by George Wier
One in the head, one in the heart, one in the gut, Gil reminded himself.
Before he got near the steps leading up the deck, he heard—or maybe he otherwise sensed—something off to his left.
He pivoted and fired. The report was more a lightning-quick sneeze than anything else. Someone cursed and tumbled across the grass twenty feet away.
Gil aimed low and fired again at where he thought the unseen man had landed, but then several things happened at once.
A streak of flame erupted from the darkness, hurting his retinas, followed instantly by a deafening report. A wasp or something stung his left shoulder, but the gun was in his right hand.
“Fuck!” he cursed.
He started to fire again but sensed something behind him.
There’s two of them!
He turned, bringing his gun around in a long arc, but his left side betrayed him and he began to fall backwards.
There was a quick, ringing whistle, as of something passing through the air, and then Gil’s gun tumbled away from him and into a squashed rectangle of light on the grass. Oddly enough, there was a hand wrapped around the butt of it. Thing, the disembodied hand from The Addam’s Family, was trying to steal his gun! Thing twitched and the gun sneezed again, erupting a small gas-flame jet of fire from the silencer end across the grass.
Gil raised his right arm to peer at his hand to compare it to Thing against the light from the French doors, and realized he couldn’t find his hand. Instead, what he found was a spurting stump.
Skillet knew the shit had hit the fan, and he wasn’t about to go charging back there into the dark, gun in hand, and start shooting. If he did, there was an even chance he’d hit his partner, and that simply wouldn’t do.
He started to drive around the block, thought about leaving the area completely, and then realized the Expedition was one of those fancy-dan kind of computer cars that shut the engine down whenever it was farther away than a short distance from the key fob; say, more or less than fifty yards.
He took the corner to the immediate right, one street behind the target’s house, then turned into the driveway at the second house on the right and stopped. He glanced at the dashboard and saw that it was 2:33 in the damned morning, and rubbed his eyes. When he opened them again, he saw that his headlights illuminated not a garage but a seven foot-tall board fence. Above and beyond the fence, he expected to see some big trees, but there weren’t any there.
“Hmph.”
His window was rolled down, so he heard the gunshot. It wasn’t Gil’s gun. Gil’s had a silencer.
“Shit,” Skillet said, and floored the accelerator. The fence parted like so much tissue paper and after a quick rain of tumbling, splintered boards, his eyes picked out a small kiddie pool, half-filled with water and sitting right in his path. There was another board fence beyond.
He hit the kiddie pool and it made a loud squish and a squirt, but the fence was coming up fast. Flooring the accelerator didn’t help any; the accelerator resisted the urge to go through the floor.
Skillet hit the target’s neighbor’s back fence doing forty-three miles per hour.
Shelby watched the disembodied hand as it pulled the trigger on the gun. The gun jerked and turned a flip. Halfway through the flip it fired again straight up into the air, then slammed back down into the grass where it fired once more. After that, it lay still.
Shelby was still reeling from this odd turn of events when the headlights came roaring through the fence at the back of Quinn’s property. The truck—for a moment, he was certain that’s what it was—came on at a full clip directly at him. He tried to moved backwards, but his heel caught on something protruding from the ground and the back of his head thumped hard against the earth. The sword flew from his hand.
The driver must have slammed on the brakes, because the truck came to a stop ten feet away.
Shelby was momentarily addled. His vision doubled, then doubled again and it was as if he swam in the dark waters of a lake somewhere. All he could see were strange lights, and all he could hear was the voice saying, “Gil! Gil!” But Shelby had no gills with which to breathe in these eerie waters. He sank back to the ground and waited for the spinning sensation to cease.
Billy Strongbow had been hit, and it hurt like the dickens, but he felt for the wetness of blood along his ribs on the left side of his chest but could find none.
