Crosshairs

by Harry Hunsicker

  Nolan spoke first. “I am so confused.”

  “What’s your name?” I said to the man.

  “It doesn’t matter.” His voice was deadpan. The muzzle of the gun never wavered from my face. “The name on my birth certificate died on the battlefield.”

  “Mr. Nazari?” Nolan said.

  “I think I’ll shoot you first.” The man’s tone was the same, but the way his shoulders hunched forward betrayed a certain amount of anger I knew I couldn’t begin to fathom.

  “During an oil field fire, right?” I nodded slowly.

  “His name is Captain Josh Pendergast, United States Army.” Anita crossed her arms. “Missing, presumed dead during a classified mission somewhere in the Middle East in 1999.”

  “Are you gonna shoot me, Captain Josh Pendergast?” I nodded at the gun.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Who do you work for?” I said.

  N

  He put a round into the wall between my head and Nolan’s.

  She flinched. “No more questions for the crazy dude, okay, Hank?”

  “Ooo-kay.” My voice cracked.

  “Why would they not tell me you were alive?” Anita said. “Why would you not tell me?”

  “It was better that way, don’t you think?” Pendergast took several deep breaths. His color was bad, pasty, almost the hue of a corpse. “Avoid what surely would have been a messy divorce.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Anita must have noticed it, too. “Are you ill?”

  Pendergast turned the pistol toward his wife.

  “Enough with the melodramatics. Put the gun down, Josh.” Anita smirked, her tone light and cheery but in a condescending and belittling way. “You always were a weak man.”

  “Do you have any idea what an insufferable bitch you are?” He gripped the pistol tighter, knuckles going white.

  “Oh, come now.” Anita smiled. “You’re like all men. You need someone to tell you what to do, where to do it.”

  “Heya, doctor lady,” Nolan said. “Let’s not get the whack-job more aggro, okay?”

  “I want to kill you now.” Pendergast put his free hand on the back of a bar stool and leaned on it for support.

  “You don’t have the balls to murder the mother of your child,” Anita said.

  “How is Mira?” He smiled for a moment.

  “She has asthma.” Anita smirked. “But no father.”

  “I’ve dreamed of this moment.” His knuckles were white against the grip.

  “Then do it. Shoot me.” She tapped her chest with one finger. “Go ahead.”

  “No.” He stuck the pistol in his belt. “I won’t go against my orders.”

  “Huh?” I looked at Anita and then at Pendergast.

  “Your research is important.” Pendergast knelt beside Jordan’s corpse and patted his pockets, removing a key ring. “The truth must come out.”

  “Oh, Josh.” Anita’s shoulders slumped, her eyes cast downward.

  “The truth about what?” I said.

  “Look at me.” Pendergast stood, the keys jangling at his side. “Look at what has happened to me.”

  His coloring had changed, face now mottled the color of old maraschino cherries, slick with sweat. His breath rattled in his chest like marbles in a can.

  “If the world finds out about the chemicals, it won’t fix you,” she said. Her tone almost sounded like she cared.

  “Nothing can help me.” He leaned against the counter. “But there are others …” He dropped the keys and slid to the floor.

  “Pendergast?” I leaned forward. “You okay?”

  “Josh?” Anita came around the counter. She knelt by her husband, placed a finger on his carotid artery.

  “The keys.” I nodded my head toward where they lay.

  “What?” Anita appeared confused.

  “Unlock the cuffs.”

  She grabbed the key ring and rifled through them, stopping at the smallest one. “Is this it?”

  “Never know until you try.” I stood up awkwardly and turned my back to her.

  She fumbled with the ring, but after a few tries she got the key in place and unlocked the cuffs. I freed Nolan as Pendergast shook his head several times and pushed himself to his feet.

  “What happened?” he said.

  “You checked out for a second.” I stuck the cuffs in my pocket along with Jordan’s keys.

  The four of us turned at the sound of the front doorbell ringing.

  “Wonder if that’s the pizza I ordered,” Nolan said.

