ON Edge (An Ozzie Novak Thriller, Book 1) (Redemption Thriller Series 13)

by John W. Mefford

  Alfonso steered away from the curb and zipped down 11th Street.

  24

  As I eased the Cadillac into the parking lot at Tito’s complex, I slowed to a crawl. The ten-foot-wide pothole was as deep as Lady Bird Lake, or so it seemed, knowing I had a little donut for a rear tire. I braced myself for the impact.

  Whaboom!

  I grunted at the crunch of the Cadillac’s undercarriage into the jagged concrete.

  “You okay, Ozzie?”

  Stacy was back on the line after stepping away to investigate my query.

  “I’m good, although I can’t say the same about my car.”

  “Don’t tell me you got in a wreck. Are we going to have to call you a lawyer?” She giggled in a way that made her sound like a little old lady.

  “Ha ha,” I said without enthusiasm. I made my way into the parking space on the end. Seven spaces down from my spot, I noticed the top of Tito’s green VW bus. He’d called it a 1965 classic. I’d retorted with my own description: a classic piece of garbage.

  “Were you able to find any evidence of a personal email account for my dad?”

  “I didn’t want to say anything at first, but…” She stopped short. I thought I picked up a giggle, but I couldn’t rely on my hearing.

  “Were you saying something?”

  “Sorry. Will you promise not to tell Arie?”

  “Arie. Why him?”

  “You promise?”

  I crossed my chest. “I just crossed my chest.”

  “I snuck out my laptop. Am I a bad person?”

  “No worries, Stacy. I’m not the FBI, IRS, FDA, or Homeland Security. Did I miss anyone?”

  “Crap. You think they’re looking for my laptop?”

  “How many secrets are you keeping on it?”

  There was a pause, and I thought the call had been dropped. “Stacy?”

  “I’m here, Ozzie. I’m thinking that somewhere on my laptop I have my grandmother’s famous Fried Pineapple Explosion recipe.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “She actually won a blue ribbon at the state fair in Dallas back in 1960-something.”

  “Your secret is safe with me. How about Dad’s email?” I loved hearing Stacy’s stories, but after my night, before my head hit my pillow, even a borrowed pillow, I needed to feel like I’d made some progress.

  “Just as I expected, I found an email I had forwarded to his personal account.”

  That got my attention. “When did this occur?”

  “It’s dated about eighteen months ago. I remember what happened. He called me from the golf course, said he couldn’t get to his work email from his phone. He asked me to check on something. So I just forwarded the email to his personal account.”

  “Do you have it there? What was it about?”

  A quick moment of silence. “Is this going to get me involved in this FBI investigation, Oz? I don’t want any trouble.”

  I watched two women come out of the building, arm in arm. It was dark, difficult to get a good look, but they seemed happy and carefree, as if life were just a breeze. That was me a couple of months ago, but it felt like another lifetime. I sighed.

  “You have nothing to worry about, Stacy. I’m just trying to figure out who my dad was working for. And I’ll be damned if anything or anyone is going to stop me from finding out.” The moment the words left my mouth, I knew I’d taken it too far. “That sounded harsh. I’m sorry. It’s not directed at you. It’s just been one of those days.”

  A car drove by on the side street, its engine rumbling. It looked like one of those old Corvette Stingrays. It was as if I were living in the world of vintage cars.

  Stacy responded. “If it’s anything like the funeral reception, I can’t imagine. So, the content of the email is pretty innocuous. It has to do with his client, a city councilman who was charged with DUI, and the client was paranoid about any word of this leaking to the press, so he insisted on routing his emails to your father’s private account. I don’t even think the guy is in office anymore.”

  “Do you know if Dad’s account is still active?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  I asked her to text me the email address. “Wait, do you know the password?”

  “Pfft. Do cows shit in barns? Come on, Oz. I don’t forget things like that.”

  Wow, I’d forgotten how lucky I’d been to have such a talented person as my admin. “You’re the greatest, Stacy.”

