by George Wier
The garage was clean, the way he always kept it. He rarely ventured into the garage anymore. It wasn’t part of his normal life, and it decidedly wasn’t part of his habit to park in his garage, but a singular moment this night had changed that. It was when he was sitting in his safe and secure office on the third floor of the police station talking to Terry Roberts on the phone. Roberts had somehow been watching him, had implied that taking Quinn’s life would be a simple matter.
Half expecting a bullet to enter his car and kill him right there in his own driveway, Quinn Thompson eased up on his brake and let his car roll slowly into the garage. The second he cleared the door, he tapped the button again and the door trundled back down into place.
Quinn sat in silence and breathed.
“I shouldn’t have let him use her to get to Moore, no matter how important it was supposed to be,” he whispered to himself.
“So what are you going to do about it?” he asked himself. He had yet to open his car door or otherwise go through the motions of killing the engine and getting out. If he let the car run long enough, the carbon monoxide buildup from his exhaust would begin to backflow in through his air conditioning vents, and he would die slowly.
“I’m going to call Strongbow. Then I’m going to resign. That’s what I’m going to do.”
“Then Roberts wins,” the questioning, reasoning side of himself answered.
“Roberts used to say you were incapable of thinking in terms of futures. Why don’t you start doing that.”
“But how?”
“Insurance,” Quinn said to himself, quietly. “Get a message to someone and instruct them to deliver it to the media if something should happen to you. Implicate Roberts. Confess your sins, and include enough essential information and evidence that will bring him down if he does kill you.”
“Good. That’s capital thinking. But who to send it to? You don’t have any real friends. You’ve lost Shelby. He was your only friend. Shelby. Where are you? I need your help. You would know what to do. If you’re good enough to hide from me, you’re damned good enough to help me out of this. Okay. You’d better think. Go in the house, get something to eat, sit down at your home computer and get your ass to work. Don’t leave the house until you’ve got it figured out. If you have to, call in sick to work tomorrow. They don’t like you there anyway. You really should seriously consider retirement. You’re already vested. Okay. Good.”
A decision having been reached, Quinn killed the motor and opened the car door. He paused for a moment and soaked in the silence, before letting himself into the house. He drew his sidearm, clicked off the safety and walked through the house slowly, listening, turning on the lights and making sure the windows and outside doors were secure as he moved along.
When he was satisfied he was relatively safe, he flipped on his rarely-used security system, flipped the safety back on his gun and holstered it.
Quinn Thompson sat down at his computer, turned it on, and got to work.
“Phone,” Skillet said.
“I hear it. While I answer this, don’t say a fucking word.”
Skillet made a zipping gesture over his mouth.
“Hello?” Gil answered.
Skillet listened to half of the conversation.
“Yes. I’m available. When?”
“Now is fine. Name?”
“Okay. Address?”
Gil repeated it back as if he were writing it down. He made motions to Skillet to grab the pad and pen on the coffee table and start writing, and Skillet was quick to comply.
Skillet held up the paper for Gil to see. Gil nodded.
“Got it,” he said into the phone. “Special instructions?”
There was a long pause while Gil listened.
“No shit?” he said.
Apparently there was no shit.
“Okay. Double the usual fee. Is that okay?”
Apparently it was.
“Okay. Leaving now to handle this. It may take awhile. Deadline?”
Gil listened to the deadline.
“Okay. Consider it done.”
He hung up.
“What gives?” Skillet asked.
“Different employer. I don’t like working for this guy. He’s an asshole, but he pays well.”
“What’s the job?”
“You won’t believe it when I tell you,” Gil said.
“I believe everything you say.”
“I know you do. You hardly every question me, which is why I keep you around. This is the same employer who got us to take out the Moore guy.”
“I remember. He gave you the gun and everything. Then you had to give it back.”
“Yeah. I didn’t like that, but he paid for it.”
“So who’s the target?” Skillet asked.
“It’s a cop.”
Shelby stepped outside with Billy Strongbow into the dark night. He didn’t bother turning the outside light on. The two men looked up through the branchwork of the two live oak trees overhanging the gravel parking lot to see the stars.
“How late is it, do you think?” Shelby asked.
“You learn to stop looking at your watch in this line of work,” Billy said.
“You didn’t tell me your plan. About tomorrow.”
“I don’t have a plan. That’s the beauty of it.”
Shelby grunted.
At that moment Billy’s phone tweedled. He removed it from his shirt pocket. “Ha,” he said. “It’s your best friend.”
“Quinn.”
“Yeah. I’ll take the call. See what he has to say.”
“Uh huh.”
“Strongbow,” Billy said.
Shelby waited.
“Hold on a minute, Lieutenant. I’ll need you to repeat that. I’ve got an associate here with me, and he’ll need to hear this too.” Billy held the phone down in front of him and switched it to speaker phone. “Okay, say again?”
“I think my life is in danger. There’s no one I can trust. Tonight I had someone imply they could shoot me through my office window while they were talking to me.”
“Do you know who it is?”
“Of course I know who it is,” Quinn said. “Have you found Shelby?”
