Executive Dirt: A Sedona O'Hala Mystery (27 page)

That’s when the shooting started.

I crawled backwards just as Mark took aim with one arm out the door and yelled, “Hold your fire!”

An arm came flying off the robot and slapped into his hand, knocking his gun onto the concrete and forcing him back. “Shit.”

Through the opening, I could see Howard shooting at the scarecrow with wild abandon. Clint was barely recognizable because of all the blood, but he took a very precise swing at the guy standing behind him, connecting hard with his elbow.

The guy he hit was one of the ones who had been sitting near Howard at Joe’s funeral. Clint’s next blow smashed hard into his nose. The guy went down and didn’t even twitch.

Before Clint could take further action, Howard turned and shot him.

Clint was already bleeding from one arm and now his leg blossomed dark red.  His face contorted with pain.  With superhuman determination he clawed his way towards Howard and the garden.

“That’s right, you bastard!” Howard yelled. “I said I’d bury you here, and I will! No one steals from me!”

Mark edged his hand towards his gun.

“Howard?” I screamed the distraction before he could shoot again.  “Why are you burying people in my backyard?”

He swung around and took a shot at the open doorway.  I was already behind the wall and back down flat, but thankfully his gun was out of bullets.  He squawked loud enough to be heard over the security alarms in my yard.

I hit the buttons on the control switch, leaving him screaming into the silence.

“Why aren’t you at the patent meeting?” he sputtered.

“Why aren’t you?” I yelled back.

“You stole my idea! You’re going to pay.”

I didn’t have any idea what he was griping about.  I pressed more buttons on the phone, but the robot was still flailing feverishly. The remaining arm windmilled around and around while the rest of the thing gyrated like a headless chicken.

Mark felt around the porch for his gun while staying mostly inside and keeping an eye on Howard.

Clint finally reached the garden.  He grabbed wildly at the robot and yanked hard. A robot leg detached, pitching him sideways into the dirt.

Howard reached into his pocket.

Mark yelled, “Freeze, asshole!”

Howard ignored the order, pulled out a clip for the gun and would have been shot by Mark, except Clint swung the robot leg like a pro baseball player, nearly separating Howard from his head. “I don’t...deliver...” He had to stop to gasp in two quick breaths. “Illegal shit for...shitheads.”  With a groan, Clint fell flat.  He lay unmoving.

Howard clutched his head and groped around for his gun or the clip.

Mark and I both rushed him.  Behind me, I could hear Brenda yelling.

Mark landed two punches before slamming Howard to the ground. A well-placed knee in his back kept him down.

I picked up the robot leg and held it ready to bash him in the head if he so much as wiggled.  “What the hell are you doing here, Howard?”

Brenda rushed out with my medical kit in her hands.  She went straight to Clint. “I swear, Sedona, I didn’t know you were working another case and had people coming over.”

The way she melded those two things together made my eyes cross. “Neither did I.”

“No one steals from me and lives to tell about it,” Howard bellowed. “First Joe thought he could steal one of the watches.  Then it turns out Cary and he were stealing the phones and selling them to street thugs and cutting me out of the profit!”

“Those were Borgot phones, not your phones,” I pointed out.

“They put the plan at risk! We could have all been rich. All Cary had to do was follow directions and get the code to Rohit.  But no! Lazy asshole hired an even lazier asshole!”

“Why sell it to Rohit in the first place?”

“Rohit was the best there ever was.  I can code. I had special tutoring because the law department required that we know programming for filing patents. Rohit could code anything. When he started his own business, I knew it would make money.”

“You were friends?”

Howard snarled, “He wasn’t in my league or he wouldn’t have failed.”

It took me a moment to make the connection, but his mention of the law department and learning to code was a big clue.  “Rohit was your computer programming tutor in college, wasn’t he?”

Howard’s head twisted, but he didn’t answer.

I pointed to the prone guy on the ground. He was also Howard’s age.  His hair was black.  He didn’t look it, but I guessed anyway. “He’s Hispanic, isn’t he?”

Howard’s eyes flicked to his buddy. “Vince? He’s Italian. Sosa’s the Spanish expert.”