  As I pushed the car door open, I saw another car driving down the tree-lined side street, one of those lowrider cars, going about five miles per hour. Two guys were in the front. It didn’t turn into the parking lot.

  Instead, it stopped right there in the street. With one foot still on the floorboard, and a gust of chilly wind making my eyes water, I stopped moving. Something was off. The driver’s-side window of the lowrider was rolled down, even with temperatures in the thirties. Were they going to ask me a question? But the driver didn’t lean out the window.

  I picked up a strong waft of wood burning in a fireplace. Not many people still had wood-burning fireplaces. Back in San Francisco, when Nicole and I had frozen our asses off just from walking five blocks toward the wharf, we’d scoot into a coffee shop, grab two warm mugs of coffee, and huddle near the public fireplace. We jokingly dreamed of someday having our own fireplace, one that used real wood, where we could snuggle by the roaring fire and hug and kiss each other without worrying about offending other people.

  At this very moment, someone was probably doing the same thing that we’d talked about all those years ago. I had this strong urge to have her close to me, her body against mine in front of our wood-burning fireplace.

  I blinked and saw a glint of metal. I didn’t think; I just dove back into my car. In midair, I heard a series of muffled pops, and as I landed—the gear shift slamming into my ribs—glass exploded just above my head. A second of silence. Were they coming after me? I wouldn’t be able to hear if someone was walking toward me. Should I lift my head? I was a sitting duck, no way to protect myself.

  Just then, a woman’s scream pierced the still air. The kind of scream that chilled your bones. I pushed up, spotted the woman near my car—one of the two women from earlier—and followed her gaze to the driver standing next to his open door, pointing his pistol at a man huddled on the ground. Where did that guy come from? He held up an arm, trying to protect himself. They were both cloaked in darkness. Words were exchanged, but I couldn’t hear what was said. The thug was going to kill the man.

  I kicked open the door, jumped out of the car, and yelled at the top of my lungs. The shooter swung around and fired his gun without even looking. I lunged for a row of trees lining the back of the narrow parking lot. I felt the breeze of a bullet whiz by my forehead, clip a tree trunk, and spray tiny chunks of bark into my eyes.

  I took a breath and realized the shooting had stopped. But that sense of relief lasted only a second. I lifted my eyes and saw the shooter turn back to the man, who was now crawling away. I also noticed a shopping cart turned on its side. I leaped out of my stance and screamed, “No!” It must have scared the shooter, who lurched just as his gun fired.

  The man on the ground cried out, grabbing at his leg. I ran at the shooter, screaming, waving my arms, determined to stop this madness. He turned, aimed his gun right at my chest. I screamed louder, dodged left and right, but kept running toward him. I hoped I was freaking him out, scaring him. He shuffled closer to his door and jerked the pistol at me, but nothing happened. I saw a guy’s head pop up on the other side of the car. He was yelling at his buddy to go. The shooter glanced at the other guy, but then turned back and tried to shoot me again. The gun didn’t fire—he must have run out of bullets.

  Out of nowhere, I saw a blunt object a second before it connected with my head. I literally saw stars, then my knees slammed to the concrete. My vision was blurred, but I still saw the car race away, fishtailing around the corner.

  A moment la
ter, the woman ran up to the man who’d been shot. She put her hands to her face and cried. My efforts had been for naught. An innocent man had died.

  25

  The ambulance driver flipped on his siren, carefully negotiated the massive pothole, and drove off to the hospital. I was leaning against a police cruiser, holding an ice pack to my head as I watched the screaming woman from earlier sob uncontrollably in the arms of her friend.

  The woman’s name was Janet Patterson, I’d learned. She was twenty-four, a recent graduate of the UT School of Arts. Her first art show was scheduled for the next night. The two women had a blanket around them, huddled between two officers. Fog pumped into the nighttime air like a sea of smokestacks. The temperature must have dropped another ten degrees in the last hour.

