by Mason Cross
Freel flinched and then launched himself across the room toward the chest of drawers. Gage yelled at him to freeze as Freel yanked the top drawer open and pulled out a large wood-handled revolver. He swung his arm around and pointed the gun square at Gage’s chest.
33
Sarah bid Diane Marshall farewell, and ten minutes later she was back at the diner on Main Street where they had bought coffees earlier. She pushed open the glass doors and scanned the interior, looking for Blake. The place was either a genuine throwback, or took its retro credentials seriously. It felt to Sarah like an old-time ice cream parlor. Bluesy rock played over the speakers. Sarah didn’t recognize the song, but like the rest of the place, it could have been original ‘60s or could have been last week. The place was busy with teenagers gazing into their phones, which spoiled the ambience a little. After a couple of seconds she located Blake, at the far side of the room in one of the booths. She headed over to him, tapping the folder that contained the pictures Diane had printed against her palm.
Blake was sitting with an untouched bottle of water, his expression inscrutable. His phone lay on the table beside the bottle.
“You know what?” she began. “I may become a ... what was it you called it? Person locator myself. My contact came through, big time: new name, address, even a picture.”
Sarah slid into the seat across from him. Her smile faded when she saw the look on Blake’s face.
“What is it?”
“I owe you an apology,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“I already found her.”
Once again, she was taken by surprise. She put the folder down on the table, waited for him to continue. Before he could say anything, a wide-eyed waitress materialized with a menu, smiling expectantly. Sarah was mildly surprised that she wasn’t on roller skates. She ordered a peanut butter shake and watched her until she had retreated out of earshot before looking back across the table at Blake.
“She works in the library, right across the road.” He gestured out of the window. Sarah didn’t look away from him. “I wasn’t sure she would be there, but ... well, she was.”
“What did she say?”
“Aren’t you mad that I didn’t wait for you? Or call you, even?”
She thought about it for a second. “Mildly irritated, maybe. But no, not mad. Besides, it was worth the trip. I got her address.”
Blake smiled. “I don’t have that yet.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Are you withholding again?”
He shook his head. “Scout’s honor.”
She sighed. “I get it, you know. You wanted to see her alone first. It’s just ... you don’t always have to keep the cards so close to your chest. You could stand to loosen up a little, Blake. If that really is your real name.” The last part had been a joke, but Blake suddenly looked uncomfortable.
He cleared his throat. “You know, if I had really thought about it, I’d have known it would be better to bring you along. I guess I didn’t want to think about it too much.”
“Let me guess, it wasn’t the happy reunion of your imagination?”
“You could say her reaction was ambivalent.”
“Did you tell her why we came looking for her?”
“The edited highlights,” Blake replied. “She claims Freel isn’t involved in anything shady.”
“That she knows of.”
“I don’t know. She seemed pretty adamant. And from what I remember, she isn’t the kind of person who’s easily fooled.”
“At first, I was adamant that my husband had quit gambling. Several times. Sometimes we believe what we want to believe.”
The milkshake arrived, and Blake picked his water up and clinked the bottle against Sarah’s glass, taking his first sip.
“Can’t argue with that.”
“So when do I get to see her?”
“She wants to talk it over with Freel first. She said she’ll meet us tonight and bring him along.”
Sarah thought it over. “She knows, doesn’t she, deep down?”
Blake didn’t say anything.
“Okay, so at least we can warn them to be more careful. I mean, if we found them, so could the guy from the other night, right?”
“That’s what I’m worried about. I need to talk to Freel, no matter what.”
Blake’s cell vibrated on the table, the screen signaling an incoming call. He picked it up and glanced at the number, looking up at Sarah as he hit the button to pick up.
“It’s her.”
34
Dominic Freel lay on his back on the carpet, his lifeless eyes pointing up at the ceiling, the revolver still loosely entangled in the curled fingers of his right hand.
Gage kept the gun trained on Freel’s chest as he stepped toward him. Freel had taken three bullets: one in the right shoulder, two around the heart. Gage nudged the revolver out of Freel’s unresisting grasp and kicked it across the floor, before dropping to one knee. He put his left hand to Freel’s throat, his fingertips searching for a pulse he knew he would never find.
Gage let out a grunt of frustration. This had not been part of the plan. He knew he shouldn’t have let Freel lead the way up here, but he had been confident that the man posed no threat to him. That had been correct. There had been no possibility of Freel making it across the room, retrieving the gun and getting a shot off. Gage would have had time to order out for pizza in the time it took him. What he had not anticipated was that Freel would be stupid enough to take such a great risk with such a minuscule chance of success. Gage had waited until the last possible second to stop him. Freel had been no threat to Gage at all, but in the end, he had been a threat to himself.
Freel’s mouth was slightly open, as well as his eyes. His features were frozen in an expression of mild surprise.
A three-note chirp broke the silence. The phone again: the source of the interruption that Freel had fatally gambled was enough of a distraction to make his move. Gage patted down Freel’s hip pockets, finding a cheap Motorola cell phone in one. He tapped the screen and found Freel had set a PIN lock. It would be a simple matter to break it later on, but for now Gage didn’t need to. You could view recent notifications without unlocking it. He swiped his thumb down from the top of the screen and saw one missed call and one text message from the same contact: “Carol.”
The wife, he supposed. Gage had forgotten all about her. Perhaps this wouldn’t be a complete dead end after all. He could read only the first part of the message, but the preview showed enough:
You home? Coming back, need to t ...
“Need to talk," was a reasonable bet. He hoped the subject would be helpful to him. He turned Freel’s phone on to airplane mode and pocketed it. Dominic Freel would be missing that conversation.
Remembering what he was here for, he grabbed the collar of Freel’s shirt and ripped the top three buttons open. Nothing around his neck. He patted the pockets down, worrying that Freel had taken the location of the key—not to mention the lock that it fit—to his grave. Nothing but loose change and the keys for the Toyota. He checked the shoes. No concealed spaces. He rolled the body face down and ran his finger along the inside of Freel’s belt. At the small of his back, Gage’s fingers contacted something taped to the inside. He pulled it free and grinned as he saw the duplicate of the brass key he had taken from McKinney. Same size, same interlinked Cs logo. Only one difference: a number one instead of a two.
Carol Freel, or whatever her real name was, would be home soon. The town simply wasn’t big enough for her to be far away. He considered for a second the best way to welcome the new widow home, and decided it would be important for her to see the consequences of non-cooperation first-hand. He picked up Freel’s revolver, emptied it, and put the bullets in his pocket before dropping the gun in the wastebasket. He opened the other drawers to be sure there weren’t any other nasty surprises waiting. Satisfied, he walked back out onto the landing and across to the nearest bedroom at
the top of the stairs. The office door was wide open, and anyone ascending to the second floor would see Freel’s body.
Less than a minute later, he heard the sound of rapid footsteps on the sidewalk outside.
He kept the bedroom door open and flattened his back against the wall, out of sight as he heard a key twist in the lock and the front door open. He felt a frisson of anticipation that he did not altogether welcome. A female voice sounded from the hall downstairs.
“Dom?”
She waited a moment before starting up the stairs.
“Why aren’t you answering your phone? We need—”
She stopped mid-sentence, simultaneously with the sound of her footsteps on the stairs stopping. Gage estimated she was on the fourth stair from the top, just into line of sight with the door to the study.
She didn’t say anything else, her footsteps quickened as she scaled the last four steps and rushed across the landing. There was no scream, just a sharp intake of breath. He heard a floorboard creak as she knelt down, no doubt checking for a pulse. But she wasn’t talking to her husband, wasn’t yelling at him to wake up. Perhaps the three holes in his chest had convinced her not to get her hopes up.
Gage stepped out onto the landing as she was getting up and turning back toward the door. She froze as she saw the gun pointed at her, still side on, in the middle of turning. The look in her eyes said she knew the same gun had killed her husband. She didn’t try to run. Smart.
“Who are you?”
Her voice was unsteady, but remarkably calm. Her pallor told him she was in shock from the discovery, but she wasn’t losing it completely. She wasn’t sobbing or fainting or tensing to make an impossible dash down the stairs to the front door. She was keeping it together, because she knew that whatever else was going on, she was in a life or death situation. Gage upgraded her from smart to smart and collected.
Gage didn’t reply to her question. He was busy looking her over. She was dressed in jeans and a gray shirt. It didn’t look like she was carrying a weapon, but the position she had frozen in meant he could not see her right side or her right hand. He was through taking chances. He didn’t want to kill her if he could avoid it.
“Hands where I can see them. Slowly.”
She took a breath and slowly straightened so that she was facing him in the doorway to the study. She held both hands out loosely at her sides. They were empty.
“You killed my husband,” she said. Her voice was a little louder than it had been, as though the enormity of the fact had only just hit her.
“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “He didn’t give me much of a choice. Believe me, I’m as upset about it as you are.”
“He’s dead.”
She was kind of laboring the point, now. Perhaps he had been hasty. Perhaps this was just the delayed reaction. If she was about to dissolve into a hysterical mess, she was no good to him. He needed her lucid.
“He is dead,” Gage agreed. “All I wanted to do was talk to him, and he drew down on me.”
She said nothing, but took a step back. She looked shaky on her feet.
For some reason, Gage thought of another time he had held a gun on someone and tried to speak soothingly to them. Nearly two decades before, he had confronted a strung-out junkie who had taken four people hostage in a liquor store in a small town near Victoria, killing one before Gage and his partner showed up. Even now, years later, he could remember vivid details. The sick, greenish skin tone of the junkie. The dark red blood pooling underneath the dead clerk. The green light from the neon Busch sign in the window glinting off the shards of shattered liquor bottles.
“I love the cheese,” he had kept saying over and over. The nonsensical phrase sounding more and more urgent as he struggled to make Gage understand him. In the end, he had put the gun to his own head. Gage had considered just letting him pull the trigger for a second, before adjusting his aim and putting a bullet in the junkie’s hand.
He didn’t want to have to shoot Freel’s wife, too.
“Same rules now,” he said. “With you and me. All I want to do is talk.”
Her eyes focused. She seemed to take it in. She tilted her head in the direction of the desk and swivel chair, on the opposite side of the room from the body of her husband. “Can I ... can I sit down?”
“Fine, slowly.”
She backed over to the chair and sat down, no sudden moves. Gage lowered the gun slightly. Easing a little of the tension off would help, he hoped.
“How did you get into my house?”
Again, her voice was unnaturally loud. It was almost as though she was speaking to ...
Finally, Gage realized what was happening. He raised his gun again and hardened his voice. “Give me your phone.”
She hesitated. “I left it in the car.”
Gage took a step forward and saw a raise in her right hip pocket. The side he hadn’t been able to see when she was turning to leave the room. “Give me the phone.” He pointed the gun at her head now.
She looked at him for a second and then reached into her hip pocket. Slowly, she withdrew it. When it was out of her pocket he roughly grabbed it with his free hand and glanced at the display.
As he had guessed—almost too late—there was a call in progress. She must have dialed the number as she was examining the body, then slipped it into her pocket when she saw Gage.
He raised the phone to his ear, not taking his eyes off Freel’s wife, who he had now upgraded to tricksy bitch. She said nothing, but her blue eyes burned with defiance.
“Who is this?” he said.
There was a pause. An open line, he could hear traffic noise in the background and an echo. A car in motion. And then a man’s voice. Clear and deliberate.
“Somebody who will find you, and make you sorry.”
35
We crossed an intersection just after the light had turned red, narrowly missing a white van that was a little too quick off the mark on the other traffic stream. Sarah sucked air through her teeth as she corrected her evasive steer and brought us back into the lane. I barely heard the blare of the van’s horn. I was too focused on the voice at the other end of the phone.
“Be very careful who you threaten,” the voice said calmly, “I already killed one person today. I may decide to make it two.”
“If you—” I began, but whoever was speaking on Carol’s phone had already hung up.
I took the phone from my ear, cursing as I looked at the screen. The end-of-call log told me it had been four minutes, twenty-two seconds since my phone had rung in the diner. Four minutes, twenty-two seconds since I had picked it up and heard silence on the other end. I was just about to hang up when I heard a low mumble. A man’s voice, some distance from the speaker and muffled, saying something about hands, and slowly. And then a clearer voice. Carol’s voice. Words that sent a chill through me.
“You killed my husband.”
How far were we from the house now? How close had four minutes and change gotten us?
Sarah risked taking her eyes off the road and saw that I had taken the phone from my ear. “What happened?”
I had managed to convey to her what was happening while keeping a hand over the receiver and listening. She had known what to do, had headed straight for the car and got in, punching the address Diane Marshall had given her into the GPS as I held the phone to my ear and jumped in the passenger side. We hadn’t even discussed that we were heading to Carol’s house, it was simply the only place we knew to go. Carol herself had confirmed it a couple of minutes later—"How did you get into my house"—but in doing so had tipped her hand to the man who was threatening her. And I was pretty sure I knew exactly who that man had been.
“Blake!” Sarah prompted, snapping me out of my train of thought.
“Just get us there,” I said. “How far?”
Barely an hour before I had been thinking about what a small town this was. At this moment it felt roughly the size of Tokyo.
Sar
ah glanced at the map on the GPS screen. “Half a mile.”
“Look out,” I yelled.
Sarah looked up and yanked the wheel hard right, just avoiding a taxi that had pulled out of a side street without looking. The evasion left us diagonal across the road, facing oncoming traffic. Sarah slammed on the brakes, and a dirty green pickup braked inches from hitting us. Another horn sounded as Sarah backed up, straightened, and slammed the car into drive, wheels spinning as she let the clutch in.
She covered the rest of the distance in under a minute, barely reducing speed as she took the final turn onto Sycamore.
“Drop me here, then move up the street.” I looked ahead, scanning the street for safe spots. “Park behind that panel van.”
Sarah nodded. I had the door open and was out of the car as soon as she slammed to a halt two doors from the address Diane had given her. It was on a quiet street lined with new-looking two-story houses. Sarah floored the gas as soon as I was out and moved herself and the car away from the front of the house.
I kept my gun by my side, ready to bring it up quickly as I surveyed the house. It had been at least three minutes since the call had ended. I was pretty sure that we would find no one in there, no one alive, anyway. The red front door was half-open. I kept my eyes on the windows, looking for movement. I weaved my way toward the door to present a moving target.
More than three minutes from the moment Carol’s clandestine call to me had been discovered. Enough for the man on the other end of the phone call to make his escape. Trenton Gage had found his way to Quarter a lot quicker than I had bargained for.
I held the gun up and nudged the front door the rest of the way open with my foot. The door swung back, revealing a hallway and a staircase. I moved through the doorway and cleared the ground floor in seconds, moving from room to room with increasing urgency.
I climbed the stairs and as my head drew level with the top floor I saw a doorway, and within, the lower half of a man’s body, lying on the carpet. I forced myself to go slow, listen for the small giveaway noises of someone lying in wait, but my gut told me there was nobody up here.