“I’m not looking for Shelby. You’re the one looking for him. I’m looking for the person who killed Richard Moore.”
“That would be Shelby,” Quinn said.
“No, it wouldn’t. Do you want my help or not?”
“I’m not sure I want your help. But...I think I need Shelby’s.”
Billy tried to read Shelby’s face in the scant light cast by a distant streetlamp, and all he caught was a nod.
“Okay,” Billy said. “Where are you?”
“At home.”
“What’s your address?”
“It hasn’t changed,” Quinn said. “Shel knows where I live.”
“If this is some kind of trick, Lieutenant, I’m going to be sorely pissed.”
“It’s no trick. I may already be a dead man.”
Shelby stepped forward and looked down at the phone. “Quinn,” he said. “We’re coming.”
Shelby hurriedly re-entered the office. He snatched up the office phone and called Sheppard, and told him he and Billy had to leave, and that he needed to come right away and stay with Rachel and Squire.
In the meantime, Billy summoned an agent from down the street by phone and had him pull into the lot and back his car in where he could watch the front door.
Inside the do-jo, Shelby hurriedly explained to Rachel that he had to go. He began donning his chainmail armor.
“This sounds serious,” she said. “Why do you have to leave?”
“Because I have to. Sheppard is on his way, and Billy has two FBI agents outside. One parked right near the front door, and another halfway down the block. You’ll be fine until I get back.”
“But it’s two o’clock in the morning!”
“Yes. It is.”
The chainmail slid over S
helby’s muscled form. He began pulling on his boots.
“Dammit,” Rachel said. “At least let me help you.”
“Okay. Grab the breastplate. I shouldn’t need more than that. It’s got catches on the sides and at the shoulders.”
“It sounds like this is going to be dangerous. You’ll stick out like a sore thumb.” Rachel’s eyes took in the whole room. She noticed the black canvas covering the rear windows of the place and ran over to them. She pulled at one of them and the long cloth came down with a ripping sound.
“What are you doing?” Shelby asked.
“You may need the cover of darkness.” Rachel stood in front of Shelby with the cloth out to the side. She gave it a hard flap in the air, and before it could come back down, she slid it around Shelby’s shoulders and tucked it into the top of his chainmail around the back of his neck, forming a cape. She pulled the straps together over the cloth on one side and fastened it, then the other side.
“You’re changing my costume,” Shelby said.
“So are you. It’s nighttime,” she said. “And maybe at night, you need to be the Black Knight.”
“Yes. This night I may,” Shelby replied.
Rachel kissed him lightly.
“Come on!” Billy called from the doorway. “You two can do that later.”
“Helmet?” Rachel asked, and held it out to Shelby.
“No time.”
“Shield?” she asked.
“Just the sword.”
She belted the sword around him quickly.
“Oh for crying out loud,” Billy said. “I’ll be in the car. Maybe you’d better hurry.”
When Billy was gone, Shelby turned to follow after him.
“Shel,” Rachel said.
He stopped and turned. “What?”
“You need a haircut.”
He laughed. “And?”
“Be careful.”
“Me? Careful? Never.”
“I know,” Rachel said, but Shelby was already out the door.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Shit,” Skillet said. “Every light in the house is on.”
“Shut up,” Gil said. “That’s a shit-kicker song. Now I’ll have it going through my head.”
“Huh?”
“The damned song. Tell you what. I’m gonna get out and walk around the outside. If I can shoot the son of a bitch through a window, maybe we won’t have to even go inside. Anybody comes along, cover me.”
“What’s that mean, cover you?”
“It means do whatever you have to do, but make sure I come back. Alive.”
“Oh. Sure, boss.” Skillet leaned forward, pulled the pistol out of the back of his belt and checked the load.
“Why’re you checking the load. I saw you check it before you left.”
“I dunno. In case I screwed something up when I checked it before.”
Gil thought about that for a moment, then nodded. He got out of the car and walked two houses down and regarded the subject’s house from beneath the draping limbs of a willow that had not yet shed its leaves. The night was cool and dry.
After a minute of standing there in silence, Gil seemed to float across the wide residential Tarrytown street like a wraith.
Skillet rubbed his head. “Oh Laws. I don’t like this here much,” he whispered to himself.
Gil was gone two full minutes when Skillet noticed headlights coming. He hunkered down in the passenger seat and waited for the car to pass. He was peeking over the dashboard as it slowed to a stop in front of the house. A man got out of the driver’s seat. Another figure he couldn’t see well got out on the opposite side, a black robe furled around him.
As the two moved up the front walkway, the black robe billowed back. It looked like a cape of some kind. “This ain’t Halloween, is it?” Skillet whispered. “No. I don’t think it is.”
Skillet then did what Skillet always did best. He sat and waited for what was to come.
Halfway up the front walkway, Billy Strongbow’s cell phone rang. He looked down at it. “Quinn,” he said.
“You’d better take it,” Shelby replied.
“Strongbow,” he said into the phone. “We’re on your front walkway.”
“Then you should know that there’s someone besides you outside. Around back, I think, or he was a few seconds ago.”
