Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery (43 page)

I began to panic. If the phone didn't turn back on, I couldn't call anyone. If I couldn't call anyone, no one would know my whereabouts. Just Jeffrey Brickmeyer. A fact that was
very
unsettling to me.

"Let's hope I can get it up and running, right?" I made sure to look him in the eyes. "Otherwise, I might have to use yours, eh?"

I thought I'd caught him off-guard, because he flinched, but he made a concerted effort to turn his shock into a fluid,
I-don't-know-what-you're-talking-about
kind of shrug. "Don't have it on me," he said. "Damn thing's always dying on me anyways, so it'd probably be as worthless as yours right now. Needs a new battery, you know."

"Right, yeah. I think mine's starting to dry out. Fingers crossed," I said.

He smiled. "Fingers crossed."

The second go-round, the phone made a near-complete recovery. I managed to get the detective on the second ring. Jeffrey watched me the entire time. "Hunter," I said. "I know I said I was out, but I've got some information you might want to-"

"Save it, McKane." He sounded like he was talking through clenched teeth. "Where are you? Are you hiding out?"

"I'm at the Laveaus' house."

"We sent a cruiser by your place. Any reason you're not home?"

"Trying to tie up some loose ends."

"Do you have a solid alibi for today?" he asked. "Any witnesses?"

My heart began thudding in my chest. "D.L., at the very least. Why?"

"I'm only telling you this because you've been honest with me. Leland Brickmeyer was just found floating in his own pool. The one he just got through building."

I tried to play it cool, shifting around so that I could smile, plainly and falsely, at Jeffrey. I even managed a half-hearted thumbs up. "Uh-huh," I said, glancing back at Jeffrey, who was giving me a strange look. Both of his hands were shaking. "What does that mean, exactly?"

Hunter sighed impatiently. "Means he's dead. Somebody killed him, tried to make it look like an accident. Damn poor job of it too. Couldn't have been a more obvious drowning, according to the M.E."

I had a momentary flash of my first conversation with Uncle K, and something about it pinged with me. Something about water and drownings. "Any ideas?" I asked.

"None yet, though I'll tell you that the car you've been putting around town in was seen out here earlier today. Kind of a bad coincidence, don't you think?"

You wouldn't be telling me this if you suspected me, I thought. At least I hoped that was the case. "Absolutely," was all I could muster. “No, you’re right.”

In the background, somebody was saying something. Hunter covered the mouthpiece with one hand and yelled before returning his attention to me. "Now, what is it you wanted to talk to me about?"

Jeffrey's eyes bore into the back of my head. I whispered, "You're busy with the senator's situation."

"Just tell me, Mc-"

The phone went dead. For the last time, I figured. I replaced the worthless hunk of plastic in my jeans pocket. "Guess the water was too much for it," I said.

"Happens," Jeffrey replied, a bit too gleefully for my taste. "You want to hop in the Beemer with me? In case it starts raining again?"

"Where is it?" I knew I hadn't seen it on the way in.

"Parked around back. Somebody sees what happened in there, they might start to think I was involved."

"I see." I weighed my options. "The bike's a loaner. I leave it out here and something happens to it, I might as well count myself as a missing person."

Not funny, Jeffrey's look told me. “All right, suit yourself,” he said. He paused, thinking of what to say next. “So, do we try to sneak up to the Boogie House? I’ve got a pistol in the glove compartment.”

“Let’s just get out there,” I said. “I’ll think of something on the way. Maybe we can take Ronald Bullen together.”

He said, “You think both of them are out there, Ron
and
his brother?”

I ignored him and headed for the motorcycle. Luckily, it cranked on the first try.

*  *  *

My mind raced along at the speed of the asphalt beneath me. I watched the younger Brickmeyer's car closely in the bike's handlebar mirrors. Occasionally, I goosed the throttle and stepped out way ahead of the BMW, for no other reason than it made me more comfortable. Jeffrey looked nervous, and I didn’t want some unfortunate accident to befall me.

I tabulated the casualties in this mess. Leland Brickmeyer could be added to the list, probably at the hands of Kweku Laveau. Maybe the same for Red and Lyle. H.W. Bullen. Emmitt Laveau. And, of course, Vanessa. Would Janita be added to that list by the end of the day?

I took the straightest, most visible route out to the Boogie House, going right through the center of town. I drove without being noticed. I was a ghost. A phantom. As I watched the town disappear behind me and the Beemer speed up, dread rose in me and I gouged the throttle, redlining the bike all the way out to the Boogie House.

Circumstance had boxed me in. I was afraid that if I stalled, Janita Laveau might end up dead. Sure, it might be a trap, but at this point I’d rather be the one to get caught up.