“And they helped you code the languages.  I bet Rohit tutored them too.”

“Borgot wouldn’t hire them, the idiots. I told Borgot they had nothing without the languages. These companies think they can stick any old crap out there and sell it, even with no new functionality.”

I couldn’t argue the point because it was often true. “So you sold the code to Rohit at Clockworks instead.”

“We were so close to production when the venture capitalists yanked the funding at Clockworks. We were gonna be rich. And Borgot was raking in plenty of funding for a stupid phone! That watch is going to make way more money than just another stupid phone. When Rohit takes it to market, I’m going to be right there, funding it and getting my piece.”

“Yeah, funding it with the money Rohit paid you for the modules you stole from Borgot and your two language experts.”

He didn’t have an answer for that, but he spit at me. “You’re supposed to be at a patent  meeting.”

A meeting that would have left my house empty in the early morning hours so that another body could be buried here. A meeting supposedly planned by Lawrence, whose email was readily available to his assistant, Howard. “There is no meeting this morning, is there?”

Mark didn’t give him a chance to answer.  He pinned Howard’s arm behind his back and yanked him to his knees. “Get some rope, Sedona, unless you happen to have handcuffs or strong tie wraps.”

I headed for the porch, but had one more important question. “Why kill Joe and Cary?”

“Cary hired Joe, that was his problem,” Howard grumbled.

“That left you with Cary as your problem.”

“The idiot didn’t even recover the stolen smartwatch. Claimed Joe wasn’t wearing it.  He probably stole it himself.”

“Probably,” I agreed, not about to admit that I had sat on the watch and then absconded with it.  “Any special reason you picked my yard to dump Cary?”

Howard laughed, hysteria having parked and stayed. “During the code review, you blurted out my idea for letting the customer name the phone assistant.  It was my idea, and I would have won if you hadn’t yelled it out first in public! Cary was the perfect way to warn you that if you steal from me, you die!”

Cary’s body had been a personal threat alright, even if I hadn’t known what the warning was about. If I had managed to suggest a patentable idea, Howard probably would have moved me up the kill list because he believed all good ideas were his personal property.

“Did you call 911?” Mark demanded as he dragged Howard towards the house.  On his way past the prone guy, he checked to make sure the guy was still out cold.

“Not yet.”  I leaned over and pushed Howard’s gun further away from him even though the clip was empty and Mark had him immobilized.  The gun had a silencer on the end, but it had been plenty loud anyway.

Brenda said, “I need an ambulance.”

I picked up the robot leg and dragged it inside with me to call 911.  No way was I going to stand around without a weapon of some sort.

Chapter 38

I dialed 911 and began answering questions over and over while dragging around the robot leg and hunting for duct tape or rope.  I finally set the leg against the couch and went into the garage.

There was a roll of twine on a shelf with a whole host of gardening tools, including orange oil, seed packets, a small trowel and, yes, a list of instructions from Dad.  I grabbed the twine.

“Are there shots still being fired?” the voice in my ear asked.

If I said no, were they planning on taking their time?  “I need an ambulance,” I repeated, scurrying out through the back door.  I tossed Mark the twine and yanked a robot arm free in case I needed it. Radar had probably not intended the limbs as weaponry, but the arm was nice and heavy.

“I’ve stopped the bleeding,” Brenda said. “He may still need a transfusion.”

“I asked for an ambulance,” I told her, ignoring the 911 operator squawking in my ear.

“Oh good. I called Sean. I told him to find a babysitter before he comes over and to bring my medical supplies.”  She continued bandaging Clint’s leg.  His eyes were open.

“She’ll take good care of you,” I told him.  “Why did Howard shoot you?  Are you working for him too?”

“No!”  He closed his eyes and breathed steadily for a few breaths.  “I got curious after your visit. I wondered about the phone and being asked to do a forty-thousand-dollar ballet lesson.  I started poking around to see what I could learn about who sent me the original email.”

I shook my head. “You shouldn’t get involved in this investigation stuff.  It’s dangerous.” I shot a pointed look at Brenda, but she was too busy to notice.

Clint glared up at me. “I had a buddy do some background checks for me, but nothing came up except on the dead guy, Joe.  He had a record for petty theft and a hell of a lot of traffic tickets.”

