Murder Takes a Break

by Bill Crider

  I reached the second floor and looked down the hallway. Mrs. Peavy was standing outside her bedroom door in a green nightgown, staring at me. She wasn't holding an AK-47, thank goodness. Not even a .38.

  "What's happening?" she said. "Where's my husband?"

  I was sure she was talking loudly, but I could barely hear her. My ears were still ringing from the gunshots.

  "He's downstairs," I said. My voice seemed to echo in my skull. "He's fine, but some others aren't. It might be a good idea to call 9-1-1. Where's Chad?"

  She looked at the pistols in my hands, then at a door at the end of the hall.

  "I don't know," she said.

  I left her there and ran to the door. It was locked. With the shape my knee was in, I wasn't going to be kicking it open. I stood to the side and shot the lock to pieces.

  I went into the room carefully, but the care wasn't necessary. Chad wasn't there. The window opposite the door was open, and there was a big sycamore tree just outside.

  I was in no condition for tree-climbing. I went back downstairs, where Lattner was lying where he'd fallen. Big Al, on the other hand, was standing up and pointing the Colt at me. I was getting tired of looking at it, so I shot her again, in the arm this time. She fell back behind the couch.

  Mr. Peavy was sitting on the floor, looking at me with wild eyes. He was no doubt reconsidering having his son enroll in any college or university that would hire a two-gun maniac like me.

  I handed him Lattner's pistol. "If either of them tries anything, pull the trigger," I said, and ran on outside.

  There were plenty of lights on in most of the surrounding houses now. Mrs. Peavy might be calling 9-1-1, but so were half the neighbors. The cops would be on the way before she said ten words.

  Chad was running down the sidewalk. He had half a block's head start on me, but I started after him anyway. I was in pretty decent shape, thanks to my almost-daily run, and although he was a football player and much younger than I was, I didn't think he'd been working out lately.

  The problem was my knee. I was afraid it wouldn't hold up long enough for me to catch Chad.

  I suppose I could have fired a few shots at him, but the truth is that a pistol is rarely accurate at any distance beyond thirty yards, and I was already breathing heavily, which is not conducive to unerring aim. In other words, I was as likely to hit a nearby house as to hit Chad. More likely, in fact. Even if I thought I could hit him, I couldn't be certain that I wouldn't kill him. And I didn't want to do that. Not even if he was a murderer.

  So I pounded along behind him, wishing that I was twenty years younger and a few pounds lighter. Having a sound knee would've been nice, too.

  But you have to make do with what you have, which in my case was an ageing body and a knee that was already beginning to cause me to list alarmingly to one side.

  We ran for two blocks, and I thought I might actually be gaining, but if I was, the gain was so small that it was measurable in millimeters.

  Chad wasn't pulling away, however; I was sure of that. That was the good news.

  The bad news was that my knee felt as if something inside it might be about to fly apart. I wasn't going to be able to go much further.

  Luckily, I didn't have to. Chad fell down.

  It was an old neighborhood, and some of the trees near the sidewalk had sent their roots under it, cracking the concrete and making it dangerously uneven. I had barely missed stubbing my toe a couple of times, and when Chad went down I wasn't terribly surprised.

  The surprise came when he twisted around and shot me.

  I hadn't thought he'd do it, though I should have known better. He'd shot at Sharon, killed Henry J., and had most likely eliminated Patrick Mullen as well.

  Why shouldn't he shoot me, too?

  My leg went out from under me as if jerked by a rope. I fell on my shoulder and rolled into the street. The curb wasn't very high, but it was better than no cover at all.

  Chad's next bullet chipped concrete a foot from my head and screamed away. The one after that came a little closer, but not much. It did, however, hit something: a car across the street. That's what I mean by accuracy being affected by exertion. He was lucky to have hit my leg. Or I was unlucky. One or the other.

  I tried to slow my breathing, and I gripped the Mauser with both hands.

  "Chad," I said. "Put down the pistol. The police are on the way, and I don't want to have to shoot you."

  That was true. I really didn't want to shoot him, but he said, "Fuck you," so I did.

  36

  "You two make quite a pair," Cathy Macklin said.