  Pendergast pulled the Ruger from his belt, but the movement caused him to lose his balance and he almost fell over, steadying himself on the counter.

  The front door creaked open and then slammed shut. Lumbering footfalls marched toward the kitchen.

  Tom Maguire, Anita’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, walked in. He looked at Pendergast and at me and gulped. “W-w-what the heck is going on here?”

  “Who are you?” Nolan put her hands on her hips, an incredulous look on her face. “And would someone lock the fucking door?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” Anita rolled her eyes. “Tom, why are you here?”

  “This is Tom.” I sighed and relaxed. “Anita’s boyfriend.”

  Tom frowned and looked at Pendergast, now slumped on a bar stool.

  “Let me see if I got this straight.” Nolan pushed herself away from the counter and turned to Anita. “By my count, you’ve slept with a hundred percent of the men in the room right now. Rock on, sister.”

  “We did not have sex,” I said. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

  “Anita, what are they talking about?” Tom’s brow furrowed, trying to figure it all out. “Ohmigod! What the heck is that?” He bounced from one foot to the other, pointing to the corpse of the man who called himself John Jordan.

  “That, Tom, is a dead body.” I rubbed my eyes, suddenly tired beyond words.

  “Oh, jeez.” His faced blanched, eyes wide as golf balls. “We gotta call the police.” He pulled a cell phone out.

  “No.” Anita, Nolan, and I spoke at the same time.

  Tom froze, the phone in one hand, staring at Anita.

  “I know this is difficult for one who has spent his life in the safety of the corporate world, peddling pharmaceuticals to indifferent physicians such as myself.” Anita’s tone was icy. “But there are times when the police aren’t welcome.”

  Josh Pendergast sat up on the bar stool. Blinked. Looked at Tom.

  A chill ran down my spine, and I didn’t know why.

  “Where’s Mira?” Tom’s voice was quieter now.

  “Upstairs.” Anita looked at her ex-husband when she spoke.

  “You’re a drug rep?” Information clicked in my head, but it still made no sense. “Who do you work for?”

  Tom smiled once and squared his shoulders, the bumbling jock persona melting away like a dab of ice cream on hot asphalt.

  “Fortunary, right?” I measured the distance from where I stood to the Ruger tucked in the back of Josh Pendergast’s belt.

  Tom didn’t reply. Instead he pulled a Glock from behind his hip and pointed it at Anita Nazari.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  I tensed and reached for the gun on my hip that I no longer carried. Nolan took a deep, loud breath. Anita was as still as a stop sign, a look of utter and total incredulity on her face.

  “Mama?” Mira’s voice sounded sleepy.

  Everyone in the room turned to the back stairs, where Anita’s daughter stood in a bathrobe. After that, everything happened at once.

  Josh Pendergast pushed himself off the bar stool, his head connecting with Tom Maguire’s stomach. Nolan grabbed Anita and pushed her toward the door. I lunged for the stairs and Mira.

  Sounds of scuffling from the counter. A shot rang out.

  I scooped up Mira. Kicked open the back door. Dashed into the yard, running past the pool. I was vaguely aware of footsteps behind me, hoping they belonged to Nola
n.

  The back gate wouldn’t open, despite my repeated latching and unlatching of the locking mechanism.

  “Crap.” I kicked it.

  Nothing.

  I hit it with my free hand. Again, nothing.

  Another shot sounded from the interior of the house.

  Anita pushed me to one side and reached to the top of the wooden gate. The barrier swung open, and the three adults and one child soon found ourselves in the alley behind Anita’s suburban house.

  “Now what?” Nolan said.

  The sound of breaking glass came from the house.

  “We get in the Escalade and get the hell out of here.” I headed toward the end of the alley, still carrying Mira, Nolan following.

  “Wait.” Anita hadn’t moved. “What about Josh?”

  “Doctor lady.” Nolan turned around and marched back to where Anita stood. “You have officially crossed the line from being merely annoying to constituting a danger to the rest of us, including your child.”

  “He’s hurt,” Anita said.

  Nolan grabbed her arm and pulled. “Let’s go.”

