Stranded

by Alice Sharpe

  Was the chief warning him off the case because he was afraid Alex would find something that tied him to one or more deaths, maybe even to domestic terrorism?

  And...how important was Alex’s job? How much could he push without jeopardizing it? If he lost employment or went on unpaid leave, it would be impossible to find another job of the same caliber in Blunt Falls. They’d have to relocate.

  He thought of what Dylan had said. Was Jess giving their marriage a chance solely because of his paycheck? There was no forgetting the way she’d acted when he first got home, as though she was undecided how she felt about him. He could remember the way she’d nervously folded clothes rather than sit next to him.

  His phone rang again. This time he saw that it was Dylan calling and he realized he’d been driving aimlessly for over an hour. “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Just saw the chief leave the bank with a briefcase that had to be full of money, what else?”

  “Maybe he emptied his safe-deposit box,” Alex said.

  “Or maybe he made a big withdrawal. But why? Just wanted to let you know your trusty aide is on the job.”

  “Thanks,” Alex said, and hung up. He’d pulled over for the call and now as he edged back into traffic, that old feeling of someone tracking him hit yet again. Searching his mirrors, he looked for anything out of place, but traffic looked pretty much like it always did midday Saturday and he could see nothing amiss.

  What was he doing out here alone when Charles Bond could be driving into town, up to their front door? He made an abrupt turn and went home.

  * * *

  JESSICA SAT BACK on her heels and admired her handiwork. She doubted the garden would ever again look as it had under Billy’s tender care, especially since there would soon be a child digging in the dirt and playing in a sandbox, but the promise of flowers in the months to come pleased her down to her soul.

  It was a lonely weekend despite Alex’s attempts to help her. When he was home, he was distracted and when he was at work, he just kind of disappeared. Since this was the weekend before the targeted Memorial Day, everyone at the station was pulling extra duty. Billy’s murder had slipped to a back burner, on hold until after Monday, Alex explained, but there was something about the way he said it that made her wonder if he was being completely frank with her.

  On Sunday, she picked up the flowers from the store and spent much of the day making small bouquets, tying them with red, white and blue ribbons and storing them in the refrigerator for delivery the next morning. Alex had said because he had parade duty later in the day, they would have to go very early so he could be with her. That was fine, she didn’t care when they went, although the thought crossed her mind that she would miss seeing the nice clerk from the nursery.

  Monday dawned overcast and nasty with promises of thunder and rain to come. “I guess it’s a good thing we’re going out to the cemetery first thing this morning,” she told Alex.

  “No kidding. I have to be at work by eleven, so we should leave right after breakfast.”

  They ate a quick meal and opened the closet for rain gear. She was zipping her slicker when Alex got a call and the look on his face as he took it made her cringe inside.

  “Change of plans,” he said after a few terse words. He grabbed his service pistol from the top shelf of the closet and slid it in the holster. “I have to go.”

  “Where? Who was that?”

  “Dylan. He needs me right now.”

  “I’ll go with you,” she said.

  “No. I’m sorry, but this is too dangerous. I’m not going to put you in jeopardy like I did with that bomb.”

  She pulled the coat closer around her body and held it. “You’re scaring me,” she said. “What does Dylan want?” As he stared at her, she all but stamped her foot. “Be honest, Alex. I know something is wrong.”

  “He’s been following Chief Smyth.”

  “What? Why?”

  Alex seemed to have to struggle to get the words out. “Because the chief’s been acting odd. Toward me. Nasty, almost. Dylan swore to get to the bottom of it and now he says Smyth is out at the Summers place and he’s not alone.”

  “Who’s he with?” she insisted.

  “Dylan says it’s either Charles Bond or his double. I seriously doubt this is the case, but I do have to go. You wait here. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  She nodded once, unwilling to send him off worried about her, but just as determined to go about her life. What was her option? Sit here alone and wait for news Alex had been shot? No, thank you. “Be careful,” she said.

  He kissed her. “I’m sorry I kept this to myself. I should have shared it with you.”

  She kissed him back and sent him on his way, but there was an old familiar ache in her heart.

  * * *

  ALEX DROVE AS fast as he dared. He couldn’t wrap his head around Smyth and Bond meeting at Lynda’s house of all places. The skies just kept growing more and more ominous and the weight of the clouds seemed to mirror the weight in his own heart.

  He’d think about Jessica later. For now he made himself blot out the look of disappointment he’d seen in her eyes.

  Twenty minutes later, he pulled up on the other side of the hedge outside the house. Dylan had pulled his car behind a dense copse of trees and was mostly out of sight. Alex was surprised his partner had chosen such a spot because of the inevitable scratches to the paint.

  Alex moved quickly and silently toward the property, stepping over the yellow police tape that had been broken and now dangled down into the mud. Smyth’s sedan was parked close to the double-wide. There were no other vehicles in sight, though the acrid smell of the fire still filled the air. The yard was muddy now where fire trucks had disturbed the soil a few nights before. Had whoever Smyth been meeting with already left?

  “Psst...” Dylan said from a couple of feet away.

  Alex hotfooted it to the bushes behind which Dylan stood. His partner was wrapped in a dark slicker, his face and hair wet, though the rain had just started to gently fall. “They’re in the kitchen,” he said.

  “Maybe we could sneak around back—”

  “No, I tried that. You can’t hear anything. The front door is ajar. We’ll have to chance going in.”

  “But there’s only the one car,” Alex said. “Did the meeting break up?”

  “No. Smyth stopped at that motor lodge outside of town, this guy got in and they drove out here together.”

  Alex delayed. If Smyth caught him spying on him, he’d have a major fit. Worse, he’d probably fire him outright and he’d probably have just cause. Entering a building unlawfully, trespassing now.

  “You’re right to hold back,” Dylan said suddenly. “Listen, you stay here. I’ll go...”

  “No,” Alex said, his mind snapping back into focus. He pulled out his cell and put it on Vibrate, shoved it back in his pocket. This was about way more than Billy’s murder or Lynda Summers’s death. If Frank Smyth was involved with the militant terrorists responsible for killing Mike and all the others, responsible for putting a bullet hole in Nate and terrorizing Jessica, then this was Alex’s fight. Job or no job, future or no future.

  “Cover me,” he said as he pulled his pistol. He crept up the steps and across the threshold, Dylan right behind him.

  The house greeted him as it always did, with boxes still wobbling on top of one another, bags of junk still overflowing. If anything it appeared more squalid than ever and it certainly smelled worse as years of garbage continued to rot in the corners. He breathed through his mouth so he wouldn’t gag, then turned and met Dylan’s gaze. He signaled for Dylan to stay put and tiptoed toward the kitchen, sliding on a pile of overturned magazines, catching himself by grabbing the wall. He stood without breathing for a moment, sure he must have been heard, but there
was still no sound coming from the kitchen. He continued forward, deeper into the house, where the light had trouble penetrating and the smell got worse and worse.

  The kitchen was new territory to him, but here, too, movement was restricted by rubbish. It appeared there might have once been stacks, but now things were overturned, upended as though they’d fallen or been pushed aside during a fight. Two open bottles of beer, both half-drunk, occupied the only clear drain-board space and from the beads of moisture on the glass, it was obvious they were fresh.

  Where were the two men? Had they battled their way out to the backyard? He could see a corner of the door and it appeared closed.

  The place smelled like hell. If that wasn’t the stench of fresh blood, he didn’t know what was and it raised the hairs on the back of his neck. He rounded the counter to a relatively clear spot and stopped dead in his tracks.

  Frank Smyth lay in a pool of his own congealing blood, which had also sprayed and splattered everything around him. The poor guy looked like he’d been through a meat grinder. There was no way he could have survived, and even as Alex knelt to feel for a pulse he knew there could be none. An unopened briefcase lay close by.

