Everyone Dies

by Michael McGarrity

  After ten more minutes, the kid arrived. Green left his car, circled behind the building to avoid any curious eyes inside the shoe store, and walked into the shop. The bell on the door tinkled and the kid and the woman looked up from the counter and smiled at him.

  “Back so soon?” the woman asked.

  “Yeah, I need to send some flowers to another friend,” Green said sheepishly as he stepped toward them, looking at the kid. “Were you able to make that delivery?”

  The kid nodded. He had a big ugly-looking pimple on his neck. “Yeah, I just finished the run.”

  “That’s great,” Green said. “Were there any police officers there?”

  The kid gave him a funny look. “Just the one that took the flowers. He wore a badge and a gun on his belt.”

  “But it was the father, right?” Green said, describing Kerney to the kid.

  “Yeah, it was him,” the kid said, “as far as I could tell.”

  “Super,” Green replied, as he pulled the pistol from the waistband at the small of his back. He shot the woman first and then the kid, the silencer flattening the sounds into dull splats.

  He stepped around the counter. Both were dead, the kid with a stunned look on his face, and the woman still wearing her frozen, customer-friendly smile. He took the truck keys out of the kid’s pants pocket and concealed the bodies behind the counter.

  Moving quickly, he put on a pair of latex gloves, found more keys in the woman’s purse under a small desk, locked the deadbolt to the back door, and turned on the telephone answering machine. He got a wad of paper towels in the small restroom, wiped off the counter to destroy any fingerprints, and put the pen he’d used to write the note in his shirt pocket.

  He pulled a piece of plain paper from the tray of the fax machine, and wrote out a message in block letters with a felt-tipped marker. Then he grabbed a fancy floral display from the refrigerated case and taped the message to the inside of the shop’s door.

  Green glanced around before locking up. No one was in sight. He wiped his prints from the handle of the door, put the flowers in the delivery van, and drove away unable to resist the laugh that bubbled out of him as he thought about the sign he’d put up. It read:CLOSED DUE TO A DEATH IN THE FAMILY

  That sure as hell was true, and would soon apply to Kerney and his family, too, if all went well.

  Green eased into the passing lane, making sure to use the turn signal even though no cops were in sight. Within the hour he’d be done with it, back in his car, and heading for the open road.

  Over a second cup of coffee, Kerney explained why he believed the killer was the bald-headed man and not Olsen.

  Clayton, who agreed with Kerney’s analysis, nodded. “So we’re back to having an unknown suspect.”

  “Unless we can make an ID, this could drag on for some time,” Kerney said glumly. “But if we stay smart and ask the right questions, we’ll find him.”

  “Well, until then we’ll just have to keep our guard up,” Clayton said as he got up and put his coffee mug in the sink.

  “I’m sorry all this crap fell on you and your family.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Clayton said as he returned to his chair. He leaned forward and gave Kerney a studied look. “Tell me something. Did you go into the delivery room with Sara?”

  Kerney nodded, grinned, and his eyes lit up. “You bet I did.”

  As Kerney described the experience with unabashed delight, Clayton felt the last of the pinprick anger he’d always felt about Kerney begin to wash away. The thought came to him that his boneheaded rejection of Kerney hadn’t been fair to the man. That it had been ground into him by his mother for as long as he could remember never to question who his father was, no matter how much he longed to know.

  For the first time Clayton wondered if he’d been angry with the wrong person. Maybe it was time to stop trying to be the perfect, politically correct Apache man his mother always expected him to be and instead concentrate on being Kerney’s friend.

  Clayton smiled as Kerney described his shaking hands and pounding heart when he’d looked at Patrick for the first time and cut the umbilical cord. “Isn’t that a kick?” he said.

  “You’ve done it?” Kerney asked.

  “Twice.”

  The doorbell rang and Kerney got to his feet. “It’s probably more flowers,” he said.

  He checked out the window to be sure and recognized the van, although the man waiting with flowers in hand wasn’t the same kid who’d delivered earlier. He took a couple of bills from his wallet and swung open the door.