  “She’s really upset, but at least she has a friend, Ozzie.” Brook gingerly touched my elbow as my eyes shifted to the shopping cart still lying on its side at the mouth of the parking lot, empty tin cans scattered around it. Officers and CSI techs were milling about, scanning the ground for evidence. They had already bagged the object that had smacked my head—a full sixteen-ounce beer.

  I wasn’t sure when Janet would be able to fully recover mentally from this trauma. I hoped she would get help. But nearly all of my concern was for Sam, the man who was shot in the leg…the same man who’d shined shoes outside of the Novak and Novak office building for more years than I could recall. Due to loss of blood, Sam had gone into what one of the paramedics called hypovolemic shock. He’d opened his eyes briefly when I had dragged myself over to him earlier. He muttered words that no one heard, but I could read his lips: “I was just looking for some spare cans so I could make a few dollars on the side, Oz. Damn, I guess luck isn’t on my side.” Then his eyes flickered and shut.

  “I hope like hell that Sam is going to make it.”

  Brook nodded, let out a tired breath. “These drive-by shootings are so senseless. The perps are usually young, cocky, and just trying to prove something. They don’t give a shit about human lives.”

  “I don’t think it was a random drive-by shooting.”

  She’d just turned to watch her colleagues near the shopping cart and scattered empty cans. She stopped moving for a second, then slowly turned to me. “What are you saying, Ozzie?”

  I told her to hold on a minute. I walked over to my car, asked one of the CSI techs if I could look for a personal item, and, given the okay, I pulled the item out. When I turned, Brook was standing right there. I almost plowed into her.

  “What is this?” she asked as I held the note in front of her face. She mouthed the content of the note and said, “I’ll ask you again: what is this?”

  I explained that I’d found the note attached to my car in the parking garage earlier when she dropped me off. “That, along with a little present.” I pointed at my back tire.

  “They put a donut on your car?”

  I didn’t laugh. My face was so cut up from the shards of glass that it hurt to stretch the skin. “They slashed my tire, Brook. It kind of goes with the theme. First they threaten me, and then, apparently, they try to kill me.”

  She raked her fingers through her hair, then put her hands at her waist. “Jesus H. Christ. This was no random shooting.”

  “I already said that.”

  “This changes everything.” She glanced at the note, then up at me. “Why didn’t you call me when you found this? We could have tried to get prints off the paper.”

  I was expecting that question, but I didn’t have a good answer. “I don’t know. I was just pissed and wanted to fix my car and leave. It was irrational. And now…I wish I had called you. Then maybe Sam wouldn’t have been shot.” I blew out a breath, dropped my hands to my side.

  She took the ice pack from my hand and put it against my head. “Believe me, you need the ice.”

  “I got this injury from a can of Schlitz.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “I think the guy in the passenger seat chucked it at me. Some luck I have, huh?” I winced as I grabbed hold of the ice pack. “Schlitz. I didn’t think people still drank that piss water.” I was trying to change the topic, anything to keep my mind off the fact that my action, or rather, inaction, had likely led to an innocent person being shot and possibly killed. I went to my second tactic and bit into the side of my cheek, keeping my emotions at bay.

  “Listen, Oz, in my line of work, you second-guess yourself all the time. But it’s useless. We can’t predict human behavior. Certainly not the kind where people just start shooting a gun at random people. Frickin’ nutjobs.”

  “You’re right. They came after me, but Sam just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Police had checked his ID earlier and learned that Sam lived just a couple of blocks away. They called his home and found out he was living with his sister’s family. They were going to head out to meet the ambulance at the hospital.

  Brook spoke to some other officers, then led me over to the sidewalk so her colleagues could continue doing their work.

  She held up the note and read it out loud: “Your dad died for a reason. You will too, if you don’t stop snooping. What do you think they’re talking about here?”

  I tried to pull my thoughts off the replay of the shooting, of seeing Sam on the ground. “I…I’m not really sure.” I wanted to rub my face, but as soon as I touched it, I was zapped with a sharp sting from one of the cuts.