  I suppose she was right. Dino was still wearing his sling, though I don't think he really needed it. He was using the old sympathy ploy with Evelyn, so she wouldn't pay too much attention to me. He thought I was getting entirely too much attention from Cathy, and for Evelyn to feel sorry for me too was more than he could take.

  I was playing the injured hero part to the hilt, limping around like a buzzard with a broken talon. I'd had more stitches than Dino, so I felt I had to seem more wounded. It wasn't exactly the macho approach, but it seemed to be working. So I smiled at Cathy's remark.

  "She didn't mean that in a good way," Evelyn said, seeing my face. "She meant that you two are crazy. You should be ashamed of yourself, Tru, shooting a helpless young man like that. And you —" She looked at Dino "— you should get a real job and stay out of trouble."

  We were at Dino's house, but for a wonder the TV wasn't on and we were able to talk without having to shout over the rantings of the exercise guy. I was drinking a Big Red straight from the bottle. Dino was having a little Wild Turkey and water, while Cathy and Evelyn were drinking some kind of white wine. Evelyn had brought it. Dino doesn't keep white wine in the house. He thinks it's even worse than Big Red.

  There was a small artificial Christmas tree in one corner of the room. Dino hadn't set it up, of course; Evelyn had. It was even decorated with lights and balls, and there were a few presents under it. I'd snooped around it a little, being a detective, after all, and there was one with my name on it. I had no idea what it could be, although I'd shaken it a time or two.

  "I was thinking about asking Dino to go to work for me," I told Evelyn. "But I'm not sure I could trust him."

  Dino looked hurt. "When have I ever lied to you?" he asked.

  I didn't even bother to answer.

  "I helped you crack the Kirbo case, didn't I?" he asked.

  "Hindered me is more like it. If you'd told me about Sharon sooner, you might have saved me some trouble. Her, too. I would have been a lot more careful with Chad Peavy."

  I wasn't absolutely sure that was the truth, but it sounded like the right thing to say. If there was any irony in the situation, I didn't see it.

  "The one you should have been careful with was that cop, Lattner" Dino said. "I always told you that you shouldn't go to the cops."

  In that case, he'd been right. And calling the cops had been someone else's mistake, too. Henry J.'s. Along with Dino and Big Al, he was the last person in the world I would have expected to call the police, but that's what he'd done. He thought he had a good reason, however.

  On the night of the party it had been Chad, not Randall, who'd slipped the GHB into Kelly Davis' drink. Randall had been too drunk to do much of anything and hadn't even known what was going on. Kelly had had a bad reaction to the GHB, and after only about an hour had slipped into a coma. Then she'd stopped breathing altogether.

  Chad had panicked and told Henry J., who was there to provide whatever the kids needed for a good time — liquor, drugs, and probably even barbecued ribs if anyone had asked for them — as long as someone could pay.

  Henry J. had called Lattner, who was Big Al's tame cop. He was the one who'd called her at the Hurricane Club and tried to blame me and Dino for Henry J.'s death. That was why the call had arrived so late; Lattner hadn't been able to get to a safe phone to make it.

  When Lattner arrived at the p
arty, Henry J. had sent everyone away except for Chad and Randall. When Lattner found out that the dead girl was his own niece, who had actually spoken with him on the phone that very afternoon, he went berserk.

  Chad blamed Randall for everything, Henry J. went along with him, and Randall was too out of it to defend himself. Lattner had begun hitting him. Randall fell down, and Lattner kicked him in the head. The kick was probably what killed him, but we'd never know for sure. His body was somewhere in the Gulf, and unlike Kelly Davis's it hadn't washed up where it could be found.

  Henry J. had called Big Al, who had come to the house with a friend who had a boat. The two of them took care of the bodies, though not very well. Apparently they hadn't weighted Kelly Davis's carefully. We'd never know for sure, since Big Al claimed that she hadn't been involved, and the friend was currently sailing somewhere on the blue waters off the coast of Mexico. Or so Big Al said. I had a feeling he wouldn't be showing up in Galveston again, no matter where he was.

