by Jim Heskett
He placed the second camera at the far side of the cabin, hidden in a downed log below eye-level. And the third camera Harry placed to the east, inside a puffy bush. He placed them so their fields of view would all overlap and provide a full picture of the cabin and its immediate area.
Out of breath after all the action, Harry paused near the front of the cabin, pulse bumping. Having six cameras would’ve been better, but buying three of them had set Harry back more money than he was willing to spend. He presently couldn’t afford to replace these three, which made him concerned that he would spend too much time obsessing over these cameras once he’d left here.
“I guess we’re done,” he said. “We should probably go. The longer we stay, the more we risk being seen.“
Then an idea occurred to him. Something smart and easy, the kind of thing he immediately couldn’t believe he’d never thought of before.
“Wait. The foot locker’s gone, right?”
Serena nodded. “Evidence.”
Based on the size and weight of the box, though, Harry could assume it had left a mark on the floor. Maybe that mark would give him a clue how long Lukas had stayed here, stealing things from people around town.
“I want to check something out,” he said, and then he strode toward the front door.
“Wait,” Serena said, “Let me go in f—“
Before she could finish the sentence, Harry opened the door. Like watching it happen onscreen, his hand extended, turned the knob, and pushed.
A baseball bat whoofed through the air.
Harry didn’t see the face of the person holding the bat, but he saw those arms swing out from behind the door. It happened too fast for him to move, but it still felt like slow-motion.
The hunk of wood smacked into his stomach. His midsection exploded with the intensity of swallowing a hundred little knives. The pain raced up and down his body, making his knees buckle underneath his weight. Harry staggered back and fell off the wood plank porch onto his back. The air rushed out of his lungs.
He heaved in a breath like fire as he stared straight up at the tops of the trees. For a second, he felt paralyzed, his entire frame thumping like one giant bruise. Serena was shouting and moving, but Harry’s ears pulsed with adrenaline and he couldn’t hear any of it.
The figure with the bat leaped over Harry’s immobilized body and out of view. Scrambling, shuffling, grunting noises. Gunshots came… one, two, three.
Serena appeared over him. “Are you hurt?”
“F…fine. Go get him. Go!”
17
Serena ran. She’d paused a moment to check on Harry, to make sure he wasn’t going to bleed out. He’d taken a hefty thump to the midsection with a wooden baseball bat, but seemed able to breathe okay and move around. No blood, no woozy and blank eyes of a concussion. In fact, he’d ordered her to go.
After a quick check inside the cabin to make sure there wasn’t a second attacker, Serena darted toward the trees. Behind her, Harry grunted and labored to sit up, but he waved her onward.
The figure was around six feet tall, one-hundred eighty or so pounds. Most likely male, based on the appearance and movement style. But she’d only caught a split-second glimpse of the dark shape before he disappeared down a hill to the left. No sign of his face. She wasn’t a hundred percent sure about the height and weight, either. Everything had happened so fast.
Serena pivoted downhill, her feet shuffling through underbrush at lightning speed. Knees high with each step, she tried to stay mindful of the limitless number of underfoot objects that could trip her. The trees were like skinny spires providing lanes across the grass. They also threw haphazard shadows everywhere, and the webwork of light tested her senses.
She moved as fast as possible, but she’d lost sight of the figure. With a leap, she jumped over a downed tree and then paused when she landed. She spun left, then right, all the way around. In every direction, she saw nothing but empty forest. A light breeze shuffled leaves around her, and birdsong interrupted the silence. She was alone.
“Damn it,” she said through clenched teeth.
Then, to her right, a whiff of motion and the sound of feet cutting through the foliage. She reached into her holster to draw her P320 pistol. The blur moved from left to right, and she could make out more features. A tall man with dark jeans and a black windbreaker jacket about thirty years past its fashion expiration date. She could tell he was either Caucasian or Latino, but a dark hat pulled low obscured his facial features. For a second, she thought he looked like one of the two hillbillies in the truck from yesterday, but the height and build didn’t match up.
Serena raised the P320 and stared down the three dot sights. With her legs spread at shoulder-width, she lowered her center a gravity a few inches and trailed the moving figure for a moment before she pulled the trigger.
The bullet sailed across the expanse between them and she heard it strike home. A yelp, a tumble, then he popped up. Serena watched blood trail from his leg. She’d missed his chest, her intended target. And a limb shot wasn’t enough to take him down. He kept moving, getting further away from her. Any hope of catching up to him slipped away, because she’d made the mistake of assuming her shot would stop him. It hadn’t.
She bared her teeth and took off in a flurry of leaves and twigs. She knew he had an unbeatable head start, but pushed her legs as hard as she could, regardless. And the distance between them only grew when he butt-surfed down a steep patch, popped up, and hit a hard right around the edge of the hill. Whoever the target was, he had a mastery of this terrain that Serena lacked.
In two more steps, he vanished from sight.
Serena hauled ass. As much and as fast as she could, she set her eyes on the spot where he had disappeared. Three seconds later, she caught up to where he’d been and she could see spots of blood on the nearby shrubs. Serena locked onto the blood trail and hopped around the blind edge of the hill.
But within five steps, she noted the creek at the bottom of the valley, and that's where the blood trail would end. With no clear direction, she forced herself to slow. This had changed from a foot race to a hunt, and speed could easily lead her down the wrong path.
She stopped at the edge of the water and turned in a circle. Nothing but quiet woods in all directions. She could hear a hammer cracking against something, echoing across the valley. Voices, maybe far away, maybe hiding in the nearby trees. A car honked behind her, the sound bent and warped by the landscape. For a moment, she thought it had been Harry’s car, but then she decided it had been a truck.
Serena dropped to her knees and closed her eyes, breathing and listening. But nothing came. She studied the muddy banks of the creek for footprints. If he had come this way, he’d probably been moving fast enough to hop the creek in a single step. She saw no footprints on the other side. And, as suspected, the trail of blood ended at the water.
“Clever hillbilly,” she muttered.
Her target had vanished. The man who had attacked her boss had escaped, which meant she had failed to protect Harry, her one job. As she looked at her hands, aching and covered in holler dirt, she realized she had two options: walk back to Harry, admit failure, and quit. Or, walk back to Harry, admit failure, and swear to him she would never let him down again.
18
Harry opened the front door of his office. Serena had refused to let him enter alone until she was sure Kemba wasn’t two doors down at the barbershop. As Harry’s top suspect, she’d suspected an attack. But he wasn’t worried about Kemba coming after him. Harry hadn’t told the barber any of the details he’d learned so far. Better to keep him in the dark, thinking Harry was investigating something else.
When Harry and Serena parted, it had been awkward. Mostly because she’d tried to tender her “resignation” as his bodyguard, which Harry had of course laughed off. Maybe the thumping ache in his stomach had colored his thoughts, but he had no intention of firing his protector and best friend just because she hadn’t p
revented an attack neither of them had known was coming. He didn’t pay Serena for her soothsaying abilities. He paid her because she looked awesome standing nearby as a silent and stone cold presence in the corner of any room. Harry didn’t have the physique to pull off that feat, so he’d outsourced it.
Groaning, Harry eased into his desk chair. He’d worried about broken ribs, but decided against a hospital visit. The pain was already abating, so nothing felt broken. Just sore as hell.
Also, Harry had to start thinking about how his behavior looked to others. What had begun as a simple burglary had now ballooned into a homicide investigation. He had to be careful where he showed his trust. Serena was firmly in his camp, no doubt about that. He couldn’t say the same thing about anyone else with certainty.
Harry lifted the laptop lid and typed in a few commands to link up to the cameras he’d placed at the scene of the crime. Once the settings had been all configured, he hit the button to begin the stream and found himself looking at three windows, each showing a blue error screen. All the camera feeds refused to connect.
“I’m not surprised,” he muttered.
Someone had already taken the cameras. It had been only thirty minutes since Harry had placed all three around. That meant he had eyes on him the whole time he and Serena were at the cabin, probably to clean the crime scene.
Or, it could have had nothing to do with Lukas’ death. Maybe one or two entrepreneurial hillbillies had quietly followed him because he was an outsider in the holler, then taken the (rather expensive) cameras, and were now on their way to Fayetteville or Branson to pawn them as fast as possible.
“Crap,” Harry said as he sat back and tugged on his lower lip. If he ordered new cameras today, they wouldn’t be here for at least two days. A lot could happen at that cabin in two days. He could possibly find a store in Little Rock that had similar cameras, but driving there and back would eat up a whole day. Living in a small town had advantages, but it had its disadvantages, too. Eureka Springs did not carry high-tech espionage equipment at the corner store.
He tabbed over to a different application, one slowly churning through terabytes of data to return information on Kemba Wood’s credit card activity during specific timeframes. Namely, Harry was looking for something concrete to link Kemba to the deceased thief Lukas Maslow. So far, Harry had the inconclusive and circumstantial link that they could have potentially met years ago in Missouri, although the definitive proof hadn’t yet followed.
The search had been mind-numbingly slow. “That’s what happens when you leave your government job,” Harry said to the empty office. “You lose access to all the cool and high-speed toys.“
Unearthing Lukas’ medical records had so far proven to be fruitless. Harry figured that a financial search might take another day or two to complete. If he could find a credit card receipt that put him in the same place and time as Lukas, Harry would finally establish the connective tissue the case lacked.
In the meantime, he saw no problem with widening his search. But who to target? Who in this town would have the motive and means to kill a mentally handicapped thief?
Something caught Harry’s eye, and he grunted as he stood and wandered over to the window. There, meandering down the street, was a cluster of a half-dozen men and women, all wearing name badges. The AA conference was still in town for another couple days.
There had been broken liquor bottles inside the foot locker.
“Whoa, wait a second,” Harry said to his reflection in the window. “I’ve assumed that Lukas was the one who smashed everything. But what if he wasn’t the smasher? What if he just wanted whiskey and sex toys because the NDCS wouldn’t allow those things when he was living in Missouri, and someone else smashed up his stuff and killed him?”
Someone who had a reason to be mad at alcohol?
It seemed thin, and certainly not enough to unseat Kemba as Harry’s prime suspect. But it was a possibility. He strode outside, his eyes immediately looking left, toward the barbershop. Still empty, still no sign of Kemba.
Harry’s office was flanked by a nail shop on one side, and the AA meeting space on the other. He peered into the windows to see a mostly empty room. Four tables arranged in a square made up the bulk of the space, with posters containing various inspirational sayings all over the walls. Some were vague and universal, like “easy does it.” Some were vague and confusing, like “think, think, think.” Harry the Outsider didn’t try to parse the secret Alcoholics Anonymous language.
He saw a single person inside the one-room office, a tall white woman. She was currently rounding the tables, collecting books to put in a plastic storage bin.
Harry opened the door, and the woman smiled at him. She was young, maybe mid-twenties. She checked her watch and said, “You’re early. Next meeting isn’t for about forty-five minutes. If you’re just looking for a safe place to wait, you’re welcome to hang out here until then, or you can come back. Up to you.”
“I just wanted to ask you a couple questions, if that’s okay.”
She set down her storage tub and widened her smile. “Of course. What would you like to know?”
“Seen a lot of extra traffic in here since the conference?”
“Oh, sure. It’s been standing-room-only at some of these meetings.”
He tapped his lips together a few times, unsure how to change the subject. “You heard about the new barber being a victim of theft, right?”
Her brow knitted, seeming flustered. “I saw the temporary windows, but no, I didn’t know what happened. That’s terrible.”
“Anyone strange coming to your meetings?”
Now she cocked her head, and he could see the suspicion blooming in her eyes. “I don’t underst—are you a cop?”
“No, ma’am. Private investigator. Harry Boukadakis.”
“Well, Harry, I don’t really know how to answer your question. We get ‘strange’ people coming to AA meetings all the time. We serve the lowest of the low, the people who have nowhere else to go. No one comes sailing into AA on the wings of victory. But since ‘anonymous’ is half our name, we don’t take attendance at our meetings or keep records of comings and goings. That's their business.”
He pursed his lips and nodded, feeling like he’d blown it. In his excitement and haste, he had gotten to the point too quickly. Harry imagined his mentor standing over his shoulder, giving a slow shake of his head.
People weren’t coin slots awaiting exact change. They were much more fluid, and Harry had come on too strong.
“Thanks for your time,” he said, and then backed out before he made a name for himself among the AA community as being nosy. The woman’s broad smile returned as he left, and she offered him a sincere wave and a good day.
Harry made the arduous ten-step journey back to his office, returned to his desk, and cracked his knuckles. “Let’s do this the best way I know how, until I can figure out how to stop putting my foot in my mouth.”
With a few clicks, he accessed the registry of the Motorway Lodge, then started pulling lists of names. If he needed names from the towering Sunrise Hotel and Spa, he could ask his friend Neva. But since the Motorway had won the room block contract, everyone from the conference would be there.
If any of these people had a criminal record, Harry would know within seconds.
19
Harry had a list of four conference attendee names in his pocket. He felt more strongly about some than others as he crossed the parking lot. None of the names triggered emergency alarm bells, so he thought he’d tackle the closest option: the convenience store at the edge of the strip mall’s parking lot.
As Harry traversed the sidewalk outside the small structure, he paused in the same spot he’d seen Kemba Wood stand two days ago. Harry faced the barbershop. At this vantage point, he could see everything, including the front and side of the barbershop. His view didn’t extend around the back, but he could certainly see the stretch of sidewalk protected by the awning around th
e side.
Standing here, Harry felt a gnawing sensation growing in his stomach he was starting to associate with “the hunch.” That vague and indescribable thing private eyes and detectives experienced like divine intervention. It bubbled up inside of him, firing his senses and making him feel alive. Making him feel like this moment was important.
And then, it pushed up his throat and expelled from his mouth as a belch.
“Oh,” he said, checking around to make sure no one had heard it. A hunch and a burp felt roughly the same, and Harry reminded himself to spend a little more time studying the subtle differences between the two. At least while in public.
Still, there was something significant about this spot in the parking lot.
It would have been entirely possible for Kemba to see everything from here, including the face of his thief and which direction he’d run as he fled while the glass still settled. He might’ve even seen the muddy boots, too.
Behind the strip mall, the ground quickly escalated to a hill, so if Lukas had escaped to a getaway car, there was no way to know if Kemba could have seen it from this lower vantage point. In fact, Harry didn’t know if Lukas drove. Twenty-five years ago when they were teenagers, Lukas didn’t seem to have the mental capacity to operate a car. Had that changed?
The holler was miles from here, so it’s not likely Lukas walked home. Did he have some sort of co-conspirator? For all Harry knew, maybe Kemba himself had met Lukas near that hill and driven him home.
“Or maybe he did walk to the holler from here. I just don’t know.”
Like the hunch that turned out to be a burp, Harry had to remind himself not to settle on any one thing being true without concrete proof. But with so many variables and unknowns, the urge to make assumptions to fill in a few of the blanks burned at him. He had to resist it at all costs.
As Harry was standing, Kemba’s car arrived and parked in front of the barbershop. A few seconds later the burly man grunted himself out of the car and frowned at where Harry was standing.