  She looked off for a second, then back at me. “This note is implying that your dad was indeed murdered. As you know, we’ve yet to see evidence of that fact. Maybe we missed something. Maybe the video from the hospital will identify the perp. But how many people admit to murder? Not many, in my experience, that’s for damn sure. This note is essentially doing just that.”

  The intensity in her voice was palpable. She was feeling the heat that would likely come as the note was shared with others in the APD.

  “Doesn’t sound like you’re too convinced that you’ll find anything in the hospital surveillance video that points us to the killer.”

  “I think it could go one of two ways. Either it comes up blank, which means we have no idea if they’re just taking the opportunity to take credit for the murder, when in reality he simply died. Or the murderer was absolutely brazen, the kind of guy who would stare at the camera, flip it off, and then go put some drug in your dad’s IV or something like that.”

  I huffed out a breath, which sent a stabbing pain straight to the bump on my head.

  “So, Oz, for starters, don’t tell a person about this note. Got it?”

  She was good at giving orders. “Yes ma’am.” I sounded like I was mocking her, but I wasn’t. I was just tired and beaten down by everything.

  “Okay, back to the note and what this means and who might be behind this…” She set her feet shoulder-width apart and stared at me. Maybe she thought there was something I hadn’t told her. If that was the case, she’d be right. It was Ray. I’d brought him in to try to figure out who Dad’s client was. But Ray was one of the best at his line of work, from what Dad had told me. It was hard to imagine that he would have been compromised, especially so quickly. He was still waiting on me to get him Dad’s email-account information. He did say that he would talk to some of my coworkers and even some of Dad’s old buddies. Was one of them connected to the person behind this? Possibly. I had to talk to Ray, to share the note—yes, the exact opposite of what Brook had just asked of me. I had to find out whom he’d spoken to and if he believed any of them might be connected to Dad’s mystery client, his death, or this shooting. The list of tragedies was growing by the hour.

  “What are you thinking, Oz? Come on, don’t hold anything back.”

  I knew I had to, at least for now. “I’m guessing that someone found out that I brought you, the APD, in to investigate Dad’s death.”

  “And that’s it? You haven’t done any other snooping?”

  I shrugged. “What can I do? Dad
told me he didn’t keep any record of this client.”

  “You know this changes everything. I need to start questioning people at the firm, your mother, Bianca, everyone, to find out what they know about your dad’s work. This investigation just got bigger. I’m going to need a lot more help.”

  She ran her fingers through her hair, brought up her phone, and started typing out a message. I wasn’t sure if she was asking her superiors for more support or what. The next thing I knew, someone hugged me from the side, nearly knocking me over. My ribs felt a prick. “Your name is Ozzie, right?” It was Janet Patterson, tears in her eyes.

  I tried grunting out a response, but she spoke first. “You saved that man’s life. Sam’s. If you hadn’t tried to distract that shooter, Sam would have died. Thank you, thank you, thank you.” She squeezed so hard it hurt my ribs…again, but I didn’t say anything.

  I patted her on the back of her head. “I just hope Sam makes it.”

  She cried more. Her friend came over and joined us as a VW bus drove up. Tito hopped out with two trays full of coffees.

  “Just in time, my friend,” I said.

  Tito handed out the coffees to APD’s finest and then finished up where we were standing.

  “You’re the greatest, Tito,” Brook said. “The guys all appreciate it too, even if they didn’t say anything,” She sipped her coffee.

  “It’s the least I can do, Detective.” He turned his sights and scanned the scene, shaking his head. “Man, I’ve lived here for over five years, and I’ve never had a shooting or anything violent take place here before.”

  “I’ve only been your roommate for two nights,” I said, tongue-in-cheek. While I tried to be funny, the comment just sat there. As Janet and her friend drifted over to the grass, Brook, Tito, and I traded glances.

  “Listen, Tito, it might be wise if I find a cheap motel until I can find more permanent digs.”

  “What? That’s nuts, Oz.”

  “Tito, they were after me. They left me a note earlier.” I could feel Brook’s eyes on me, and I addressed her for just a moment. “I’m living at his place. He needs to understand the kind of danger he’s in.”