Death Glitch

by Ken Douglas

  She’d taken the gun, put it in the safe along with her passport, other important papers and Lee’s Glock. Jeff, along with everyone else in her family, knew how she felt about guns, so in the morning he didn’t mention it. Neither did she.

  As much as she hated guns, they’d come in awful handy if Lila Booth were to catch up to them. She sat up, heard the dog stir. He’d been sleeping by the side of the bed, but he was on all fours now, alert.

  Alicia lived on Ralston, near the university. Izzy could walk over to Sierra, go up a couple blocks, then go through the park and enter her house through the back gate. If she didn’t turn on the lights, anybody who might be watching from a parked car out front wouldn’t know she was there. She could go in the back door, up the stairs to her room, open the safe, get the guns and be back well before dawn, without the girls ever knowing she’d been gone.

  She sat on the edge of the bed. It had been a chilly night, but still, and she hated a stuffy room, so she’d cracked the window. She’d been lying awake in sweatpants, sweatshirt and thick running socks, as a hedge against the cold. She pulled off the sweatpants, stepped into her Levi’s. She’d been wearing her favorite Wolf Pack sweatshirt and decided to keep it on. She loved the Wolf Pack, UNR’s football team, and never missed a home game. She’d been going for years and they’d called her their good luck charm. She hoped the sweatshirt would bring her luck tonight.

  She picked up her Nikes, then started for the bedroom door with the dog at her heels.

  “ No, boy, you’re not coming!”

  But the dog was thinking along different lines. As soon as she’d opened the bedroom door, he shot through, scurried down the stairs and was waiting for her by the front door. The door was bolted shut. A sturdy bolt. Izzy thought for a second, she could lock the door after herself, but she couldn’t throw the bolt. Plus, if she did lock up after herself, how would she get back in.

  She backed away from the door, went to the kitchen and on into the garage, the dog at her heels.

  “ I said you’re not going!”

  At the side door, she pulled back the bolt, opened the door and the dog shot out.

  “ Well, maybe you are going.” She pulled on her Nikes and followed Hunter out into the night, thinking that at least she wasn’t leaving the front door unlocked. And she’d be back in less than an hour, so she wasn’t too worried about leaving the house unprotected.

  Outside, the air was brisk, the sky clear. She looked up, sighed as she spied the Big Dipper. She’d always loved the stars and even at her age, she still gloried in the Star Wars films, even the badly reviewed, “Phantom Menace.” True Anikan should have been older in the film, but even George Lucas can’t get it right all of the time.

  “ Beam me up, Scottie.” She hugged herself. Then said, as she’d done countless times before. “I just wish you were out there, that you could take me away.” It had always bothered her that some poor guy from Kansas would complain how he’d been abducted against his will, when she was down here dying to go. If they were out there, why didn’t they pick her? Like life, it was so unfair.

  At Sierra, she checked her watch. A quarter to three and the street was deserted. She heard a car coming from the south and stepped behind a tree as it approached. Hunter seemed to understand, because he moved behind her as a police car cruised on by. In her past life, the life before yesterday, she considered the police as friends and protectors. She wasn’t so sure anymore.

  “ Come on, boy.” She started up the street, headed in the direction the police car had gone. Two blocks later, she came to the park’s eastern entrance. The park was closed, the gate was down and barred against traffic, but a person could step around it and she did. Hunter did, too.

  She’d heard that sometimes kids hung out in the park after dark, but the back of her house bordered on the park and she’d never seen them. Folks said coyotes crossed under McCarren from the hills and came into the park at night, looking to catch the wild geese that hung out there. She’d heard them often enough, but she doubted they caught many of the geese. They were tough birds.

  But she didn’t see any geese as she moved along the road and that was odd, because lately they’d been out in force, slowing traffic to a crawl, daring the cars to run them down as they took their own sweet time getting out of the metal monsters’ way. Maybe they went somewhere else at night. Or maybe the coyotes were about and the geese had hightailed it elsewhere, not wanting to do battle with them.

  All of a sudden she was glad she had Hunter with her. She didn’t know why, couldn’t wrap her mind around it, but she knew the dog would protect her, that that was why he’d been so eager to come along.

  “ Good, boy,” she said.

  The further they got into the park, the more eerie it became. The lights on the ranger station, club house and museum were out. She could see them from her bedroom window and she’d never been able to pinpoint exactly when they went off. It seemed no matter how late she stayed up reading, they were on when she fell asleep and when she woke, usually before the dawn, they were out.

  There was no breeze. No sound. It was as if she were in another world. Her footsteps were silent, the sound seemingly gobbled up in the night, but when she got to the gate behind her house, the hinges creaked to beat the band, sending a screeching fingernails on blackboard sound jackknifing up her spine, chilling the back of her brain.

  She stood stone still, listened to the night, trying to hear if other humans were out, wondering if she’d disturbed anyone, but the night stayed quiet. As far as she could tell, her neighbors were all safely snug in their beds, dreaming away.

  All of a sudden a cold breeze, coming from the north, chilled her. She turned, looked up. There were clouds in the northern sky. It seemed a storm was coming in. They hadn’t had any snow yet this year. It was due and it looked like it was coming.

  She and the dog went through the gate and she screeched it closed, pushing it against the wind, which was strong now and getting stronger.

  She went to the back door, the wind at her back and Hunter at her heels. She keyed the lock, was about to open the door, when the dog moved between it and her, waiting for her to open it.

  “ No!” she whispered. “You stay here.” She was only going to be inside for a couple minutes tops and she was going to be stealthy and quiet, in case there were watchers out front. The last thing she needed to be doing was chasing a dog around in there.

  The dog looked up at her, whined.

  “ No, sit!” Though she was whispering, she was firm.

  But the dog didn’t sit. He persisted in trying to block her entry. Either that, or he was being insistent on going in first. Either way, Izzy wasn’t having it.

  “ I said sit!” She grabbed the fur on both sides of his ghostly white face and pulled him away from the door. She pushed down on his haunches. “Sit!”

  The dog did.

  “ That’s better.” But when she went back to the door, the dog was there before her, whining.

  “ Sit!” she pointed back to where she’d taken the dog. “Now!”

  Hunter gave her a baleful look, moved aside, sat.

  “ That’s better.” She turned the key, entered into the kitchen, making sure to close the door after herself. She didn’t want the dog sneaking in.

  Inside, she went to the stairs, stopped. Something wasn’t right, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. A smell seemed out of place. A hint of mint. An imaginary spider as real as any she’d ever been afraid of crept up her spine, stinging her back with every frozen footfall.

  She made herself into a statue, ears attuned to the house, eyes getting used to the dark. She heard not a sound, save her shallow breathing. Her heart was racing, threatening to thump out of her chest. Cold sweat trickled from under her arms. Her hair felt like it was on fire. She wasn’t alone in the house.

  Her first instinct was to turn and run back the way she’d come, lead the intruder into Hunter’s jaws. But she fought it. Whoever was in h
ere with her was being silent as granite.

  Why?

  She strained her ears. Heard nothing and now even that smell of mint seemed to be gone. Could she have imagined it? She inhaled the night. No, it was there. Barely, but it was there. But did that mean there was somebody inside with her?

  No, she was sure there was nobody in the house, because if there were, they’d’ve surely struck by now. More than likely somebody had been and gone, leaving his minty smell behind. She wanted to call out, find out for sure, but she resisted the urge.

  Instead, she started up the stairs, went straight to her bedroom, then to the closet where she saw that her shoes, which had been neat little soldiers at parade rest on the floor in front of the safe, had been pushed aside. Somebody had been here, had found the safe, not hard to do as it was a two foot square thing on the closet floor. She hadn’t needed to hide it, as she had no jewelry to speak of. She’d only needed it to keep her back up hard drive and important papers safe from a fire. And to keep the guns safe. Her shoes had been in front of it, her winter sweatshirts had been folded on top of it. They too had been thrown aside.

  She dropped to the floor, trained the tiny LED flashlight she kept on her keychain at the dial, dialed in the combination. Safe open, she took out a small Ruger. Officially called a lightweight compact pistol or LCP, Izzy had given it the name Elsie Pee. A couple weeks after she’d confiscated it, she’d gone to Shields, just about the largest sporting goods store on Earth, and bought a box of the new Buffalo Bore 380 Auto +P Jacketed Hollow Points. If she was going to have a gun in her safe, she needed to know if she could rely on it if the day ever came, though she never imagined it would.

  Izzy wasn’t a fan of hollow points, because of the damage they could do, but she didn’t trust any of the other ammo on the market made for the little gun. She never wanted to fire it, never planned on firing it, but if she ever did, if she ever had to, she wanted to stop whoever she was shooting at and the ninety grain jacketed Hollow Points made by Buffalo Bore would stop any man. Not like the Glock would. That would rip an attacker a new asshole, make him dead fast, but the little Ruger could be carried in a lot of situations where the Glock would be impossible to conceal. Especially with the wallet holster her nephew had made for it.

  She put a magazine in the weapon, racked the slide, chambering a round, then she ejected the magazine, slid another round in it, then reinserted it. That gave her seven shots, six in the mag, one in the chamber. Satisfied, she slipped the gun into the wallet holster, stuck her finger through the hole in the center of the holster, fingered the trigger. Perfect. The weapon would look like a wallet in her hip pocket, but instead of money it held seven rounds of hurt.

  As she was left handed, she slipped the wallet gun into her left hip pocket. Then she got out the Glock. It was a death making machine, a Glock 23, the official service pistol of the FBI. It held thirteen rounds of 40 caliber ammunition, yet only weighed about two pounds loaded. And though it was just shy of seven inches long, it was too big for her to conceal, unless she had it in the purse, where it would be hard to get at.

  As she had with the small Ruger, she chambered a round, giving her fourteen rounds. She was an anti-gun nut, but she wasn’t stupid. Lila Booth was on the warpath, wanting her granddaughter dead and someone, probably Lila, had shot her last night. Plus, there was the problem of her new found youth. People were going to be after that. She needed protection.

  Armed, she felt safer. With the Glock in hand and now with her eyes used to the dark, she looked around her closet, her clothes were neatly hung, just as she’d left them. Whoever had broken in either didn’t have the time or wasn’t inclined to rip the place apart in his search for who knows what, but he did think she might have something of value in the safe. Why else clear out the space in front of it? And why clear off the top of it? Had he been planning on carting it away, to open later? A strong man could do it, she supposed, or maybe two, or a man with a dolly. It wasn’t bolted down.

  Maybe he wasn’t so strong. Maybe he was coming back with help or with a dolly.

  Time to go.

  She glanced around her bedroom on the way to the hall and the stairs, saw that it was undisturbed. Did that mean whoever had broken in was good at his craft or that he’d known about the safe and had come right to it?

  She was still trying to work it out when she got to the stairs. If the man had known about the safe, how come he hadn’t had the ability to take it away? Was it bad planning? At the bottom of the stairs, she was still working on it when a horrible thought struck her. What if he had come equipped to take the safe? What if he had a dolly? Or worse, what if there were two men and they had planned on carrying it out, but then she’d interrupted them?

  What if they were still in the house?

  Out of nowhere a fist wrapped around the Glock, ripping it from her hand.

  She smelled mint on his breath as she dashed back up the stairs.

  She was at the top, when he grabbed her by the foot, jerked her backward. She fell on her stomach, used her hands and elbows to protect her face and chest as he pulled her down the stairs.

  “ Don’t resist, Izzy.” It was Shaffer. After years of the man’s ass kissing, she’d know his voice anywhere. “It’ll go much easier if you cooperate.”

  Chapter Seven

  The man with mint on his breath flipped her over as someone turned on the light. The bright light stabbed her eyes and that-combined with the shooting hurt radiating out from the back of her head, caused because Minty Breath turned her hard, twisting her legs as he did it, smacking the back of her head into the bottom step-had disoriented her for a flash of a second. Thank God she’d gone for carpet on the stairs, because had she listened to her designer and gone with hardwood, the bastard could have cracked her skull.

  She was about to let out a scream, when he’d slapped her.

  “ Stay quiet!” His voice was rough, like he’d smoked too many cigarettes. Squinting against the light, she saw it reflecting off Minty’s shaved head, almost as if he’d oiled it. Recognition hit her like a wrecking ball. It was Eric Ackerman, the cigar smoking wise ass who worked for hospital security. She hadn’t seen him since she’d retired, over five years ago, but she’d know that oiled head anywhere. He’d been the butt of many jokes.

  “ It’s best if you do as he says,” Shaffer again.

  “ Where’s your red-faced girlfriend?” Izzy said to Ackerman, spitting the words between gritted teeth.

  “ I’m right here,” Niles Lundgren said.

  “ Did Aaron tell you girls that breaking and entering is a crime? Not to mention assault.” Though Ackerman and Lundgren tried to project tough guy images, they were lovers and everybody who’d worked at St. Catherine’s back when she was on staff knew it. Izzy was surprised they were still there. They were both cop wannabes and talked incessantly about how they were going to get on the Reno Police Department as soon as there were openings.

  “ Smart mouth gonna get you in trouble.” Lundgren grabbed her left arm, Ackerman took her by the right and they more dragged, than lifted her into the living room, where they deposited her in one of the antique wing chairs she’d had facing the sofa. She never did like those chairs and she liked them even less right now. Her designer had insisted they were the perfect compliment to the room. White suede Chelsea wing chairs, they were as ugly as they’d sounded, but she’d been pulling seventy and eighty hours a week at the hospital back then and didn’t have the time or inclination to argue, so she’d been stuck with them. Time and again she’d promised herself she’d get rid of them, but like so many things in her life, she hadn’t found the time to get around to it.

  Shaffer took a seat on the sofa, facing her, the gay guards stood behind her, with Ackerman holding the Glock. She wanted to spit in Aaron Shaffer’s face, tell him where to get off, but Lundgren had been right, her smart mouth would only get her in trouble. She needed to calm down, wait for an opening, an opportunity to get her hand into her ba
ck pocket.

  “ You can understand why we’re here, can’t you?” Shaffer said.

  “ No, Aaron, I can’t. I told you I’d call you and you gave me your word you’d keep quiet about what happened to me.”

  “ Too many people saw you in the OR. They knew you weren’t on staff and they’d heard us talking. It was only a matter of time before someone put it together.”

  “ Nobody knew me.” Izzy clenched her fists. “I told you I’d be in touch, that we’d figure this thing out. Didn’t you believe me?” She had to gain his trust.

  “ Everything that goes on in the OR is recorded. Like I said, it was only a matter of time before somebody figured it out.”

  “ You’re in charge of the hospital. If anybody could make those tapes disappear, it’s you.”

  “ Water under the bridge,” he said. “We are where we are and we’re running out of time.”

  “ Oh my God, what did you do?”

  “ I was worried something might happen to you. I wanted to make sure you were protected.”

  “ Who did you tell? Besides your gay lapdogs, that is.”

  Ackerman slapped the back of her head with an open palm.

  “ Ouch.” She really was going to have to watch her mouth.

  “ Don’t anger them. It won’t help you.”

  “ You didn’t answer my question.” She knew if she kept at him, he’d tell her. He was a weak man. Izzy had been surprised when they’d made him CEO of the hospital. They could have done much better and they couldn’t have done much worse.

  “ I had Dr. Romero call somebody he trusts on the Reno PD.”

  “ So Romero knows? You told Romero? Christ, why didn’t you just call a press conference?” Romero was a good doctor, but he was a gossip.