The Cruelest Cut

by Rick Reed

  Jack’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he surveyed the surrounding area looking for any sign of light escaping from the cabin. There was none. He had a feeling of dread that maybe he was too late. Katie and Susan could be dead. But then he heard the soft moan again and again a loud thud.

  Jack crawled farther under the cabin and lay motionless, listening, waiting, and was rewarded by the sound of someone walking across the floor toward the door that led onto the porch. If Eddie was looking outside, he was probably seeing only darkness. Jack knew there was no way to make out the boat from that distance. He still had the element of surprise. Then he remembered that he had the cell phone with him.

  Oh, shit! he silently mouthed. If the phone rang, he was directly beneath Eddie. He reached for the phone, hoping he had left it on vibrate, but it rang in his hand.

  He knew that if he didn’t answer, Eddie might kill the women. If he did answer, Eddie might hear him and kill the women. “Fuck it,” he said under his breath and slid out from under the cabin and walked up the steps and onto his porch. He sensed, more than saw, the movement inside the cabin as he reached out and tried the door. It was unlocked. He pushed the door open and said, “Eddie, I’m coming in. I’m alone.”

  He wasn’t sure he’d been heard and was about to repeat himself when he heard a whimper from inside. He stepped into his front room just as a bright light shined into his eyes.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

  Captain Franklin pulled into Two-Jakes and parked by the surveillance van loaded with electronics equipment. There were five uniform patrol cars, several unmarked police cars, two from the narcotics unit, and two K-9 cars. He was amazed that dispatchers had managed to coordinate this meeting without alerting the news media to the event. He walked to the back of the van and noticed the newly reinstated chief of police, Marlin Pope, leaning inside and talking to Dubois County Chief Deputy Sheriff Mark Crowley.

  “I guess I should say something like ‘Great Caesar’s Ghost’ or something appropriate about this equipment,” Pope was saying, obviously impressed with the technology. Franklin knew that this type of equipment would never be in the future budget of the Evansville Police Department.

  Crowley smiled and looked a little embarrassed. “I was just telling your chief here that I’ve pinpointed Jack’s cell phone, and it’s in the same place as Katie’s cell phone. Liddell thinks they’re inside Jack’s cabin.”

  “That crazy son of a bitch,” Franklin said, shaking his head.

  Liddell asked, “Mark, did Jack ever answer his phone?”

  Crowley shook his head.

  “What’s the plan, Captain?” Chief Pope asked.

  Liddell spoke up, and said angrily, “The plan is, we surround Jack’s cabin, and then we go in and kick Eddie’s skinny ass to the moon.”

  Pope rolled his eyes. He’d forgotten how plainspoken the big Cajun was. But, on the other hand, he would never want to be the target of Liddell’s rage. He’d seen a few of those unfortunate persons, and they were almost always in the back of an ambulance, or in a hospital.

  Franklin looked at Liddell, but spoke to the chief, saying, “We are going to set up a perimeter around Jack’s cabin. I called the Coast Guard, the sheriff’s department, and the fire department, and asked for the use of their boats to take some of our SWAT team out to set up a river perimeter. For all we know, Eddie may have a boat out there. Other SWAT members are going with one of our crisis negotiators to set up a command post near the cabin. I’ve also called for a couple of ambulance units to stand by.”

  “You sure Jack’s in there?” Pope asked, and Franklin nodded that he was.

  “I already called Little Casket,” Liddell said, and when the chief looked at him, he shrugged his big shoulders and said, “Hey, if Jack’s in there, Eddie’s coming out in a bag.”

  Before Jack entered his cabin, he had slipped his gun from behind his back and held it to his side, keeping his body slightly angled to hide the weapon. The light that was in Jack’s face remained steady.

  Eddie said, in a singsong voice, “To market, to market, to buy a fat pig. Home again, home again, jiggety-jig. We’ve been waiting for you, Jack.”

  The light in Jack’s eyes shifted to the right, and Eddie said, “Now drop the gun before I cut this one’s head off.” To emphasize his point Eddie caused one of the women to give a muffled scream.

  Jack heard a cry, but couldn’t tell who it came from. The light had obliterated any night vision he might have.

  “Is that another of your riddles, Eddie?” Keep him talking. Get a location on him, then bye-bye asshole. Jack’s finger tightened on the trigger.

  “I always thought you were the brave one,” Jack said, and Eddie laughed. “But I see that you’re a bigger coward than your brother. Hiding behind women in the dark. What does Bobby say about that, Eddie?”

  Eddie stopped laughing. A lamp clicked on, and Jack could see both women now. What he saw made his stomach lurch. Katie and Susan were tied to kitchen chairs, and duct tape was wrapped around their faces. Eddie was crouched low behind them, the blade of a long knife, like a giant machete, held so close to Katie’s throat that blood had trickled down her neck and onto her clothes. Katie had been beaten. One eye was swollen shut, the other electric with fear.

  Susan was in worse shape. Her jaw looked misshapen, maybe broken. And though her face was covered in blood, Jack saw anger flashing in her eyes. Susan was a fighter. A survivor. But poor Katie was a sixth-grade schoolteacher. Her only association with violence was through the rare stories that Jack had shared with her when they were married, or perhaps what she read in the newspapers. She looked as if she was going into shock, and Jack felt he had to do something now or she wouldn’t make it. There was no time for negotiations. He hadn’t come there to talk.

  “Drop the gun, hero,” Eddie said with a crazy grin on his face. “I won’t ask again.” He used the blade to slice Katie’s face, causing her to give a painful scream, and then dropped the blade to her throat.

  Jack was a good shot, but Eddie was not making himself a target. Eddie was crouched so low Jack feared he would hit Katie if he tried. Then he had an idea. He used his thumb to push the release on the backup and felt the loaded magazine slip loose.

  He slowly moved his left arm out where Eddie could see the gun, and as he did so he said, “I didn’t come here to bargain with you, asshole.” Jack laid the gun on the floor and carefully kicked it toward Eddie. The gun came to rest under Susan’s chair and a surprised Eddie glanced down.

  “Pick it up,” Jack said.

  “What?” Eddie looked at Jack as if Jack were the one that was crazy.

  “Haven’t you ever heard the old saying? You should never bring a knife to a gunfight, dick-for-brains.”

  Eddie’s mouth quivered; his eyes widened with rage. He dropped the knife and grabbed the gun, but Jack didn’t move. Eddie reached around Katie, pulling the tape loose from her mouth. She drew in a huge breath, but he grabbed her roughly by the jaw, pulling her head upright. “I want you to see this, motherfucker. This is for me ’n’ Bobby.”

  Eddie put the gun to Katie’s temple. “Who’s the dick-for-brains now, Murphy? Who’s got the gun now?” he said, and pulled the trigger. Katie screamed, and her head lurched to the side in an attempt to avoid the blast that she knew was coming. But there was only the sound of an empty click.

  Jack knew the gun would never fire with the ammo clip disengaged. It was one of the safety features of that particular model. He reached inside his coat and pulled his .45 Glock from its holster. “You’re the dick-for-brains, Eddie,” he said, and squeezed the trigger.

  The bullet caught Eddie in the forehead, blowing bits of tissue and skull onto Katie and Susan, and sending a large portion of Eddie’s brains flying into the kitchen.

  Jack watched Eddie crumple to the floor like a blow-up doll that had a massive air leak. In the movies the bad guy was always blown backward twenty feet, or his entire head explodes when you put a
hundred and forty-five grains of lead into his skull. But in real life, the bullet only made a little hole where it went in, and it took out a chunk about the size of a plum where it came out.

  It took Jack a moment to realize that Katie was still screaming hysterically and was trying to spit something out. Later he would realize she was spitting out bits of Eddie’s skull.

  And then all hell broke loose. The living room and kitchen windows broke simultaneously, and objects clattered around the rooms, soon filling them with tear gas. Jack moved to the women and covered them with his body to shield them from the concussion of the stun grenades that he knew would come in right behind the tear gas. The blast was meant to stun, and the grenade did its job. With the blinding flash and concussion, Jack became too disoriented to move, and it appeared that men in gas masks were moving toward him in slow motion.

