by L. T. Ryan
“If a weapon other than someone’s fist did it.”
“You’ll be able to tell?” she said.
He shrugged. “That’s why I sent it off.”
We stood without speaking for a moment. I stared at Jessie. April stared at me. The ME tapped his foot and cracked his knuckles.
I looked over Jessie’s body. Her face and head took the brunt of the attack. She had a fresh scar on her arm. I noticed nothing else.
“Anything else?” he asked after a minute.
“Jack?” April said.
I looked up. I had plenty of questions. Not for him, though. I wanted to be able to ask Jessie what happened. How did it happen? What led to it happening? I wanted to tell her I was sorry for how things ended, and the trouble I dragged her into a decade ago.
“Jack?” April said.
“Yeah, sorry. Let’s go.” I nodded at the ME. He turned away.
I heard Jessie’s body being slid back into the frozen tomb that precluded her eternal stay underground.
We sat inside the car. I grabbed the back of my head and exhaled. It didn’t feel real. Even after seeing her corpse, I couldn’t believe that Jessie was dead.
“You OK?” April placed her hand on my shoulder.
I shifted in my seat so I faced her. “Tough to take in, you know?”
“Remember what happened to my mom?”
I thought about it for a minute. There had been an accident a year before I left for the Marines. April’s mother and father had been out on the water. He went below deck to grab a couple beers. When he came up, she was gone. That was the story, at least. It never sat well with me. But the man telling it was the only witness and he was also the town’s sheriff. How could you doubt him? An independent investigator came in at her father’s request. The Mayor picked the man out. The guy found no evidence of foul play, said it was an accident. She had been drinking, fallen overboard, and the tide carried her body away.
“I remember,” I said.
“Still keep hoping she’ll just show up one day. Come walking up along the river and find her way to my house.” April looked away. “Or at least that her body will wash up. I suppose I should let that go considering it’s been twenty years.”
Neither of us spoke for five minutes. She started the car, but we didn’t leave. The air that came out of the vents smelled like stubbed out cigarettes at first. The smell faded, leaving behind an ice-cold breeze that hit the middle of my face.
“You know what I think?” I said.
“What?” she said.
“I think those guys know more than they were letting on. I think that little message was more than them trying to get under my skin.”
“You think they were involved?”
“Them, and Glenn. Hell, Matt’s his brother. Think about the scene. That could have been a two-man job. Definitely not suicide. I think one of them held her while the other went to shoot. She moved. The bullet hit but didn’t kill. One guy punched her. She stopped. The other shot and killed her.”
“Plausible.”
“Probable.”
“So what should we do?”
“I think you should go over and question them.”
“What about you?”
I stared out the front window at the blackness beyond the parking lot. “I’m going with you.”
She shifted into drive and crossed the parking lot, turning right and taking us toward town. She bypassed Main Street. We prowled along the outer edges of the historic center. Streetlights lined one side of the street, not the other. She turned into an older neighborhood. Thirty years ago, my grandparents lived there. Now it looked nothing like it did then. The houses were worn down. The lawns were messy, full of weeds, or just brown. Some of the homes we passed looked abandoned, or inhabited by squatters. I saw the house my grandfather and his brother had built themselves. Someone had painted it purple.
“What the hell happened here?” I said.
“The economy,” she said. “Most folks bugged out some time ago. Went to Jacksonville, Gainesville, Tampa and Orlando. However few jobs those cities have, it was better odds than here.”
The economic state of the country wasn’t something I dwelled on. Since becoming an adult, I worked either for the government or as a contractor. There were plenty of jobs available in my line of work. And they paid well.
“There it is.” She pointed ahead.
The house looked like the rest in the neighborhood. The gutter hung off the roof on one side. Siding was missing in a few places. The lawn had grass two feet high mixed in with bare spots.
April blocked the driveway with her cruiser. She left the engine running.
“Take this.” She tossed a key toward me. “That’s a spare. If you need to run, you do so.”
“I’m not going anywhere without you.”
There were no blinds or curtains covering the wide front window. The TV lit up the far wall. Images flashed on the screen. I couldn’t tell what they were watching. Two of the men occupied opposite ends of a couch. Glenn sat in a recliner against the left wall.
A dog barked as we walked up the driveway.
Matt rose off the couch and walked toward the window. His frame blocked my view of the television. He cupped his hands to his face and leaned into the glass. He shouted something. The other two men rose. Glenn went to the back of the house. Jed went to the front door. Matt met him there. The door swung open and both men stepped out. Jed held a baseball bat.
“You might want to rethink that,” I said.
“Wasn’t the warning at the house enough for you, Noble?” Matt said.
“Put the bat away, Jed,” April said.
“You brought the cops, Jack?” Matt said. “Can’t fight fair and square?”
“Fair and square got both of you knocked out in five seconds. She’s here for your safety.”
Matt took a few steps forward and spit in my direction. It missed me and hit about ten long blades of grass on its way to the ground.
“Where’d Glenn go off to?” I said.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jed said.
“Saw him through the window. He went to the back of the house. It’d be best for you all if he came outside.”