He lay with his back to the fence, moaning, and watched as the gun with the hand wrapped around it flopped like fish on a riverbank. Then the big SUV came through the back fence. Billy tried to get up, but a lance of pain assailed him and he gave up. He raised his gun with his right hand, but even that action brought a spasm of pain.
Cracked rib or ribs, he thought. Where’s the bullet?
He would later find it in his inner jacket pocket, where it had entered, struck his badge and flattened like a griddlecake, then dropped down into his pocket, a souvenir from the night, if he wanted to keep it.
Billy watched the man get out of the SUV and go to retrieve his partner, who was sitting with his back to a tree in the bright headlights, holding the stump that was his right wrist with his left hand, squeezing hard to make the blood stop spurting.
“Gil! Gil!” the black man said, then looked from Gil to the gun with the body-less hand still wrapped around it. “Shit,” the black man said, then bent and helped Gil to his feet. He led him to the passenger side of the SUV and stuffed him inside.
“My hand,” Gil said. “Get it.”
“Yeah,” the black man said and closed the door on his friend.
He retrieved the appendage and pried it loose from the gun, which fell back to the grass and laid there. The black man returned to the SUV, got inside, backed up, then turned a circle in the back yard, sheering off the driver’s side view mirror on a narrow tree trunk.
For an instant the headlights revealed Shelby, struggling to get to his feet.
“Damn,” Billy breathed, and began to use the fence behind him to inch his way up to where he could stand.
The French doors came open and Quinn Thompson stepped onto the back porch, and fired three rounds at the fleeing SUV before it could exit through the wide new hole it had made in the fence. Safety glass shattered at the rear of the SUV, but it was gone in a roar from the engines.
“Shit,” Quinn Thompson said.
“Some help here?” Billy called.
CHAPTER TWENTY
At the same moment that Gil was watching his disembodied hand fire his gun into the ground, Rachel Ward called her mother on her cell phone from Sheppard Payne’s desk in his office. The coffee pot was on, and Rachel was determined at some point to take a cup of hot coffee out to the FBI Agent sitting in the black car outside.
“Hello, Princess,” Lily Ward said.
“I’m not a princess, momma. Did Sully go into my house yesterday?”
“He did. He was protecting you and he got himself shot for his troubles.”
“Oh no. Is he...is he all right?”
“You were about to ask me if he was dead. No, he’s very much alive. In fact...” Lily Ward had apparently put her hand over the phone and was talking to someone. Rachel suspected it was Sully. She made out the muffled words, I so am going to tell her, and then she was back on. “There’s a bit of news.”
“You are so going to tell me what?”
“Sully and I are engaged.”
“When did this happen?” Rachel asked.
“Right after I was finished doctoring his foot. That’s where he got shot. You see, his foot was against my crotch, and—”
“Oh, no Mom. I don’t want to hear this.”
“—well I guess it stirred up some old feelings I thought were long gone. Anyway, he’s sleeping with me now. I just wanted you to know.”
“Mom!”
“Oh, don’t worry. He’s injured, so I had to be the one on top.”
“I do not want to hear this.”
Lily laughed. “What’s so s
hocking? Young people have sex, middle-aged people have sex; so why can’t old people have sex too?”
“I don’t want to hear about you having sex, of any kind. Next thing you know you’ll be trying to tell me about technique, and I don’t—”
“Oh, technique. Let me tell you something honey, you don’t need technique when you’ve got a package that—”
“No! Stop! Mom, look. Shelby’s back. He left with an FBI Agent to go help Quinn Thompson. Someone is trying to kill us all.”
“Oh dear. Yes, I know someone’s after you. That’s why I sent Sully. But Sully said you left with the FBI fellow, so I figured you were safe. Sully was injured and needed my...loving touch.” Rachel’s mother let out a giggle and then said aside from the phone, “Stop it!” But it was clear what the situation was.
“Mom, are you in bed right now with him?”
“Of course I am. It’s after three o’clock in the morning.”
“Maybe I should talk to you later.”