  While the bodies were being taken care of, Chad started working on a story about what had happened to Randall. He and Henry J. had originally planned some story about how Randall and the Davis girl had met at the party and run away together, but the sudden reappearance of her body had ruined that one. So Chad just told everyone that Randall had disappeared.

  Lattner had gotten himself assigned to the Kirbo case so he could keep things covered up, and he'd been pretty successful. The only other kid that Chad had met at the party was Patrick Mullen, and Lattner had talked to him to make sure he didn't know enough to hurt anyone. He'd also assured him that there was no need for him to worry about things, that the investigation was going just fine.

  When I started poking into things, everyone got worried, but Chad was the one who'd panicked. Again. He wasn't a professional like the others, and he'd decided that he'd eliminate the witnesses.

  He and his father had taken a handgun class together, and they were both licensed to carry. So Chad was thoroughly familiar with his .38. He'd tried for Sharon, taken out Henry J., and missed on Patrick Mullen, who'd been visiting his grandmother in Pasadena. He was a lucky guy, that time at least.

  When it dawned on Lattner that Dino and I hadn't killed Henry J., he realized that Chad was on a rampage, and went after him.

  So did Big Al, of course. Chad should have thought about the consequences of his actions, but if he'd been the kind to do that, he never would have tried using GHB in the first place.

  "How's the cop doing, by the way?" Dino asked.

  "He'll be all right," I said. "He lost a lot of blood, but they patched him up. Anyway, he's not a cop anymore."

  "Yeah, they don't like to keep guys like him on the force," Dino said. "Sets a bad example. But he's no worse than the rest of them."

  I was never going to convince Dino that there were a lot of good law enforcement officers, so I didn't even try. Old prejudices die hard.

  "What about the boy?" Cathy asked.

  "He's OK," I said. "If he'd had a little more fat on him, he'd be even better. And he wasn't defenseless. He shot me first."

  Even though Chad had been trying to kill me, I'd tried to shoot him in the side, avoiding any major organs. He was so lean that there hadn't been much loose skin for the bullet to pass through, and I'd broken one of his ribs. That was the least of his problems, however. He wouldn't be enrolling in Texas Tech again for a long, long time.

  "I feel sorry for the Kirbos," Evelyn said. "They seemed like such nice people."

  I felt sorry for them, too, especially Janey, who I was afraid was going to have real problems with Tack. He blamed himself for what had happened, and from what Dino had told me, he hadn't reformed. In fact, when they'd returned home, his drinking had gotten suddenly much worse. He hadn't been sober for more than five minutes since we'd told them about Randall. Evelyn had gone with us to talk to them at the Galvez after we found out the truth, since Dino thought having her along might help Janey. I wasn't sure that it had.

  "Did you mean what you said about us working together?" Dino asked me.

  "We wouldn't be able to get along. You have to be able to trust your partner."

  "I trust you. And you can trust me, too. I promise."

  He smiled toothily and made an attempt to look trustworthy, which was sort of like a panther trying to look like a vegetarian.

  "The kind of work I do is mostly pretty boring," I said. "It involves sitting in front of a computer all day."

  "That couldn't be much worse than sitting in front of the Home Shopping Channel all day," Evelyn said.

  "Hey, I don't just sit." Dino indicated some of his work-out equipment. "I get a lot of exercise. I'd miss that."

  "You'd get plenty of exercise on some of the things Tru works on," Cathy told him. "I wish he'd spend more time in front of the computer and a lot less on these jobs you bring him."

  I wished it, too. Dino's jobs never seemed to end the way they should. Too many people got hurt. The Peavys, whose son would be in prison. The Kirbos, who would never see their son again.

  I'd gotten a call from Kelly Davis's mother, though, to thank me. There's always some good even in the worst things, I suppose.

  And then there was Big Al, who'd gotten off again. There was no proof that she'd ever been directly involved in the deaths of Kelly or Randall, or even that she'd aided in the disposal of the bodies. She'd forced her way into the Peavy home, and she'd fired her pistol there, but those were minor things. And she had a very good lawyer.

  I drank the last of my Big Red and set the bottle down on Dino's coffee table.

