by John Lutz
The shed. It was much closer than the trees. Schueller might be in it or behind it.
The way he was running, his wound must be slight. He might even have doubled back and be in or near the house, behind Quinn.
Perspiration like ice water trickled down Quinn’s spine.
He was turning back to glance at the house when motion in the corner of his vision caught his eye. His head snapped around in time for him to see Schueller break from the cover of the storage shed and bolt for the woods. He was carrying the shotgun in his right hand.
Schueller was beyond range of Quinn’s handgun, and he knew it. Even if Quinn stood still and fired a perfectly aimed round, it would dig into the ground well behind the fleeing killer.
Quinn began to run. He was like a mountain gaining momentum, slow off the mark, but picking up speed.
Schueller had a good lead, and he was running fast despite his wounded leg. Certainly faster than the older and heavier Quinn.
But could he keep running?
He stopped suddenly and whirled. The shotgun he was carrying interfered with his running rhythm and slowed him down, and he had a better use for it. He fired it toward Quinn, who paid it no attention. The shotgun didn’t have nearly the range of his pistol.
Quinn watched Schueller toss the gun aside. He recalled that it was a double-barreled model, good for only two shots without a reload.
A mistake, not waiting for me to come within range. You’re rattled.
Schueller settled into a swift pace toward the trees. Quinn took an angle that would cause them to meet a hundred feet or so before the trees, and tried to breathe evenly so he wouldn’t get winded so fast. He knew that behind him someone had surely called in the state police, but they wouldn’t get here soon enough. All Schueller had to do was reach the county road and flag down a motorist, or make his way to some unsuspecting homeowner who had a car, and that would be the end of the chase.
And maybe the homeowner.
Quinn felt pain creeping into his thighs, and a burning in his lungs. A slight ache began in his right side that he knew would soon become a stitch and double him over.
He swallowed the pain and lengthened his stride.
Gradually, inexorably, he began to gain ground.
Schueller glanced over his shoulder and saw that Quinn was getting closer. He spun momentarily so he was running backward, grinned, and waved at Quinn. Then he turned back around and picked up speed.
Quinn matched him stride for stride, and then some.
When the trees loomed ahead of them, Schueller was within pistol range, but still too far away for accuracy. He would soon be lost in the cover of the woods.
Every step was agony for Quinn. He cocked the hammer of his revolver, then stopped running and planted his feet. Unable to steady himself, he didn’t hold out much hope for what he was about to try. Gripping the gun with both hands, he laid out a pattern of shots in the direction of Schueller just before Schueller was swallowed by the sheltering darkness of the trees. Quickly Quinn reloaded and fired another pattern of shots into the shadows.
His chest heaving, he trudged toward the woods.
In the shadowed silence of the trees, Quinn glanced around and saw what looked like blood on some of the undergrowth. Felt it and found it damp.
Schueller’s blood.
But he couldn’t determine direction.
Within a few minutes Quinn heard an engine whine and turn over. Then another. He recognized the sound immediately and remembered the small twin-engine plane parked on the edge of the airstrip.
He charged into the undergrowth and dry leaves, toward the sound of the aircraft engines.
Now the engines were roaring. Quinn could imagine the small plane taxiing, bumping across the grass. It wouldn’t need much speed or distance to become airborne.
He broke from the trees just in time to see the plane picking up speed down the airstrip, moving away from him. He stopped and stood still, sighted in on the small aircraft, and fired the remaining two shots in his revolver.
They seemed to have no effect on the plane.
And then they did.
Something was preventing the plane from taking off. It slowed, sat still for a moment, and then the left motor roared louder and it turned around near the far end of the grass runway to return the way it had come.
Both engines howled, and the aircraft came at Quinn, earthbound but picking up speed at an alarming rate. He fumbled to reload his revolver as he side-shuffled toward the woods.
He barely made it into the safety of the trees. He was safe.
But Schueller wouldn’t or couldn’t stop or veer the plane. The aircraft made the edge of the woods, slammed a wing into a tree, spun, and rocked to a halt, facing away from Quinn. One engine was mangled, its three-bladed propeller twisted and stopped. The other engine was still roaring, its propeller whirling. Quinn found himself in a hurricane of littered wind.
He squinted into the gale of the prop wash and saw Schueller half climb, half fall out of the cockpit. The plane’s left wing was sheared off at the engine nacelle. Schueller staggered as if drunk, stopped, and stood between Quinn and the whirling propeller, leaning back slightly and letting the prop wash help support him. He was injured from the crash, or one of Quinn’s bullets had found him. Blood flowed from a wound in the side of his head, black in the dappled moonlight. More blood ran down his arms, which were hanging limply at his sides, raised slightly and tremulously in the rush of air.
Both men knew that the game was up.
Quinn pointed his revolver at Schueller and with his free hand motioned for him to come forward.
Schueller smiled. Shrugged.
Instead of moving forward, he backpedaled, and the propeller had him.
Quinn heard the engine’s roar momentarily change pitch, saw Schueller suddenly become parts rather than a whole human being. Quinn felt wetness on the backs of his hands, on his cheeks and forehead.
He turned around and sat down on the ground, hearing the engine cough and become silent.
He bowed his head in the throbbing stillness of the woods.
He didn’t look behind him.
