by Jon A. Hunt
A metallic rapping bang split my senses. I recognized, as if watching from outside a dream, the call of Jetta Donovan’s pawn-store .38. Then fresh agony snatched my shoulder and new blood splashed poor Waldron’s lifeless face. My blood. The impact spun me. The filthy horse floor and the antique bottle tipped up to catch me.
Thirty-one
First class killers from Rico’s mold don’t second guess their handiwork. More pragmatic sorts like Del or Nick just put another bullet in you if the first one didn’t finish the job. But the world is full of amateurs who have to look to be sure. JD had just made a lucky shot.
He approached behind the .38’s smoking nose the way a ‘coon hunter follows an untested hound. He kicked my fallen gun into the flames. He used his good leg. The other wore crusted blood and dirt from the knee down. He looked pretty rough compared to the immaculate financier in the two-story office overlooking Music Circle. But I didn’t look any better.
We glared at each other while I pressed my left hand against the ruins of my right shoulder. Pain there made damaged ribs easier to ignore. I’d bleed out sooner than JD, not as quick as Waldron. The old man felt colder beside me than the liquor bottle touching my thigh.
Whiskey bumped an impatient hoof on the floor. Gunshots and fire didn’t faze the Devil’s jumping horse. JD’s head pivoted toward the horse and the woman he’d married against his better judgment. She’d become an ashen statue with living copper hair beside the gelding. Her eyes weren’t on JD’s, they met mine. Possibly she’d picked up on my hunch.
After Jetta’s shot at me days earlier, three in the tunnels, one for Waldron and one for me, the little stump of a six-shooter shouldn’t have any live rounds left. If nobody’d reloaded it.
“Mr. Bedlam, you have got to be the worst hire I ever made.” His castle burned, the foundations of his monumental persona crumbled, yet JD’s voice remained perfectly modulated.
“I don’t need your money,” I said. The punch line had worn thin.
Planks at my back warmed. JD stepped to Sandra and kept the revolver facing me. Empty brass sparkled in the firelight from the weapon’s cylinder. I couldn’t see into the barrel.
“Give me the rope,” he commanded.
Sandra hesitated.
“I’ve wanted to put this horse down for years. I could do it right now, of course.”
Tears tracked the soot on her cheeks as Sandra placed the braided nylon in her husband’s upturned palm. Whiskey stamped and snorted thunderously. His composure inside a burning barn astonished me, but even he had his limits. JD’s fingers closed over the rope and he worked his wrist in circles so the lead wrapped snuggly around it. That didn’t seem like something an experienced horseman would do, but JD wasn’t really a horseman and Whiskey wasn’t my horse.
“Amazing animal,” JD proclaimed to none of us in particular. “Foaled on a tobacco farm, played inside the barns with the smoking fires. He isn’t afraid of anything—”
“Jonathon. Please—”
“Shut up, Sandra. Or whatever your name is.”
She went still. JD banged his uninjured foot lightly against an old-fashioned metal jerry can near the stall. The unscrewed lid rattled loosely and the contents swished. Gasoline. The stuff had no good reason for being there.
I pushed myself slowly upright against the wall onto my feet. Somehow I had the Scotch bottle in my left hand. JD adjusted the .38 to suit.
“Wouldn’t you rather use this?” I said. “Old booze seems more the Donovan style.”
The revolver threatened from an outstretched arm. Mild gray eyes assumed a faintly cross squint. “No, thank you. Whiskey’s a teetotaler in spite of his name. He remembers the smoke and the fire, but he hasn’t forgotten an abusive alcoholic stable hand, either. He might trample you for uncorking that bottle before I could shoot.”
“That’s why you bought the Macallan for your first wife, isn’t it?”
JD laughed. It was a brittle laugh. I kept going. He meant to kill me regardless.
“Vintage Scotch for Katherine, rare stuff, served up on horseback when both of you knew better. Two kinds of Whiskey did the dirty work and you were able to look for a new wife with only minimal scandal, considering. Can’t easily call that murder when the horse won’t testify.”
“Very inventive.” I wasn’t certain whether he meant my hypothesis or his method. He rocked the lethal jerry can idly with his toe.
Sandra’s green eyes focused on me, not on the revolver. Gunfire continued to pop sporadically outside My vision fuzzed around the edges.
Keep yakking. Keep his attention away from the gas. While you still can…
“What’s wrong with a divorce?” I asked. “Last I checked, it’s legal in all fifty states.”
“You would consider that. You have money, but no reputation worth safeguarding.”
JD was stalling, too. He wasn’t any surer he had another shot than I was.
A beam sagged portentously, back where the stables blazed like the inside of my grandparents’ wood stove. Whiskey nearly jostled JD off his better foot. The barn doors on our end hadn’t been unbolted. Sandra had quietly gotten a little nearer to them. JD sensed Sandra’s movement and briefly swept the gun in her direction.
“You’re not going anywhere, slut!”
The ugly word would’ve sounded out of character had JD not been waving a .38 around.
“Oh don’t waste your breath lying about it!” he snapped. A bit forceful; I hadn’t said anything. “I know you slept with her. Everyone does, sooner or later. Everyone.” His face tilted toward the gas can. Firelight brightened the thin edges of his rimless glasses.
Sandra had taken another step. I didn’t dare look at her.
“You’re going to kill everyone who….cheats, then?”
“There’ll be no proof. The FBI never finds any.”
Funny, his mentioning them. What had JD and Pennington been arguing about when Honeywell overheard them? I caught myself slipping, straightened again, weaker.
“Too bad mom wasn’t a drinker. But people might’ve gotten suspicious a second time.”
His eyes were obscured by flames reflected in his glasses. I had to guess whether I’d struck a nerve. JD’s wife, the slut, the wayward banker’s daughter who’d once answered to a different name, had a hand on the barn doors’ draw bolt. I kept my mouth wagging.
“I bet Muriel figured out how you killed Katherine, and she told you. So you shoved her down those stairs, before she had a chance to tell anyone else. The tunnels made it easy.”
Cracks began to show in that cautious, clever voice. “Watch yourself, Mr. Bedlam—”
He didn’t dare pull the trigger. The .38 might go “bang” and shut me up for good. Or it might just click, and we’d all know. If he kicked over that gas can, though…
“There aren’t any stairs here,” I said. “I’m not thirsty and you won’t get me on that horse. Are you going to shoot me again or not? What are you capable of, JD?”
He took a step toward me, caught himself. If JD was the only one who walked out of the cataclysm that consumed his second wife and her latest lover, he wouldn’t evade scandal this time. He might escape prison. It would be a tragedy. Not murder. After all, I’d shot him first.
“How low will you stoop to protect that precious reputation? It was worth a wife and a parent. Is it worth a daughter, too? She loved you, you know. She told me so. Even when you confined her, manipulated her. Lied to her. What else have you done to your little girl, JD?”
A second step in my direction wasn’t possible without Whiskey’s cooperation. I could tell JD wanted to unwind that rope for something less beneficial to his professional standing. He wanted his hands around my neck.
“You’re happy letting your little girl burn,” I said.
That dragged JD too far. He jerked the .38’s chintzy trigger. Its hammer slapped a spent primer and I didn’t die. He flung the worthless gun and lunged again, his mouth a furious slash beneath desig
ner eyeglasses. His other arm was yanked taut by Whiskey’s lead rope. I pitched toward him. He punted the gas can across the floor. The cap flopped open, heaving gasoline over the floor and my feet. Flames skipped along the walls to join the vapors.
“YOU burn!” he screamed. Not calm. Not restrained. Wrathful.
A draw bolt rammed free. Wind and rain washed inside the stable house.
JD’s free hand clutched at my throat.
Searing death swirled around us, devoured the world. I brought the liquor bottle down hard on JD’s head. Glass shattered. The perfume of well-aged Scotch had a second to smell wonderful before it, too, flared. The gelding bellowed something between bestial terror and rage. His massive body superseded the rest of the inferno. JD had no chance to disengage himself. He spun into the maelstrom with a snap of shattered bones. A brutally hard thing struck my forehead, either Whiskey’s skull or a random flying chunk of pig iron.
Horse and master—if JD could be called that now—catapulted through the newly opened barn doors. Not together, exactly. Whiskey cleared the opening while the man bashed into the oak timbers on his way through. Then both were gone.
I spun a ragdoll pirouette, rain and fire flashing through my fast-failing vision, and tipped four feet short of the black opening onto the melting rubber stable house floor.
Thirty-two
Sirens.
They’d finally turned the sirens loose. But their strident yowls hadn’t roused me. A whiff of honeysuckle did that.
“Tyler.” Smoke and emotion coarsened her voice. My name still sounded musical.
I opened my eyes beneath early evening thunderclouds. I’d been dragged over grass and manure and propped against the paddock’s inner fence. Sandra knelt beside me. Her hair flicked wet copper strands at the wind, the only friendly color in a world dominated by blacks and grays and ravenous orange. She couldn’t have brought me this far on her own.
“You....need to get away...from here,” I croaked.
She laughed, softly in spite of her hoarseness, the way an unscarred teenage girl who’d yet to love anything besides puppies or horses might.
“I don’t think you were a bad hire at all,” she whispered. Her lips pressed mine, simultaneously rough and gentle as rose petals, flavored with soot and honeysuckle and salty tears. Then she was gone and the hard cold rain tried in vain to drum her memory away.
I couldn’t get my feet under me quick enough to follow. Whiskey hit harder than anyone else who’d ever given me a right cross. JD had warned me. The horizon kept trying to upend itself and I seized a fence rail for support. Leaden echoes of the big horse’s testing kicks to his stall replayed between my ears, long after the horse had bolted and the stable had burned.
I squinted through pelting rain toward the fire. The nearest stable wall popped and rippled. Redness shot through gaps in the siding. The barn doors, through which Whiskey and JD and I must all have escaped, lay sizzling in the wet grass. Glare from the opening threw weird shadows from every object that pressed the turf, horses, man-sized figures. All maintained their intimacy with muck and horse shit because they were deader than me.
JD’s glasses sparkled at a puddle’s edge. Their owner lay face down in three inches of water. His body had a sloppily folded appearance. One hand hovered in a grasping curve, as if time had violently stopped for him before he’d could retrieve his fallen eyewear. The lead rope which proved to be his undoing was as absent as the four-legged juggernaut who’d been clipped to the other end. The arm that once held the rope wasn’t in the puddle with the rest of JD.
Perhaps remorse for misusing his fancy Scotch would kick in when my shoulder healed.
I heaved myself over the four-rail fence, climbed the identical outer fence with similar poise, and splashed across Hillbriar’s limestone-edged driveway that always turned to milk in the rain. Headlights followed the uphill curve and funneled through the second gate, bent back against its stone pillars from being forced open. Any horses left had no interest in what was inside that gate anyway. Two Metro cruisers and Smally’s woebegone pickup led the procession; everything with pretty blinking roof lights stayed impatiently at the bottom of the hill till given permission. I didn’t see anyone who looked like Sandra out in the field or on the road.
Lights shined inside the mansion. Specialists poked about in there with white gloves and camera flashes went off regularly. If Pennington was around to supervise, I hadn’t spotted him.
No one coming and going through the ponderous entry paid much attention to the burning stables across the drive, or to the fiercer spectacle of the blazing guest house. Firefighting wasn’t their job. The old home refused to die lying down. Flames shot from the guest house higher than everything, walls and huge portions of roof had fallen in, but the timber infrastructure persisted. For the first time in half a decade the front doors opened wide onto an eerily dark maw framed with tortured combustion.
The party’s just getting started. Come on in.
The police cars and pickup circumnavigated the fountain, which continued to blast frothy plumes sixty feet in the air while surrounded by fire. The spray transformed to sparkling red, blue and orange jewels. Rafferty and others emerged from their vehicles to stop and stare, for the same reason I did.
Whiskey stood under the cascade.
