by K C Ames
“I have confirmed that Greyson Bay entered Costa Rica via the Juan Santamaría Airport ten days ago and there is no exit stamp, so he’s still in the country. He flew in from Atlanta on the same flight with Chris Longo.”
“Oh, jeez,” Dana said, glancing over at her hiking stick.
“Yes, not good. Listen, Dana. I’m mobilizing a SERT team to your house.” SERT was the equivalent to a SWAT team in the United States. “Unfortunately, the fastest I can get a SERT team mobilized down to Mariposa Beach is in forty-five minutes. Agent Picado and I are on our way down from Nicoya too, and I have Officer Freddy Sanchez on his way from Guiones Beach, so he’ll be the first police presence to arrive. Until then, stay put in your house. Do not leave your property, okay?”
“Yes, okay,” Dana said, sounding lightheaded.
“I have an all-points-bulletin out for his arrest with the entire police force from the transit police, municipal police, and customs at the airport and in the border with Nicaragua and Panama, so if tries to sneak out of the country, he will be caught. So hang in there. We’ll get the son of a gun.”
Dana stood from the chair and leaned on the railing of her deck. She saw Ramón walking down the driveway towards the front gate.
She was just going to ask him to man the front gate, so she was relieved to see him heading that way. She watched him for about a minute before he was out of sight. She could not see the front gate from anywhere in her house.
She sat back down and fired up the security camera she had mounted on the front gate. She pulled up the crisp high-definition video feed, which offered a wide view, and saw everything was quiet out there.
She then thought about the back and how that was the weak spot from a security perspective and exactly how Chris Longo had broken into her bookstore.
She was comforted that the entire property was surrounded by a tall concrete wall with jagged pieces of broken glass embedded into the cement at the top, making it very difficult for anyone to not just reach the top of the wall, but also to climb over it without getting cut up.
It was standard security seen in most homes in Costa Rica. Jarring at first for the new expat or the tourists, but then you got used to it, and on that day, Dana was over the moon happy her uncle had secured Casa Verde so well. But it’s not like she was living in Fort Knox, and Casa Verde sat on 120 acres of land, so a determined person could make it over the wall undetected somewhere along the property.
Wally meowed just then. “Okay, sure, you’ll protect me,” Dana said to him as she rubbed his chin. She was still rubbing his chin when a new text from Benny arrived. It simply stated: at the gate.
Dana was overjoyed as she looked at the 9-inch high-resolution color LCD screen monitor and saw Benny’s white Land Cruiser driving in.
Ramón must have let him in as he usually did. She watched the monitor to make sure no one was lurking around, trying to piggyback behind him, and by anyone, she meant Greyson Bay.
The monitor indicated the gate was shut, and she didn’t see any suspicious activity. Feeling relieved, she headed downstairs and opened the front door to greet Benny. She felt bad tearing him away from his law practice but was happy he was there to keep her company until the police began to arrive. She was so freaked out, she was even looking forward for Detective Picado to show up, scowling as usual.
The driveway leading from the front gate to the main house was one-quarter of a mile long, so she could hear Benny’s truck crunching on the gravel before she could actually see it.
She came downstairs and opened the front door to greet him. She smiled when she saw the familiar white SUV drive up towards the front of the house. He parked by the carport as usual.
She could see him sitting on the driver’s side, seemingly talking to someone. She looked closer and she could see fear in his face. He looked up and they made eye contact. His face was ashen. That’s when she heard Benny scream in a blood-curdling manner she had never heard from him before, “Run back inside.”
Thirty-Four
After Benny yelled, she noticed for the first time that someone was in the back seat right behind him. She saw that person’s arm go up in the air above Benny’s head. The person was holding something in his hand. She was too far away to see what it was, and what happened was clear as the man in the backseat brought his arm down hard, striking Benny in the back of the head so hard with the object that she heard a loud thwack that sounded like someone had hit a melon with a hammer.
“No!” Dana screamed without even realizing she had opened her mouth.
She watched Benny slump forward and a gloved hand shoving him to the side.
Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion as far as Dana could tell. The backseat door on the driver’s side was flung open, and Greyson Bay jumped out, holding a black gun in his right hand.
Greyson Bay looked at her and smiled, but there was murder in his eyes.
“At last, we meet in person,” he said sinisterly. “Don’t you move, Dana,” Bay said, pointing the gun at her.
She had no idea what came over her. It was as if she was having an out-of-body experience, but she ran back inside, slamming the door shut. She heard the sound of the gunshot and heard it striking the wooden door.
She screamed and quickly turned the lever to the deadbolt, and she ran upstairs. She heard banging at the door, so she ran up two steps at a time. She tripped at the top, banging her knee hard on the hard tile. She hissed and watched in amazement as her knee ballooned in size right in front of her eyes.
“Get up,” she yelled at herself. She got to her feet and scampered all gimpy to her bedroom, then out the sliding doors to her deck. She grabbed the hiking stick and felt dumb about bringing a hiking stick to a gunfight, but it was better than nothing.
“The police are on their way, Greyson, including a SWAT team, no lie, so just leave right now,” Dana shouted from the entryway of the patio doors leading from her bedroom to the veranda. She wanted to peer over her railing down below, but wasn’t about to give him a clear shot. She could hear him banging on the door, and from a crack on her wood deck, she could see him down below, pacing around frantically like a bull at a gate.
“Give me those books and I’ll leave.”
“Oh, brother, you can’t really be that much of a numbskull. I don’t have those books here or in the bookstore. I gave them to my lawyer for safekeeping. They’re stored safely in a bank vault in San José. You went through all this. You took a man’s life for nothing. For books that are five hours away, protected inside a bank that you’ll never get access to. Just go before the police arrive.”
“I didn’t kill that busybody hippy. That was Chris’s doing. Not that I blame him. He told me what happened. How he was just making sure you didn’t have the books hidden in your store. He wanted to check there first, since it was easy pickings for him to break into your store in comparison to this fortress you’re living in here. So he breaks in and was searching your place when that idiot confronted him for breaking and entering. Starts ranting and raving about thievery, and that Jerry Garcia look-alike takes out an old Polaroid camera. An honest-to-goodness old-school Polaroid camera because he’s too Zen for digital, I guess. So he’s going to take Chris’s picture and he’s going to make copies and plaster them all over the province. Well, he couldn’t let that happen, so he had to kill him.”
“I’m not lying about the police, Greyson, they’re on the way here as we speak. Just go.”
“I believe you. But it will take them a while to get to this lovely little beach town tucked away in the middle of nowhere. I’ve done my homework.”
“I already told you, I don’t have the books.”
“Maybe I just kill you, your stupid boyfriend, and that idiot peasant at the front gate. Just for messing up all my plans.”
Dana actually felt relief, since that meant that Benny and Ramón must still be alive, and she hoped that if Carmen was aware of what was happening, that she had the good sense to not
leave the safety of her house.
“You said you’re not a killer. Why start now, over nothing?”
He laughed, and it was the creepiest laugh she had ever heard, like the demented Joker. Guttural. Evil. Frightening.
“I said I didn’t kill that moron in your bookstore. But who do you think killed idiot Chris?”
Dana didn’t say a word. She didn’t dare. Let him confess to everything. She hit the record button on her phone.
“Yeah, that’s right. Chris wanted to run away back to the States. Mister Tough Guy was a ball of nerves, acting like a cat dunked in water. I had him meet me in the seediest part of town. So I popped him with this here local pistol I bought off some meth head on the streets,” Greyson said as he waved the gun in his hand in the air like it was show-and-tell.
“That way the police would think it was a local junkie that killed him. A mugging gone bad. Case closed. Then I could sneak back down here to get what I came all this way for… those books!”
“Your plan worked, so just go,” Dana pleaded.
“Yeah, but that’s all over now. You told the police. Your boyfriend. I’m sure the whole town knows about me by now, so this isn’t about the books anymore, it’s about your snooping and not leaving well enough alone. You ruined my life, so I’m going to take yours,” Bay seethed.