  EPILOGUE

  Liddell and his wife, Marcie, stood at the elevator bank in the lobby of St. Mary’s Hospital. Jack came into the lobby carrying a beautiful bouquet of daffodils in one hand, and another bouquet of some kind of yellow flower that looked like small sunflowers in the other hand. Jack was never good with flower names, but knew that daffodils were Katie’s favorite, and he had seen the sunflower-looking ones around Susan’s place.

  “Oh, what beautiful flowers, Jack!” Marcie said, and rose onto her tiptoes to kiss his cheek.

  With a big grin, Liddell tried to kiss him, too, and Jack pushed him away. “Not in front of your wife, Cajun. She might not let us be partners anymore.”

  Marcie slapped Liddell on the arm and, in a low voice—the one his mother called an “inside voice”—she warned him to behave himself in the hospital.

  Jack wondered why people kept their voices low in a hospital. Was it like a church, or was it because of the mystery of medicine or the sense of death lingering in the halls? He wasn’t sure, but the last couple of times he’d been in the hospital, all he wanted to do was scream.

  The elevator came, and they all rode to the fifth floor, where Katie and Susan were sharing a room. When the elevator doors opened they were all surprised to see Susan standing there, waiting for the elevator.

  “You’ve already been released?” Jack asked happily.

  Susan pulled him back on the elevator. “We have to talk,” she said seriously, then to Marcie and Liddell, “Hi. Sorry, but I’m in a hurry. See you later.” And then the door shut and the elevator headed back down.

  “What is it?” Jack said.

  “I have to get out of here,” Susan said, and Jack just then noticed that she had dressed hastily and hadn’t even tied her shoes.

  “Are you escaping? Oh, you’re a bad girl?” Jack said with a grin.

  “Damn right,” Susan answered, and as the doors opened at the lobby, she said, “Just walk to the lot with me. I’ve called a cab already.”

  “There’s no need to do that, Susan. I’ll take you home.”

  “No,” she said a little too quickly, making Jack look at her. Something was wrong, and he wondered if it was just the aftereffects of her harrowing ordeal with Eddie.

  “Look,” Susan said, “you and I both know that you executed Eddie.”

  Jack was shocked into silence. He hadn’t thought of it that way. He did what he had to do to save their lives. If he had given Eddie any chance at all, one or all of them might be dead. “I had to make a decision,” Jack said. “I chose for Eddie to die, instead of you or Katie.”

  Susan’s eyes grew moist, and she looked away from him. “I just…I just never thought that I…or that you would…” Tears slid down her cheeks, and she looked at Jack. “I just can’t deal with this right now. You should go and be with Katie. She needs you more than I do right now,” she lied.

  The cab pulled up, and Susan slipped inside. She didn’t look at Jack as the cab pulled away. He stood there for several minutes looking after her.

  She’s been through a lot. She doesn’t know what she’s saying, he thought. But it felt as though she hated him. The sad thing was, he could easily understand why.

  He trudged back into the hospital and rode the elevator to the fifth floor. As he entered Katie’s room, he found her propped up in bed looking at a huge basket of flowers. He was chagrined to see Don Shull sitting beside the bed, holding one of her hands in his and patting it gently.

  “Look who’s here,” Liddell said, smirking.

  “Yeah.” Jack said, wearing a grin. “Look who’s here. Dr. Shull.”

  “Hi, Jack,” Shull said happily. “I heard about that rescue of yours last night. Man, they ought to make a movie about you. I’m just so grateful that you got our little Katie out of there in one piece.”

  Jack looked at Shull, wondering if he was being facetious or serious. He decided that Shull wasn’t being a smart-ass, but he was sure that Shull was attracted to Katie. He hated to admit it, but he sort of liked Shull. And besides, maybe Katie could use a friend like him. She would have some hard days ahead of her. But Jack was so preoccupied by Shull’s presence in Katie’s room, in her life, that he hadn’t noticed the look that crossed Katie’s face when he walked in.

  “Are those flowers all for me?” Katie asked, and Jack realized he was still carrying both bouquets of flowers. He had forgotten to give Susan the one he brought for her. But she had been so rude with him that he decided instead to give them both to Katie.

