by Joel Goldman
A center hall split the house in half, leading to the back. There was another room to my left, the one with the light on. It was empty, a swinging door on one wall closed, not moving as it would have been if Roni had just passed through it. I took two tentative steps, stopping and listening, not hearing anything until Terry’s voice broke the silence.
“Come on and join us, Jack. Things are getting mighty cozy back here. Roni and I are having a regular reunion, but Brett isn’t having quite as good a time.”
I let out a sigh and a shiver, holstered my gun, and covered the last steps to the rear of the house, stopping at the entrance to the kitchen. Brett Staley was lying on the floor, facedown, blood trickling from beneath his body, pooling in a depression on the warped linoleum floor.
Terry Walker was standing a few feet away, his back to the rear door, one arm locked around Roni’s middle, her eyes wide and wet, the muzzle of his gun pressed against her throat. I started to kneel so I could check Brett’s pulse.
“Don’t bother,” Terry said. “He’s dead or will be in a minute.”
Brett’s arms were extended from his body, both hands empty. I looked around the room, not seeing a gun on the floor, table, or counter.
“He wasn’t armed. You didn’t have to shoot him.”
“Not how I saw it. Roll him over.”
I turned Brett onto his back. There was a Ruger. 44 Magnum Redhawk sticking out of his waistband.
“Now don’t get stupid. I need you to pick up Brett’s gun and yours, one at a time, by the butt, lay them on the floor and kick them over to me. Two fingers or I’ll shoot you where you stand.”
I did what he said.
“What’s it like,” I asked him, “to come home and kill the children of people you grew up with?”
“Don’t waste your time, Jack. I left these people behind fifty years ago and never looked back. Nothing but a job brought me back, and nothing but bad luck got them killed.”
All I could do was keep him talking, hoping he would drop his guard and give me an opening. Roni was trembling, glancing back and forth from Brett’s body to me.
“You work for Nuestra Familia or one of the other cartels?” I asked.
“I don’t work for nobody but me,” he said.
“And you just happen to handle shipments of guns to Mexico. How’d you find out about this one?”
“Old friend of mine from Matamoros. Him and me done a lot of business over the years, and he’s close to one of the cartels. He called me last week, said there was a load of guns supposed to go to Nuestra Familia, but Cesar Mendez couldn’t close the deal because the seller was trying to hold him up for a last-minute premium.”
“Law of supply and demand.”
“My friend said there was a play to be made. If I could get the guns he could move them. He said Mendez was dealing with a boy named Brett Staley. I figured he had to be related to the Staleys I grew up with and that would give me an in. I’d pay what needed to be paid, say hello to my old friends, and be on my way.”
“Then why kill Frank Crenshaw and Nick Staley?”
“Didn’t want to. Tried not to. I tracked Brett down at the grocery last Saturday, told him I wanted to make him a fair offer. He brought Frank and Nick in on it, and they laid the whole scheme out trying to impress me, real proud, telling me that Jimmy was part of it, like that’d make me want to pay more. I made my offer, and Brett said he would get back to me, that he had to talk to someone else.”
“Mendez?”
“Had to be. I figured Brett was going to ask him if he would beat my offer. So I said, ‘Okay but don’t take too long.’”
“And the next day, Frank killed his wife, and Roni shot Frank.”
“Which turned a simple business proposition into a cluster fuck. I should have known better than to bother with those boys. They were losers, just like everybody else in Northeast always was and will be.”
“Frank was looking at the death penalty. The only chance he had was to trade his life for you and Cesar Mendez.”
“Not a deal I could let him make, not with those guns sitting out there somewhere ripe for the taking.”
“How’d you convince Roni to give you her gun?”
“I didn’t!” Roni said, struggling against Terry’s grip.
He jerked his arm up, clamping it around her neck, her face reddening.
“She’s not lying.”
“Then how’d you get it?”
“I was visiting Lilly when Roni called to tell her about shooting Frank. Lilly asked if I’d stay in case Martha needed anything while she went to get Roni. I like to carry a gun in my line of work, but I didn’t have one because I had to fly here on short notice, so after Lilly left, I went looking to see if there was any more guns in the house. I found the one Roni kept in her dresser drawer. When she and Lilly came back, I went to the hospital to see if I could get close to Frank.”
“You were lucky that Roni and the nurse got into a fight and the cop guarding Frank left his post.”
“I’ve had my share of luck, good and bad. I was checking out the setup on Frank’s floor when she got off the elevator. I ducked into an empty room when I saw her. The next thing I knew, she got into it with the nurse and that cop came running. I knew it was going to be my only chance, so I took it.”
“And you threw the gun in a Dumpster on your way out. That was sloppy. Your Mexican friends wouldn’t be impressed.”
He bristled, the first reaction I’d gotten. It wasn’t much, but it was something. He didn’t like being made fun of.
“It was smart. If the cops found the gun, they’d check the registration and go looking for Roni, not me, and that’s what happened.”