“Piss off,” Matt said.
“I can get a warrant,” April said.
I almost questioned her.
Matt did. “For what? We ain’t done nothing. If anything, I want to press charges against Jack for assaulting me. So, there, take him away Ms. Sheriff.”
Both men laughed.
I looked at April. “I’m growing tired of this.”
Matt took a few more steps toward me. “So what are you gonna do about it?”
I said nothing.
“As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “you’re trespassing on my property. Get the hell off it before I kick your ass.”
April said, “You rent this house.”
“Don’t matter,” Matt said. “I know that much.”
He stood inches from me. A wave of tequila and corn chips and his body odor blew past me. I might as well have been standing in a dumpster.
“Get going, Jack.”
I didn’t move.
“Jack, we can get another car out here. Craig’s close. I’ll call him. We’ll watch the house. These drunks aren’t going anywhere.”
I said nothing, kept my eyes on the man in front of me.
Matt moved quicker than he had at the bar. It caught me by surprise. He drove his big hands forward, into my chest. I lost my balance for a second. He followed it up with a head butt. I managed to move to the left, but not far enough. He caught the side of my forehead. The maneuver didn’t have the intended effect of splitting my face open. It left both us reeling a bit though.
I shook my head and regained my balance. He threw a right hook at me. It was wide and sloppy. I ducked it and delivered a blow to his midsection. The air left his lungs like a balloon deflating. He bent over. I grabbed the back of his head as I drove my knee
into his face. He fell down, gagged on his blood.
Jed came running toward me swinging the baseball bat.
I didn’t have enough time to reach the M40 tucked in my waistband and avoid his next swing, so I waited. He waved the bat back and forth like a kid stepping up to the plate for the first time. There was no cohesion. His next attempt would be wild and in my direction. I prepared to avoid it and gain control of the bat.
“Freeze!” April yelled.
Jed stopped in place. He glanced at me, then her.
“Take your shot, man,” I said.
He thought about it. I could see him inching forward. He stopped just out of arm’s reach. That gave him plenty of room to work the bat. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t count on me kicking him, so it came as a surprise when I slammed my foot into his crotch. He dropped the bat and fell to his knees. I kicked him in the face and then pushed him over. He landed on top of his friend.
“That’s the second time you two ended up in a pile today. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.”
April and I left the two guys on the ground and walked to the front door.
“Glenn,” I said. “Come out here. We need to talk to you about what happened to Jessie. We know it wasn’t an accident.”
There was no response. The door was open. I couldn’t see or hear any movement.
“What do you think?” April said.
“We can wait him out.”
A roaring sound filled the still night air.
Chapter 24
I turned and ran to the driveway. The motorcycle created a breeze that crashed into me as Glenn drove by. I grabbed the bat off the ground, cocked my arm back. By that point, he’d traveled too far beyond my reach. I couldn’t do anything but watch the red taillight shrink into the dark.
“Dammit.” April rushed past me. “We can’t let him get away.”
One of the guys on the ground laughed. The other moaned.
“Let’s go,” she said, already halfway to the car.
“Don’t think about leaving town,” I said to Matt and Jed as I walked by. Jed got to one knee and flicked me off. I altered my course and kicked him in the face. He collapsed again.
April stood behind her open door, shaking her head. “Why?”
I dropped the bat on the driveway and shrugged. “Why not?”
She put the cruiser in reverse and gunned it. My head whipped forward then back as the rear tires hopped the curb behind us. Two quick thumps. April didn’t seem to care. She kept her foot on the gas and shifted into drive. Tires spun in the grass, dug into the earth. We lurched forward. The rear axle dropped six inches. The tires squealed until they got their grip set on the asphalt.
Didn’t matter how fast April drove. We’d lost Glenn. He had a head start on a motorcycle. He could have cut through someone’s yard and pulled into a shed by now. Or ditched the bike and taken off on foot. Woods surrounded the neighborhood on three sides. There were more across Suncoast, although the tributaries and gulf lay beyond. April slammed on the brakes, opened her door and stepped out. I joined her by the cruiser’s trunk. We were near the entrance to the neighborhood, facing the way we had come.
“I’m getting Craig over here. He can bring those two drunks in.” She pulled out her cell and held it to her ear. Seconds passed. She made a twirling motion with her hand, then said, “Craig, get over to 2424 Magnolia. There’s two guys passed out on their front lawn. I want them locked up.”
“He on his way?”
“Voicemail.” She hung up. “What do we do now?”
Porch lights flicked on. People wandered through their front doors, down their driveways, and gathered along the side of the street. Hard to tell what would happen in a neighborhood like this. Their stares and gestures made it obvious they weren’t fans of the local law enforcement. How far would they go, though?
I kept my eye on the growing crowd, and said, “His wife’s funeral is tomorrow morning. No way he doesn’t show. Have a couple of your deputies waiting there and arrest him afterward.”
April followed my stare. She glanced at me, then turned back toward them. “Arrest him for what?”
“I don’t know. You’re the cop. Force him to go in for questioning. Catch him jaywalking for all I care. Get him to the police station and let me work on him.”