I didn’t know what I expected, but I was going to damn well find out. I just hoped the spirits which had helped me along to this point would see it through to the end.

*  *  *

I parked the motorcycle in the woods a ways from the Boogie House and approached cautiously.

"Hey, McKane, wait up," Jeffrey whispered urgently, getting out of his car. I paid him no mind. "They might be armed."

I kept walking, taking a roundabout course that led me along the broadest wall. That way, I could case out the building, get a sense of what I was walking into.

Glancing back at Jeffrey, I saw abject terror in his eyes. He was following along, one hand in a jacket pocket, presumably gripping the gun.

I let my eyes drift downward, but he shook his head. “It’s mine,” he said, clutching it tighter.

In response, I took a step forward, as if to demand the weapon, but he stopped, jerked backward. He was shaking his head emphatically. It was then I had to make a choice. I could go on like this, or try to wrestle the gun from him.

I looked over his shoulder, thinking about how close my house was from here. I seriously contemplated leaving him to go back home.

“I want to use my gun,” he said.

Before I could protest, a loud sound boomed from within the Boogie House. I knelt down, and Jeffrey followed suit.

It didn’t sound like a gunshot - it was more solid, like wood on wood - but it convinced me I didn’t have time to wander back home. It had to be now, no matter how unprepared I was.

I circled around and approached from the backside. I managed to keep my nerves intact, but Jeffrey shook uncontrollably. I could hear the fabric of his jacket rustling as I pressed myself against the wall.

Pausing briefly at the front corner of the building, I peered around and looked for any sign of human life. Seeing none, I stepped around and readied myself for the big reveal.

The front door was empty; I could see that from my position against the wall. I don’t know what I had expected, but it wasn’t this. My pulse quickened, and an equalizing surge of adrenaline pumped through me.

“Bullen,” I bellowed, “if you’re in there, just know I’m stepping inside. Don’t shoot. This is Rolson McKane.”

And then, just like that, I went into the Boogie House.

*  *  *

It took a few moments for my eyes to register what I was seeing.

Ronald Bullen was strapped to a chair, side-by-side with Janita Laveau. There was a third empty chair next to them.

"Figures," I said. I felt the cold of a gun barrel being placed against the back of my head.

Fourteenth Chapter

"I'm not a crack shot with a pistol, but at this range I could make our guests living Pollack paintings," Jeffrey said. "Play nice and sit in the chair beside Emmitt's mother."

I did as I was told. Jeffrey held the gun against my temple as he made me tie my feet together and then tie them to the chair. I then had to stretch my hands behind me so he could tie them together. Once this was done, I had no chance of getting out. I tried various tactics from action movies, but they only rubbed my wrists raw, so I gave up.

Jeffrey tiptoed along one wall, reached the end, turned around, and repeated the process. His face was clenched in its usual frightened state. He looked on the verge of tears.

"Oh, man, this all escalated. So. Quickly." He punched a rotten board, but it didn't break. "How'd I get here?"

Bullen tried to speak, but a filthy length of cloth had been stuffed in his mouth and secured with duct tape. He was on death’s door but hadn’t crossed over. He had the look of a quilt patched together with human skin.

I turned to Janita. "You all right?" I whispered. She nodded, but it was clearly a lie. Her face was dotted with bruises and one eye was swollen. She was not gagged but didn't speak, either.

Jeffrey’s back was to us, and he was talking to himself in that way that only someone who is deluded can. I leaned forward. "Bullen," I said. "You all right?"

Bullen's eyes remained fixed on Brickmeyer. He nodded, but this, too, was an unfortunate gesture. His nostrils were coated in dried blood, each eye purple with deep, harsh bruises.

Jeffrey spun around. "Uh-unh," he said. "No planning. Can't have anything interrupting this, can we? This part has to go well for the whole business to work out properly."

Something, a blur of some kind, flickered in my periphery, but I ignored it. Or tried to. Jeffrey hadn't seen it, or couldn’t see it, so I wondered if I had, either.

It was then I caught a slight whiff of gasoline. Jeffrey smiled lopsidedly, fake and disturbing, before crossing the length of the juke joint and pulling out a giant red canister.

He held his nose to the opening and said, "Yep, that's the stuff." He shook it once, and pungent gas sloshed out, covering his right hand. The younger Brickmeyer sniffed his knuckles and shrugged before heading back in our direction.

The process began with Jeffrey dribbling gasoline around us. He stopped after a few rounds and placed the canister on the floor. "I've got two of these," he said, "Just in case it don’t get hot enough in here."

He coughed once and spat on the floor. "You know, you should be glad your phone cut out back there at the Laveau place. A couple more seconds with the detective, and I'd have killed you right there. Wouldn't have wanted to, but that's the way it is."