We knew that already and both Huntington brothers were more than capable of background checks.  Even if they weren’t, Radar could have gotten the information.  I looked over at Howard and his cohort, Vince. “How’d you end up shot?”

Clint grunted. “Keiko has contracts with some big companies, so I’ve gotten to know a few bigwigs. One of the guys put in a good word for me at Borgot, telling them I was a player looking to invest. I figured the investor meeting would let me meet Lawrence face-to-face and maybe find some clues to what was going on. But even using an alias and dressed in a suit, Howard recognized me.”

“So did I.”

“Yes, but you didn’t come gunning for me. He decided I stole the code you took when you switched the phone out.  He came to retrieve it.”

“And you told him I had it?”

Clint closed his eyes again. “No. I have no idea why he dragged me here.  He showed up with two other morons and shot me before stuffing me in the trunk of a car.”

“Two guys?” I started to panic. “There’s only one guy with him now.”

“I kicked the other guy backwards down the stairs at my place. That’s when I got myself shot the first time.”

“They left the other guy there? Was he dead?”

Clint snorted. “I didn’t check.  We stepped over him on the way out.  When they opened the trunk to let me out here, I planned to attack, but the guy with the gun stayed too far back.”  He indicated Howard with a twist of his head. “He ordered me to walk back here.  From what he said, he thought I’d just lay down in my own grave and wait to be shot.”

Fortunately, Howard hadn’t known about Miley.  She had startled him into firing early and often.  She had also provided enough of a distraction to give Clint a chance to fight back.

Sirens finally broke through what had once been a quiet neighborhood. I checked my fence, but Mr. Jackson wasn’t peering over.  A smart man would cower behind his couch if he lived next to me.

I hurried inside, leaned the robot arm next to the leg and unlocked the front door.  Thinking fast, I went back to retrieve Mark’s gun.  No need for it to be lying there on the back porch when the police arrived.

I tucked it safely away.

Mark dragged Howard inside. Since I wasn’t listening to anything the lady said, I set the squawking phone down and helped Mark tie Howard to one of the kitchen chairs.

“There were two guys with Howard at the funeral,” I said.  “They must have been Vince and Sosa.”

Howard laughed. “While you all stood there staring at the corpse, Sosa and Vince snuck around back and tied up the driver. Sosa slapped on the driver’s jacket and Vince hid in the backseat.”

“No wonder the hearse didn’t wait for Joe’s mother.”

Mark shook his head. “And they drove off thinking they had the watch.”

“If I’d known you put a fake on him, I’d have shot you first.”  He struggled against his ties to no avail.

I looked around for my robot arm.  This guy deserved at least one more smack to the head. “Wouldn’t all this have been easier if you’d just started your own company, hired people to do the work and paid them?”

“Sure, and get kicked out the second the real money gets involved. I saw what they did to Rohit.”

Before either of us could reply, the front door slammed open.  Sean came flying through the door.  Behind him, we could see an ambulance pulling up to the curb.

The police followed very soon after.

Sean did a lot of yelling and swearing. Howard actually tried to hire him to be his lawyer.

“He charges more than you’re worth,” I said. “He only takes on
innocent
clients.”

Sean didn’t argue with me, but his eyes bulged.  He made sure no one asked Brenda any questions. I thought he could have made the authorities leave me alone too, but all he did was glare at me while I gave my statement.

Chapter 39

It took another week for things to settle down at work.  Rohit did own the code he had written, and he was willing to sell it to Borgot in exchange for leniency and a small amount of cash. Anything Howard had worked on while at Borgot belonged to Borgot, but his two friends had done most of the language coding.  Sean had decided that he would represent Rohit, which made me proud, but also worried.

When Mark came over for dinner Friday night, he handed me a list. “Sosa and Vince both worked for Clockworks.  Rohit tutored both of them as well as Howard for two years in college.  Rohit was thrilled to have been able to hire them at Clockworks.”

I scanned the list. “No wonder Howard hired Cary and Joe to do deliveries. Rohit knew him.  He might not have agreed to the deal if he knew who was trying to bilk him.”