“Emmy, Emmy,” Brynn muttered, clutching her face, clawing futilely at Michelle.
“I’ll kill her.” Shoving the gun into Brynn’s neck. “The fucking keys!”
“No, no! Here, take them. Please! Just leave!”
“Emmy!”
Michelle grabbed the keys. And ran outside.
Graham dropped to his knees, pulling his cell phone out, and dialed 911. He cradled Brynn, who pulled away and climbed to her feet. She started to black out, swayed against the stair rail. “Emmy…”
“Who’s Emmy?”
She forced herself to speak clearly through the pain. “Empty. The gun was empty.”
“Shit.” Graham ran to the door as his truck skidded down the street and vanished.
Brynn rose, then heard a soft voice from nearby: “Could somebody—”
Both Brynn and Graham turned toward the kitchen door, where Anna stood, her hands covered with blood.
“Please, could somebody…Look. Look at this.”
And she spiraled to the floor.
ROWS OF ORANGE
plastic chairs in the corner of the brightly lit room. Walls and tiles scuffed. Graham sat across from Brynn, knees close but not touching. Their eyes were focused mostly on the linoleum and they looked up only from time to time when the double doors swung open. But the doctors and employees pushing through them were dealing with matters unrelated to Anna McKenzie’s life.
Twining her fingers together, Brynn stared at her untouched coffee.
Sick with horror, sick with exhaustion.
Her phone quivered. She looked at the screen and muted the ringer, because she didn’t want to take the call, not because of the No Cell Phone Use sign nearby.
A patient walked from the admitting window into the waiting area, sat down. Squeezed his arm and winced. He glanced once at Brynn and returned to his waiting state of numb silence.
“Been an hour,” Graham said.
“Nearly.”
“Long time. But that’s not necessarily bad.”
“No.”
Silence again, broken by cryptic announcements over the hospital PA. Then Brynn’s phone was vibrating again. This call she took. “Tom.”
“Brynn, how’s your mother?”
“We don’t know yet. What do you have?”
“Okay. Michelle got through the roadblocks somehow. They haven’t found your husband’s truck.”
Brynn hunched forward and pressed her injured cheek, as if the pain were payment for her misjudgment.
Dahl continued, “You were right. We found that friend who drove up from Chicago this morning. She was the only one coming to visit. Michelle, we guess, is a hit man…. Well, hit woman.”
“Hired by Mankewitz or one of his people.”
“What they’re figuring,” Dahl said.
“So Hart and Comp were supposed to be the bodies left behind.”
“The what?”
“The bodies left behind…. She was going to make it look like they were the only killers and they got into a fight between themselves after the Feldmans were dead. So we wouldn’t bother to look further. But it went bad. Hart reacted too fast or her gun jammed, who knows? She had to run. Then I found her in the woods.” Brynn pinched the bridge of her nose. Her laugh was bitter. “And rescued her.”
Another doctor came out, through the double doors. Brynn stopped talking. The physician, wearing blue scrubs, kept going.
Brynn was reflecting on the look that passed between Hart and the young woman at the interstate.
You came close, Michelle. Real close….
Hart’s words to her by the highway had a whole different meaning, now that Brynn knew the truth.
And she recalled Michelle’s shocked reaction when Brynn told her about meeting Hart in the van beside the meth cookers’ camper. The woman would have been terrified that Hart had mentioned Michelle’s real identity.
“And somebody from Mankewitz’s crew was probably going to come pick her up when it was over. Hell, that’s who was taking shots at us when we were on that cliff.”
Brynn was aware that Graham was staring at her, taking in the conversation.
She continued to the sheriff, “She needed the evidence I’d brought with me—the guns and clips, the map, the boxes of ammunition. Her purse. That’s why she was so willing to come back with us to our house. Something probably had her prints on them. Or trace evidence that might lead us to her. She’d planned to collect it at Lake Mondac after she’d killed Hart and his friend…. Wait, Tom. What about her shoes? A pair of women’s shoes at the Feldmans’ house? In the yard. Any prints?”