She looked at me again and leaned back, her brows furrowed and her arms crossed. I remembered her giving me the same look when she was five or six after I told her she couldn’t stay up to watch TV. Only this time the hurt was real.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “My temper got the better of me, and he got away.”
“What’s done is done,” she said with a sigh. “Why hasn’t Craig called back?”
“Maybe he fell asleep.”
“Maybe we should go over and check up on him.”
I shrugged, jutted my chin toward the crowd fifty feet away. “I think we should go somewhere before that group of people decides to do something stupid.”
She nodded. “Maybe we should go get a drink.”
“I can handle that.”
We turned and walked to our respective sides of the vehicle. I kept my head on a swivel and my stare focused on the crowd. They did nothing. We both slipped inside the car.
She drove through town, past the only bar I knew of within five miles. She didn’t slow down. I said nothing. She’d spent her entire life here. She knew the places to go. Something new could have opened up, and I wouldn’t have had a clue. Maybe she was taking me to a new restaurant where I could get a steak and a beer.
That would be heaven.
Downtown Crystal River was deserted. The roads were lit up with new orange street lamps. The only sound was the purr of the engine and the near jet-like sound of the air conditioning blowing through the vents. It was the coolest I’d felt since arriving in Florida.
We left Main Street and the lights behind, headed north. I knew there was nothing that way, at least not on Suncoast.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“You’ll see,” she said.
Five minutes later she turned right. The darkened street offered no clues. She hugged the road’s curves. Second nature. She’d driven them hundreds, if not thousands of times. Finally, she pulled onto a gravel driveway, cut her headlights and parked the car in an open garage. With a twist of her wrist, the engine and the vents went silent.
We sat in silence for a minute. The ticking of the cooling car sounded like shotgun blasts.
“Want to come in?” she said.
“Do I have a choice?” I said.
“You can walk back to your brother’s house.”
I thought about it. The mental map I pulled up told me it’d be a three or four mile walk. It was dark and hot and muggy, and that didn’t appeal to me. Also, I couldn’t recall seeing a beer in my brother’s fridge.
I wasn’t sure if hers had any, but I’d risk it.
“All right,” I said. “Lead the way.”
The exterior of her house looked old enough that the shingles might have been made of asphalt. The yard was well maintained. The grass was short. Hedges were trimmed. There were plenty of flowers, all in bloom. Red, yellow, orange, purple. She didn’t care about cohesion. She must’ve liked the vibrancy of them all.
Her keys jangled as she pulled them from her pocket. They reflected the streetlight in front of her house. She stuck one in the doorknob. The lock clicked. She pushed the door open and flicked on a light. A pool of white washed over the front step. A tabby cat greeted her with a long meow. It rubbed against her leg, gave her a long stare, and then walked away.
“Perfect pet,” she said. “Says ‘hi’ when I come home and then takes care of himself. Haven’t even been able to find a man who can do that.”
“Say hi, or take care of himself?”
She smiled. “Either.”
I said nothing.
“It’s a joke, Jack. Just trying to lighten the mood. It’s been a rough day for both of us.”
“Day? Try decade.”
She walked away from me. Her arms crossed in front of her. Her hands went to the opposite sides. She grabbed her shirt and pulled up a few inches. It slipped out from her utility belt clad waistband. The bottom of the shirt rose up a few inches. Her skin was tanned. A colorful tattoo adorned her right side. She let go of the shirt with her left hand. The hem fell to her hip. She used the same hand to unclasp her utility belt. It hissed through the belt loops of her pants. She held it out to the side. It looked like a dangling water moccasin. She let it fall to the floor.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, looking back at me. “Make yourself at home.”
The foyer had one picture on the wall of the Eiffel Tower, and no furniture. I glanced down the dark hallway. Looked like it led to the bedrooms. To the right, I saw the dining room. An old oak table with four chairs sat under a dark light fixture. I walked forward, into the living room. She had a full size couch and a love seat. Both were upholstered with the same faded denim fabric.
I walked past the furniture to the back door. White vertical blinds covered it. I pulled them back. It was pitch black beyond the thick glass. I reached my hand to the side and found a switch. A light cut on, dim at first, then bright once it warmed up.
Her backyard wasn’t much. Fifteen feet deep and as wide as the house, all enclosed with a six-foot privacy fence. There were no trees or shrubs or flowers back there. Didn’t even see a grill. I figured April spent little time in her backyard. The front yard appeared to be her tranquil place.
“What are you doing?”
I turned and saw April standing there with two bottles of Miller Lite. She’d changed into gym shorts and a pink tank top. She’d pulled her hair back. Her arms and chest and legs were as tan as her side.
“I thought you said you had beer?”
She extended her arm toward me. “You a snob now?”
I hiked my shoulders in the air and held my hands out to the side. “Spent some time in Europe. They’ve converted me. A bit, at least.”
April walked toward me and stuck the bottle in my hand. “You’re in Florida now, bud. Act like it.”
I brought the bottle to my lips and took a pull off it. It was cold and refreshing and once I got past the aftertaste, it was pretty good.