I tested the waters with Jeffrey. "Janita's got nothing to do with this, Jeff. Let her go. Deal with Ronald. Deal with me. He kidnapped Emmitt, and I'm the one who investigated the case."

"Why would I care about that?"

"Because it would have eventually led me to you, wouldn't it?"

Jeffrey's face turned bitter. "You and he, the two of you, were going to ruin our family. And she," he said, flicking his eyes toward Janita, "was just as bad as my old man. She wouldn’t have accepted her son. She wouldn’t have wanted him to be with me. So she's got to participate in this with you, I'm afraid."

"Are you afraid, Jeff?"

"No," he said, avoiding eye contact. "I've got it all figured out. Bullen kidnaps the both of you, brings you here in order to get you to talk about my father - to frame him - but what he doesn't count on is two local cops figuring it out just in time to stop it all.”

He paused, listening, and then said, “Oh, and here they come now."

The sound of brakes outside. Two doors slamming. Feet crunching on dead twigs. I was unimpressed with the two uniformed officers who stepped inside: Owen Harper and Ricky Walton. Owen looked like he’d swallowed a cat whole, but Ricky couldn't have been happier to see me strapped to this chair.

"What's with the fire?" I asked.

Jeffrey glared. "Once Bullen figures out he can't get information out of you, he decides to kill you. He shoots you both in the head and sets the place on fire to destroy the evidence, but Owen and Ricky here show up and kill him in a shootout just as the Boogie House grows too hot for the bodies to be salvaged. It all fits with the picture the LJPD will paint of Ronald Bullen. Story over."

He tried to smile, but his nerves wouldn't allow it. “Oh, and speaking of narrative, that reminds me."

Brickmeyer's hand emerged from behind his back with the pistol. He had put it up to do the thing with the gasoline. I saw it, really, for the first time then. It was Bullen’s gun and not his. He fumbled with it for a moment, trying to cock the hammer, and then he aimed and fired at Owen Harper.

The bullet caught him in the chest. Undoubtedly, Jeffrey was going for a headshot but had missed. Owen stumbled back, surprised, and fell against the entranceway, a jagged red circle forming at the entry point. "Hey!" Ricky screamed. "That wasn't the deal."

"He would talk." Jeffrey said. "Got it during the firefight. Simple as that."

Ricky stared, standing stock-still at the feet of his dying partner. His hand had gone to the hip holster, his fingers unsnapping it instinctively. Framed by the doorway, he almost looked heroic. Almost.

"Relax, officer. I'm not going to shoot
you
. I just can't have this coming back to me whatsoever. Okay, now let's get on with it."

Ricky continued to regard Jeffrey skeptically, even as Jeffrey returned to the canister. The hand remained fixed on the butt of his pistol. Jeffrey's (or rather Bullen's) gun had returned to its former position, in the back of his pants.

Brickmeyer hefted the can above his head and dumped gasoline all over Bullen, who struggled against the ropes and screamed deep within his throat, the sound of man aware of impending death.

My attention was drawn upward. My mind had produced another hallucination, this time hovering just above Brickmeyer's head, spreading out like a bat readying itself for flight. I glanced at Ricky to see if he was seeing it, too, but he no more registered the black haze than he did his partner moaning at his feet.

The smell of gas hit me instantly. Droplets of the stuff spattered my face. In all the commotion, I tried to dislodge my hands from the tape, to no avail. Janita remained still and quiet, as if she'd accepted the situation’s inevitability.

When Jeffrey stopped pouring, the room became quiet, save for Bullen’s exhalations. He sputtered and grunted, trying to keep the gas from going down his nose.

"Asshole kept a file on my father the entire time he worked for the LJPD," Jeffrey said. "Wanted to ruin him because of a decades-old land dispute. Can you believe that?"

No one replied. Even Ricky regarded him suspiciously.

"He was
obsessed
," he continued. "The pictures he showed you, McKane, were ones he himself took. Psycho. You know why he kidnapped Emmitt in the first place?" He leaned over and spat in Bullen's face. "
Desperation
. Somebody found his little file and destroyed it. Thanks, Ricky. He thought it was over. And then he happened upon me and Emmitt together. It gave the sick bastard motivation for one last-ditch attempt to ruin my dad. But it didn't work, did it? Did it, motherfucker?"

Jeffrey took a step back. He breathed with a force that made me think he was hyperventilating. "My God. What am I doing?"

There was a brief moment when I thought he might call the whole thing off. But then he got that look in his eyes again, and it all recommenced.

He turned to Ricky. "Shoot him.”

