by George Wier
He stepped back almost to the door through which he had come, judged the distance, and threw himself into a dead run.
At the last moment he decided to forget about the plastic chair. It would likely cave in on him. He leapt up, contacted the surface of the table with one foot, at which point the table began to flop forward. He extended his other leg and touched the top of the ledge. The space yawned below him for only an instant and he was onto the roof of the parking garage and going into a roll on the hard concrete.
“Shit,” he breathed.
He ran down the ramp and into the waiting shadows of the garage.
Squire licked at the glass on the passenger side of the car. Thus far the parking garage was deserted. This condition, however, was subject to change without notice.
“Unlock the door for me, will ya?” Shelby asked.
Squire stopped licking and looked up at him.
“Okay. I see how you are. You could use some intensive training.”
Then he remembered. About fifteen years back when he’d bought the damned thing, Rachel had insisted on a remedy for his propensity to lock himself out of the car with the keys in the ignition. He’d purchased a magnetic key holder. But where had he put it?
Shelby laid down on the concrete and began looking and feeling under the car. Inside, Squire yipped away at him.
He heard distant shouting.
“The jig is up,” he said.
At that moment his fingers found it. He pulled the holder loose and tried to get it open as he got up from the concrete. It wouldn’t budge. He scraped it against the top of the car door and the metal matchbox came apart in his hands. The key fell free, a glint of bright silvery metal.
It worked in the door lock and he had Squire in his arms in a moment.
“We’re on foot, doggie,” he said. “They’ll run us down in this hunk of junk.”
He heard distant footsteps pounding the pavement at a run.
He pressed down the door lock and closed the door as quietly as he could. It was no more than a few steps to the ledge of the parking garage.
Shelby looked down into Waller Creek, an old creek bed filled with odd stones, hunks of concrete, a little foliage, and pools of brackish water. The drop was at least twenty feet.
“Here goes nothing,” he said.
Shelby hopped up onto the ledge, tucked Squire tightly against his chest, and dropped feet first into space.
A month after Rachel left him, Jonathan Holloway, the father of Aiden Holloway, came to Shelby’s front door with a loaded gun in his hand.
That day it had been raining. The gutters were full and his front lawn was a veritable sea. He had not seen another being in three weeks other than the local convenience store clerk who sold him his beer.
All Shelby could see was the top of the man’s head through the three panes of glass in the door. Whoever the man was, he was short.
Shelby opened the door.
The man smiled at him for a moment, but when he recognized Shelby, he dropped the smile. A wet paper sack fell from his hand and the gun upwards. Jonathan Holloway had his son’s killer squarely in his sites, at point blank range.
“I’ve tried, Mr. Knight. I’ve tried living with what you did to Aiden. It’s been three years. I can’t do it any longer. I’m going to kill you now.”
Shelby met the man’s gaze. The sadness there was absolute. In this world there are so few absolutes. There are shades of gray, sure. Those are plentiful. They grow and thrive in profusion all around. But an emotion that is pure, refined, untainted by any admixture, any blend of other emotions, is a rare thing. It is like a fire beneath the sea. A precious gem hidden in an acre of sewage, love without longing, or hatred absent defeat.
The gun quivered in Jonathan Holloway’s hand.
“Do it,” Shelby said, quietly. “I’m ready.”
The sad eyes slowly widened in surprise as the rain pattered on his balding pate.
“Don’t wait or you won’t do it,” Shelby added.
The quiver became a quake. The hand shook.
Shelby saw the depth of the man’s sadness. Saw the days, months and years of desperation. He saw the mornings when the man awoke and it took a mere handful of heartbeats before his waking mind reminded him, ‘Your son is dead. You will never see him again. He will never speak to you. He is dead. He will always be dead, now and forever.’
“Please,” Shelby said. “Do it.”
Jonathan Holloway dropped the gun in the rain and ran from Shelby Knight’s front porch. He got in his car and nearly wrecked it in desperate retreat.
Shelby stepped out into the rain and edged the gun off the porch into the standing water beside the house with his foot.
The next day the boxes appeared on Shelby’s front porch. He had no idea what was in them, but he knew where they had come from. They were Aiden Holloway’s possessions. The boy’s father could no longer live in their company.
The boxes sat on Shelby’s front porch for three weeks before he put them in his storage locker not far from downtown. The day he put them away he opened them and found out a great deal about the young man he had gunned down.
Shelby Knight had slain a kindred soul.
CHAPTER FOUR
Rachel Ward stepped out of her car on Congress Avenue, fed the parking meter half a dozen quarters from her purse and walked through the doors of the dress shop. It was her own establishment: the stylish sign out front declared the place to be Rachel’s.
She loved the smell of the place whenever she walked inside. The cool air was welcome after the heat outside from the trailing end of summer.
Since changing her last name back to Ward following her divorce from Shelby, there were few people outside of immediate friends and her mother who still associated her with him. It came as a shock to see one of Shelby’s old police friends at the front counter talking to Leslie. It was Terry Roberts. Terry was no longer in uniform. He did, however, have on tan slacks and a navy blue blazer that revealed his badge clipped next to his belt buckle when he turned toward her. The look on Leslie’s face, behind the counter, was one of anxiety.