“Are you armed?” Billy whispered.
“You’re damned right I am,” Quinn whispered back, desperation in his voice.
“Where are you?”
“In the garage, waiting to blast whoever comes through from the house with a twelve gauge.”
“Okay. We’re going around back and see if we can catch this guy. Don’t shoot us.”
“Is Shelby with you?” Quinn asked.
“Yeah.” Billy hung up. “Quinn’s in the garage with a shotgun. He says there’s someone in the back yard,” he whispered to Shelby. “I’ll take the right, you take the left. Meet up in the middle. Don’t kill anyone unless you have to.”
Shelby nodded.
“Did you bring the gun I gave you?”
Shelby shook his head. “Left it with Rachel. She might need it. I’ve got this.” Shelby removed his sword from the scabbard and it rang.
“All right.”
Shelby turned and moved off toward the south side of the house.
The lights from the windows illuminated bare patches of grass with diffuse orange light as Shelby moved along. This also had the effect of making the shadows darker. Quinn had a great deal of foliage around his home—banana trees with their broad, three and four-foot long leaves, dozens of olive and citrus trees. Shelby moved around the patches of light and kept to the shadow. After a moment he came to the side gate and found it already open by mere inches. There were no lights coming from windows along this side of Quinn’s limestone block home.
The fellow stalking Quinn had come this direction. Shelby would have to use stealth.
The chainmail weighed on him, but it wasn’t nearly as heavy as the bulk of the sixteen-gauge steel plate mail he wore walking the streets of downtown Austin. Also, and most importantly, the chainmail was silent. Maybe it would stop a bullet. Maybe.
As he stepped slowly into the side yard, Shelby’s senses seemed to combine and extend outward ahead of him in a moving cone. The human body has only five senses—or so it is taught by those egotistical enough to so pontificate—but in actual, living circumstances, those senses combine into so much more, giving a heightened awareness of things like sense of gravity, of joint position, of body salinity, of external temperature, and on seemingly ad infinitum. If the body were merely a simple robot form, complete with cameras in the place of eyes, microphones for ears, and even simulated olfactory sensors for the nose—taking in air and sampling its chemical composition and reporting all the data back to some sophisticated computer program that could make some sort of sense of all of it—it wouldn’t be one millionth the hypersensitivity of the human body and mind under stress. The air over the fine hairs of the neck, hands and face feed one of the body’s most acute sense organs—the skin. The sinuses take in a hundred or perhaps a thousand scents and the mind sorts them, tags them based upon experience and setting, and flags those that are anomalous, or even questionable. An accumulation of such flags from any one sense or combination of senses acts much like a mental semaphore, spelling out D-A-N-G-E-R in larger-than-life mental letters. All by way of saying that Shelby Knight sensed the presence in Quinn Thompson’s back yard the moment he entered the side gate.
Shelby heard a car start up behind him and across the street somewhere. Maybe it was a neighbor, deciding to make a late night run to the local convenience store. The driver gunned the engine and it passed behind him, fifty feet away and through a miniature forest of bushes and trees. There was the slightest whine as the vehicle took a corner off to his left and shot away. He turned his focus back to the presence in the darkness ahead, and stepped slowly along the side of the house.
The
garage was on the other side of the house. He could see Quinn in there in the dark in his mind’s eye, his shotgun loaded and held ready, his palms damp and his forehead beaded with sweat. Quinn was no longer the spring chicken. He was getting close to retirement. A little too much excitement could stop the man’s heart. Maybe the powers-that-be were all too well aware of the fact, and so had nudged him over to the desk-bound, administrative side of police work while the younger bodies took on the more tense, adrenaline-pumping, vapor-fueled moments. Moments, in fact, such as he was living through at the moment.
And how was Billy Strongbow making out? Was there even a gate on that side of the house? He would likely find out soon enough, one way or the other.
Shelby moved around the corner of the house and into the back yard.
Gil hovered behind a large tree in the back yard. He had no idea what kind of tree it was. The back porch light was off, and he could see into the kitchen and the back bedroom. The target had shown himself briefly, but before Gil could get off a shot, he disappeared again and stayed gone. There wasn’t much for it but to wait.
He heard the slam of a car door, but couldn’t tell which direction it came from. It could have been from a neighbor’s house around the block, or from directly in front of the one he was standing behind. For some reason, the son of a bitch target liked a lot of plants. While a few here and there was generally good for stealthy work, the place was a jungle.
Gil waited another two minutes.
Fuck this, he said to himself, stepped out from behind the tree and approached the French doors, which spilled ever-lengthening, and in the same instance, ever-dimming rhomboids of yellow interior light across the concrete back porch and the uncovered wooden deck. He was going to have to walk up on that deck and test the back door. But he knew it was locked. If nothing else, he could take a peek from a side angle at the door handle inside and get an idea of whether or not he could easily unlock it after stoving in one of the little windows with the butt of his gun. Then he could go inside, find the target, shoot the son of a bitch, exit the front door and be in the Expedition and away. The whole thing should take less than a minute.