“You got rid of Frank, but you still couldn’t close the deal even though you told the cartel that you had the right connections to make it happen. They must think you don’t know your ass from third base. What happened? Was Brett screening your calls?”
His face flushed, and his eyes narrowed.
“The little shit showed me no respect. I went to see Nick yesterday, told him his boy better meet me at the store last night. Nick was there, but Brett wasn’t. He pulled his gun, tried to scare me off, but I don’t scare. We fought, and his gun went off. I waited all night for Brett to show up, but that damn Mexican kid came snooping around and that took care of that.”
“It must have been hard to explain to the cartel that you’d fucked up again.”
Terry jammed the gun deeper into Roni’s neck. “Why do you keep yanking my chain when I’m the one who had faith in you even if Lilly didn’t? I saw that I could sit back and let you lead me to the guns. So who’s the fuckup here? You or me?”
“How many people are you willing to kill for those guns?”
He tilted his head toward me, then at Roni, counting. “Two more ought to about do it.”
“You’d kill your own granddaughter so some asshole drug dealer in Mexico can use them to kill another asshole drug dealer?”
Chapter Seventy-four
Roni lost what little color she had in her face, squirming in his grip to look at him. Terry eased the gun away from her neck, squinting at me.
He said, “That’s a load of crap.”
“I don’t think so. There was a reason you came looking for Lilly Chase before you went looking for the guns. Had to have been something more than her red hair that made you want to see her that bad, and she must have been glad to see you because you’ve been at her house so much I was beginning to think you’d moved in. I saw the way she touched you tonight, running her hand across your shoulders. I’d say she was thinking about asking you.”
“That shit don’t mean nothing!”
“Here’s the clincher. Lilly got pregnant while she was a teenager living at Rachel’s House. I did the math. You told me you disappeared the night of the Electric Park fire, fifty years ago. Lilly’s daughter, Martha, is fifty years old. She was pregnant when you ran away. She had your baby and never got married b
ecause she never got over you. And now you’re going to murder your granddaughter, the only child of your only child.”
Blood rushed from his neck into his face, turning him red, then purple with rage, his mouth twisting into a snarl as he flung Roni to the floor, raising his gun at me and aiming straight for my heart.
“You son of a bitch!”
The bullet should have struck me before I even heard the sound of shots being fired. In that instant, my body exploded in spasms, my knees buckled, and I wondered why there was no pain, but I knew the pain would come if I lived long enough to feel it.
It wasn’t until I saw Terry fall backward and collapse like a rag doll that I realized he’d missed me. As I corkscrewed to the floor, Roni scrambled to her feet, holding the Redhawk over Terry, the muzzle flashing and smoking as she pulled the trigger again and again.
She dropped the Redhawk and fell to her knees, crawling to Brett, turning him over and cradling his head in her lap. I managed to stand, steadying myself with one hand on the kitchen counter, taking deep breaths, drunk-walking the few steps to Terry’s body and picking up his gun and mine and the Redhawk, leaning against the refrigerator for support.
She looked up at me. “What now?”
“You surrender.”
She nodded. “It was self-defense. Just like before with Frank. I saved your life again.”
“And I’m grateful, but the first shot was probably enough.”
“Not after what he did to my grandma, leaving her pregnant like that. But everything will be okay now, won’t it?”
“Not for a long time. You’re in a tight spot.”
“But I didn’t know anything about the guns.”
“Then what were you doing here?”
She glanced around the room, blinking, her hands fluttering, her mind spinning.
“Brett called me. He said to meet him here. He was going away and wanted me to go with him. When I got here, he told me about the guns. He said he needed my help to get rid of them.”
“Why was he shuttling them from one house to the other?”
She brightened, her confidence returning. “The bank had a buyer interested in the other house. They were coming to look at it in the morning. He had to get the guns out of there.”
“That’s the trouble with making it up as you go along,” I told her. “It’s tough to make all the lies hang together. If that’s all he was doing, there was no reason to ask you to help and no reason to get rid of the guns. All he had to do was move them from one house to the other.”
“No,” she said, raising her hands in protest. “You don’t understand. He wanted out, and he wanted me to go with him. That’s what he said.”
“And you were going to run away with him and leave your mom and grandma without even saying good-bye. Is that it?”
She folded her arms over her chest, bending at the waist. “Yes. When he said he was leaving, I realized how much I loved him.”
“Roni, the moon isn’t pink. I hear what you’re saying, but we both know you’re lying. You remember what you kept telling me the last few days?”
“What?”
“You kept telling me that it’s over. Well, you’re finally right. It’s over.”
She sat up. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Sure you do. Frank and Nick were lousy businessmen, and Jimmy could barely hold a job. They let you pay their bills because they couldn’t even do that on their own. You told them they were finished if they didn’t find another way to make money. The stolen goods operation was your idea. You sold them on it and told them what to do.”
“No! That’s crazy.”
“Looking back, you’re right. But nobody wanted out of Northeast more than you did. You said so yourself, even your house was strangling you. Getting Jimmy to steal construction materials that Frank could fence was easy, but there wasn’t enough money in it to get you out.”
