Criminal Intent (MIRA) (34 page)

Teddy strode across warped pine floorboards to the window and lifted the tattered green shade. From here, he could see the length of the driveway and a quarter mile of roadfront property. Perfect. He dropped the shade and glanced at the kid. She sat on the floor, hunched up in a corner, watching his every move with huge, accusing blue eyes. “Why are you doing this?” she said.

“Because
it’s what I do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Taking his cell phone from its belt clip, he said, “It’s nothing personal, kid. It’s my job. I’m a hired killer.”

“People actually pay you to kill other people?”

He grinned, that same disarming grin he’d used to win her over at the mailbox. “Fucking amazing, isn’t it?”

Her eyes narrowed. “You’re crazy.”

“Nope. Heartless, maybe. Ruthless, for sure. But not crazy.” He came near her, squatted down in front of her, and she flinched. Holding his cell phone up in front of her, he said, “Get your mother on the phone.”

“No.”

“Did you see the knife I used to cut the rope? Did you get a good look at the blade?”

She glared at him without answering.

“I know you saw it, kid. You watched me slice that rope in two. You saw how sharp the knife is. If you don’t do what I say, I’ll start chopping off fingers. Amputation without anesthesia. Ugh.” He mock-shuddered. “Messy and painful.”

“You’d do it, wouldn’t you?”

“If you do what I say, Sophie, you’ll never have to find out.”

She looked at him without speaking, then she lifted her joined hands and with one finger, punched a series of digits into the phone.

“Wise choice,” Teddy said. “You’re not only pretty, you’re smart.” He lifted the phone to Sophie’s ear, heard the muffled response at the other end.

“Mom?” the girl said. “Mom, I’m here with this awful man. I don’t even know where we are! He grabbed me while I was getting the mail and he put me in his trunk, and now he’s threatening to cut off my fing—”

He took away the phone, pushed the end button, and began silently counting.

“Why’d
you do that?” she said.

When he reached five, the phone rang. “Psychology 101,” he said, and pushed the send button. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Spinney.”

“Don’t hurt her! For God’s sake, don’t hurt her. Please. She’s only fifteen years old. She had nothing to do with any of this. If you want to kill me, fine. But you have to let her go.”

“I believe you have something I want, Mrs. Spinney. I’ll make an even trade. The envelope for your daughter.”

“I’ll bring it to you. Just, please, don’t hurt her.”

Teddy studied his cuticles. He really was due for a manicure. “You know,” he said casually, “I’d thought that before this was all over, you and I might have a little fun together. But now that I’ve seen your daughter—” he smiled over at the kid “—I think I like her better.”

“You lay a finger on her, you son of a bitch, and I’ll tear out your heart with my bare hands!”

“The envelope, Robin. Bring me the envelope.”

“Where are you?”

“About two miles out of town, on Route 113, there’s an old abandoned farmhouse on the left. Pull into the driveway and wait. When I see you sitting there, I’ll call you. Bring Louis with you.”

“How do you know about Louis?”

“I know about everything. And I have a bird’s-eye view of everything that comes and goes around here. If I see any cops—if I see anybody besides you and Farley—I’ll kill her first and ask questions later. Got that?”

“I’ve got it. Listen, you have to give me a few minutes. I have the envelope, but it’s not here. I have to get it.”

“You do that. I’m a patient man. Just remember, at the first sign of trouble, your daughter gets a bullet between her eyes.”

He broke the connection, reattached his cell phone to its belt
clip. Pulled out a pack of cigarettes, shook one free, and took it in his mouth. He flicked his lighter, watched the flame for a while before he brought it to the tip of his cigarette.

“Now what?” the kid said.

He sat down on the floor across from her, crossed-legged. Took a long drag on the cigarette, exhaled, and flicked an ash on the floor. “Now we wait,” he said.

You’d have thought the circus was in town, the way people were acting. The only thing missing was the cotton candy concession. How this many supposedly rational people could be entertained by a drunken fool with a BB gun courting catastrophe and humiliation, he couldn’t imagine. But this was Serenity, where this kind of entertainment didn’t come along all that often. People took what they could get. Once Eddie sobered up, he’d probably die of embarrassment. Men made such fools of themselves over women. Especially when they had a bottle in their hands.

He spied Randy Moreau at the fringes of the crowd. Moreau was a good kid who tended bar over at the River City Pub while he worked his way through the local community college. Randy had dreams of becoming a cop. He might as well start getting in a little practice now. “Hey, Moreau,” Davy shouted, and waved his arm in a come-here gesture.

Randy trotted over with the enthusiasm of a golden retriever pup, a wide grin on his face. “Well, if it ain’t the Lone Ranger,” he said.

Davy tossed him the keys to his cruiser. “Here you go, Tonto.”

“What’s this?”

“I just deputized you. There’s a roll of crime scene tape in my trunk. Start herding these yahoos across the street, string up the tape, and tell ’em to stay behind it. If that doesn’t work, you have my permission to start shooting ’em.”

“Yes
sir!” Snapping him a sharp salute that would have done Gomer Pyle proud, Randy wheeled around and marched off toward the cruiser.

The cell phone at his hip vibrated. Ignoring it, he waded into the crowd. There were probably only about forty people gathered in a cluster on the sidewalk, but it felt more like four hundred. He wasn’t sure if it was his uniform or the grim expression on his face that did the trick, but they parted before him like the Red Sea parting for Moses. It might have been his imagination, but he almost thought he heard a collective intake of breath, as though they were all waiting to see how he was going to handle the situation. A new, grudging admiration for Ty Savage overtook him. Any man who’d choose to spend his days this way had to be a lunatic. But nobody would ever mistake him for a chickenshit.

Eloise Tiner’s sister Debbie lived in a tidy white house behind a lush front lawn. Right now, Eddie was standing in the middle of that lawn, his balance a little off kilter as he gazed up at the house. His bottle of Jim Beam sat in the grass beside him, yawing at about the same angle as Eddie. “You listen to me, Eloise!” he shouted. “You come out here now, you hear?”

At one of the downstairs windows, a curtain lifted and somebody peeked out before quickly retreating. “I mean it!” Eddie shouted, swaying and nearly losing his balance. “We are gonna have this out right here, right now!”

When he got no response, Eddie raised the BB gun and aimed it at one of the bedroom windows. He pulled the trigger, missed the window, and a BB pinged off the rain gutter. Somebody hooted, and a smattering of applause rippled through the assembled multitude.

“Hey, Eddie,” Davy said amiably, “haven’t we already been through this once today?”

Eddie swung around, still pointing the BB gun, and Davy sensed
a collective shift in the crowd behind him, away from its business end. “You go on home now, Hunter,” Eddie said. “This is between me and my wife. It ain’t none of your business.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” he said. “What you’re doing here is against the law, and I happen to be the law in this town. Way I see it, that makes it my business.”

“You’re fulla shit. There ain’t no law against a man talking to his wife.”

“There’s a law against threatening with a loaded firearm—”

“Shit, Davy, it ain’t no real gun.”

“Public drunkenness, vandalism, terrorizing. Should I go on?”

Eddie blinked a couple of times. “Cripe, Davy,” he whined, “you ain’t no fun at all since you quit drinking.”

At Davy’s hip, his cell phone vibrated again. “Even when I was a drunk,” he said, “I had better sense than to pull a stunt like this. Why don’t you put down the BB gun and I’ll give you a ride over to the station? We can sit down and drink some coffee and talk about it.”

“Ain’t nothing to talk about. Either she comes home with me right now, or I’m having the locks changed tomorrow morning, and that’s it.” Eddie wheeled around in the direction of the house. “You hear that, Eloise?” he shouted. “I mean it. This is it. The! End!”

From somewhere in the crowd, somebody yelled, “Maybe that’s what she’s hoping for.” The anonymous jokester’s words brought a few chuckles.

Eddie reached down, picked up his bottle of Jim Beam, and took a slug. Clutching the bottle to his chest, he said, “I just want to know one thing, Eloise. Why? Why’d you go with him? Didn’t I give you everything you ever wanted?”

From behind Davy, that same anonymous voice yelled, “And probably a few she didn’t want.”

Somebody
snickered, and Davy wheeled around, giving the entire group the full force of his coldest stare. “Shut the fuck up!” he snapped.

Stunned silence greeted his words. Most of the faces staring back at him were familiar. People he’d known all his life. Randy Moreau, standing by his makeshift police line, started to cough, but cut it off abruptly.

“Bloodsuckers,” Davy muttered, and turned his attention back to Tiner. Diplomacy was getting him nowhere. He should have remembered you couldn’t reason with a drunk. He ought to know. He’d spent enough years living with one. Had even been one himself for a while. But not anymore. For the first time in a long time, Davy Hunter didn’t see the future stretching out ahead of him as one long, bleak subway ride to hell. “Eddie,” he said, “it’s time to end this little charade. I’m coming over there and I’m taking the BB gun.”

“Stand back!” Eddie squeaked, pointing the gun directly at him. “Don’t come no closer or I’ll shoot ya!”

Trying not to think about the conversation he’d had with Dixie about how it would feel to be shot by one of those hard little pellets, he began walking slowly and evenly in Eddie’s direction.

“You shoot me with that thing,” he said, steadily bearing down on Eddie, “you’ll be paying whatever it costs to have those BB’s scraped out of my hide.”

“I mean it, Davy!”

“Not to mention reimbursing the town of Serenity for the cost of a replacement uniform. One without holes in it.”

“I’m warning ya. I’ll shoot you, and then I’ll shoot myself.”

Death by BB gun. He supposed it was possible, but he doubted that Eddie Tiner, in his current state of inebriation, possessed the coordination to pull it off. Staring Tiner straight in the eye, Davy walked up to him and removed the gun from his hands. Eddie didn’t even try to stop him. Tears filled the man’s
red-rimmed, rheumy eyes. “Damn it, Davy,” he said, “she cheated on me. What’m I supposed to do now?”

Been there, done that. Bought a whole closet full of the fucking T-shirts.

Davy handed the BB gun to Randy Moreau, who’d jogged up to stand beside him. Pulling Eddie’s arms behind his back, he cuffed him, then patted him on the shoulder. “You move on,” he said, turning Eddie and giving him a gentle shove in the direction of the police cruiser. “That’s what you’re supposed to do. You just put one foot in front of the other and keep on moving.”

This was her worst nightmare, come to vivid and terrifying life. This was all her biggest fears and all the bad things that had ever happened to her all rolled into one. This was fourteen-year-old Timmy Rivers, hit by a drunk driver and left to die; this was her mother, slowly and agonizingly dying of cancer less than a year after she retired from a job she’d spent twenty-five years hating; this was Mac, perishing in the flames of his wrecked cruiser in a ravine beside a deserted Mississippi highway. This was nuclear war and school shootings and airplanes crashing into skyscrapers. This was the bogeyman under the bed. This was, for God’s sake,
Sophie.

“Drive faster,” Annie ordered as Louis took a corner so quickly the dust flew.

“I’m driving as fast as I can,” he said. “If I get us both killed, it’ll defeat our whole purpose.”

“Tell me, Louis, do you have any kids?”

“No.”

“Then shut up, because you don’t have a fucking clue where I’m coming from. Turn here.”

Louis turned. Trees and houses passed in a blur. The car made a slow slide into the correct lane, and she let out the breath she’d been holding.

“What’s
the story with your boyfriend, the cop?” he said. “The one who’s twice my size?”

“I can’t reach him.” She’d tried four times to reach Hunter, but she kept getting his voice mail. “And he’s not really my boyfriend. I’ve only known him for a week.”

“A lot can happen in a week.”

“Yeah.” The word came out on a brittle laugh that was half sob. Hard to believe it had been just a few hours since she’d last seen him. It felt like a lifetime ago. Then again, it had been. This morning, her daughter had been safe. Now she was in the hands of a madman.

“Right here,” she shouted. “Right here!”

Louis applied the brakes and turned the wheel, and the Camry came to a screeching, shuddering halt in the dusty parking lot beside an ugly chain-link fence. A man in greasy blue coveralls stood next to the front door, keys in his hand, gaping, openmouthed, at their arrival.

Annie was out of the car before the dust settled. “Mr. Gaudette?” she said.

“Ayuh.”

“I’m Annie Kendall. The blue Volvo?”

“Yup. Your car’s not ready yet.”

“It doesn’t matter. I need to get something out of it. Where is it?”

“In the shop. But I was just locking up for the day. My wife expects me home every day at 4:30 for supper.” He lifted his watch and jiggled it for emphasis.

“Well, today, she’ll just have to wait. If you don’t let us in so I can get an envelope out of my car, my daughter’s going to die!”

Looking faintly shocked, Gaudette unlocked the door, and the three of them crowded into his tiny office. “Now, let’s see,” he said. “Where did I put those Volvo keys?”