“Why?”
“To get her out of the way. Teri’s nuts enough to think that Tanya is the only reason she can’t have Kenny to herself. If she gets Tanya out of the way, she would think the coast is clear.”
“Shit,” Pete says, a sentiment I share completely.
We’re a block away from the Schilling house when I see Teri’s car.
Pete pulls up in front of the house, and I’m out of the car before he is. I run to the front door, which is fortunately but ominously open. I rush in, Pete right behind me.
We hear a woman’s voice, a frightening sound somewhere between a scream and a plea. It’s a large house, and impossible to be sure where the noise is coming from, but I realize where it must be.
“Pete!” I call out, hoping he can hear me but Teri can’t. I run for the room I was in months ago, the room where Troy Preston’s body was in the closet. I push open the door, and Tanya is huddled in a corner. Teri faces her, holding a handgun, but turns to me when she hears me coming in. Unfortunately, the gun turns along with her. “How nice you could join us,” she says.
I raise my hands, even though I haven’t been told to, and she motions me to stand near Tanya. I know Pete is out there in the hall, but he would have to get well into the room before having a clear shot at Teri. Teri could easily hear him coming and kill one of us before he could intervene.
I have no idea what to say to get out of this. Things that come to mind, like “You’ll never get away with this” and “There’s no reason anyone should get hurt,” seem like pathetically ineffective clichés.
Instead, I try to surprise her, to make her think. “Why did you kill those young men?” I ask.
“You know about that?” she asks, her voice and half-smile reflecting pride in her own accomplishments. “Bobby said you were smart.”
“Is it because they broke the pact? They didn’t take care of Bobby?” As I say it, I’m watching the small corridor between the doorway and the main part of the room, hoping Pete can get in here without her noticing him.
“He would have taken care of them. If he had his legs, he would have been a star, and he would have taken care of every one of them. They took an oath. A goddamn blood oath.”
Bobby did have his legs, but I don’t think I’ll remind her of that fact right now. I think I see a slight shadow in the corridor, and right now all I can do is hope the shadow is who I think it is.
The panicked Tanya seems to move slightly, causing Teri to yell and point the gun at her. I’m afraid she’s going to shoot, but she doesn’t. “Look at her,” Teri says to me, indicating Tanya. “This is who Kenny thanked on television, for making him a star. Doesn’t that make you sick?”
I see the shadow in the corridor move, so I look in the other direction, the direction of the window, and yell, “Pete!”
Teri turns toward the window, just for a split second, and it’s enough time for Pete to get into the room. He yells, “Drop the gun!”
But Teri doesn’t drop the gun, instead turns with it, and Pete has no choice but to shoot. The bullet hits her full force in the shoulder, sending her flying back into the wall as her gun falls harmlessly to the floor.
I grab Tanya and hold on to her, and it feels like within moments the room is filled with every cop and paramedic in the United States, as well as one running back for the Giants.
THIS SESSION WITH Carlotta is going to be about me, and as I sit in her waiting room at eight o’clock in the morning, I’m looking forward to it. She’s seeing me on an emergency basis, since I called her and told her I was in a lot of pain.
“Emotional pain?” she had asked.
“Emotional pain,” I had confirmed. “I’ve got things I need to talk about.”
Carlotta opens her door and lets me in precisely at eight. I mutter a greeting, head straight for the couch, and lie down. “I don’t think I can deal with Laurie being gone” is what I think. “Do you think Teri Pollard is sane enough to stand trial?” is what I actually say.
“This is the source of your emotional pain?” Carlotta asks.
“Not exactly.”
“Then perhaps we should talk about the source of that pain.”
I sit up and shake my head. “It’s too painful.”
We go on to talk about Teri, and I tell Carlotta what Pete Stanton has told me about his interrogation of her. Teri has openly admitted—in fact, bragged about—how she looked up each player who had verbally signed on to the “pact,” all those years before. The first young man had laughed at her, ridiculing the idea that anyone could have taken it seriously.
Carlotta nods. “That would have set her off. And once she killed him, there was no turning back.”
“But according to Pete, she was very calculating about it all. She took her time, didn’t make them at all suspicious. She just slipped the potassium in their drink, and that was that.”
“And her husband had no idea what she was doing?”
“It doesn’t seem so. Bobby apparently didn’t take the pact as seriously as she did, although she could only have heard about it through him. She wasn’t there that weekend.”
“The insecurity that would have driven Bobby to his psychosomatic injury would have made him build up the importance of the pact when he first related it to his wife,” Carlotta says. “He was afraid he wasn’t good enough to achieve success, so he was telling her that they’d be taken care of even if he failed.”
“And she bought into it,” I say.
Carlotta nods. “So strongly that she couldn’t rationally deal with the disappointment when it turned out to be an illusion.”
We talk about it some more, and even though there are twenty minutes left in my session, I stand up to leave.
“Andy, why don’t you talk to me about what’s bothering you?”
“I find it harder to deny things if I admit them first.”
“It might help,” she says.
“I’m not ready.”
“When you are, I’ll be here.”
I nod. “I’ll call you as soon as I am. Figure about four years from Wednesday.”
I’M NOT GOING TO make it as a placekicker. I know that now. I got a book to study the technique, and I’ve been trying it in the park for an hour a day, each of the last two days. I’ve been kicking off a tee, while Willie fields the kicks and Tara and Cash watch. All of them knew I was going to fail long before I did, as they watched my kickoffs bounce pathetically along the ground.
I do have another plan to reach the NFL, though. I’m going to be a coach. But I don’t want to be like those other crazed coaches who stay up until three o’clock in the morning watching opponents’ tapes. I’m going to be a placekicking coach. The hours shouldn’t be too long, and the placekicking book I got gives me a head start.
I have already taken on another case. I’m representing Kenny and Tanya Schilling in proceedings to let them adopt Jason Pollard. Since he’s Kenny’s natural son, and they are an upstanding family with sufficient financial resources, it will be an easy win. Especially since there is no doubt that Teri will be confined for the rest of her life.
I’ve now added “breaking and entering” to the personal criminal history I began when I instigated Quintana’s murder. I made the assumption that Teri Pollard had taken the four hundred thousand dollars of Quintana’s money from Troy Preston the night she killed him, and on Tuesday I climbed through a window of the Pollard house to look for it.
It took about an hour, but I found it buried under a mountain of toys in Jason’s closet. I sent it, in the form of a check, to Adam’s parents, with an accompanying note telling them that it was money he had earned. I also mentioned that he had talked about buying them a house, but that they should certainly do what they wish with the money.
Laurie sent me a letter. I got it last Wednesday, a couple of days after I talked to Carlotta. The envelope is pretty thick, so it’s probably a few pages. Someday, maybe in the next couple of years, I’m going to open it. And then,
a few years after that, I’ll probably read it. If she wanted to come back, she’d call. This is probably a rehash of her reasons for leaving, and I just can’t let myself think about it right now.
I read in this morning’s paper that there’s an eclipse coming up early next month. It upsets me that I have no one to whom I can say, “I told you so, the whole thing is a scam.”
The truth is, there’s a lot of things I want to say, but there’s no one around that I want to hear them.
Laurie is the only person I really love in this world, and I hate her.
Sudden Death Page 24