85
Penny had a difficult time conversing with Fedderman, the way he was lying on his stomach, with half his face mashed into his hospital pillow. The nurses, with cunning expertise and Velcro restraining material, had made it impossible for him to turn over.
“Thish p’low mush have a thread count about three,” he said.
It struck Penny as odd that Feds would complain about the pillowcase’s roughness on his face rather than the holes left by the pellets that had penetrated his right back and shoulder when he’d instinctively turned away from Schueller’s shotgun. One of the pellets had almost lodged in his spine, and possibly would have paralyzed him. As it was, he should completely recover but for a peppering of scars on his back.
“I guesh you were right about the rishk factor,” Fedderman said.
Penny had been crying intermittently since hearing from Quinn that her husband had been shot. Shock had become relief, then anger, then
… something else. The crying she did now was for relief if not actual joy.
She leaned close to Fedderman. “You’re an idiot, Feds.”
He knew that tone of voice. He smiled.
“No,” she said, “ I’m the idiot. You don’t marry someone intending to change him. And now you’ve made me realize how much I’d miss you, and I’m trapped.”
“But you don’t mind?”
She kissed him. “The question doesn’t apply,” she said. “I’ve got you. We have each other. As close to forever as we can make it.”
He smiled into his pillow. “Shwell,” he said.
“I’m not going to buy a gun,” she said.
“Shwell.”
Huh?
While Enders and Coil sometimes served as legal consultants to Waycliffe College and its faculty, there wasn’t enough evidence to indict the law firm. Th
e Waycliffe conspirators, along with mid-level Meeding Properties executives, received guilty verdicts on counts of fraud, insider trading, and impeding an investigation. They were found not guilty as accessories in all six homicides; Chancellor Schueller, in death, bore all the guilt.
Enders and Coil knew how to sweep up after their clients, and themselves.
Sarah Benham, a decorated former Marine who was in the employ of Meeding Properties to help facilitate the eminent domain case and eviction of Mildred Dash, was also convicted.
Though Sarah was a troubleshooter in Meeding Properties Security, she did in addition insure art, which was the basis for her relationship with Waycliffe College. It had led to her acting on behalf of the co-conspirators in the Meeding Properties-Mildred Dash dilemma, and to sharing in their mutually supportive lie.
While free on bail and awaiting sentencing, she was found in her bathtub with six empty martini glasses nearby and her wrists sliced.
Not only was the defendants’ legal team supremely skilled at speaking untruths without lying, they knew how to deflect. They had managed to have the recording made at Chancellor Schueller’s house declared illegally obtained and inadmissible in court.
And inaccessible to the public.
Waycliffe College would survive the storm of damaging truth and innuendo, so the respected institution could sever itself from its past.
For everyone involved, nothing was cheap
Jody was terminated at Enders and Coil before Mildred Dash’s family filed suit claiming Mildred’s death was premature and caused by Meeding Properties and the law firm harassing her in a campaign of terror to try forcing her illegal eviction.
Jody became a friend of the plaintiffs, and in her room above Quinn and Pearl in the brownstone prepared herself to testify for Mildred Dash’s family in court.
Quinn and Pearl would sit on the sofa with after-dinner drinks and listen to her, though they couldn’t quite understand what she was saying.
“It sounds as if she’s talking to herself and answering,” Pearl said.
“She is,” Quinn told her.
“Is that healthy?”
“Not for anyone who gets crossways with her.”
“Should we be worried?”
“No,” Quinn said. “She’s asking the right questions, and I suspect her answers are good ones.”
EPILOGUE
Rio de Janeiro, the present
On Corcovado Mountain, half a mile above Rio, stood a statue of Christ the Redeemer, arms spread wide as if blessing the sprawling city below. Also beneath the beneficent figure of Jesus, Daniel Danielle reclined on a padded lounger on his sun-washed fifth-floor balcony, facing the city’s edge and the beach near Grande Tijuca. Daniel preferred these beaches near the favelas, where many of Rio’s thousands of homeless street kids swarmed.
Street children were a problem in Rio, but not for Daniel Danielle. They were a savvy, hard-bitten lot, but they were also made vulnerable by lack of time on earth. Prey for predators. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these children join the disappeared each year. No one seemed to notice. No one seemed to care. No one searched for them. The poor greatly outnumbered the rich in Rio, and there was little to spend on the welfare of wild children.
Daniel placed his espresso on the round tiled table next to his lounger and put on his sunglasses. They had prescription lenses, and he enjoyed sitting in the late morning sun and reading the latest edition of the New York Times. The paper had certainly been interesting lately, but now that was over and he knew the news would be more mundane.
At least for a while.
Occasionally Daniel felt the urge to travel, to return to the U.S. and take up his old hobby. But he knew that truthfully it was safer to indulge in it elsewhere. Perhaps, ideally, where he was.
A warm breeze played over his bare legs. He removed his prescription glasses and put on plain tinted ones, the better to observe the beach. He smiled, as he did most mornings. He knew he had much to smile about. Life was going smoothly. His investments using stolen money had performed admirably. The problems of the common man were for others. What he needed he had in abundance.
He stretched languidly, closed his eyes, and decided on a short nap. Afterward, perhaps he’d make plans for tonight.
Before him, like a bestowal from God, were the children of Rio.
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