  "I have an idea," I said. "Why don't we all go out to eat tonight?"

  "Who's buying?" Dino asked.

  "My treat," I said.

  "Where will we go?" Cathy asked.

  "I'd like some Mexican food," I said. "How does that sound?"

  "It sounds good to me," Evelyn said.

  "All right," I said, getting to my feet. "I know this place where they have great enchiladas."

  I had limped almost to the door before Dino started yelling.

  AFTERWORD

  When I was a child, I thought Galveston Island was one of the most romantic places in Texas. Many years later, I still do, and writing a series of novels about Truman Smith, who's fortunate enough to live there, has been a tremendous pleasure for me. If you've ever visited Galveston, you can surely understand a bit about the fascination the place has for me. If you haven't visited there but you'd like to, you can take a virtual trip any time at all by visiting the city's Web site at http://www.galvestontourism.com. It's a trip you won't regret.

  If you enjoyed this book, check out the other books in the Truman Smith mystery series.

  Dead on the Island (Truman Smith, Book 1)

  Gator Kill (Truman Smith, Book 2)

  When Old Men Die (Truman Smith, Book 3)

  The Prairie Chicken Kill (Truman Smith, Book 4) – Coming Soon

  SPECIAL BONUS SHORT STORIES

  Cap'n Bob & Gus from Bill Crider's collection The Nighttime is the Right Time

  &

  Shadder – by Tom Piccirilli – from his collection Futile Efforts.

  Cap'n Bob and Gus

  By Bill Crider

  Another series character I enjoy is Bill Ferrel, a Hollywood private-eye who’s never appeared in a novel. He’s been in a number of short stories, however, including this one, which was listed in the “honorable mention” section of a big volume of “the year’s best fantasy stories.” I never thought of it as a fantasy, however.

  I think it was S. J. Perelman who said that Hollywood was a dismal industrial town controlled by wealthy hoodlums, or something like that. Maybe he was right. But it seems to me there are just as many rich lunatics as there are rich hoodlums. In fact, the guy who was bellowing at me on the phone was probably both.

  I was trying to calm him down. "Mr. Gober, I can't understand a word you're saying. Maybe if you'd stop yelling."

  "Goddammit, Ferrel, I'm
not yelling! You want yelling? I'll give you yelling!"

  He turned things up a notch or two. He sounded like a buffalo with a bullhorn. I decided there was no need trying to make sense out of things until he ran down.

  It took about five minutes by my watch. When I was sure he was finished, I said, "Go over the part about the parrot again."

  "Goddammit, Ferrel, have you been listening to a word I've said?"

  "Yelled. A word you yelled."

  That set him off again. He pays me pretty well, so I guess he's got a right to yell if he wants to. He's the head of Gober Studios, and in 1948 his pictures grossed nearly as much as those of any studio in Hollywood. As best I could tell Gober was hoping to do even better in '49, but apparently something had happened to the parrot.

  I didn't know what a parrot had to do with Gober's box office, and I didn't want to fool with one, but I'm on retainer to the studio. Usually that involves keeping some star's name out of the paper for having gotten boozed up and assaulted a cop or maybe having knocked up someone's underage daughter. I could handle that kind of stuff, but a parrot? I wasn't sure about a parrot.

  And then I thought I heard something about a cat.

  "Hold on there a minute, Mr. Gober," I said, trying to interrupt his semi-coherent soliloquy. "Did you say something about a cat?"

  "Goddammit, Ferrel!"

  He always seems to start off that way. Sometimes I think I should just go ahead and have my name legally changed to Goddammit Ferrel and let it go at that.

  "Goddammit, Ferrel, haven't you been listening to me at all? This is not just a cat we're talking about here. This is the cat. This is Gus."

  "Oh. Gus."

  "That's right. Gus. And the parrot is Cap'n Bob. Cap'n Bob and Gus. They made us a hell of a lot of money last year, and now Cap'n Bob is missing!"

  Well, it had finally happened. I'd always thought Gober was more stable than most of the studio heads I'd met, but now I knew I'd been wrong. He'd flipped his lid, blown his wig, and twirled his toupee.