“Princess, we’re going to get all this stuff sorted out in the morning. Sully and I are both coming over there.”
“But you don’t know where I am.”
“Of course I do. The last time you were here and you had Sully fix your phone, he put something on there that allows him to figure out where you are. He said it doesn’t always work, like when you’re not in a hot spot—whatever that means—but about an hour ago we were able to get a fix on you. What are you doing in a storage yard on the East Side? That’s not a good place for my little girl.”
“It’s a long story, but the short version is that this is where Shelby has been staying while he’s been dodging the police.”
“And now he’s rescuing Quinn. I’m sure I don’t understand. Honey, it’s late. Let’s talk about it in the morning. We’ll be there about eight o’clock. Then we’ll go get some pancakes or something.”
“Okay, mom. Tell Sully thank you.”
“You should be thanking me. I was the one who sent him.”
“Thank you, mom.”
“Mighty fine,” Lily said, and hung up.
Rachel sat in the silence of the office. After a moment she had the feeling she was being watched. She looked behind her toward the rest of the office and the doorway to the do-jo, but there was no one. The feeling persisted. She looked down and saw the doleful eyes of Squire looking up at her.
“There’s that cute doggie! Come on, puppy. We’re going back to bed.”
“Got to get you to the hospital,” Skillet said. He was driving seventy in a residential area.
“No...hospital. Take me to...Luza’s.”
“Is that a pizza place? Better keep that rag tight around the wrist. It’s still bleeding a lot.”
“Not...pizza place.” Gil said. He called up the address in his fuzzing, hit-and-miss memory and managed to mouth the words.
“What was that?” Skillet asked.
“I said three two...one...one...Pleasant...Valley.”
“Got it. You ain’t gonna faint, are ya? Put your head down and put your...wrist up high.”
Gil did his best to comply, but the purple spots over his vision had gone so far as to intrude over the blackness of night. He did his best to comply, however.
“Pleasant Valley is the other side of Austin.”
“You...better hurry...then,” Gil managed, then collapsed against the passenger window.
“Ohh Lordy,” Skillet said to himself, and stomped on the accelerator.
He turned off of 2244 on to the Mopac Expressway and headed south. He would turn east on Highway 71 and come up to Luza’s—whatever the hell Luza’s was—from the south, thereby shaving minutes off by going completely around downtown Austin.
It was weird driving along with Gil’s armless hand tucked under his armpit, but he’d seen in a movie once that it was important to keep the appendage body temperature if there was to be any hope of re-attaching it. Still, it was unsettling. For the first time, Skillet began to have doubts about his partner. In all likelihood, the time was soon to come when he would have to ditch him. But Gil apparently wasn’t much on people ditching him and leaving him high and dry. Those who did didn’t seem to live very long.
“Hmph,” he said aloud, then to himself, out of fear that Gil might hear him, he thought, I may have to kill you, Gil. It’ll be all right. I promise I’ll make it quick.
Skillet sighed, and settled in for the drive.
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t put you under arrest,” Quinn Thompson said to Shelby, leaving off the fact that he knew the true identity of the man wearing the chainmail and the black cape, and what that identity was. They stood in his kitchen. Three other policemen were there and were done taking down statements from Detective Quinn, FBI Agent Strongbow, and Danel Artola, the White Knight.
“Well, the fact that we came to your aid, and possibly saved your life, should mitigate matters some,” Shelby said.
“What do you say we let these officers get back to their duties so we can talk in private?” Billy winced from the effort of speaking. He was seated at Quinn’s kitchen table. An EMT had applied several turns of tape around his chest. There was no doubt he had a cracked rib and should be in the hospital.
When the officers left, Quinn watched as Shelby sat down at the table next to Strongbow.
“You’ve totally changed your appearance,” Quinn said.
“I was running from you.”
“I have to believe that you were guilty of the murder of Rick Moore. The ballistics match your gun, Shel. It was either you or it was an accomplice.”