Jeffrey stepped away from the three of us but kept his gaze fixed on the cop. “Jesus. You know, Bullen, I dreamed last night that I'd burned you alive. I just put a lighter to your face and watched it go. It was so real. I woke up seeing things. I want to, but I can't do that. I'm not a monster. Not like you. Ricky, shoot him."

Ricky glanced from Bullen to Jeffrey to me and then back to Jeffrey. "I can't do that, J," he said, stuttering. "I can look the other way. That was our deal. But actively taking part is beneath even me."

"Taking part? Taking
part
? You're already taking part. You're
here
, aren't you? This will save the police department. The only way it can even function is with my father’s help. Without him, it would fall completely apart."

"That's why I'm here," he said. "My job's all I got."

They glared at one another for a moment. "Fine, give me the gun. I'll do it myself. It's just got to look real enough that you can cover it up."

They exchanged pistols, and Jeffrey took the time to figure out how to use it before approaching Ron. "Dad sure will be relieved about this."

Then I had an idea.

I leaned over. "Forgive me," I whispered to Janita. I felt the slightest nudge of approval. I dreaded what I was about to say, but it was a last-ditch effort.

Jeffrey raised the pistol, aiming for Bullen’s forehead. His finger trembled on the trigger.

"Maybe that's why your father killed himself," I said, blurting out the words in a single breath.

He turned to me, face twisted up into something quite inhuman. The black smudge surrounding him continued to grow. “What’d you say?”

"You think that picture in the paper is why he stuck his head underwater and didn't come up? I do."

"Shut up."

I didn’t bother to think about what I was saying. As long as he let me talk, I was safe. "I do. I think he was ashamed. Ashamed before he found out and even more so once he knew for a fact that you weren't just ineffectual but something he couldn’t approve of."

Jeffrey’s face became jagged, uneven. "McKane, I'm warning you. I'll kill this one and then work on Laveau right in front of you. Make you watch."

I ignored him, plowing forward. "You know that phone call I made?" He didn't respond, but I kept going. "What I didn't tell you is that your old man is dead. Was found today, while you were out and about, planning this little coup. I bet your cell phone isn't on, is it?"

He was incredulous. "Stop it. You're lying."

"Check with your accomplice over there. Certainly he's heard about it by now. Ask him."

Brickmeyer straightened up as if a cold finger had grazed his neck. His whole body went rigid, and he dropped the gun to his side. "Liar!" he said, finally. "Fucking asshole liar. Call this asshole a liar, Ricky. Tell him how full of it he is."

"Jeff," Ricky began, taking a step forward. "He-"

"No! It's not true,” he said. He was shouting. “It isn't. McKane convinced them to stage it all, to get someone to make a mistake."

Ricky stepped forward, searching for sufficient words. "I saw him, Jeff. He's gone, man. Just do what you got to do, and let's get the hell out of here. Your family's gonna start looking for you soon."

Jeffrey didn't quite begin to cry at this, but his face twisted up into a horrible expression, and he began to make these half-hiccup, half-sobbing sounds.

"It's all over," I said. "There's nothing left to protect. Killing us won't do any more for your father than letting us go. Please, Jeffrey. Listen to reason."

He raised both hands to his face and quietly broke down for a moment. Seconds dragged by. Once his shoulders stopped moving with the weight of his grief, he leveled the barrel of the gun on Ronald Bullen and shot him three times in quick succession.

Bullen gurgled in his throat and thrashed violently. The first bullet got him in the chest. Brickmeyer hadn't held the gun tightly, so the second and third shots went higher. The second pierced his shoulder and the last clipped his head. It wasn't enough to kill him instantly, but a quarter of his skull disappeared in a spray of blood.

I was in shock. The smell of smoke and blood and gasoline were making me sick. I didn't even turn my head to watch Jeffrey splash the walls with gasoline and set them on fire. I smelled the result, and I heard the crackling of wood as the place went up. Old as it was, it wouldn't take long for the whole building to be reduced to ashes.

He returned to his spot in front of us, his eyes burning holes into me. "You're next, asshole," he said, yelling in order to drown out the screaming and groaning and destruction.

I've always thought the saying "staring down the barrel of a gun" was kind of strange and dramatic, but it was the most apt description my mind could muster. The darkness inside the barrel was more terrifying than any night in the Boogie House.

And just before the pistol bucked in Jeffrey’s hand, I saw a nearly-invisible coil wrap itself around the younger Brickmeyer’s arm, like a python tightening around a victim, and somehow it filled me with a sense of grim, knowing comfort. Jeffrey Brickmeyer had no idea what he was doing to himself.

The gun erupted in flame, emitting a cacophonous roar, and for a moment I thought my stomach had caught on fire. I felt my blood and life seep out and stain my shirt. Janita was screaming at the top of her lungs. The same word, repeating,
nononono.