No Way to Die

by M. D. Grayson

  “Hey, you,” I said, opening the door. “What brings you by?”

  Toni looked at me. “Hey, yourself. I figured it was time we talked.”

  My heart started beating a little faster. I nodded. “Okay.”

  She stared at me for a second from the doorway. “So are you going to invite me in—?” she said, and then stopped abruptly. She tried to look past me into the room. “Are you—do you have company already?”

  I smiled and opened the door wide. “No company—I’m all yours,” I said. “Come in.”

  She walked past me, and I closed the door. I followed her into the living room.

  “How was the camping trip?” she asked.

  “Fuckin’ glorious,” I said. “Sunshine both days. No rain. No people to speak of. Had the whole place to myself.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “It was. Very relaxing. I ran on sweet trails both days. I fished. I played the guitar. I loved it. You should have gone with me.” Then, I remembered why she hadn’t. “Oh, speaking of which, how was your weekend? How’d your hot date with Ogden go?”

  She shrugged. “It was good,” she said. “But I wouldn’t call it a hot date.”

  “Really? No wild, passionate sex? No breakfast in bed yesterday?”

  She gave me a look.

  “Not that it’s any of your business, but no. We went to dinner. We talked. Then he brought me back home, and I went to bed. By myself.”

  I gave her a quizzical look. “You okay with that?”

  “Of course. What—you think I went out with him to get laid?”

  I shrugged my shoulders and raised my eyebrows. “I’m maybe just a little surprised that he didn’t even try?”

  “Well, he didn’t. Not everyone’s like you, Logan. Not everyone’s into gratuitous sex like you are.”

  “Ouch,” I said, clutching my chest and falling backward on the sofa. “That hurts." I sat up. "And by the way, that’s a strikingly unfair statement. How many relationships have I had in the past three or four years that fall into the category of ‘gratuitous sex’?”

  “Define relationship,” she said.

  “Okay. More than a week.”

  “Counting Jennifer Thomas or not?” she said.

  “Well,” I admitted, “okay. So that’s one. But aside from that, how many?”

  She thought about it for a moment. “Not many, I suppose.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Not many. About the same number as you, I’d venture to say.”

  She rolled her eyes the way she does.

  “And do you want to know why I’m so pious?” I asked.

  She looked at me. “Why?”

  “Simple. It’s because I’m saving myself for you, that’s why. You’re the one.” I threw myself on the floor and wrapped my arms around her feet.

  “Oh, puh-leeze,” she laughed, stepping away. “You’re completely full of shit. I need a beer. Want one?”

  I laughed. “Sure,” I answered as she walked into the kitchen.

  I’d been listening to Juber’s Altered Reality, so I turned itback on again.

  “So,” I said to her a minute later as she came back into the living room with the beers, “if you’re not here to regale me with scintillating stories of your weekend conquest, why are you here?”

  “Believe it or not, I miss talking to you like this,” she said, sitting down.

  I smiled. “I hear that,” I said. “Me, too. Why’d we stop, then?” I asked. “It’s because of Jennifer, isn’t it?”

  She looked at me and sighed. “Partly,” she said. “Not because I’m jealous, or anything. But nowadays she takes up a lot of your time. You might say that your dance card has been pretty full lately, mister.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I looked into her eyes. “Really, I mean it. I’m sorry. I never meant for anything to get in the way of what we have together.”

  She smiled. “That’s nice,” she said. “What will Jennifer have to say about that?”

  I shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t care, Toni. And truth be told, she probably won’t care, either. We don’t have that kind of relationship.”

  “What, the kind where you actually talk to each other?”

  “Be nice. We don’t talk about deep stuff, not like you and I used to. You and I share stuff—heart to heart. Jen’s not interested in that. Anyway, ‘commitment’ is not a part of my relationship with Jen. Never was.”

  “You’re saying she could walk in tomorrow and tell you ‘Danny, I met my true love last week in Virginia and I’m moving back there to live happily ever after with him,’ and you’d be just fine with that?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’d want her to give me my Canucks sweatshirt back before she left.”

  She laughed and shook her head. “You’re amazing,” she said. She took a long drink from her beer.

  I smiled. “I know.”

  She looked up. “Amazing as in ‘bizarre,’ not amazing as in ‘wonderful,’ you dipshit.”

  “Ouch,” I said. “That hurts.”

  She thought about that for a few seconds. “So let me get this straight—you share your heart with me, while at the same time, you share your bed with her?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I suppose that’s how it is,” I said.

  “You realize that sounds kind of fucked up, right? And that it’s probably going to blow up one day?”

  I shrugged. “Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. But I know this—you and me—I look at us as permanent. One day we’ll probably each be married, and I hope even then that we can still be best friends, if that’s possible.”

  “Hate to burst your bubble, dude,” she said, “but if I ever get married, I’m going to make damn sure my husband’s my best friend.” She paused. “Not to say you and I couldn’t do lunch every now and then.”

  I thought about this, and then I nodded. “I suppose I understand. I guess I wasn’t thinking that far ahead.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s okay for now. But at some point, the time’s going to come. Ready or not.”

  I nodded again. “You’re probably right. You usually are. But, meanwhile, I very much miss spending time with you. I miss our talks—talks like this. And I will definitely make certain from now on that my dance card has plenty of empty slots that, hopefully, you’d be willing to fill.”

  She smiled. “I’d like that.”

  I looked into her blue eyes and practically melted right there on the spot. God, she was beautiful. It was damn hard to keep our relationship professional—for me, anyway. Suck it up, dude.

  “Friends again, then,” I said, holding up my beer bottle.

  “We were always friends,” she said, clinking her bottle against mine. “Just no benefits.”

  We talked for an hour about her mom, my mom, my dad, her sister, and so on. We listened to music and just kicked back, relaxing—just like the old days. It was damn near perfect.

  * * * *

  Later, we sat side by side on the sofa with our feet up on the coffee table. “So,” she said, “what are you thinking about the case?”

  “I’m thinking,” I said, “that if we don’t come up with something concrete pretty damn soon—next few days or so—I’m going to reach a point where I’ll need to tell my dad that Katherine Rasmussen’s probably wasting her money with us. I’ll be able to say we have lots of suspicions, but nothing else. And to fully develop those suspicions could take a very long time—if ever. We’re going to reach an inflection point pretty soon where if we continue to take money from her, it would be borderline dishonest.”

  She nodded. “That sucks,” she said. “But it’s probably true. But something about this whole thing makes me really uncomfortable. I’ve got a strange feeling about this.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “Me, too.”

  “It’s like there’s an answer out there that we should see, but we don’t.”

  “Well, we think Holly’s lying to us. Maybe we need to press her some more.”

&
nbsp; “Or figure out some other way to lean on her,” she said.

  I thought for a few seconds and said,“Well, I’m not ready to throw in the towel yet. We’ll keep after it until we agree that we’ve gone as far as we can. But you got to remember—it might not be that we’re dealing with a murder that can’t be proven here. It might be that Katherine’s wrong—it’s just a suicide, after all. If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck—it might just be a duck.”

  “True,” she said, nodding.

  She stayed for another half hour or so, helping me to straighten up. At the door, she turned, and we hugged. I haven’t hugged Toni all that often over the past five years, and I have to admit, it felt good.

  She left about ten thirty. I felt happier than I’d felt in a long time.

  * * * *

  I usually don’t have much of a problem getting to sleep. I attribute this to clean living and plenty of exercise. In Iraq, I was famous for falling asleep once in the middle of a mortar attack. Tonight, though, after Toni left, I had trouble falling asleep. My mind was too busy. I thought about Toni, of course. I was immensely relieved that she and I seemed to be finding our old footing. I suppose I’m something of a creature of habit, and it was very comforting to think that we could be back to our old selves soon.

  But this raised the question of how to deal with Jennifer. If it did come time for Jen and me to end our relationship, would it really be as simple as I’d told Toni it would be? And what about the notion of Toni with John Ogden? That whole thing left me uncomfortable. Was this a doublestandard? Okay for me, but not for her?

  Then I remembered that when I’d asked Toni if Jennifer Thomas was the reason Toni and I had stopped hanging out together, she’d said “partly.” What did “partly” mean? Toni had cooled off toward me a month before Jennifer came along. If she had other problems, what were they? I decided I needed to get to the bottom of this.

  With the “Toni problem” thoroughly beat to death, my mind drifted back to the case. Here, the answers were even harder in coming. I ran circular theories around in my head for about two hours and didn’t come up with any new insights. I wasn’t going to solve the case there in the middle of the night, and I would have preferred not to even think about it.

  One thing I couldn’t get out of my mind, though, was that Holly Kenworth had neglected to mention the fact that she’d basically had Thomas go down and buy her a gun. Why would she do this and then, why would she fail to mention it? Seemed like a pretty significant oversight. Holly had to have known that the gun she had Thomas buy was the gun that fired the fatal bullet, yet she hadn’t seen fit to tell anybody. Like most things in this case, it had a couple of possible explanations: an innocent one—she forgot or maybe didn’t even know; and a sinister one—she was hiding this fact, hoping that no one else knew about how Thomas came to own the gun. Either way, it was a loose end that I needed to check out.

  Truth be told, if I think about it for any great length of time, I start to get really uneasy when there are too many loose ends like this. That was my problem, lying there and struggling to get to sleep.

  I’ve always been a worrier this way to a degree, but one cold morning in the mountains of Afghanistan really drove it home for me. In 2002, I was a twenty-year-old E4 (Specialist) in the 2nd Battalion of the 187th Infantry Regiment—part of the famous 101st Airborne Division. We were operating with a group of Canadians—they called themselves the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry Group; I always got a kick out of that name—we called them the 'PLIGS'. One day we combined forces in a joint effort to remove al-Qaeda and the Taliban from a high mountain valley known as the Shah-i-Kot Valley. The operation was called Operation Anaconda.