  A few moments later, we rounded the corner onto the side street running perpendicular to Anita’s block.

  “Hang back for a moment.” I put Mira on the ground and pointed to a line of shrubs by the alley entrance.

  Anita grabbed her child and pressed the youngster’s body to her own.

  “We really should have stopped for guns,” Nolan said.

  I crept across the lawn and pressed myself to the side of the house. The Escalade was where we’d left it, parked behind Anita’s Range Rover. No one was visible.

  I touched the keys in my pocket and eased myself away from the house, preparing to dash for the Cadillac. I froze when the front door of the house opened and a swath of light painted a section of the front lawn.

  Tom Maguire’s bulky frame staggered out, plodding down the sidewalk. His gait was wobbly, one sleeve of his suit coat torn away, revealing a shoulder covered in a white dress shirt. He held a pistol in each hand, the one in his right appearing to be the Ruger carried by Pendergast.

  He walked to the cars parked by the curb. When he got to the Cadillac he fired two silenced shots into the radiator, then repeated the action on the Range Rover. Then he turned toward the corner of the house where I was hiding and staggered toward me.

  I slipped away and ran back to where I’d left Nolan with Anita and her child, about thirty yards away.

  “We got problems.” I kept my voice low.

  No answer.

  “Nolan?” I squinted in the darkness, the streetlight on the far corner doing little to pierce the night.

  Groan.

  I rummaged through the bushes. My former partner was lying in a heap between two holly trees, barely visible even when I was only inches away.

  “Nolan?” I knelt beside her. “Are you okay?”

  “Uggh.”

  “What happened?” I cradled her head.

  She blinked several times. Rolled over onto her hands and knees and shook her head several times. “The doctor packs a mean right hook.”

  “She decked you?”

  “Yep.” Nolan stood up. “Must have taken off with the kid.”

  I started to say something but stopped when a shaft of light penetrated the shrubbery.

  “Out here, where I can see you.” Tom Maguire’s voice was shaky yet forceful. He was on the house side of the line of shrubs, the alley a tantalizing though probably fatal escape route.

  “Don’t even think about it,” he said.

  “We’re coming out,” I said. “My partner is hurt.”

  Nolan and I stepped out of the bushes and into the glare from Maguire’s flashlight.

  “Where’s Nazari?”

  “She punched my lights out and then took off.” Nolan rubbed her jaw.

  No response. I imagined the wheels turning in his head, calculating and planning the next move. The suburban landscape was strangely still. No joggers, no people out walking dogs. I heard a worn-out muffler chug a few blocks away.

  “Which way?” Maguire said.

  “I was out cold,” Nolan said. “Couldn’t really see, now, could I?”

  “What about you?” Maguire jiggled the light over my face.

  “I was heading for the car, didn’t see what happened either.”

  “How convenient.” He pointed the muzzle of the Ruger at my knee-cap.

  The chugging muffler grew closer.

  “That’s the police,” Nolan said.

  Tom Maguire cocked his head to one side, seemingly to position one ear for a better listen.

  A rattling pickup rounded the corner. By the dim light of the street-lamp I could read the sign on the side, TOOGOODE AND TOOGOODE,

  CONTRACTORS.

  The truck stopped a few feet from the alley.

  “What the hell?” Maguire lowered the pistol until it was out of sight of whoever was in the pickup.

  The truck turned and drove over the curb and onto Anita Nazari’s yard. The headlights illuminated the three of us.

  “That’s not the police.” Maguire swayed a little on his feet, and I realized Pendergast had inflicted a fair amount of damage on the man.

  Because the headlights were shining on us, I couldn’t see who was driving. Because the muffler was worn, the series of soft explosions was hard to discern against the rattling of the truck’s motor.

  What wasn’t hard to hear or see was Tom Maguire yelping and dropping the gun and flashlight on the lawn. The rat-a-tat pops kept coming, sounding like tiny spits of anger in the still night air.

  Tom screamed once and fell over on his back.

  He looked like a pincushion, his body studded with large-gauge nails.