“Recovered them. But no prints.”
“None?”
“Looks like they were wiped off, like the Ford. Wiped off with Windex.”
A faint laugh. “She did that when I went for the canoe…. Brother, did she have me fooled.” Brynn rubbed a knuckle against a faint bump on her rebuilt jaw, as she often did when thoughtful or upset. The betrayal stung her deeply. And she said in a soft voice, “I was supposed to be one too.”
“What?”
“A body left behind. She was using me as bait. She didn’t have a sprained ankle at all. She was moving slow to draw the men close. And she tried to keep them following in our direction all night. She broke the Mercedes window to set off the alarm—probably as the men were heading toward the highway. And complained about putting on those boots, made a big deal of it. She was stalling, trying to get them closer to us. And who knows what else? She had some crackers. I’ll bet she dropped those.” Brynn laughed sourly, shaking her head. “Once, she had this outburst, screamed like a banshee. It was to let them know where we were. She was waiting for them to catch up. Then she’d shoot them in the woods. Me too.”
“Well, Brynn, why didn’t she, you know, just shoot you right up front?” Dahl asked.
“She needed me for insurance maybe, or to help her get out of the area. Most likely use me to help her kill them.”
Aware that Graham had fallen silent, his jaw set, large hands clasped together.
Brynn told Tom she’d better go and asked him to call her if they found anything at all.
They disconnected and she turned to her husband to give him a summary of what had happened. He closed his eyes and rocked back. “That’s okay,” he said, cutting her off. “I got enough.”
She touched his leg. He didn’t respond. After a few minutes, she lifted her fingers away and called the neighbor where Joey was staying. She talked to her son for some moments, telling him the truth—that they didn’t know anything yet about his grandmother. She let him ramble on about a video game he’d been playing. Brynn told him she loved him and hung up.
Husband and wife sat in silence. Brynn looked at her husband once then shifted her gaze down at the floor. Finally, after an eternity, he rested his hand on her knee. They remained that way, motionless, for some minutes—until a doctor came out of the double door. He looked at the man with the hurt arm and then walked directly toward Brynn and Graham.
HART GOT RID
of the car he’d hijacked on the interstate. He did this as efficiently as he knew how: He parked it in the Avenues West area of Milwaukee with the doors locked but the keys in the ignition. Some kids wouldn’t notice and some would notice but think it was a sting and some—in the quickly redeveloping area—would notice but would do the right thing and pass the car by.
The car, however, would still be gone within one hour. And harvested for parts in twelve.
Head down, exhausted and in agony from the gunshot and the other trauma of the night, Hart walked quickly away from the vehicle. It was a cool morning, the sky clear. The smell of fires from construction site scrap teased his nose. His instincts were still running the show and were directing him underground as fast as possible.
Walking along the sparsely populated streets he found the Brewline Hotel, though it was nowhere near the Brewline. It was the sort of place that thrived on business by the hour or by
the week but rarely by the day. He paid for one week in advance with a bonus for a private bath, and was given a remote control and a set of sheets. The overweight woman clerk took no notice of his physical condition or absence of luggage. He trooped up the two flights of stairs and into room 238. He locked the door, stripped and dumped his fetid clothes into a pile that reminded him very much of Brynn McKenzie’s soaked uniform at the second house on Lake View Drive.
He pictured her stripping.
The image aroused him for a few minutes until the throbbing in his arm tipped him out of the mood.
He examined the wound closely. Hart had taken paramedic training courses—because his job often involved physical injuries. He now assessed the wound and concluded that he didn’t need a doctor. He knew several medicos who’d lost their tickets and would stitch him up, no questions asked or gunshots reported, for a thousand bucks. But the bleeding had stopped, the bone was intact and, though his bruise was impressive, the infection was minor. He’d start on antibiotics later today.
Hart showered under a stuttering stream of water, doing his best to keep his arm dry.
