by Dan Arnold
“Put your hands behind your head and lace your fingers! Now cross your feet. If you move, at all, I’ll send you straight to hell.”
I kept the .45 on him as I stepped around him to look out at Tony.
Tony was alive. He was lying on his side out on the ground where he had fallen from the porch. He was squirming and struggling for breath. His shotgun was lying about five feet away.
“Tony, how bad is it.”
“Shit!” He swore. “I’m alright. No, I’m not… damn.”
I had to keep an eye on Whitaker, so I couldn’t do anything to help Tony.
I glanced back outside.
Tony was on his hands and knees now, trying to get to his feet.
I picked up Whitaker’s shotgun.
“Tony, I’ve got Whitaker on the floor.” I called out.
Tony was on his feet now, wiping at his eyes.
“Is he still alive? He asked.
“Yes, unarmed and unharmed.”
“Well now, isn’t that nice?” Tony growled.
Sixteen
The hour after the shooting had flown by. As I secured Whitaker, with Tony’s hand cuffs, Tony had read him his rights. Then we cleared the trailer and found the two little girls. They were both alive, but not at all well. They were in an ambulance on the way to the hospital now. Of the two girls, Victoria Winslow was in pretty bad shape. She was conscious, but nearly completely catatonic. It had been the other little girl we had heard scream when Whitaker took the duct tape off her mouth. Tony and I showed up just as he had taken her into a back room in the mobile home
There was no sign of Aaron Horowitz, the little boy who had been with Victoria in the trunk of the Impala.
The whole area was now crawling with emergency vehicles and law enforcement of every conceivable type. There was DPS, sheriff’s deputies from two counties, local cops, the Justice of the Peace and constables, even Texas Rangers and game wardens. There was a dispute over jurisdiction.
Tony would be going to the hospital when we were through here. All of the cops were treating him like a hero, with the possible exception of his lieutenant.
Tony looked like hell. I felt that way myself, but Tony was injured. His Kevlar tactical vest had saved his life, stopping all the pellets and debris from the door, but he had taken most of the energy of a twelve-gauge blast full in the chest, from about four feet away. The door had barely slowed the pellets, and he’d been knocked back through the warped, old 2x4 front porch railing, to land on his back in the yard. He’d had splinters and dust from the door in his eyes. His tears had washed away most of it, but splinters and debris had also struck his neck and face.
He had ignored the pain until now, but clearly he was hurt and nearly done in.
“Thanks, J.W. I haven’t had a minute to think till now, but I know you saved my life.”
“Your vest did that, Tony.”
“I’m alive because you kept him from blowing my head off, J.W. If you had stayed on the back porch like I told you to, Whitaker would have killed me.”
“Yeah well, the best laid plans don’t last past the first contact with the enemy. You wouldn’t even have been in harm’s way, if I hadn’t led you into it. I guess the important point is we got him, and those girls will go home to their families.”
“Thanks, J.W., I’m glad to be alive.”
Finally! I wished it hadn’t taken this to get him there.
We both stared at nothing for a while.
We wanted to forget what we had seen.
Tony had to be driven to the hospital in Tyler. I was taken to the town of Rusk, the County Seat of Cherokee County, for additional questioning. It was routine and according to procedure, but the attitude of the deputies was cordial and as accommodating as they could be.
From a police procedural point of view, this was a disaster. The only saving grace for me was I was a civilian, licensed and legal. I was engaged in investigating the kidnapping of my client’s daughter, and I had alerted the authorities. It helped that I had saved Tony’s life and secured the suspect. I hadn’t even discharged my weapon.
Nothing I had done was worthy of charges, nor would any of my actions interfere with the official investigation. Tony had been in pursuit of a suspect in recent child abductions.
Getting a conviction on Whitaker should be no problem.
My phone was filled with missed calls and recorded messages. I ignored them.
On my way back to Tyler, I called Christine. I told her to call the client in Jacksonville and apologize for my failure to show up for our meeting. I hadn’t even thought about it till now.
“The news people have been calling. Somebody must have tipped them off. It’s all over the news, John. They’re saying an unnamed Tyler police officer located and rescued the two little girls who were abducted from Tyler in the last week. The unnamed officer has been hospitalized with a gunshot injury he sustained while acting on a tip from a citizen. A suspect in the case is in custody. They have a helicopter flying over that mobile home, out there in the woods.”
“I think Tony will come out of this in pretty good shape. I don’t understand why he was hospitalized. I thought he would just be treated and released”
“What about you, John, are you OK?”
“I’m not hurt, Christine. I’ll be fine. Right now I’m pretty shaken up. I think I’ll go to the hospital to check on Tony. Tell everybody to leave me alone. I mean, reschedule and take messages. Hell, I don’t know what I mean.”
“I’ve got it, John. Don’t even think about it.”
“Thanks, Christine.”
“John, you need to get some rest. You sound terrible, besides they might not let you see Detective Escalante.”
Of course, she was right. I was completely wrung out and I wasn’t thinking clearly. Every news person in the country would want to interview Tony. The Tyler PD would want to keep him isolated until he was completely debriefed and prepared to meet the press. And since I was involved in the incident, there was no way I could visit him.
“Yeah, OK, I’m going home.”
It turned out Tony had been kept for observation to be sure he didn’t have a bruised heart. The shotgun blast had fractured his sternum. He had a couple of broken ribs from hitting or landing on the porch railing. His face and neck had small lacerations from the splinters blown out of the door. He was sore, but he would heal.
After what we had seen in that trailer, we both had bruised hearts. You can’t live in this world without the occasional bruised or broken heart.
Tony’s name and mine eventually got broadcast by the news media as part of the sensational story. I was identified as a private investigator. Tony was always referred to as a hero cop.
The Tyler PD had to go easy on him. He had single-handedly put them in the national spotlight. In fact, because he had already passed his lieutenant’s exam, they promoted him to a desk.
Christine and I moved into our fancy new office. I decided to raise our daily rate to $500.00. We were going to have to generate more income to pay for our new space. Christine was true to her word. She chose the furnishings and appointments with exacting care. Her taste was impeccable.
It was an ideal place to meet with Victoria’s parents.
Victoria was… recovering. She was responding well to treatment and was outwardly a typical ten year old girl. She never left her mother’s sight these days. Sometimes she woke up at night screaming, but the doctor’s felt she would slowly make adjustments and learn to cope. The Winslow family was making plans for home-schooling, starting in the fall.
Children are resilient, thank God.
The door to my corner office was open so Victoria could see her mom, and vice versa. Christine was sitting on the floor with her, playing jacks.
“We can’t thank you enough, Mr. Tucker. Lieutenant Escalante said you were responsible for locating Victoria. He said you were the only one who never gave up, and you led him to where that man was keeping the girls.”
“Plea
se don’t thank me. Thank God. There is another person you can thank as well. His name is Dustin. You may have seen him on the sidewalks at one time or another. He’s the tall skinny black man pushing a shopping cart around. He told me everything I needed to know to track down Whitaker.”
“Oh, OK, but we hired you. I would like to know what we owe you. Money wise, I mean. We can never repay you what we owe you,” Mr. Winslow said.
“You owe me nothing. In fact, here is the check you first gave me, as a retainer. I’d appreciate it if you would use the money to help Dustin. He’s homeless and he has some mental issues. I don’t expect miracles, but any help you might give him would go a long way towards doing something good with the money. I would appreciate it, very much.”
Eventually we learned the fate of Aaron Horowitz. He was a kid Whitaker had just picked up one day, after visiting his mother in Marshall. The authorities recovered a lot of forensic evidence from both the trailer and the Impala. They found a great deal of further incriminating evidence on Whitaker’s computer. He told the police he had sold Aaron Horowitz, to ‘some guy from Louisiana’ he had connected with over the internet. Whitaker had carried the little boy in the trunk of his Impala, to a truck stop in Shreveport, where he made the sale to a guy he knew only as ‘SleeZ362’. It was a Federal offense, transporting a kidnap victim across state lines.
The Feds were able to track down ‘SleeZ362’ from his internet activities. He was arrested. He led them to the place deep in the Louisiana woods, where he had buried Aaron Horowitz’s body. Whitaker was now implicated in the boy’s murder.
I took no comfort from the news. It was certainly no comfort to the Horowitz family.
Sometimes, I have to remind myself that this world is not my home.
Seventeen
After our meeting with Victoria and her parents, Christine and I were having pie and coffee in a cafe that had a TV tuned to America’s most popular ‘talk’ show. We found ourselves listening to a conversation on the television, already in progress.
“… It’s like the way we all want peace. Everyone everywhere would prefer to live in peace. Peace, at home, at work, in the marketplace, with our neighbors, even inner peace, are all very desirable. But basic human nature is selfish. We are never satisfied. That selfishness guarantees conflict. We want our politicians to agree on a course of action, but they can’t compromise because they want to get re-elected. They enjoy the perks and benefits of being career politicians. They put their personal selfish ambition above the good of the country. We can see their selfishness pretty clearly. We’re all real quick to point out other people’s selfishness, but fail to recognize our own.”
“So, you’re saying world peace is impossible, because people are selfish?”
“Yes, because we want what we want, and we want it now, on our own terms. Also, we are egotistical. We are convinced our own personal point of view is correct and good, and anyone who disagrees with us is incorrect or ‘bad.’ We choose up sides, which causes conflict as well. One way or another, it’s always ‘us versus them’.”
“How do we get beyond constantly being in conflict? What will it take, for us to all just get along? If we don’t figure it out, then we will simply self-destruct through wars and aggression. The planet can’t sustain our rate of population growth, not to mention what we are doing to the environment...”
“Yep, you can always count on “O” asking the hard questions, but never getting to the truth,” I said.
“I don’t know why you pay any attention, if she irritates you so much,” Christine said. “And, you’re pretty egotistical yourself. You seem to think you know all the answers,” she added.
I smiled. She had a point.
“I guess I just find people fascinating, so intellectually complex and primal, all at the same time. The sheer diversity is astounding. I marvel at the work of God.”
“Oh brother,” she rolled her eyes. “Here we go again with the God talk. You seem to see your God in everything. I never see God at all. If you can’t see it, then it is irrational to believe in it.”
“Really, if you can’t see it, then it doesn’t exist, so it’s irrational to believe in it? What if it’s invisible to our ocular lenses, or just too small to see, like oxygen or the atom?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re just being argumentative. Science has proven the existence of oxygen and the atom. You can’t prove the existence of God,” she said.
“Christine, your test was whether or not a thing could be seen. You said if it couldn’t be seen, it must not be real. What if it isn’t a question of being invisible or too small to be seen, but rather too complex or too big to be seen?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Some things are too complex or too big to be seen. I’m not talking about the entire cosmos with all of the galaxies and billions of billions of stars, which you haven’t seen, though I’ll bet you believe it exists. You have seen automobiles built by the Ford Motor Company. Now, those are just creations of Ford. They aren’t Ford Motor Company. You could go to a board meeting and see some of the workings of the corporation, but that is only one aspect of the Ford Motor Company. You could be a stockholder, but that is only a small part of Ford. The FMC is just too big and complex for you to see it all, at any one time, or in any one place. So is the Federal Government,” I continued. “We see what it does, but we don’t see the government itself. These things are just man made constructs. How much more diverse and complex are the works of God? Just His works, mind you. God himself is far bigger and more complex than our eyes are able to see, or our minds are able to grasp. Science hasn’t proven His existence in the whole. However, science is constantly discovering more and more, about the complexity of His creation. Humans are only able to speculate about how big the cosmos is, and that’s only a tiny part of His creation.” I was just starting to warm up. “To look around us at the things we see on the earth and in the heavens and say we can’t see God, is like a single bacterium on the back of an elephant, saying the elephant doesn’t exist, because it can’t see the elephant. It’s not really a seeing problem, it’s a believing problem. No matter how smart the bacterium is, I’ll bet it’s not as smart as the elephant, and God created both of them.”
Christine blinked at me.
“Honestly John, do you sit up at night thinking about this stuff?”
I grinned at her.
When we got back to the office, my part-time operative, Gary, came in with his report on an insurance fraud case.
“It’s all there in the log book, John. I think this guy is legitimately injured. I watched him for days. He hasn’t left the house much. He can’t play with his kids. I saw him try to lift a bag of groceries out of the back of his wife’s car. He couldn’t do it. I could see he was frustrated and embarrassed. I have video of it. If you combine what I’ve seen with the medical reports and the anecdotal information from people who know him, it all adds up.”
I nodded.
“Good work. I’ll wrap it up with the client. I have something else for you.”
“Yeah, goody, goody, what is it?”
“This one is a domestic issue. Christine took the particulars. We need to gather some information on one Timothy Leroy Shaw, 29 years old.”
“Not another divorce case! I thought we were pretty much through with those.”
“No, this is more of a character assessment. Apparently Mr. Shaw has made some threats against the brother of his girlfriend. The brother is hiring us. He’s concerned for his safety and the safety of his sister. Christine gathered some basic background on Mr. Shaw, but I need you to follow him around for a while and see what he’s into.”
“I can’t start on it until Wednesday.”
“Not a problem, I’ll handle it till then. I’ll pass it off to you on Wednesday, if it isn’t already concluded.”
Tim Shaw’s history showed he had no felony convictions, DWI’s, or any arrest record. He had no restraining orders
against him and he wasn’t a registered sex offender.
His credit report was pretty typical for a 29 year old. He had served as a corporal in the Marine Corps. He had never been married. He worked as an electrician for a company that did mostly commercial jobs. On paper, he looked pretty harmless.
I decided to check out the girlfriend, Diane Montgomery, and her brother, Tom Montgomery, as well. When they came up clean I was back to square one.
“Christine, tell me again about the Tim Shaw case. What’s the issue exactly?”
“A guy by the name of Tom Montgomery called in and requested our services. Tom Montgomery is about 30 years old, and his sister, Diane Montgomery, is 22. He said his sister is dating this guy, Tim Shaw, and his sister, Diane, thinks they are in love and will get married.” She began. “Mr. Montgomery claims he heard from a friend that Tim Shaw is a well-known player, and is only interested in putting notches on his bed post. He decided to confront Tim Shaw about these allegations. When he did, Mr. Shaw told him to mind his own business and keep his mouth shut. Mr. Montgomery claims Shaw threatened to kill him if he said anything to his sister about the matter.” She concluded.
“It’s a crime to threaten violence against someone, but since there were no witnesses...” Gary trailed off.
“… Exactly. That’s why he decided to hire us to check out Mr. Shaw. He hopes to get something conclusive against him that he can take to his sister. He doesn’t want to risk doing anything which might put him crossways with Mr. Shaw. He believes Shaw was serious about killing him,” Christine said.
“Yeah, but if we do find anything Mr. Montgomery can use against him, Shaw is going to know Montgomery was involved. Then what happens?”
“I guess he’s hoping we find something criminal, so he can get Shaw put away.”
“Sounds like a good way to get into trouble with his sister. The heart wants what the heart wants. Diane might hate her brother for interfering.” I pointed out.
“Not if she doesn’t know about it.” Christine answered.