  “Yes,” he said, setting the flowers on the table beside her bed, “they’re both for you.”

  “Daffodils,” she said, and tried to smile, but winced instead.

  Shull said, “Katie’s being released this afternoon. Her doctor said there were no major injuries. Her jaw is bruised badly, but it isn’t broken. I’ve offered to take her home later.”

  Jack looked at Katie, but she seemed to deliberately not look at him. He decided not to offer to take her instead of Shull, and he wondered why he was the recipient of all this anger from her and Susan for saving their lives. He decided that he’d never understand women as long as he lived.

  The next few days were spent with Internal Affairs and in front of the Public Safety Board’s Shooting Inquiry. Franklin had again taken Jack’s duty weapon and ordered him to take the required three days of paid leave. Per standard operating procedure, his duty weapon would be examined to be sure that it was the weapon that killed Eddie, and that he was using police department-approved ammunition. Normally it would be test fired and the bullet would be compared to the one that blew Eddie’s head apart, but the crime scene techs had been unable to locate that bullet.

  Liddell kept him up to date on the departmental goings-on, and Jack was glad to hear that the Safety Board and the mayor had agreed to leave Marlin Pope in the position of chief of police until the next election, three years down the road.

  He also learned that the missing persons detective, Larry Jansen, had somehow dodged federal charges of illegal wiretapping by recording a private governmental conversation between Mayor Thatcher and Double Dick. Instead of going to the federal pen, Jansen had been moved from Missing Persons to the Vice Unit. To Jack, that was tantamount to inviting the fox into the henhouse. But then, that was politics.

  Double Dick had also survived the fracas, even after it had been discovered that he had taken the cassette tape from the pile of clothes that was evidence in a murder investigation, and then had attempted to destroy the tape by running it through a magnetic eraser, and then lied to internal affairs investigators. He had been cocky, thinking he was in the clear, until the sneaky internal affairs guys told him that the tape had been miraculously resurrected by the FBI. Of course that was a lie, but Dick fell for it because they said FBI, and Dick didn’t know dick about whether a tape could be “brought back to life.” He confessed tearfully and had to be shut up by Dan Grossman, the city attorney, before he let any super secrets slip out.

  End result, Dick maintained the rank of deputy chief, along with all the pay and privileges, and was riding a desk in Personnel and Training in perpetuity, o
r at least until another mayor came along with toe jam for brains. Who says crime doesn’t pay?

  Jack made several attempts to contact Katie, but each time she declared she was busy, or ill, or any other thing she could say to get shed of him. He had been too embarrassed to call Susan after her remarks that day at the hospital. Liddell assured him that both women were recovering from their injuries, both mental and physical, and advised his partner to just give them some time to come to grips with what happened.

  “They’ll see that you had no choice, buddy,” Liddell had said. Jack wanted to believe that, but he felt that their injuries were so deep that things would never be the same between them.

  By the end of the week Jack had been cleared by the Safety Board and reinstated to duty once again. But the reactions shown by Katie and Susan made him feel guilty. It was his fault they were involved in the first place. His fault that they had been terrorized by Eddie and nearly died. Definitely his fault they had watched Eddie die.

  He also worried that he felt no remorse for killing Eddie, or actually, he should say that he felt glad that Eddie was dead and that he was the one that killed him. How normal is that?

  Anytime a policeman is involved in a shooting, he is encouraged to take advantage of the police department’s mental health program. Jack had always wondered how a shrink that had never done anything more violent than tear open his Gummi bears could counsel someone that had just committed the ultimate act of violence by taking a life. But he decided to take Chief Pope’s advice and see the counselor, if for no other reason than to make some sense of Katie and Susan’s anger with him.

  And that was how he found himself sitting on a bench in Garvin Park on a beautiful sunny day in late October, awaiting the arrival of the shrink that had been assigned his case. The doc’s secretary had insisted that his caseworker liked to work outdoors when the weather was nice. Jack attempted a joke with the secretary, suggesting that caseworker was a nice name for a squirrel doctor, so maybe they should meet in a park. She giggled politely, and Garvin Park was agreed on.