Rachel forced herself to smile and walked across the store toward him.
“Rachel,” Terry said. “I was just looking for you. How are you doing?”
“I’m fine, Terry. To what do I owe the pleasure of seeing you again?”
Terry glanced toward Leslie, then back to Rachel again. “Is there somewhere we can talk in private?”
“Certainly. Come back to the office.”
Leslie breathed a sigh of relief. Police always made her nervous. It was probably because she was prone to going out with bad men, who ran up against the police sooner or later.
Terry followed her, and once the door was closed to her small back office, all raw brick walls and rows of almost useless shelves—she needed hanging space for her stock, instead—she offered him a chair which he immediately took.
“Detective Roberts, now, isn’t it? Congratulations.”
“Thank you, Rach.”
Rachel frowned just a tad. She detested the shortened use of her name. Quickly the frown was gone, and she decided to bring the meeting to a point. She suspected something bad was coming, and she hated that feeling. There were far too many bad times in her life, and she was set to make the best with what she had left.
“What’s happened?” she asked.
“Shelby. I’m looking for him.”
She breathed a sigh of relief. He wasn’t dead. He hadn’t taken his life or something. “You’ll probably find him at home. Last I knew, he rarely leaves.”
“He knocked Quinn over the head down at the station, then fled on foot.”
Rachel laughed. “Are we talking about the same Shelby?”
Terry’s face was dead-set in seriousness. “Yeah. We are. I thought he might come here.”
“I don’t know that he’s even aware I have a shop here. I haven’t spoken to him since...since before the divorce.”
“I’m just checking is all.”
“Why would he hit Quinn over the head? I mean, apart from the fact that Quinn is a complete ass?”
Terry Roberts pursed his lips. “I don’t know what kind of history you people share. Oh, I know about you and Shelby, but not where Quinn is concerned. I’m just doing my job. I’ve got to find him and bring him in.”
“When did this happen?”
“About ten minutes ago?”
“No crap?”
“No crap.”
“And he’s on foot, huh? Well, a patrolman is bound to pick him up somewhere between there and home. He’s got nowhere else to go.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“I can’t speak for the last seven years, but I doubt he has any new friends. What’s he supposed to have done to warrant having to hit Quinn over the head and escape?”
“He killed someone.”
Rachel looked at the man before her. It was instantly ludicrous. Shelby should never have been a cop. The idea of him purposefully harming someone, even someone who had it coming, was utter bullshit.
“Who’s he supposed to have killed, huh?”
“Richard Moore.”
Rachel went wooden. She had heard that Richard had been killed two weeks ago, but hadn’t made any connection with Shelby with regard to it in her mind.
“Hah! That’s a lie.”
“His gun, Rach. The ballistics match. He murdered him.”
“Ballistics. Hmph. I don’t care. You don’t know Shelby. I mean, you might think you do. But that was ten years ago when you two were in blues together. He made detective and you didn’t, at the time. I think you hated him then. I think you like seeing him take a fall. Tell you what, Terry. I don’t know where he is, and if I did, I sure as hell wouldn’t tell you. So why don’t you get the fuck out of my office and leave me alone.”
Detective Terry Roberts stood, slowly. As he did, she noticed the gun above his waist along his right side. This action was careful and practiced, designed to show her he was in charge, no matter what she had said.
“There’s no reason for you to treat me like that,” he said, his voice edged with a coolness that belied the situation. “I’ll do you a favor, Rach, and put it down to your reaction to the nature of the news. But from where I’m standing, I’d be nicer to officers of the law if I were you.”
She shoved the papers on her desk away from her. “You know what. You’re right. I should let you hold on to your stupid opinions and just let it go. Fine, Detective Roberts.” She stood. “Please accept my apology.”
“That’s fine,” he said and turned to go.
Before he was out the door, she said, “Detective Roberts, my name is Rachel, not Rach. When you call me that, you’re assuming a familiarity and an intimacy that has never and will never exist. You can call me Ms. Ward.”
“Good day to you, Ms. Ward,” he said, and ducked out. The door closed softly behind him.
Shelby was thinking about Jonathan Holloway as he moved along Waller Creek, attempting, whenever possible, to keep to the deeper shadows and out of the water. The water, though, was unavoidable.
Squire licked at his face.
“This is my pay,” Shelby stated, and got a small yip out of the puppy.
Jonathan Holloway had come close to pulling the trigger all those years ago. Another half an ounce of pressure, maybe, and it would have all been over. Shelby Knight would’ve had no more guilt, no remorse, and no dreams. Just the first painful jolt, then cold oblivion.
Why didn’t you do it, Mr. Holloway? You should have. If it were me, I would have.
Ahead, the creek curved to the east and became narrower. The roar of the Interstate traffic had grown loud. He had to get across it somehow, and into East Austin.
They would be looking for him. Everywhere. First, they would do a room by room check of the police station, then satisfied that he wasn’t there, they would expand their search. Several police officers would be combing the adjacent streets and blocks at the moment, looking for a man fitting his description. Eventually they would search the creek, find the deep imprints in the mud where he had landed, at which point they would send officers down into the creek.