  Loose ends about did me in that day. Our intel guys severely underestimated the number of enemy fighters and worse, their commitment—their willingness to stand up and fight. Instead of a couple hundred enemy fighters who were supposed to flee at the very sight of our helicopters, there were more than one thousand pissed-off fanatics who clearly had no interest in tucking tail. This, coupled with a really shitty contingency plan for bad weather, led to some real problems that morning. We were supposed to land more than four hundred troops in our Task Force Hammer. Unfortunately, bad weather and heavier-than-expected enemy fire made it so that there were only about two hundred of us the first day. Bottom line—instead of us outnumbering the enemy two to one, they outnumbered us fiveto one—definitely not good. We spent the whole friggin’ day in a fierce firefight, trying to keep from being overrun. They were shooting at us from all angles. It was a genuine clusterfuck.

  The next day, the brass figured out that the bad guys had managed to get us to fight them on their terms instead of ours—never a good scenario. Wisdom prevailed, and they got things sorted out. The ultimate result was a favorable one—but it took a lot longer than planned and, frankly, we were damn lucky we didn’t have higher casualties.

  I took away several lessons from this. First, I always try to make sure I’m as prepared as I can possibly be. You’ll hardly ever see me without a gun—sometimes two. Next, I never want to fight the bad guys on their terms. Whichever way they choose to fight, I usually try to do it some other way. Finally, I try to know as much about my enemies as I can before I have to mix it up with them.

  I should add something else. Over the past four years, I’ve come to trust Toni’s gut feelings—sometimes even more so than my own. The woman has an intuition that’s uncanny. Unfortunately, if she felt like something was wrong, there was probably something wrong. And “something wrong” in this case meant that there was still a murderer out there—someone who probably knew a lot more about me than I did about him. This was never agood thing, to say the least.

  I finally fell asleep, but only for another hour andahalf or so. I woke up thinking about Toni again. When I saw that it was four o’clock on Monday morning, I decided to hell with it—I’d had enough tossing and turning.I figured I’d just get up, get ready, and go straight to work. Today being Monday, there was no training run scheduled. I left the apartment at four thirty.

  Chapter 13

  I LIVE ABOUT five blocks from my office, so rather than drive, I decided to walk. I hoped that the cool night air would help me get things straight in my mind. To a pretty large extent, it did. I think there’s something about the perspective you take in looking at a problem that determines your outlook. For some reason, when I’m lying in bed, inactive, problems seem bigger and more insurmountable than they should. In the morning, when I’m awake and firing on all cylinders, these problems turn back into mere obstacles—obstacles that will yield to proper planning and execution. Monday morning, I was ready to tackle my problems head-on.

  It took me fifteen minutes to get to the office. I was just reaching for the door when I noticed that it was already unlocked. I froze for a moment. This wasn’t good. I could see through the glass door that the lights were off inside. I stepped back away from the door and pressed up against the wall. I reached for my cell phone to dial 9-1-1, but the thought hit me that if I simply had these guys busted, they’d clam up and I’d never know who they were or, perhaps, what they were after. I decided I’d do a little recon first.

  I reached down and drew my handgun. I keep it in a belt holster in what we call Condition One—gun cocked, bullet in the chamber, safety on. I held the gun in a standard low-ready position—arms in tight, gun pointed down.

  It was completely quiet outside, the silence broken only by the sounds of traffic on the I-5 freeway half a mile to the east.I scanned the parking lot, searching for lookouts. If there were any out there, they’d have probably already seen me and might have informed the people inside that someonewas coming.

  I hadn’t noticed anyone when I walked up, and fortunately, I didn’t see any car now that looked like it might have held a lookout. The parking lot lights were bright enough to illuminate the insides of the half-dozen cars parked there so early in the morning. All looked to
beempty. I turned my attention back to the door.

  I visualized the interior layout of our office. We’re situated on the second floor, at the far south end of the building. The lobby is off the front door, right when you walk in. The only things in the lobby are a desk and a couple of chairs, so it’s unlikely any bad guy would be there. Getting inside into the lobby, then, and getting the door closed behind me would be my first objective.

  Once inside, the office layout runs east to west. A long central hallway extends from the lobby to the back door, with my office located on one side of the hallway and the conference room on the other. In between are offices paired off across the main corridor from each other for Doc, Kenny, and Richard, plus one more office that we use as a workroom. If there were a bad guy inside, he’d likely be in one of these back offices. Or he could be in Toni’s office, which is right up front off the lobby. So after I got inside, clearing Toni’s office would have to be my second objective. Then, I’d work my way farther in.

  I strained, but I heard nothing coming from inside. Maybe no one was there. Maybe they’d been there and already left. For that matter, maybe someone just forgot to lock the door. I pushed the main door open slightly and peeked inside. My eyes were adjusted to the dim outside light filtering in through the windows, but I saw nothing. I quickly slipped in and pushed the door closed behind me. Fortunately, the door is a fairly new commercial unit that we’d installed when we rehabbed the office prior to moving in. It made no noise at all as it swung closed.

  I crouched down and remained motionless, listening hard for the sounds of anything suspicious. Sure enough, a couple of seconds later, I heard a muffled bang as a file drawer closed, somewhere in an office down the hall. That answered that question. Someone was definitely inside. I could feel my adrenalin level elevating. My heart rate increased. On the Cooper Color Code, I moved to Condition Red—full alert, ready to fight.