Strongbow started to explain, but Shelby held up his hand and said to Qunn, “Take it easy for a bit, will you? It probably hurts to breathe, much less talk.”
Stronbow clenched his teeth and nodded.
“Okay,” Shelby said. He looked up at Quinn, who stood with his hands on his hips. His shotgun leaned against the back of an easy chair, five feet away. “For the last time, I didn’t kill Moore. When we got your call, we came running. It seems to me within the realm of the possible, that whoever is threatening you was the same person who gave you my gun to return to me ten years ago.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“After I killed Holloway. Procedure. Anytime there’s a police shooting, the same process applies as in a regular investigation. You run the ballistics to match the bullets to the gun. In this instance, you had to know for sure that the gun that killed Holloway was my gun. You discovered it was.”
“Of course it was. You admitted to that much when it happened. It was a terrible accident, Shel, and you’ve been killing yourself over it ever since.”
“I know. I know. But after, that’s what I’m talking about. After the investigation was over and you returned the gun to me, someone had to have put it in your hand to do it. Who was that, I wonder?”
Quinn Thompson raised his eyebrows and shook his head. “Hell, I don’t know. That was ten years ago.”
“I know. Time does funny things, doesn’t it? But for me, it’s all right now. Ten years is this moment. I’m going to say a name and see if it jogs your memory any. There was a new, upstart detective back then, who was bucking to make a name for himself. He was all over the whole Moore drug-running investigation—”
“Terry.”
Shelby nodded.
“Yeah. He gave me the gun!” Quinn jabbed a finger at Shelby. Then he frowned. “But so what? What does that mean?”
“It means that the gun he gave you wasn’t my gun. It was another gun. Same make and model. But like Agent Strongbow says, no one—not even you—pauses to memorize their serial numbers. He gave you a second weapon to give to me, which I thought was mine, then he kept mine in case he needed it for the future.”
“Why would he need it for the future...”
“Yes?” Billy said. “You’re having a moment there, aren’t you?”
“Shut up. Let me think a minute. So ten years ago, Detective Roberts giv
es me the gun you used to shoot the Holloway kid to return to you after the investigation—which I do seem to recall doing—only it’s not your gun. Then he waits ten years and uses it to kill Moore. But why? Why would he do such a thing? Nobody’s got that kind of look-ahead. Not even me.”
“Roberts does,” Billy raised up and spoke quietly. “There has to be a tie to two things: one, the Holloway shooting, and two, the Moore murder. Say that he hired someone to take out Moore, but he gives him Shelby’s gun that he’s been keeping all these years.”
“But Shelby’s gun—I mean, the gun that killed Moore—is in evidence lockup.”
“By now he’s switched them back,” Shelby said. “Whoever he had kill Moore brought the gun back to him. Later, he substituted it for the gun he gave to you ten years ago to give to me in lieu of my actual gun. See, he did the reverse of what he did ten years ago when he gave you a stand-in weapon for mine. Tell me, when you got the warrant to take my gun from the house to run the checks all over again, who did you hand the gun off to?”
“Shit. Terry. He’s the one that implied he was going to kill me tonight.”
“Bad juju,” Billy said. “He has to have a reason.”
Quinn turned and walked into the kitchen. There was the sound of glasses and liquid pouring. He brought two glasses to the table and placed one in front of each of the two men. “Drink. It’s scotch. It’ll help.”
“So what do we do now?” Shelby asked.
“While the paramedic was taping up your friend here and while another one was interviewing you, I walked outside and was given the news that Detective Roberts just resigned from the Austin Police Department.”
“Was this before or after the attack here tonight?”
“I don’t know. Probably after. Which means that it was his plan that if I died tonight, he was to become the Chief Detective, and he could run damage control from inside. But if I lived through the night, he would be...leaving the force. He must have had his ear glued to the police radio and heard I was still alive.”