  So, Smyth had met with Bond. They must have been in it together. Bond must have decided to cut his losses and get rid of Frank. Maybe they’d been using this house as a meeting spot. Maybe Lynda had gotten in the way.

  All these thoughts bombarded his head in the time it took to get back to his feet and turn around. Dylan stood behind him, his weapon drawn, as well. He lowered his arm as his gaze darted past Alex. “Oh, my God,” he said, pointing to a corner. “What’s that?”

  Alex looked around the room again and there by the door he saw something that sent a chill down his spine.

  A machete lay on the floor. A machete with a dark green cord knotted around the handle. His machete. The blade was covered with fresh blood. He walked over to the discarded weapon and leaned down again to make sure. It was his, all right. His initials were written in indelible ink on the shaft.

  He felt a cold round pressure against the back of his head. “Put down your gun and stand up. And so help me, if you try anything I will make sure Jessica faces a worse fate than the chief.”

  Dylan’s voice. Dylan.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Alex said, but he knew. No wonder Dylan was wet and covered with a raincoat. He must have been covered in the chief’s blood and washed it off before calling.

  “Put the gun down,” Dylan repeated, and emphasized his remark with a jab to Alex’s head.

  Alex set the gun down on the floor and stood. Dylan kicked it aside where it spun out of Alex’s reach.

  “Did you do this to Frank?” Alex demanded. “Why?”

  “Oh, Alex, don’t be so dense. Who do you think is Charles Bond’s Blunt Falls accomplice? Come on, dude.”

  “Are you behind everything?” Alex said, trying to merge his partner, Dylan Hobart, with this lunatic.

  Dylan nodded. “All the little mishaps and innuendos, Jess’s race to the emergency room, the garden, a couple of deaths...this and that, yeah, that’s all me.”

  “Are you trying to tell me you got Frank Smyth to drink a beer with you, then lay down on the floor so you could hack him to death?”

  “Frank was coming here with a briefcase filled with money because someone threatened to tell everyone he was Billy Summers’s father.” Dylan grinned. “You didn’t know that about our chief, did you? It’s true. He and Lynda had a thing for a while. I guess it was before he found religion. Hell, maybe it’s why he found religion. He got Lynda pregnant about a month after he knocked up his wife. God forbid his precious daughter ever find out.”

  “How can you possibly know this?” Alex said.

  Dylan smiled. “Lynda may have let herself and her house go, but she was still good for a hot time on that couch of hers. Frank did me a favor when he kept sending me over here to calm her down. Sometimes she indulged in a little postcoital chatter. Amazing what a sex-drunk woman will tell you.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Alex said.

  “I like them older. Young hotties are for show-and-tell. Anyway, I pretended I’d shown up to meet you here, too, got Frank to unwind a little by drinking a drugged beer and then used your machete to whack him. He didn’t put up much of a fight and everyone knows you’ve been a little high-strung since you got back. Frank even talked to the mayor about suspending you. I guess you got wind of it and decided to take him out.”

  Alex tried to wrap his head around the craziness. “Why would Frank want to suspend me?”

  “Because he is, or rather, was, under the impression you vandalized your own yard and then made sure you kept yourself the center of attention. He also thought you were hiding evidence like this machete. He was beginning to think you might even have killed Billy Summers yourself. He’s a gullible man, no matter what he said. He’ll believe anything you tell him if you tell him in the right way.”

  “Then it was you who set Billy up to sabotage my plane,” Alex stated matter-of-factly.

  “It wasn’t hard. I made it sound like a prank and I gave him a little money so he could work on his models. And then the little jerk found a conscience and started following Jessica around like a lost puppy. By the time you got home, he couldn’t wait to spill his guts and confess.”

  “Which you couldn’t let happen.”