He returned to the bed, naked, and lay down. He wanted to consider the night, to try to make sense of it. He thought back several weeks—to a Starbucks in Kenosha, where he was meeting with a guy he’d worked with a few times in Wisconsin. Gordon Potts was a big, hulking man, not brilliant but decent and someone you could trust. And he could hook you up with dependable labor when you needed it. Potts had said he’d been approached by a woman in Milwaukee who was smart, tough and pretty. He vouched for her. (Hart now realized that Michelle had bought the credentials with a blow job or two.)
Hart was interested. He was between jobs and bored. There was a deal going down in Chicago but that wasn’t until mid-May. He wanted something now, needed some action, adrenaline. The same way that the tweaker Hart had killed in the state park last night needed to slam meth.
Besides, the job was a lark Potts told him.
A few days later Potts had hooked him up with “Brenda”—the fake name Michelle had offered—in a coffee shop in the Broadway District of Green Bay. She said, “So, Hart. How you doing?”
She shook his hand firmly.
“Good. You?”
“I’m okay. Listen, I’m interested in hiring somebody. You interested in some work?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. So how do you know Gordon Potts? You go back a long ways?”
“Not so long.”
“How’d you meet him?”
“A mutual friend.”
“Who’d that be?”
“Freddy Lancaster.”
“Freddy, sure. How’s his wife doing?”
Michelle had laughed. “That’d be tough to find out, Hart. She died two years ago.”
And Hart had laughed too. “Oh, that’s right. Bad memory. How does Freddy like St. Paul?”
“St. Paul? He lives in Milwaukee.”
“This memory of mine.”
The Dance…
After his first meeting with Brenda-Michelle, Hart had made phone calls to both Gordon Potts and Freddy Lancaster to verify times, dates and places down to the tenth decimal. A dozen other calls too, after which he was confident that nobody was working for the law. Brenda Jennings was a petty thief with no history of informing on her partners—and was also, Hart now knew, an identity Michelle had stolen.
So he arranged another meeting to discuss the job itself.
Michelle had explained she’d heard that Steven Feldman had been making inquiries about swapping old bills, silver certificates, for newer Federal Reserve notes. She’d looked into the situation and learned about some meatpacking executive who’d hidden cash in his summer home in the 1950s. A million bucks. She gave Hart the details.
“That’s a lot of money.”
“Yeah, it is, Hart. So you’re interested?”
“Keep going.”
“Here’s a map of the area. That’s a private road. Lake View Drive. And there? That’s a state park, all of it. Hardly any people around. Here’s a diagram of the house.”
“Okay…This a dirt road or paved?”
“Dirt…Hart, they tell me you’re good. Are you good? I hear you’re a craftsman. That’s what they say.”
As he’d studied the map he’d asked absently, “Who’s ‘they’?”
“People.”
“Well, yeah, I’m a craftsman.”
Hart had been aware of her studying him closely. He looked back into her eyes. She said, “Can I ask you a question?”
A lifted eyebrow. “Yeah.”
“I’m curious. Why’re you in this line of work?”
“It suits me.”
Hart was somebody who didn’t believe in psychoanalysis or spending too much time contemplating your soul. He believed you felt in harmony or you didn’t, and if you bucked that feeling you were making a big mistake.
God, doesn’t the boredom just kill them? It would me. I need more, Brynn. Don’t you?
Michelle had nodded, as if she understood exactly what he meant and had been hoping for just that answer. She said, “It looks like it does.”
He got tired of talking about himself. “Okay. What’s the threat situation?”
“The what?”
“How risky’s the job going to be? How many people up there, weapons, police nearby? It’s a lake house—are the other houses on Lake View occupied?”
“It’ll be a piece of cake, Hart. Hardly any risk at all. The other places’ll be vacant. And only the two of them up there, the Feldmans. And no rangers in the park or cops around for miles.”
“They have weapons?”
“Are you kidding? They’re city people. She’s a lawyer, he’s a social worker.”
“Just the Feldmans, nobody else? It’ll make a big difference.”