  Green smiled as he brought the pistol from behind the vase and pointed it at Kerney’s gut. “Hello, shithead,” he said. “Try to act natural or I’ll kill you where you stand.”

  “Don’t do this,” Kerney replied.

  “Where’s your bitch and her baby?” Green asked.

  “In the bedroom sleeping,” Kerney said, raising his voice slightly.

  “Good. Keep your hands at your side, step back slowly, and let me in. Be cool.”

  “Whatever you want,” Kerney replied as he backed up.

  Green waved the pistol. “Keep moving.”

  Kerney stopped when his legs hit the edge of the coffee table.

  Samuel Green closed the door with the heel of his shoe and put the flowers on the foyer table. “How do you want it?” he asked. “You first, or the bitch and the baby?”

  “I thought you wanted me to watch them die,” Kerney said, raising his voice another notch.

  “I’m flexible,” Green whispered. “Keep your voice down.”

  “But not very bright,” Kerney said. “You didn’t do your homework with Olsen.”

  “Fuck you,” Green said, his voice rising a bit.

  “Where is Olsen?” Kerney asked, trying to keep the conversation going. He hoped that sooner rather than later, Clayton would come looking for him.

  Green smirked. “Talking won’t keep you alive. But I’ll answer your question. He’s at the bottom of a very deep hole.”

  “How imaginative,” Kerney said. “You made all these creative finesse moves, and where did it get you?”

  “Don’t try to rile me, Kerney. You still don’t know who I am, do you?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  Green heard a flush of water running through the pipes beneath the floor. “Sounds like momma is up,” he said, waving the gun. “Take me to her.”

  “Kill me now,” Kerney said.

  “No way, cowboy.”

  Kerney led the way past the open kitchen door. Clayton was nowhere to be seen. He turned the corner of the hallway just as the door to the guest bathroom behind him began to open.

  “Hit the deck,” Kerney yelled as Green swung toward the sound and fired two quick rounds, chest high into the door. He reached for Green as the man pivoted back to face him. Two bullets shattered the bathroom door and hit Green in the back.

  Kerney stepped away and let him fall. “Clear.”

  From the bathroom floor, Clayton reached up and opened the door. He saw Kerney frozen in the hallway, a body at his feet, Sara behind him holding a pistol, and heard the sound of a baby crying.

  “Sorry about that,” Clayton said, getting to his feet. “I had to use the bathroom.”

  Chapter 15

  The gunshots brought the two surveillance officers to the house in short order. After they arrived, Kerney asked Sara to take Patrick and stay with Gloria Baca until things quieted down. Knowing the place would soon be filled with cops and techs, she willingly agreed.

  While Kerney called Gloria and explained the situation, Sara thanked Clayton for saving their lives, hugged him, and got him to promise that he wouldn’t leave town before speaking with her again.

  From the portal, the two men watched Sara bundle Patrick into his car seat and drive off, followed by a detective who had orders to stay with them as a precautionary measure. When she was out of sight, Kerney looked at Clayton and shook his head, afraid if he open
ed his mouth he’d say something dumb or insipid.

  Clayton read the unspoken gratitude on Kerney’s face. “Don’t say it.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” Kerney replied, “except I’m glad you were here.”

  “So am I,” Clayton said. “Do you think it’s over?”

  “God, I hope so.”

  “Who was that guy?”

  “I’m not sure,” Kerney answered. “Let’s take a closer look.”

  In the hallway, Kerney bent over the body, removed the cap, wig, and mustache, and studied the man’s face. There was something vaguely familiar to it, but nothing registered clearly.

  “Nope,” Kerney said, and without thinking he rose up and kicked the nameless, dead son of a bitch in the side as hard as he could.

  It took most of the day to sort things out. Richard Finney, AKA Samuel Green, had been a fourteen-year-old runaway who’d robbed and brutally murdered an elderly Laundromat owner. He was one of the two potential suspects on Kerney’s list Molina and his team had been unable to locate.

  With a number of other officers Kerney had been sweeping the neighborhood near the crime scene on the night of the murder when Finney came at him from behind a vacant house, screaming obscenities and swinging a hammer. He shot Finney in the groin from a distance of four feet. At the time, he had no idea how young Finney was, but would have shot him anyway to stop the attack.

  Kerney sat in Andy’s unit while his friend read Finney’s old juvie case file. Still rattled by the events of the day, a few moments of silence were a welcome relief.

  “I guess losing your balls is enough to make anyone hold a grudge,” Andy said, closing the case file and handing it back to Kerney. “But why didn’t he just come after you? Sure, Potter handled the case in juvie court and Manning did the psych evaluation. But Finney made a straight-up confession, and Manning thought he could be rehabilitated.”

  Kerney shrugged.

  “And why did he wait so long to do it?”

  Kerney shook his head.

  “Why the Olsen disguise?” Andy asked. “Was it some sort of ‘look how smart I am’ kind of thing?”

  “Who knows,” Kerney said. He leaned back against the headrest of Andy’s unit and thought about the two dead people at the flower shop, and the skeleton of a woman that had been found buried in the yard of the burned-out house where Finney had once lived.

  He watched the crime scene techs loading up their gear. The DA had come and gone, as had the ME. Finney’s body was en route to the autopsy table, and Clayton was inside the house going through a mandatory police-shooting interrogation with Sal Molina.

  Mentally, Kerney did a body count. Aside from Potter, Manning, and Drake, there was Kurt Larsen, Mary Beth Patterson, the two flower shop victims, and the unknown woman buried in the yard. That made eight. If he’d aimed a little higher, Finney would be dead and those innocent people would still be alive. He wondered if there were more bodies Finney had left behind that no one knew about.

  “At least something good came out of it,” Andy said. “After all, Finney did ice Olsen before he could murder again.”

  “Yeah, there’s that,” Kerney said.

  Andy’s call sign came over the police radio. He keyed the microphone and answered. The water pump in Clayton’s unit had been replaced and the vehicle was operational.

  “He’ll want to go home,” Kerney said.

  “What are you going to do?” Andy asked, eyeing his friend, who looked drained of all emotion. And why shouldn’t he? For almost a week, everything Kerney cared about had been on the line. Just hours ago, a murderer intent on killing his wife and newborn child had been stopped only a few steps short of his goal.

  Kerney looked out the window wishing Andy would quit talking and let him clear his head.

  “Got any plans?” Andy asked to goad a response.

  Kerney smiled weakly. “I’m going to get to know my son, spend time with Sara, celebrate with the in-laws once they arrive, push the house project along, go down to Mescalero to visit with Clayton and his family before Sara has to report back on duty, and be grateful for all that I have.”

  “Sounds like a full agenda,” Andy said.

  “Yeah.” Kerney saw Clayton step onto the portal of the house and opened the car door. “That’s one hell of a good man.”

  “Tell him that,” Andy said.

  “I plan to,” Kerney replied as he pulled himself out of the vehicle.

  Over the next several weeks, life slowly returned to normal, helped along by the visit of Sara’s family, frequent phone calls back and forth with Clayton and Grace, and the calming effect of Patrick Brannon, who seemed, in ways Kerney couldn’t quite put into words, self-assured and contented, which of course made him all the more amazing.

  After the family celebration ended and the relatives departed, Kerney and Sara filled their days with frequent picnics at the ranch to watch the new house go up, shopping for the items on Sara’s wish list, and staying close to home, due to Patrick’s insistence that he be fed every two hours and be allowed to sleep whenever he wanted. They coped with it by taking lots of catnaps and alternating feeding and diaper-changing shifts.

  Determined to spend as much time as he could with Sara and Patrick, Kerney went on unpaid leave when his vacation time ran out, occasionally dropping by the office to deal with a few important matters, not the least of which was Sal Molina’s retirement party.

  Arrangements had been made to visit Clayton and Grace on an upcoming weekend, so Kerney booked a suite at a resort lodge in Ruidoso and made reservations to take everyone out to dinner while they were there.

  The night before they left, Sara snuggled up to him on the couch.

  “You haven’t said a word about the fact that I have to report back for duty in two weeks,” she said.

  “And I’m not going to,” Kerney said. “It’s not an issue anymore.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because,” Kerney said, taking her hand in his, “I know without a doubt that nothing can break this family apart.”

  Read on

  for a special preview

  of Michael McGarrity’s

  next thrilling Kevin Kerney novel

  SLOW KILL

  Now available from Dutton

  Ten minutes after Santa Fe police chief Kevin Kerney picked up his rental car at the Bakersfield airport, he was stuck in heavy stop-and-go traffic, questioning his decision to take the less traveled back roads on his trip to the central California coast.

  Congestion didn’t ease until he was well outside the city limits on a westbound state highway that cut through desert flatlands. Ahead, a dust devil jumped across a straight, uninviting stretch of pavement and churned slowly through an irrigated alfalfa field, creating a green wave rolling over the forage.

  Kerney glanced at his watch. Had he made a mistake in trying to map out a scenic route to take to the coast? By now, he’d expected to be approaching a mountain range, but there was nothing on the hazy horizon to suggest it.

  It really didn’t matter if he’d misjudged his driving time. He had all day to get to the Double J horse ranch outside of Paso Robles, where he would spend the weekend looking over some quarter horses that were up for sale. He hit the cruise control and let his mind wander.

  Kerney had partnered up with his neighbor, Jack Burke, to breed, raise, and train competition cutting horses. Kerney would buy some stock to get the enterprise started, Jack would contribute broodmares, pastureland, and stables to the partnership, and Jack’s youngest son, Riley Burke, would do the training.

  The sky cleared enough to show the outline of mountains topped by a few bleached, mare’s tail clouds. Soon, Kerney was driving through a pass on a twisting road flanked by forked and tilted gray-needle pine trees and into a huge grassland plain that swept up against a higher, more heavily timbered mountain range to the west.

  Finally, his road trip had turned interesting. He stopped to stretch his legs, and a conve
rtible sports car with the top down zipped by, the woman driver tooting her horn and waving gaily as she sped away.

  Kerney waved back, thinking it would have been nice to have his family with him. He’d arranged the trip with the expectation that he’d enjoy his time by himself and away from the job. But in truth, he was alone far more than he liked. Sara, his career Army officer wife, had a demanding Pentagon duty assignment that limited her free time, and Patrick, their toddler son who lived with her, was far too young to travel alone.

  Kerney had hoped that the new house they’d built on two sections of ranchland outside of Santa Fe would change Sara’s mind about staying in the Army, but it hadn’t. Although she loved the ranch and looked forward to living in Santa Fe full-time, she wasn’t about take early retirement. That meant six more years of a part-time, long-distance marriage, held together by frequent cross-country trips back and forth as time allowed, and one family vacation together each year. For Kerney, it wasn’t a happy prospect.

  He looked over the plains. The green landscape was pleasing to the eye, deeper in color than the bunch grasses of New Mexico, but under a less vivid sky. He could see a small herd of grazing livestock moving toward a windmill, the outline of a remote ranch house beyond, and the thin line of the state road that plowed straight across the plains and curved sharply up the distant mountains.

  He settled behind the wheel and gave the car some juice, thinking it would be a hell of a lot more fun to drive on to Paso Robles in a little two-seater with the top down and the wind in his face.

  Kerney arrived in Paso Robles and promptly got lost trying to find the ranch. A convenience store clerk pointed him in the right direction, and a few minutes later he was traveling a narrow paved road through rolling hills of vineyards, cattle ranches, and horse farms sheltered by stands of large oak trees amid lush carpets of green grass. He drove with the window down, finding the moist sea air that rolled over the coastal mountains a welcome change from the dry deserts of New Mexico.