No One Else to Kill (Jim West Series) (33 page)

“Sure.
 
You leaving
us?”

“Yes.
 
It’s time for
me to go.”

“I understand you were quite the hero last night.”

“Not really. Besides, I didn’t have much choice.”

The way she looked at me before she turned to get my
coffee made me wish I was twenty years younger.
 
She returned in a couple of minutes with a cup of coffee and a bag of
something.

“It’s a sandwich,” she said. “It’s on the house for
helping out my dad.”

“Why, thank you. You take care of yourself,” I said and
left. Helping out her father had been the last thing on my mind the last
several days, but I appreciated the sandwich.

I climbed into my car and started to leave when I saw
Nesbitt and Stallings standing by the edge of the parking lot. Something else
there beside them caught my eye and made me smile. I drove straight for it.

Stallings had his arm up and pointed at something in the
distance for Nesbitt to see.
 
It could’ve
been a deer, a hawk, or something else.
 
It didn’t matter to me. I was simply happy that whatever it was, it kept
their attention away from me.

I hit the mud puddle next to them, and dirty water spayed
all over both of them. I never slowed down but caught a satisfying glimpse of
them jumping around and trying to shake the water off.
 
Childish revenge, yes, but it made my day.

The first part of my drive out of the Pecos Wilderness
Area wound through beautiful forest covered hills and valleys.
 
Elsewhere in the state, the highways can
stretch for miles without the slightest bend; here it appeared that the person
tasked with laying out a straight road may have been a little tipsy. The
highway bent one way or the other about every half mile, if not more often.

Except in the big cities, which are few in New Mexico,
traffic is usually light.
 
It made me
again wonder how Vic would get out of the state.
 
The Sheriff had said that he had Vic’s rental
car under surveillance. Most likely, the sheriff wouldn’t lift it for another
day or so.
 
That left Vic on foot, and
one couldn’t just hike out of state from the Santa Fe area.
 
New Mexico extended for over a hundred miles
in every direction.
 
It might be slightly
less if you headed due north, but that would be through the roughest part of
the mountains.

Hitchhiking would also be difficult, and more so now than
ever since the murders and ongoing manhunt had made the front pages.
 
I guess if I was him, I’d be looking for a
car to steal. But then, I wouldn’t be him.

Once I hit I-40, the terrain changed and I got back into
the New Mexico I had become more accustomed to: miles and miles of nothing,
interrupted by a few trees and a house or two.
 
Actually, I liked it. It said to me, like it has always said to me,
“What you see is what you get.”

I drove on, my mind remembering years ago when I had first
returned to New Mexico after the Air Force. This area was close to where I had
encountered a news reporter for the small town of Denton. She had rekindled a
flame inside me that I thought had been extinguished forever. The two of us
were tossed into the midst of a murder investigation.
 
An ugly one, if you could call one more ugly
than others.

I had nothing important to do and would have tried to look
her up, but I knew she had moved on to bigger jobs and bigger cities back
east.
 
Still, as I drove through the
small town, I felt the tug.

I turned south on 209, a good road that went south for
twenty miles, east for thirty miles, and then straight south again for another
thirty before dying in Clovis. Traffic had never been a problem on this road,
and I encountered only a few vehicles on this last stretch of my drive home.

Chubbs ran back and forth in the backyard when he heard my
car pull into the driveway. You’d think I had been gone a month rather than
just a few days. After my obligatory bonding with Chubbs, I walked next door
and paid the fourteen year old.
 
She had
only recently taken over the responsibility for Chubbs from her older
sister.
 
My understanding of the process
was that after she received the payment from me, she would ration portions of
the money to her younger siblings, supposedly in proportion to the support they
provided her.

Her older sister, now sixteen, had moved on to high school
and more important endeavors.
 
Sibyl, her
mom, had informed me that she had become too fixated on another high school
sophomore, a boy, and might not be as reliable as she had once been.
 
So Chubbs and I had a new business partner.
Chubbs had no problem with the change in leadership, and I had long known that
all the children kept Chubbs busy while I was away.

I called Detective Bruno the day after I returned.
 
I did it mainly as a courtesy and with
perhaps a bit of curiosity regarding the search for Vic.
 
He was in a good mood but said that so far no
one had seen any sign of Vic.
 
That
troubled me only because I knew the longer he could elude the authorities the
farther away he could get.

Later that night, I learned exactly how far Vic had
traveled.
 
My first hint that something
wasn’t right came from Chubbs in the form of a low growl. He’s normally a
barker not a growler, so his growl got my attention right away.

“
Shhh
,” I said softly to him as
I sat up in bed.

Another growl.

“Quiet now,” I said and stroked his ears.
 
“Let’s see what we have out there.”

From my bedroom windows I can see most of my back
yard.
 
I separated two of the blinds with
my fingers and peered along the back of my one story house. Someone definitely
crouched at the far end by the door that went into my utility room.
 
The darkness and distance between us
prevented me from identifying him, but I immediately had my suspicions.

I reached under my bed and drew out the cutlass that had
been collecting dust there since I moved into the house. Years ago, I received
it as a gift from a friend in the British MI-5.
 
We had worked together on a particularly nasty espionage case on
Gibraltar.
 
Besides the bond we had
formed, the final outcome was about the only thing positive that came out of
the lengthy investigation. That subsequent Christmas, the cutlass arrived gift
wrapped and unexpected at my office.

I knew the cutlass couldn’t match a gun, but in close
quarters and in my own house, I felt secure with it and a few baseball bats
scattered about.

I walked quickly down the hall, stopping before I got to
the kitchen to listen. Not a sound came from anywhere until Chubbs, at my feet,
growled again.

“
Shh
, boy, we don’t want to
scare this one away.”

A phone sat on the desk in my library. I dialed 911 but
left the receiver on the desk.
 
I knew
someone would respond whether I spoke or not.

I crossed the kitchen and paused again at the entry to the
utility room.
 
The door to the outside
was to my left, and the washer and dryer and bathroom were to my right. I heard
a scraping sound coming from the doorway and guessed that he was trying to pop
open the door with a chisel or a large screwdriver.

Although I had an alarm system, I rarely used it, but he
would have no way to know that.
 
Trying
to break into my house was foolhardy.
 
If
that was Vic out there, and I was betting money it was, he had certainly become
even more irrational. Perhaps he thought that even if I had the alarm on, it
would take the authorities at least five minute to respond to my house, and
that he could get in, shoot me, and be gone well within five minutes.

But why me?
 
That was another question I would have to
think about later, as I heard a crunching sound that indicated that whoever it
was out there may have succeeded in getting the door open. Just as the
crunching sound reached us, Chubbs let out a nervous yip.

Leaning tight against the wall, I squatted down for a
second and calmed Chubbs. His silence amazed me.
 
He usually won’t stop barking when anyone
even knocks on the door.
 
I heard the
door being pushed open and immediately stood up and braced myself against the
wall of the kitchen.

For a second nothing seemed to happen.
 
Then it appeared. By it, I’m referring to
that large ugly revolver that had already taken a few shots at me. I had hoped
it would be the first thing that came into view. A real professional knows not
to lead himself around corners with his gun hand, but you see it all the time
on TV, so most amateurs have never caught on.

As soon as the revolver came into view, two things
happened:
 
Chubbs could no longer control
himself and began barking as ferociously as he could, and I slashed the cutlass
down and into Vic’s wrist.
 
Unlike what
you see in the movies, it’s not easy to slice an individual’s hand off.
 
In my case, I learned later that the cutlass
did slice through one bone before the blade got stuck in the second.

The revolver fell to the floor and Vic screamed in pain.
He also instinctively jerked away, almost wrenching the cutlass out of my hand.
I held on to the cutlass and followed Vic back into the utility room where he
collapsed in shock against the far wall.
 
Blood was streaming out of his arm, and I finally had to yank on the
cutlass for it to break away from the bone and flesh.
  
Vic screamed again and tried to cover his
wounded wrist with his good hand.

I took a step away from him and kicked the revolver into
the kitchen and out of sight.
 
Vic didn’t
appear to notice.
 
He sat there and
stared at his wrist. He seemed to be in a daze. Even Chubbs had backed away and
sat quietly.
 
I turned on the lights and
grabbed a yard towel that had been washed off the top of the dryer.
 
I tossed it to Vic and told him to wrap it
tightly around the wound.
 
He looked at
me blankly but did as I instructed.

The cops would be here any second, so I hurried into the
library, grabbed the phone and returned to Vic.
 
He hadn’t moved.

“Hello,” I said into the receiver.

The 911 operator answered me. I told her what had happened
and asked her to tell the responding police and EMS personnel to come around to
the back door. I explained that I didn’t want to leave my prisoner alone.
 
I also told her he may have murdered two
people already.
 
I turned on the outside
light and waited.

“You ass!
You nearly cut off my
hand!” Vic snarled and moaned, but never made eye contact with me.

“You were going to kill your wife and me.
 
You almost succeeded.
 
I should’ve cut off your head.”

He still didn’t look at me but he shut up.
 
I looked down at the cutlass and felt the
urge to clean it. I could see how the cutlass was a favorite weapon of a lot of
sailors a couple of centuries ago. At close range, it could do a lot of damage.

The flashing lights of the police vehicles bounced off the
few trees I had out back and signaled to me the cavalry had arrived. Chubbs,
who had been strangely silent for a while, started barking. I hushed Chubbs and
told him these were the good guys.

“You’re lucky you’re still alive, Vic.
 
I imagine you’ll be behind bars for a long
time, but if by some miracle you are let loose, don’t you ever think about
hurting another soul. Understand?”

He sat there on my floor holding the towel tightly to his
wrist and rocked back and forth. He ignored me, if he heard me at all.

“Hello?” a hesitant voice sounded from outside.
“Police here.
 
Mr.
West, what’s the status inside?”

“Everything’s secure.
 
You can come in,” I shouted back.

A uniformed patrolman appeared at the door. Another shadow
stood behind him off to the side.

“He busted in,” I said and pointed to the door frame.
 
“He had a gun.
 
It’s on the floor in the kitchen now.
 
His names Vic
Schutte
.
 
He’s
wanted for two murders.”

The young officer looked at the cutlass in my hand and his
eyes widened.

“Is that a machete?”

“No, a genuine replica of an old English
cutlass.”

“Is that what happened to his hand?”

“Yes,” I said. “I imagine you’ll want it.”
 
I offered it handle first to him, doing my
best to avoid the blood on the blade as I did.

He looked at it hesitantly.

“Bert, come on in,” he said to his partner. “Get a bag we
can put that in.” He motioned to the cutlass that I still held.
 
“And another bag for a
gun.”
He looked at me inquisitively.

“A large revolver,” I said.

“You okay with everything in here?” the one patrolman
asked his partner before disappearing. The officer inside nodded his assent.

“Are you okay, Mr. West?”

“Yes, I’m fine.”

“How bad is your hand?” he asked Vic.