  “Get in,” Petey’s soft voice called from the truck.

  I shoved Nolan toward the passenger side and we climbed in.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Petey drove us to a piece of land a few miles away from Anita Nazari’s house, on the far edges of the northern expansion of the vast sea of humans that was Dallas. He stopped in a clearing by a creek and a line of post oak trees growing along a barbed-wire fence.

  A new Winnebago was parked there, as were two smaller travel trailers. Colleen came out and greeted us, smiling this time. Bria and her daughter were there, too, but the old woman was not.

  Petey had told us they’d left the Travelers and were going out on their own. He smiled and pointed at the trailers. “Ain’t they beauts?”

  I introduced Nolan to everybody and then said, “Ever considered getting an apartment somewhere?”

  Petey laughed and shook his head. “Ya still don’t get our ways, do you?”

  Colleen served us a meal on a portable picnic table set up by the tree line. By the soft glow of Coleman gas lamps, we ate brisket and beans under a canopy of Texas stars, washing down the food with pink wine.

  Petey wouldn’t say how he’d come to be in the area at exactly the right time. He mentioned something about wanting to see where his cousin had died. Then he told us the nail gun used to dispatch Tom Maguire had belonged to Collin Toogoode.

  “Maybe Collin’s spirit told me where to be.” He winked at me. “What’s the word…ironic…that his tool dispatched his killer.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the killer of his cousins had probably died in the house a few minutes before. What was the point? I nodded and drank some more wine.

  When it was time for bed, Colleen directed Nolan and me to one of the other trailers. We had it to ourselves and in a few minutes collapsed in the side-by-side twin beds in exhaustion.

  The next morning, at Nolan’s request, Petey drove us to the nearest Cadillac dealership, a sprawling place in McKinney, where we entered the showroom and were met with stares.

  I must admit, we both looked like a year’s worth of bad Saturday nights rolled into one, dirty and disheveled with clothes that were torn and smelly.

  Nolan got pissy when
no one would wait on us. She made a series of phone calls, and sixty minutes later we were headed south on U.S. Highway 75 toward Dallas in a brand-new Escalade. She had me drive while she called a real estate agent and made arrangements to list for sale the house she and Rufus had shared.

  As the skyline of Big D slowly materialized in front of us, she said, “It’s good to be rich.”

  I nodded but didn’t say anything.

  Forty minutes later I dropped her off at the house, right as the Realtor pulled up. I drove to the Target on Central Expressway in the shadow of downtown and bought several sets of clothes and a pay-as-you-go cell phone. I had about four hundred dollars in cash left. More was in the bank, but until I learned what was going on, I was reluctant to leave a paper trail.

  I checked into a budget motel a few blocks away, not trusting my former accommodations for the time being. The guy behind the front desk owed me a favor from an incident involving his younger brother and a thug named Stumpy. He let me pay for three nights in cash and wrote down a fake name and address in the register.

  I went to my room, showered, and dressed in fresh clothes, Levi 505s, a black T-shirt, and black Nikes.

  By the time I was ready to hit the streets, it was noon and my stomach was rumbling. I headed east on Henderson Avenue in the new Escalade, into the heart of old East Dallas, my home for a number of years.

  I stopped when I found a Mexican-food restaurant where the parking lot was full of trucks with lawn and construction equipment in the back.

  I sat at a booth in the back, the only gringo in the place. Over a plate of enchiladas and tacos, I made several calls from the new cell, discreet inquiries into the events that had occurred the previous evening at Anita Nazari’s home.

  Three bodies had been found, each wearing a suit. One outside near the shrubs by the alley, obviously the man who called himself Tom Maguire. Another inside, on the floor of the kitchen, the man known as John Jordan. The third was Jordan’s backup guy, discovered in the bushes of a house several lots down.

  No mention of a man in golf clothes.

  I ate a taco and then drank some iced tea.

  After paying the bill, I called Anita Nazari’s office number from the parking lot of the restaurant. Her assistant answered and told me she had been in briefly that morning to sign some papers. Then she had left.