Dana could see him through the crack in the floor as he raised his arm, aiming the gun up towards her. She dove into her bedroom as three shots ripped into the deck mere inches from where she had been standing. Chunks of wood splinters flew through the air. Dana hid under her bed.
She heard the sound of feet crunching on the gravel and then she heard the sound of the car door opening. Thank goodness he’s leaving, Dana thought.
“Oh, Dana,” she heard Bay say mockingly.
She looked out her bedroom window down below and was horrified at what she saw. Greyson had dragged an unconscious Benny from the SUV and had laid him out on the ground. In front of his truck. Bay stood over him, pointing the gun at Benny.
“No, don’t do it, Greyson, are you crazy?” Dana shouted as she ran out towards the edge of the deck. She could see the bullet holes, which made her tremble.
“Looks like we have ourselves our own Costa Rican standoff,” he said, laughing. “I might as well go out like in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid versus rotting away in a Costa Rican jail.”
Dana felt the tears coming down her cheeks.
It felt like she stood there for hours, but it was mere seconds when all of a sudden Benny came to and he groggily reached for Greyson’s legs, causing him to lose his footing and he fell down to the ground next to Benny and they began to wrestle, kicking up dust and gravel from the driveway.
Dana saw Bay’s gun skittering down the driveway. Without even thinking, she ran back downstairs, pushing away the pain she felt in her knee for the moment. She unlocked the door and stumbled outside, almost falling again, but she kept her balance as she ran towards Bay’s gun and picked it up. She tried to aim the gun at Bay, but he and Benny were intertwined like two Greco-Roman wrestlers on the mat.
She screamed for Greyson to stop, but at that moment he managed to get the upper hand on Benny, who seemed dazed from the blow to the head he had suffered. Suddenly Greyson was on top of Benny, and he grabbed him by his hair and slammed the back of his head onto the driveway, knocking him out cold again. He was going to do that again when Dana screamed as she held the gun on him.
“Don’t you do it, or I’ll shoot.”
Greyson stopped, seeming to just realize that Dana was there and that she was pointing his gun at him.
He looked at Dana. He was sweating and was covered in dust, gravel, and blood. He breathed out heavily as he let go of Benny’s head and rolled off him. He was sitting on the ground, heaving, out of breath.
“Do you like to gamble, Dana?” he finally said after catching his breath.
“We’re not playing twenty questions here, Greyson. I don’t want to shoot you, but I will if you force me to. So just sit there until the police arrive.”
“I like to gamble. And I bet that you don’t have the guts to pull that trigger,” he said, studying her face.
“I wouldn’t make that bet,” Dana said. She tried to sound tough, but her shaky hand was showing the poor hand she was holding. She always did have a terrible poker face.
He smiled. “Okay, okay,” he said, putting his hands in the air. “Don’t shoot.”
“Don’t move and I won’t.”
Greyson had his knees up to his chest and his hands on the ground. “You got it,” he said, when suddenly both his hands came up from the ground, where he had grabbed two fistfuls of gravel and dirt from the ground, and he threw them at Dana’s face. She flinched and ducked down, most of the gravel missing her, but a few of the loose pebbles and a swath of dirt hit her on the lower part of the face. She must have been shouting, because she felt dirt and gravel in her mouth, causing her to choke and cough.
By the time Dana recovered, Greyson had leapt to his feet and was bum-rushing her. Dana closed her eyes and pulled the trigger. She opened them and saw dirt fly in the air next to Greyson. She missed, and he didn’t flinch. He almost had her in his grasp when she fired one more time. This time, she didn’t close her eyes.
She took two steps back and watched him jump on one foot and yelled, “You shot me! I can’t believe you shot me!”
“I told you not to make that bet,” Dana said, sounding all tough. She felt like Dirty Harry.
Greyson was still hopping. “You shot me in the foot,” he said as he fell to the ground. He sat up on the ground, holding his foot and crying and whimpering about how she shot him.
“You’re lucky I have terrible aim and shot you in the foot, unlike how you killed Chris Longo,” Dana said, holding the gun with both hands as she pointed it at him.
“I have more bullets, so don’t push your luck. This isn’t Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” Dana said, sounding even more confident as she stood over him.
Thirty-Five
Dana stood over Greyson Bay, white-knuckling the gun she kept pointed at him for hours. Well, it felt like hours to her. It was really less than five minutes when Officer Freddy Sanchez came blazing in on his motocross motorcycle. Carmen had emerged from hiding in her house in tears and she opened the front gate to let Officer Freddy inside. He looked shocked, seeing how Dana had subdued Greyson Bay on her own.
“I didn’t have a choice but to shoot him,” a shell-shocked Dana said as Greyson writhed on his back in the ground in pain.
“It’s okay,” Freddy said as he flipped Greyson over onto his stomach and in one motion he handcuffed him to his back. Greyson protested that the handcuffs were too tight and how much his foot hurt. Freddy told him to shut up.
Freddy turned to Dana and asked if she was all right.
Dana couldn’t speak, so she nodded as tears welled up in her eyes again, and she began to shake as the adrenaline began to drain from her body.
Freddy carefully took the gun from Dana’s death grip. “It’s okay, give me the gun,” he told her gently as she finally released her grip.
“I need to see a doctor, man,” Greyson whined. He was now facedown in the dirt.
“There are several ambulances on the way,” Freddy said as he looked at Greyson’s foot.
“I’m dying here, man.”
“Oh, please, she shot you in the foot, in and out, you’ll live. But you are very much under arrest,” Officer Freddy said.
He put on a latex glove and put the gun into an evidence bag. He looked at the evidence and smiled. “Well, well, well, looks like the same kind of gun that killed your accomplice, Chris Longo.”
Greyson breathed out heavily, causing dust and dirt to fly into the air and into his mouth. He coughed and begged to be let up.
“The OIJ will be here soon, as well as the ambulance. Until then, you’re just fine right there in the dirt,” Freddy said.
He joined Dana, who h
ad recovered and was tending to Benny. Freddy looked at him and opened his eyes with his thumb and index finger. Then he felt for his pulse. “Looks like he has a concussion. A nasty one from the looks of things, but his breathing and pulse seem fine to me, so I think he’ll be okay. He’ll have a pretty nasty headache, but in the scheme of things, that’s not too bad,” Freddy said.
“Thank God, I thought he killed him. He hit him over the head with the gun, then he slammed the back of his head on the ground,” Dana explained.
“Better not touch anything until the OIJ and the forensics team get here,” Freddy said as he walked over to his motorcycle and removed a big roll of yellow crime scene tape.
A few minutes later, Carmen came walking up the driveway with her arms wrapped around Ramón, who was waking next to her slowly, as if he had just woken up from a drunken stupor.
Dana watched as Ramón looked around, seeing Freddy corner off the crime scene. He turned red with anger when he saw the handcuffed Greyson Bay on the floor.
“That son of a gun,” he seethed at Greyson in Spanish.
“Are you okay, Ramón?” Dana asked as she got up from Benny’s side and walked towards Ramón and Carmen.
“I’m fine. I’m so sorry, Doña Dana, I thought it was just Don Benny in his car, so I let him in and then suddenly this man attacked me, and the next thing I remember, I wake up and look up at Carmen, who was kneeling beside me, shaking me.” He smiled, looking at his wife with love in his eyes.
“I thought you were dead,” she said, hugging her husband tight.
Freddy walked over to Ramón and took a look at his head. “Looks like you’ll be joining the concussion club along with Benny,” he said with a smile. “But hey, at least he hit you with the gun, and didn’t shoot you. Lucky guys, you two.”
Greyson Bay began to scream again about how tight the handcuffs were and how he had dirt in his mouth and how his foot hurt. Freddy, Ramón, and Dana all replied in almost unison, “Shut up.”
They were all laughing as Benny began to come out of it. Dana knelt back down next to him, then she shuddered in pain. “You need to put some ice on that knee,” Officer Freddy said, looking at the swollen knee. “How did that happen?”