“Where’re going to have to abandon this route,” Shelby said.
Squire didn’t reply.
Shelby very nearly missed the culvert to his left. The black opening was behind an outcropping of rocks and scree out of which grew a small cedar tree. He turned for a moment to check the way behind him. Ahead the creek jagged back to the west.
He looked to the south and to the Seventh Street bridge in time to see a police cruiser passing over it. It disappeared from view.
Had they seen him?
Eventually they would. He was already as good as caught. And the next time there would be no informal discussions across a desk. The next time he would be going to jail, and likely for a long time.
The culvert with its blackness beckoned to him.
“Friend,” Shelby said. “I need a friend.”
And then the visage of Sheppard popped into Shelby Knight’s head.
The martial arts lessons began after the Rooker incident.
Rooker was a street bum, another of Austin’s myriad homeless malcontents. And like many another of the homeless, Rooker had issues.
Among the homeless population are those few who have simply slipped through the cracks in society. By and large they are otherwise ordinary folks much like those who hold down jobs and live in homes or apartments. But one day they hit a string of bad luck that wind them up on the streets with no one to call to extricate them.
Rooker was by no means one of those.
Two segments of the homeless population are the criminals and the insane, and these two overlap such that one is not easily discernable from the other. Rooker was at least marginally insane—taken to walking along talking to himself and occasionally shouting at passersby—and he was at best a petty criminal. He was rumored to be a grafittiest, a trespasser and vandal, and a petty thief. No one ever knew his real name.
Shelby had pulled up alongside Rooker walking down the drag on a Sunday morning after a call from the rector of a church claiming the bum had stove in a plate glass window with a cinder block taken from a nearby construction site.
The attempted arrest had left Shelby moaning and bleeding on the sidewalk. Rooker had pulled some moves on him that Shelby had only ever seen in Bruce Lee movies. The guy had known his martial arts. And a week later, the man was found in an alleyway behind a dumpster. No search was able to pull up his actual identity. There were no records of missing persons matching him anywhere. Rooker’s was an old, cold case.
To look at his face, Rooker had appeared to be in his late forties. But his body was that of a hardened athlete and warrior. He lived on the street. He smelled of the refuse amid which he lived. Within fifteen feet of him the eyes of a passerby began to water.
The day following the discovery of Rooker’s body, Shelby contacted Master Sheppard.
It had been the tiniest yellow page ad, in the smallest possible print. All it said was “Master Sheppard, martial arts” and gave a phone number.
Shelby had tried calling the number half a dozen times before deciding to give up. Then, a few days following his final attempt he received a phone call. The caller simply asked: “What do you want?”
“You called me, Bub. What do you want?”
“You called me a six times, so I repeat, what do you want?”
It took Shelby a few seconds to figure it out.
“Master Something-or-other?”
“Just call me Sheppard.”
“Master Sheppard.”
The guy laughed. “Just Sheppard.”
And that’s how it began.
Shelby’s karate lessons with Master Sheppard Payne were one on one.
Sheppard was a former Vietnam veteran, an Army second lieutenant noncom who had stayed in South Vietnam with his Vietnamese wi
fe and three children following the war.
Sheppard Payne had returned to the States once the children were grown and his wife had no more use for him and his bouts of alcoholism and heroin addiction. There were no AA meetings in South Vietnam and no drug clinics. There was only whatever support he could find within himself and in philosophy and physical activity. And so Sheppard had set out to discipline himself through karate. Over the years he became a fifth degree black belt and decided to open his own do-jo. But still, as all do who have not found a solution to their problem, Sheppard backslid. And when he did, he did so with a vengeance.
Once back in the States he returned to Austin, the town of his birth, purchased a run-down storage facility on the city’s east side on marginal credit and no real hope of payment, and set up his own fledgling karate school. The school had actually never taken off. In those early days Sheppard slept in his small office, lived off the meager income from the place, and worked his ass off to keep the place clean enough to warrant a few storage customers who either didn’t care or were okay enough with the setup to justify the paltry storage rent for their excess junk. Every once in a blue moon, Sheppard would have to break a lock and clear out the junk left behind. It was the nature of the business.
He had been dithering on whether to break into Shelby Knight’s storage locker for months when the mud spattered man and his puppy showed up in his front office.
Oh shit,” Sheppard said.
“Yeah, it’s me,” Shelby replied. “This is Squire.”
“Did you fall in a latrine pit and claw your way out with a spoon?”
“Something like that. You still got my stuff?”
Sheppard looked from Shelby to the dog, from the dog to Shelby, and said, “You’re in trouble, ain’tcha? Running from the law, aint’cha?”
“Something like that. You still got my stuff?”
“You got no decent clothes either, right? And you’re on foot. Where’s your ride?”
“These need washing. So do I. And him. Yeah. On foot. You still got my stuff?”
“What stuff?”
Shelby stared at Sheppard.
“Oh. Huh. That stuff. Are you running off to join a Renaissance group?”