

  For those who ask if this could really happen, here are the newspaper stories that set the little gray cells whirring. The first idea came from two newspaper articles in Canada about two different people who knowingly infected others with the HIV virus. The rest of the story was filled in by pieces from Florida.

  On Tuesday, February 7, 2012, the Herald Tribune headline read, “After alligator kills, victim’s family sues homeowners’ group.” Before this unfortunate event, ninety-one alligators had already been removed from the pond by the homeowners’ association in the past. A representative said, “If you go walking around at night, you don’t know what you might find.”

  Another idea: The same day, same paper, another headline read, “Pythons causing demise of species?” This article came from West Palm Beach. A growing population of pythons in the Everglades is causing unease and a fall in the number of raccoons, opossums and bobcats. Where constrictor snakes lurk, the population of these mammals has gone down as much as 99 per cent. My question is, when all those mammals are gone, what will the pythons dine on next?

  I see another adventure in Sherri’s future.

  An award-winning author, Phyllis Smallman was a potter before turning to a life of crime. She was the first ever recipient of the Crime Writers of Canada’s Unhanged Arthur award, and was shortlisted for the Debut Dagger by the Crime Writers Association in the UK and nominated for the Malice Domestic Award in the US. Phyllis divides her year between Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, and a beach in Florida. Highball Exit is the fifth book in the Sherri Travis mystery series. Phyllis is currently working on the first of a new series, Long Gone Man, coming in fall 2013. Please visit www.phyllissmallman.com.