“That’s my information. And it’s solid. Just the two of them.”
“And nobody gets hurt?”
“Absolutely not,” she had said. “I wouldn’t do this if there was a chance anybody’d get hurt.” Brenda-Michelle had smiled reassuringly.
Lots of money, nobody hurt. Sounded good. Still, he’d said, “I’ll get back to you.”
Hart had driven home and researched what she’d told him. Sitting at his computer, he’d laughed out loud. Sure enough, it was all true. And he was confident that no cops in the world would come up with a sting like this. They offered drugs, perped merchandise, funny money, but they didn’t suggest a caper out of a Nicholas Cage movie.
Then came the big day. They’d driven up to Lake Mondac in the stolen Ford together. He, Compton Lewis and Michelle. The two men had broken in and, while they held the Feldmans at gunpoint, Michelle was supposed to come into the kitchen, tape up their hands and start interrogating them about the money. Instead of the duct tape, though, she was carrying a 9mm subcompact Glock. She’d walked past Hart and shot the couple point-blank.
In the ringing silence that followed she turned around and walked into the living room like nothing had happened.
Hart had stared at her, trying to figure it out.
“The fuck did you do?” gasped Lewis, who’d been poking around in the fridge for food, rather than where he should’ve been—watching the front of the house.
“Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing.” She’d started going through the briefcase and backpack.
The men had been staring in shock at the bodies, while—they’d assumed—she was looking for a key to a secret room or lockbox or something. Hart himself had been frantically tallying up the offenses they’d just bought into. Felony murder being number one.
Then he saw her reflection—she was coming up behind him, lifting the gun.
He leapt sideways, instinctively.
Crack…
The tug on his arm.
Then returning fire as she escaped.
Lying in the spongy bed now, Hart knew exactly what had happened. There was no hidden treasure. Michelle had been hired to kill the Feldmans
—Brynn had suggested as much as they’d sat in the van beside the meth cookers’ camper.
Her plan was to leave Hart and Lewis in the Feldmans’ house, the fall guys.
And Hart couldn’t help but laugh now. He’d hired Compton Lewis for exactly the same reason Michelle had hired Hart: an insurance policy, a fall guy. In case the robbery went bad and people ended up dead, Hart had been going to kill Lewis and set him up to look like the sole perp. That was why he’d gotten a loser he’d had no previous connection with. That scenario had nearly played out on the interstate. With Michelle, Brynn and the little girl together—and Hart had the squad car to escape by—it was time to conclude the evening. He killed Lewis and was about to kill the others with the SIG when who shows up but Brynn’s husband?
I was thinking with my contacts, guys in my crew, and your, you know, the way you plan things and think, we’d be a good team.
Oh, you sad bastard, Hart thought. You really did believe that, didn’t you? And here you were, 50 percent dead from the first time we sat down together, you tugging your green earring and scoffing about why were we in a faggot place like this that only sold coffee and not a real bar?
With sleep closing in, he pictured Michelle. Of all the people he’d worked with and for—dangerous Jamaican drug lords, South Side gangstas and OC bosses throughout the Midwest—the petite, young redhead was the most deadly.
The cloak of sweet, the cloak of helpless, the cloak of harmless—hiding a scorpion.
He speculated about the two women together last night. What on earth had they talked about? Brynn McKenzie was not a woman easily fooled, and yet Michelle had been the consummate actress. He thought of those surreal moments in the van with Brynn.
So, Michelle was a friend of the family? Is that how she got mixed up in this whole thing? Wrong time and wrong place, you might say. A lot of that going around tonight….
The Trickster.
In the Feldmans’ house he’d glanced quickly at a credit card in her purse and gotten her name. Michelle S. Kepler, he believed. Maybe Michelle A. There’d probably been a driver’s license but he hadn’t bothered to look for it then. He’d have to find her—before the police did, of course. She’d give him up in a minute. Oh, he had some work to do in the next few days.
The Bodies Left Behind: A Novel Page 31