  “Not so much. I ran him down after your party. He was cut up pretty bad but he wasn’t dead. I had a few of those Rohypnol pills we took off that loser last year in the car. Two little forget-everything pills threw Billy for a loop. I’d seen a tarp out at the Summers place, so I drove there to get it. Didn’t want my car to get too dirty. I think Lynda saw me. She kind of hinted she did and I knew sooner or later, she’d get chatty with someone else. I knew I’d have to get rid of her soon so I did. Anyway, when I got back, Billy was trying to claw his way up the hill. I knocked him out, dragged him and his bike up the hill, wrapped him up in the tarp and stuck him in the trunk. His bike went in the backseat.” He paused for a second and shook his head. “It was a tight fit. And then I thought of the drive-in theater.”

  “Billy was never in the Cummingses’ car,” Alex said. “You planted the evidence when you went out to question them and then you started rumors. That’s why there’s no blood on their car. And your girlfriend wasn’t rear-ended in Billings. You needed an out-of-town body shop because the front was damaged when you hit Billy.”

  “Aren’t you the clever one? They brought it back to me the day you flew up to the lake. Great timing.”

  Alex shook his head. “You’re part of these domestic terror groups? You, Dylan? I had no idea you held such deeply seated beliefs.” As he spoke, his phone vibrated with a text. It might as well have vibrated on the moon.

  Dylan barked a laugh. “I’m not some crazy crackpot like Bond and the others,” he said. “What they do is certifiable. If people are stupid enough to cave to their tactics, so be it. I participate solely because of the money, plain and simple. New cars, steroids, pumping iron, sex, excitement, it’s all the same. You were supposed to disappear forever, that was the plan. A Boy Scout like you is problematic for an entrepreneur like me. I was delighted when that loony in Shatterhorn paid me to screw with your plane.”

  Alex’s mind was still playing catch up as past events demanded examination under this bright new light of discovery. “You weren’t on a date Thursday night,” he said. “You were here breaking into the shed. Why’d you take the biplane?”

  Dylan shrugged. “I’m toying around with hooking it back to the Cummings boys. ‘Keep your options open,’ that’s my motto.”

  “Then you watched Jess and me discover the drawer in the table that you missed. You wrote the directions for Billy, your prints might have been on that card. You threw the Molotov cocktail to get rid of the
evidence.”

  “To get rid of the evidence and to get rid of you,” Dylan stated, his eyes hard, the bantering tone now absent. He lowered the aim of his gun to Alex’s knee. It was the one hurt in the crash and it suddenly throbbed like hell. The gun barrel inched up to aim at his groin next with similar results. “Now, with Frank dead and you about to die by a bullet from his gun, I can spin things any way I want.”

  A layer of sweat broke out on Alex’s brow. How could he have known and worked with this man for three years and never seen the cold-blooded egotism behind his eyes? “Forensics will be all over this,” he said. “There are no powder burns on Smyth’s hand—”

  “Won’t matter,” Dylan said, pulling a cigarette lighter from his pocket. Alex recognized it as belonging to the chief and he knew the man’s initials were engraved in the metal casing. “You know, any other guy would have said, ‘Screw this, I’m taking my wife and moving away from here,’ but not you. So I put a bug in Frank’s ear. He got the impression you were messing with this case so he’d look bad and you could have his job.

  “Then he started getting blackmail letters and you got credit for those, too. I gave him the same drug I gave Billy, the rest of which they’ll find in your pocket. Well, if there’s anything left of you, that is.” He held the flame next to a pile of newspapers that immediately began to burn.

  “Dylan, think about what you’re doing. Not just to me but to the country.”

  “I’ll be the new chief by tomorrow,” Dylan said calmly as he threw the lighter across the room. “I’ll get rid of the index cards and explain you and Smyth away.” He picked up the briefcase. “So long, buddy. All your high-flying ideals are for nothing. It’s too late. You can’t stop what’s going to happen. You should have stayed in the mountains.”