She eased Brett’s head out of her lap, scooting away, and started to stand. I pointed the Redhawk at her.
“I like you better sitting down.”
She slid back to the floor.
“Then one day, Brett told you that Cesar Mendez was looking to buy guns, and that was too good an opportunity to pass up, especially if you could build up an inventory so big that you could squeeze Mendez, maybe even threaten to sell the guns to another cartel.”
She ducked her head, avoiding me. “It wasn’t me. It was Brett.”
“I’m sure you let him think it was his idea. That way you could use him as the front man and Mendez wouldn’t know anything about you.”
She looked at him, reaching out, caressing his head. “He wanted to impress his father. Show him he really was a man.”
“And Nick, Frank, and Jimmy went along because they needed the money.”
“They were wiped out. The banks wouldn’t loan Frank and Nick another dime, and Jimmy couldn’t find work. It was a simple plan. It should have worked.” She started to cry, the tears coming fast, easy, and honest, but they were for her, not for him.
“I didn’t want any of this to happen,” she said. “I just wanted to get the money. Grandma still owed more than a quarter of a million dollars for my mom’s medical bills. She’d leveraged the house and everything else she owned. If we didn’t come up with the money, we’d end up like the others.”
“What happened to the money you got for the construction materials Frank Crenshaw moved?”
“I hid it at the house.”
“Why didn’t you split it up with the others? Everyone was broke. Didn’t they need the money?”
“Yeah, but I needed to keep them in the game more than they needed a few bucks. We were going to get top dollar for the guns, enough to get us all back on our feet. It would have worked, too, except Frank shot Marie.”
“You must have thought you were the luckiest girl in the world when Terry murdered Frank because there was no way you could have convinced him to keep quiet.”
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. Everything just got out of hand.”
She and Adam Koch were reading from the same hymnal.
“Actually, things started to come unglued when Jimmy Martin picked his kids up to take them for ice cream. You just didn’t know it.”
She winced, like she’d been slapped. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Jimmy took his kids out for breakfast the day they disappeared. He was supposed to be stealing copper for you, but he couldn’t pass up the chance to be with his kids. I’ll bet you called him to see if the job was done and he told you he’d get to it later. That’s the way Jimmy did things. When he told you he had his kids, you told him to drop them off with you and pick them up when the job was done. Then, when he got busted, you realized you had a big problem if Jimmy talked, so you went to see him and told him that if he said a word, he’d never see his kids again.”
“No!”
I opened my cell phone and read the text message from Superintendent Fibuch. “Then why did you go see Jimmy at the Farm the day he was arrested and once a week after that?”
“I would never hurt those kids, never! I was going to give them back as soon as I got the money for the guns. I swear I was!”
“But Mendez wouldn’t pay your price, and you decided to hold out, make him sweat.”
“I couldn’t believe it! He wouldn’t pay, and Terry wouldn’t either.”
“People like Terry Walker and Cesar Mendez don’t negotiate like that. When they say take it or leave it, they mean it. It’s easier and cheaper to kill you and steal the guns.”
She wiped her face on her sleeve, forcing a smile.
“But it can still work out. Everything can still be okay. We can tell the police what I told you, that I didn’t know anything about the guns, that it was all Brett and the others.”
“That’s why you put two extra bullets in Terry. You didn’t care that he jilted your grandma fifty years ago. You wanted to make sure he was dead because h
e was the last one besides me who could tie you to all of this.”
“For God’s sake, Jack. I’ve saved your life twice. You owe me!”
“Not that much. Why would I let you walk away from this?”
She stood, her face grim, her lips peeled back.
“To save Evan and Cara. Back me up, and as soon as the cops say that everything’s cool, I’ll tell you where to find them and you’ll be a hero all over again.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then no one ever sees those children again. I’ll go to my grave, and their parents will never know what happened to them. You have to choose, Jack. If you want to save those kids, you have to save me first.”
Chapter Seventy-five
“I don’t think so.”
“I’m not bluffing, Jack. I’ve got nothing left to lose.”
I used the cord from a floor lamp and the belts Terry and Brett had been wearing to bind her to a kitchen chair.
“You know what people like you always forget? There’s no such thing as a simple plan. There are too many moving parts and too many things that happen that you never thought could or would. Like you paying the utility bills for this house even though it’s vacant, in foreclosure, and Nick didn’t have the money.”
Her eyes widened. “How could you possibly know that?”
I smiled. “See, that’s what I mean. It never occurred to you that when you left your office unlocked I’d walk in, look at your computer, and find the connection between Nick Staley and Forgotten Homes LLC. And I’ll bet you never thought I would break into your office tonight and steal your mail, but I did. I saw the utility bills addressed to Forgotten Homes and saw that the accounts were current. Nick didn’t have the money, but you did and you paid the bills.”
“The bank demanded that I keep the power on.”
“I believe you,” I said, walking out of the kitchen.
She strained against the belts. “Where are you going?”
I gathered my gun and Terry’s and the Redhawk. “Upstairs to get Evan and Cara.”