His sides heaved. Muscled flesh showed raw where the glossy coat had burned away. His mane had been shriveled to the roots. But the fierce brown eyes watched me. Fear and fire and the abhorrent reek of alcohol had fallen behind. He’d outrun them. He’d left them on the wrong side of the double fences that hadn’t ever really been able to contain him. He’d known, somehow, the cooling waters would ease his pain, but sharing space with cavorting bronze imitations was beneath him. One of the metal foals had been smashed to pieces and a deadly back hoof now leisurely rapped against the remaining sculpture. Testing. The lead rope stretched in a taut line between his muzzle and a weight beneath the pool’s swirling surface.
“I wouldn’t,” I cautioned when Rafferty started toward the horse.
Whiskey’s ears laid back. He hammered the foal and crushed its blissful bronze face to accentuate my warning. The Lieutenant stopped. This type of bad-ass was beyond his negotiating experience.
I tried a couple experimental steps myself. The horse’s nostrils flared. The ears tipped upright and one turned toward me. All I had going for me were past interactions that hadn’t gotten me killed and a hint of Sandra’s familiar perfume on my face. I quietly reminded him what an ornery son of a bitch he was. He raised that back hoof tight against his body and held it there. His hind quarters rippled with tension.
The gray fingers of JD’s missing hand bobbed to the surface of the pool, on the end of the lead. I wondered if anyone besides me caught the irony of his being the second Donovan who’d died without one arm.
I shuffled closer.
The hoof fired like a sideways pile driver. Bronze clanged dully and the second foal broke from its footing and dented one of the Metro cars in the driveway. Somebody yelled “Jesus Christ!” but Whiskey and I knew his character inclined the opposite direction.
My foot splashed into swirling water. The fountain spray’s relative warmth surprised me. The fact that the gelding in the pool didn’t crush me was a welcome surprise, too. I resisted an urge to pat his blistered shoulder. The wet clasp slithered under my fingers. I fought down a sort of hysteria that had never occurred when dealing with human adversaries. The clasp worked. I let the rope’s weight carry it down the side of my jeans into the water.
“There you go, big boy.” I tried to sound friendly. I tried to sound unafraid.
Whiskey steamed and shifted in the pool. The hoof was up again, almost a dare. I made sure of my footing as I sidestepped to the fountain’s edge and out onto the driveway. He tipped his head toward the falling spray and the burning house, and neighed a deep, riotous challenge.
Rafferty materialized beside me without so much as a crunch of gravel. He
kept his voice respectfully low. “You look like shit. You gonna live?”
“I wasn’t sure a minute ago. I don’t feeling like dropping dead just yet.”
He sounded as happy about that as he sounded about anything, so not very. “You maybe have ideas where everyone is around here?”
I just wanted to find one person in particular. “When Whiskey’s done in the fountain, you can fish a bit of JD out of it. The rest is over the fence. Waldron was inside the stables.”
“The groundskeeper?”
“Yeah. Nick is in the main house.”
“There’s a couple bodies under a piano.”
“He’s one of them.”
“Rico’s here?”
I watched camouflaged field agents with rifles emerge into the glares of headlights from the trees. “Never saw him,” I said.
“And how in the hell did you get in?”
“Tunnels. Up from the bottom of the hill. They’re leftovers from Noah Donovan’s moonshining business. Hillbriar’s full of them.”
“Like the one we found inside that empty shed?”
“Empty?” I wasn’t well enough to stop myself from asking.
“What?”
“Nothing. Yeah. That’s one of the tunnels.”
Empty shed. No car….
The next person to ask about would be Sandra. Rafferty didn’t. Whiskey suddenly finished standing in his extravagant wading pool. He slapped the water and rocked his head up and down like a runaway oil derrick. His whinny was more a lion’s roar than a sound a horse made. Iron hooves attacked the drive and he charged. Rafferty and I threw ourselves out of his path but one Metro officer didn’t react quickly enough and went down; he missed getting his skull flattened by an inch. We twisted to watch Whiskey gallop toward the burning guest house.
.…the burning guest house atop Noah Donovan’s secret tunnels that were now filled with rushing heat and death….
….the burning guest house with the wide open front doors, and Sandra Donovan and a man standing on the porch.