A Wicked Plan

by Rod Kackley

  “I tell them the truck broke down. I go in. Hit Steven over the head, tie him up and shoot him. Kneecap him. Beat Debbie to death with him watching. Then I light the house on fire and run.”

  “Don’t forget the money. It’s in the kitchen. The big cookie jar on the fridge,” said Bree. “And then, that’s it baby. That’s all there is to it. I’ll be out here with the engine running, ready to go.”

  Bree was still wearing the baby doll nightgown that she had on when Tim rolled her up in the carpet. She’d forgotten her flip flops. Everything else was back at Tim’s house. They had no chance of returning.

  “It doesn’t matter. We can buy new when we get up north. Besides it will be best if they think we left in a rush,” Bree said.

  Throwing Bree over his shoulder and carrying her out to the truck was almost as good as the night of their faux kidnapping, for Tim.

  Real caveman stuff, he thought.

  What a rush! Now it’s time for the action hero stuff.

  The rumble of a truck’s diesel engine outside was just the kind of thing that could drive Steven nuts. Debbie knew that and she was on edge because of it. There was no telling when Steven would blow or what exactly would happen when he did.

  But she knew he would blow and Debbie knew it wouldn’t be good.

  “What is that asshole doing?” Steven said. “I’m about ready to go out, get into that truck, and drive it up his ass.”

  “Please don’t Steven,” Debbie said. “Whoever it is, they’ll leave soon enough.”

  Steven really wasn’t spoiling for a fight. He might have looked like it and sounded like it, but he was not ready for another battle. Steven was still nursing wounds from the three rounds of hand-to-hand combat he had fought with his lovely wife, the other night.

  He’d forgotten about the judo and karate classes she’d been taking with Bree. When Steven knocked her tooth out and smashed her nose, he and Tim thought that was it.

  Big mistake. They were wrong. Tim left the stands in the bottom of the ninth before the home team came up to bat.

  Debbie got up off the floor in one fluid motion and was on Steven like a cat fighting for the last mouse.

  She gave almost as good as she got.

  The damage?

  Steven’s nose might not be broken, but it was swollen. His jaw ached and as for his balls, let’s just say it would be a while before Steven would ready for any kind of action with Debbie or anyone else.

  Debbie was still recovering, too. Blood was still dripping out of her nose. Her mouth ached and a cracked rib had turned into a Taser shooting volts of electricity through her chest.

  So it was another night of being one of the walking wounded and wondering how much more of this she could put up with.

  The next fight will be the last fight. It has to be life or death, his or mine, Debbie thought, looking up at the guy that she thought would be the last love of her life.

  Debbie was right.

  He was destined to be the last, the final, the never any more.

  Never again, she vowed to herself.

  Debbie never had a chance to take it back.

  Tim looked like the clumsiest action hero in the world as he did a half-crouching run from the truck.

  He dashed across the street, tripped over the curb, fell on one knee, rolled on to his back, glancing back at the truck hoping Bree hadn’t noticed.

  Tim felt a little light on one side, realized the Smith & Wesson was missing, crawled back into the street to get it, holstered it, brushed himself off and started off again with a half-crouching walk-sprint to the house.

  Bree blew him a kiss partly to wish him good luck, partly to get him moving again, partly to assure he wouldn’t quit, and mostly to hide her laugh.

  Good God, what a klutz, Bree thought. This guy has to be the biggest loser in the world. He deserves everything that is going to happen.

  And so do I.

  Everything.

  Tim disappeared around the back of the house. Bree studied her nails, fingers and toes, curled up in the carpet and waited with the engine running.

  Bree was just about ready to give up and drop it in drive when she heard the first shot.

  Four shots. Then a fifth gunshot. Bree held her breath and touched herself where everyone else had to pay the price of admission. Two more shots, and a scream. Man or woman? Bree couldn’t tell.

  But she knew a scream of pain.

  Bree smiled.

  Touched again and took a deep breath.

  This was better than she had expected.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  The St. Isidore Massacre, as one headline would brand the story in the following days, did not go as smoothly as Tim and Bree expected.

  Tim was planning a surgical strike after he got into the house, which was easier than he had expected.

  Debbie answered the door with a look on her face that was part worry, part fear and part, “Oh, I know who you are, don’t I?” She let Tim in.

  Once inside, Tim the action hero, was ready to put the plan into action. Two quick shots to the knees of Steven, one more to the head of Debbie, a splash of gasoline, a flick of his Bic, grab the cookie jar with the cash, and he was out of there.

  Forget about beating Debbie to death. Tim was not about to hit a woman. He’d part her hair with a bullet, but hit her? Not a chance.

  There is always quick strangulation. It could be Plan B. It worked before, Tim promised himself.

  Tim wound up emptying his gun. Six shots, one of which hit Steven. That one bullet and the element of surprise saved Tim’s life. The other five didn’t accomplish much at all.

  However, Steven never saw him coming. The one bullet that hit the target splattered his knee cap all over the kitchen wall, coming from behind, exploding on exit.

  Steven screamed and crumpled. The big man was down.

  Tim was paralyzed by the realization that his wish had come true. Steven was screaming, holding his injured leg, foaming at the mouth and nose, crippled by the gunshot.

  Steven would never walk again.

  Just as well, Tim thought. He’s got no place to go.

  Tim was as surprised by Debbie as Steven had been by him. Tim never saw her coming either.

  But Tim heard the gunshot and felt the air ripple as the bullet tore by his head, about an inch from his ear.

  Tim dove behind the kitchen counter as three more bullets from the gun that Steven thought he had hidden from Debbie in a bedroom bureau drawer slammed into the cupboard overhead.

  Tim and Debbie were reloading at the same time, both hiding behind kitchen furniture and appliances in this suburban gun battle to the death.

  Tim finished loading first and fired first.

  He came out from behind the counter, using an avocado refrigerator to steady himself, shooting as fast as the revolver would allow.

  Four more shots. One more hit. Right to Debbie’s forehead. Her scalp flew through the air like a bad pizza, splattering against the wall, starting a bloody slide to the floor.

  One down and still one more problem for Tim.

  As bad as he was hurt, Steven was becoming accustomed to the pain and was crawling toward Tim with a steak knife in his hand.

  Two bullets left in Tim’s revolver. One of those bullets took care of Steven for forever more.

  Steven and Debbie were both dead on the kitchen floor, eyes wide open, their souls connected like they had never been in this world. Both sharing a car on the train that goes to wherever it is that dead people go, assuming they were bound for the same destination.

  I wonder.

  Tim would have liked to stop to contemplate whether they were going to the same place and if he would ever meet Steven and Debbie again and what he would say if he did, but time for philosophical speculation was running short.

  He had to get moving. The money from the cookie jar was jammed into his pockets.

  The plan was about to come to a conclusion whether Tim figured out how to br
eak the ice in the heavenly or hellish hereafter or not.

  Tim didn’t know how fast a man his age could run.

  Tim was about to find out

  The gasoline canister had gotten kicked and tipped over during the gun fight. Gasoline was all over the kitchen floor, running in a river to the stove.

  Yes, it was time for Tim to get moving.

  He grabbed the canister and ran, spreading the remaining gasoline behind him, as he tore through the living room, tripping over an ottoman and falling out the front door.

  Tim was thinking this would be as good a time as any to flick a Bic and set the gas on fire. But he was about two flicks behind the chemistry of gasoline meeting a natural gas pilot light.

  BREE WOULDN’T BE ABLE to tell anyone what she had seen first; Tim running from the house or the fireball that chased him out the front door. It might have been she heard the blast first and then felt the concussion of hot air hitting her through the window she had rolled down in the truck.

  “It was like one of those slow-motion car wrecks you see in the movies,” Bree would say later. Then everything sped up to the speed of a maniac on angel dust.

  Tim slammed into the side of the truck like he’d been shot out of a cannon. Close. He’d been shot out of Steven and Debbie’s house by the blast that leveled the one-story testament to the 1950s construction boom that had created St. Isidore.

  It was often said that all the houses in the city looked the same.

  This one didn’t. Not anymore.

  “Move over!”

  “Bullshit. Get in the other side!”

  “Move the fuck over. Now!”

  Tim won the argument thanks to the strength of his panic and the lack of eyebrows, mustache and goatee that he’d had at the beginning of the surgical strike.

  Tim threw the drivers’ side door open with his left hand, grabbed Bree by her arm with the other, pulling her out, spinning her around and pushing her toward the front of the truck.

  He got in while she raced all barefoot and baby-doll nightie around the front of the truck, scared to death Tim was going to drop it into drive and run her over.

  Bree’s door was still open and her right leg sticking out, when Tim did find the “D” and smashed the gas pedal to the metal under it.

  They were on their way.

  Another explosion or two chased them from the neighborhood, heading north as every firetruck in Swinging Izzy — both of them — screamed south.

  “You did it?”

  Tim took a deep breath to try to control the adrenalin that was doing a three-minute mile through his bodily system, looked at her with his hairless, singed face and said,

  “Seriously?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  Paul’s naked body was turning slowly at the end of a St. Isidore Hardware rope when state police troopers found him. They were not the first on the scene. Paul’s next-to-next-to final resting place was already being chronicled by a dozen teenagers, all of whom of course, had gotten the word on their tablets, laptops and smartphones, before the cops arrived.

  The kids loved to spend time in what the cable TV people had started calling The Suicide Forest, the place where bodies had been found in the trees since the 1970s, and babies had been conceived during each of those decades.

  “Confiscate all of those smartphones. They’ve all got cameras,” growled one trooper. “We don’t need this getting out on YouTube. This guy was one of ours. He was a cop.”

  Too late. The clock was ticking on Paul’s fifteen minutes of fame. His life was about to be dissected by bloggers on the internet and pundits on cable TV. His black tongue stuck out at viewers around the world on YouTube for a day before strings were pulled and the video was deleted.

  However, cable TV had already picked up the story. It wouldn’t go away until the pundits ran out of words. For the second time.

  “Friend of Tim Sheldon’s?” asked one investigator as the medical examiner’s team cut down the body and unwrapped a medium-sized body bag from its plastic container.

  “They go back to high school,” answered Chief Lumpy. “It could be a suicide.”

  “And maybe not. If you were going to kill yourself why go out into the woods to do it? Why not stay at home?” said the investigator.

  “No visible trauma,” said a Medical Examiner team member. “I don’t think he was shot, stabbed or beaten.”

  “If Sheldon is going north with that girl, why would he stop off here to kill his best friend?” wondered Chief Lumpy. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  Lumpy was thinking he should call Tim’s brother, John, his former best friend at the police academy. John might not be on the job anymore, but he deserved some respect.

  He really should be told about his brother and the trouble that he is in, right?

  Lumpy kept that thought to himself. Being known as John’s friend was not the politically correct thing to do, not anymore in St. Isidore.

  “Nothing seems like it was disturbed in the vic’s house,” said a state police trooper who had just returned from the initial search of Paul’s trailer. “There wasn’t a fight.”

  “It’s gotta be a suicide,” said Lumpy.

  “Too coincidental,” said one of the state police investigators. “Sheldon must be involved.”

  “Why? What could Sheldon be doing? Covering his tracks? Creating a diversion?”

  “Maybe he killed a witness.”

  “And maybe he didn’t.”

  “We’ve got tire tracks going into and out of the property,” said a new investigator on the scene. “Looks like the vehicle was about the size of Sheldon’s truck.”

  “Maybe he did it,” admitted Lumpy. “But for the life of me I can’t imagine why. Why waste the time?”

  The trooper’s Blackberry buzzed.

  He said, “Explosion. 117 Houser Street. The victim’s house. The girl’s house. Bree’s house.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  St. Isidore’s fire department spent the day putting out the smoldering embers of the home at 117 Houser Street along with whatever cremated remains might have been left inside.

  Trooper-blue and grey-local uniforms — the kids crossing to St. Isidore Elementary were on their own that day — canvassed the neighborhood and learned a diesel pickup truck had been idling outside the house for a couple of hours before neighbors heard an explosion that turned the house into a fireball.

  Ned Flounders, who lived across the street, told the police he didn’t see or hear anything unusual until the blast, but came up with a better story for the reporters who had driven into St. Isidore from across the state in their giant trucks emblazoned with television station decals and even some network logos with satellite dishes high on top.

  “There were gunshots, maybe five or six,” said Ned.

  “I heard at least a dozen,” said Tom who lived two doors down from the House of Death.

  “It could have been a submachine gun,” said Beth, Ned’s daughter.

  She knew that was a lie. No one else did. And no one had any idea Beth knew exactly what Tim had been planning to do and what had happened.

  In fact, Beth was the only one outside of Tim’s Dodge Ram who knew exactly what was going on.

  Bree had been feeding her a minute-by-minute, play-by-play for hours from her smartphone.

  “A man came running out of the house just before it exploded,” Beth told a state police trooper. The troops and Chief Lumpy were huddled around her, protecting Beth from the reporters. She seemed to be the best witness they had even though she’d been lying in bed making a tent out of her comforter so she could text in privacy.

  “Do you know him? Have you ever seen him before?”

  “Oh sure,” said Beth. “It was Mr. Sheldon. Everyone knows him.”

  She did exactly what Bree told her to do. Friendship can be a wonderful thing.

  “Tim Sheldon, the high school teacher?”

  “He used to be a teacher, but not anymore,
” said Beth. “He kidnapped Bree. They are heading to his cabin up north.”

  “You know this, how?”

  “Bree told me, she’s been sending me texts all morning. She just found her phone. Mr. Sheldon had taken it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  Tim’s truck was discovered outside a Goodwill store about an hour after the house explosion and thirty minutes after the medical examiner took Paul’s body out of its bag and slapped it on a shiny metal table.

  Paul’s body was cold. The truck was still warm. Unfortunately, the Dodge was as empty as Bree’s conscience.

  Tim and Bree had hopped into his old Chevy Lumina they had left in the Goodwill parking lot the night before and driven off after some quick shopping for new clothes.

  For the police it was no Tim, no Bree, no phone, no nothing. The rope, gas can and the ammo the police had seen him getting at Walmart were gone.

  “Probably burnt up in the house on Houser,” said one trooper.

  “We should pull the bullets out of those two bodies they found in the rubble,” his partner said.

  “Mother and stepfather? Do we know yet?”

  “Not yet. But they are sure one was female and seemed to be about the same size as the mother. We have to wait for dental to be sure.”

  Goodwill clerks inside the store said a man matching Tim’s description had swept through the place, buying jeans, some shirts and a couple of coats, and ran out without waiting for his change.

  “Had to be him,” said Chief Lumpy. “And Bree’s still with him, still texting her friend. That’s how we are going to find them.”

  “Why didn’t she run away when Sheldon was inside the Goodwill?” said one of Lumpy’s locals.

  “Tied up? Bound and gagged? Lord only knows what Sheldon’s been doing to that girl.”

  “But her thumbs are free. She is texting.”

  “She was. We don’t know how long that will last.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY