The Short Drop

by Matthew Fitzsimmons

  The stairwell put her out at the far end of the alley behind the car. She only saw the one head, most likely the partner of the man upstairs. His elbow rested out the window. She drew a compact stun gun, pressed it to her ear like a phone, and walked up the driver side of the alley, carrying on an imaginary conversation about her crazy night.

  The stun gun crackled against his neck.

  The driver twitched, his mouth lolling open comically. The low voltage would only incapacitate him for a few minutes, so she zip-tied his wrists to the steering wheel. She cut his seat belt away in case he thought about getting cute on the drive, then got in beside him and pressed the barrel of her gun against his groin.

  “I’ve had a bad week, so I’m most likely going to shoot you when this is all over,” she said. “But if you’re good, I’ll let you pick where. Get me?”

  The driver nodded and licked his lips.

  “Good. Well, it’s a nice morning for a drive. Head north.”

  He pulled out slowly from the alley and turned left. She watched the stationary SUV until it was out of sight.

  “You Cold Harbor?”

  The driver nodded.

  “Still having trouble talking?”

  He nodded again.

  “That’s okay. It’ll give me time to describe what happens if you can’t help me find George Abe.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  For an agonizing moment, Gibson tensed as he was led into the suite. If it was an ambush, then this would be the place to do it. He held his breath, half expecting to be greeted by a gun. But, mercifully, Grace Lombard stood alone at the window.

  The bright Atlanta sun shone through her blonde hair, which fell in a wave to her shoulders, bangs swept neatly to one side—her trademark. It wasn’t possible, but she looked exactly as he remembered her. Always a petite woman and never known to be dressy, she looked true to form in jeans and a plaid button-up. She appeared as if she’d just stepped off the old porch at Pamsrest. It gave him such a feeling of nostalgia, and he wanted to throw his arms around her, but Grace Lombard made no move toward him. A hug was not in the cards.

  “Hello, Gibson.”

  “Mrs. Lombard. It’s good to see you.”

  “Mrs. Lombard,” she repeated. “You always were such a polite boy.”

  “Thank you for seeing me. I know it’s a leap of faith.”

  “It is at that,” she said. “I hope I was right to.” She gestured for him to sit but kept her distance by the window. Her eyes looked questioningly at the bruising around his throat.

  “How have you been?” she asked cautiously.

  He gave her the bullet-point version of his life and finished with Ellie. “I have a daughter. She’s six.”

  “Six?” she said. “I imagine you’d do very well with a little girl.”

  He found that encouraging, so he held out a picture of Ellie at the National Zoo. Grace approached, took it, and sat on a nearby armchair.

  “She looks like a firecracker.” The faintest caress of a smile touched her lips.

  “That doesn’t begin to cover it. You should see her play soccer.”

  “Is she good?” She handed the picture back.

  “No, she’s terrible, but that doesn’t slow her down.”

  Grace laughed but stopped herself quickly.

  He changed tack. “I want to thank you for the letter.”

  “Letter?”

  “The letter you wrote me when I first went in the Marines.”

  “Oh, of course, yes. It seemed necessary.”

  “Well, it meant a lot. It helped. Hearing from you. I always meant to write back. It was just a tough time.”

  “It was a tough time for everyone. Not one I think of fondly. But you’re welcome, Gibson. You and your father were very special to my family.”

  Were—past tense. There was no edge to it. Simply a statement of fact.

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “Especially to Suzanne. She was devastated by everything that happened. Your father. Your… difficulties,” she finished diplomatically.

  “Yes, I’m sorry I wasn’t there for her. I should have been. She deserved better.”

  Grace stiffened. He’d worded it clumsily so that it sounded vaguely accusatory. Careful now, he thought; there was only ever going to be one shot at this.

  “Yes, well. Here you are now,” she said. “I suppose you should explain the photograph. Where did you get it?”

  “It’s probably best if I start from the beginning.”

  “You have my undivided attention.”

  Gibson cleared his throat and told her the story. Told her about Abe Consulting and how they had tracked Billy Casper to Somerset, Pennsylvania. Prior to this meeting, he had considered redacting a great many things, but in the end he told her nearly everything.

  Grace listened in silence while Denise hovered by the door.

  When he finished describing the lake house, he took the Phillies baseball cap from his bag. He held it out to her by the brim. She held it at a distance, suspiciously.

  “And what? You’re telling me that this is the hat?”

  “You tell me.” He showed her the initials, and Grace studied them.

  “This is her handwriting.” She looked up questioningly. “And this man, Billy Casper, he gave it to you?”

  “He did.”

  “Why wasn’t he arrested? He kidnapped my daughter.”

  “Mrs. Lombard, Billy Casper was sixteen when Suzanne ran away.”

  “He was only a boy?” Grace stood and went back to the window. “How is that possible?”

  He watched her carefully to see which way she was leaning: belief or denial.

  “I think they were in love. Well, Billy was in love with her. I don’t know about Bear.”

  At the mention of his old nickname for Suzanne, Grace began to weep. She didn’t put a hand up to cover her eyes. She simply wept.

  “There’s something you’re not telling me,” she said at last, her almond eyes holding his gaze without modesty.

  “Mrs. Lombard, when did things turn bad for Bear?”

  That stopped Grace cold. “When did things start to get hard for Suzanne? Her behavior? I’ve asked myself that question for years; I’ve never been able to pinpoint it. There was no one moment. It happened over the course of several years. Little things. I thought it was just adolescence.”

  “Billy also gave me this.” Gibson handed her the copy of The Fellowship of the Ring. Grace held it tightly, her head nodding at its familiarity.

  “She carried this with her everywhere,” she said, flipping through the pages. “After you finished reading it to her. She’d sit in the kitchen, peppering me with questions and writing in this book.”

  “Me too. It drove me crazy.”

  Grace laughed gratefully through her tears. “I looked everywhere for it. It makes sense she took it. She loved you so much.”

  “Do you remember Bear’s nickname for me?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “She called you ‘Son.’ ”

  He guided Grace to the page and explained the significance of the color orange. Grace read her daughter’s note, and when done, she looked up questioningly.

  “What baseball game?”

  Gibson told her the story.

  “You know, I remember that weekend,” she said when he was finished. “I’d been in California for a week, visiting family, and got back the next morning. Benjamin hadn’t been to bed. It was the angriest that I’ve ever seen him. We had such a terrible fight. And Suzanne. My God. She was a zombie for days.” She looked at the cap again. “Is that where she got it? At this game?”

  “My father bought it for her on the way home. To try and calm her down. You really never saw it before Breezewood?”

  “Not until now
. Not in person anyway. Do you know how long I stared into her eyes? Stared into that awful frozen frame of my little girl? Trying to guess what it was she was thinking? Why she ran away from me?”

  “I don’t think she ran away from you,” he said.

  “That’s sweet of you to say, but she did run away.” She paused and considered his words. “But not from me, you mean.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What could it possibly have to do with a baseball cap? You don’t think it was an accident she was wearing it in the tape.”

  “No, ma’am. I think it was a message.”

  “A message? To whom?”

  “To me.”

  “What does it mean?”

  Gibson paused, trying to gauge the moment. At some point, he was going to have to drop the hammer on her. Was this it? He didn’t want Grace to suffer, but he needed for it to hurt. It was the only way she would see. He took a breath and said it as levelly as he could.

  “Bear was pregnant.”

  It sucked the air out of the room. Grace opened her mouth several times to speak. Her face darkened, and she stood slowly.

  “I should have known better. It was a mistake to see you. Gibson, I think about the sweet little boy you were and the man you’ve become. I don’t know how it is possible. I’ll have Denise show you out.”

  Grace was slipping away from him as he knew she would. It was as necessary as it was cruel. She stood way out on a terrible ledge, and the fall would shatter her. Better to cast him as a liar than make the leap. But he thought he had seen a glimmer of awareness in her eyes, if only for a moment.

  He held out the last picture. Bear pregnant. She snatched it from him and held it in both hands, rooted to the spot. Gibson stepped in close to her and spoke quietly.

  “What it comes down to is a lie. One elegant, crafty lie. Told so convincingly that no one questioned it. Maybe I was a sweet kid like you say, and, yeah, what I am now isn’t anything I’m proud of. But I know the lie from the truth now. And I’m here because you’re caught up in the same lie. And it’s done to you what it did to me. Caused you to make decisions and arrange your life around it. So when you’re told the truth—that your daughter was pregnant, that she ran away because she was scared—you can’t hear it. But that is the truth of the lie. And it leads to one question. Who is the father?”

  “Get out!” Grace screamed.

  Denise stepped between them. “Trust me, you do not want the Secret Service to come in here.”

  “I knew it had to be something like this,” Grace choked through a torrent of tears. “Another sick attempt to humiliate my family. Is your grievance with my husband really so important to you? Suzanne adored you, Gibson. You would really ruin her reputation just to hurt him?”

  “Is everything all right in there?” a man’s voice asked.

  It got quiet in the suite. Denise raised an eyebrow at him—What’s it going to be?

  “I’m going,” Gibson said.

  “Yes, we’re fine, John. Thank you,” Grace called out to the Secret Service agent on the other side of the door.

  She held out the book to him, but he shook his head.

  “It’s yours. You should keep it.”

  “Is it even genuine?”

  “You know it is.”

  Grace flipped the pages carelessly, holding the book at arm’s length, as if it were bleeding. Then she stopped, breath caught on a jagged thorn, her hand trembling as it flattened out the pages.

  “Grace?” Denise asked. “What is it?”

  Grace, pale as old wheat, looked up at them.

  “My favorite color is blue.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Tinsley crouched in the bathroom and let the air-conditioning vent whisper truth to him. He’d been there a long time. Silent and still. Eyes closed. Listening to the room next door.

  After the interruption in Charlottesville, it had taken some effort to track them down. They weren’t fools. Once they knew they were being pursued, they had done an admirable job of covering their tracks. It wasn’t until Atlanta that he’d picked up the scent again.

  Calista Dauplaise was very unhappy. Understandable. The altercation at the lake house had been a bad business. Tinsley agreed wholeheartedly. Certainly, it was her prerogative to bring in a second team, but if she didn’t see fit to include him in those plans, then he could not be held responsible when the overlap led to inevitable confusion.

  She had not seen it that way.

  Tinsley had contemplated walking away, and under other circumstances he might have done exactly that. But she was an old client, and it didn’t serve his interests to make an enemy of her. But beyond that, something held him to these three people. A sense of history. Of unfinished business. It had been more than ten years since he’d entered this narrative. He felt an unexpected kinship with the son of Duke Vaughn, and it was important to see the boy through to his end.

  The faint click of a light switch caught his attention. Was that humming? Singing? A TV or a man? The pipes hummed, groaned, and the inviting hiss of a shower came through the vent. Tinsley waited. The hiss changed, falling to a lower register—water on skin, not on tile. It was time.

  Tinsley left his room and looked out over the parking lot. Jenn Charles and Duke Vaughn’s son were gone, leaving only the bitter man. He would deal with this one now while the opportunity presented itself.

  Tinsley walked the eight feet to the next door and knelt as if to tie his shoe. It was a cheap motel with cheap locks—he could pick it with a Popsicle stick. He let himself into the room and drew his gun. No more interruptions. He had missed twice, and though there were extenuating circumstances in each case, Tinsley did not feel right about it. The natural course of things had been diverted like the damming of a river. And like a dammed river, Tinsley could feel nature aching to correct itself.

  Apart from the glow of the television, the room was dim. The queen beds rumpled. The bathroom door ajar. The singing or humming had stopped. Tinsley moved through the room, listening for any change. He put his back to the wall of the short hallway outside the bathroom. It occurred to him almost too late that the sound the water made was wrong. It was the sharp hiss of an empty shower—water on tile.

  Tinsley brought his arms up and partially deflected the crowbar away from his head. Pain lanced through his wrists, and the crowbar scraped across the top of his head. It burned like a striking match. His gun spun across the floor. Tinsley pivoted to better defend against the next blow. It would be hard to bring a crowbar around effectively in the hallway, and it should give him time to reestablish himself on an equal footing. Unfortunately, the bitter man had the same thought. The crowbar clanged off the floor as a fist caught Tinsley on the bridge of his nose. His nose had only just begun to knit back together after Pennsylvania, and the blow ruptured it again. He tasted blood as he fell.

  The bitter man forced him to the floor with several well-placed blows. Tinsley appreciated their ferocity but also their precision. Such a thing was difficult to accomplish in tandem.

  The blows spun Tinsley around, and he felt a knee land heavily between his shoulder blades, the hard snap of cuffs around his wrists, and the cold circle of his own gun pressed to his temple.

  “You’re not as tough when someone knows you’re coming.”

  “Is anyone?” Tinsley asked.

  “Who do you work for?”

  Tinsley fell silent.

  “You understand you’re dead if I don’t get what I want,” the bitter man said. “Maybe you’ve got some kind of code about covering for your clients. I don’t really give a good goddamn. But you think on what use that reputation will be to a dead man.”

  Tinsley blinked through the blood. “What’s a code?”

  “Last chance. Who hired you? Benjamin Lombard?”

  “Who?”


  “Where’s George Abe?”

  “Who?”

  “All right,” Hendricks said. “Have it your way.”

  The bitter man dragged him into the bathroom. Tinsley understood. The tile would be easier to mop up.

  “I’m going to ask you some questions. If I don’t like the answers, then you’re going in the bathtub. And it won’t be for bath time. You understand me?”

  “The tub will catch the blood when you shoot me.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Pull the curtain. It will help contain the runoff.”

  “What are you?”

  “I’m your friend.”

  The bitter man snorted. “My friend? You kill all your friends?”

  “We weren’t friends then. We had no basis for friendship.”

  “Oh, and now we do?”

  “Things have changed. You are in the position to let me go. So I would like us to be friends. And in return I will do you a favor. One friend to another.”

  “You’re an optimistic son of a bitch, aren’t you?” the bitter man said, hauling Tinsley up to a sitting position. “Does this favor involve telling me who you work for?”

  “No, this favor involves giving you the gun and shell casings that prove you killed Kirby Tate.”

  The bitter man sat on the toilet with the gun pointed at Tinsley’s chest.

  “Where is it?”

  “In the trunk of a car. In a few days, if you kill me, the vehicle will be towed. The police will find your gun in my trunk. Your fingerprints. Other incriminating items,” Tinsley said. “Or we can walk out together, as friends, and I can give it to you. And go our separate ways.”

  “And the body?”

  “I didn’t pack it,” Tinsley said. “But the GPS coordinates where it’s hidden—I have those.”

  “And you will leave me and my associates alone?”

  “Yes.”

  The bitter man stared at him a long time.

  “So,” Tinsley said. “Friends?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT