Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879) (25 page)

I called Jennifer Gale. She sounded glad to hear from me.

“Want to have dinner after the news tonight?” she asked. “I can tell you how I've struck out, trying to trace Sweetie Fairbairn's background.”

“I'm in Hadlow, Minnesota. I got into an altercation with a truckload of pigs.”

“Are you all right?”

“I am. The farmer who caused the accident is angry, as will be George Koros when he finds out his credit card is being charged ten grand against car repairs. The pigs, though, appeared to be ecstatic. They took off across a field and might now be in Mexico.”

“Why are you in Hadlow?”

“I got a lead into Sweetie Fairbairn's background.”

“I thought you were going to keep me current on all this.”

“That's what I'm doing. Things have happened so fast there wasn't time.”

“Did she come from Hadlow?”

“You're not going to broadcast this yet, right?”

“Right.”

“Sweetie came from here. So did her sister, a woman who I saw at George Koros's building. So did George Koros.”

“All three of them?” She inhaled sharply. “Big news, Dek Elstrom.”

“Indeed.”

“When can I use this stuff?”

“When I'm sure none of it incriminates the missing Ms. Fairbairn.”

I told her I'd check in with her when I learned something new.

I didn't say that hearing her voice made me feel not so alone.

CHAPTER 42.

The moon was a thin sliver in the sky. There were no headlamps moving in either direction; no house lights lit the fields. Not even Winnemac showed his spotlit head. I was alone in that black part of Minnesota.

Still, I cut the headlamps a half mile before the cottage and coasted to a stop. I wanted to come up to the Taylor house on foot. In case Darlene had returned to finish her beans.

There was just enough moonlight to show me the edge of the road. My feet made no noise as I hurried along the hard clay.

Then there was a light, off the road ahead, to the right.

It was faint and flickering, barely visible in the darkness. I moved forward slowly until suddenly the light disappeared.

I'd gotten to the front of the Taylor cottage. The light was flickering from the back, and was now blocked by the front of the house. It was candlelight I'd seen; the house didn't have electricity.

The realization tingled at the back of my neck. I didn't want to wonder what such a hellishly poor place had done to Darlene Taylor, living out her nights in such blackness, so far out of town, and so alone. With only a candle to keep away the dark.

There was no car on the rutted drive. Whoever was in that cottage had been brought there, or had come up as I had, on foot.

I crouched down and moved around the side of the house to the back. I remembered the three windows. The dim, flickering glow was coming from the middle of them. The kitchen window.

The kitchen window I'd rubbed, to see through. Whoever was inside would know someone had been there.

That couldn't be helped now. I stayed low as I passed beneath the first window. At the one in the middle, I eased up slowly for a look.

The plate of beans was still on the porcelain-topped table, but now the stub of a candle, guttering, had been stuck in the center of it.

Something rustled low, ten, twenty feet away.

In that instant, I understood. A candle stuck in a plate of beans, not for a light but as a beacon, to draw someone who should not be there.

I caught my breath and turned.

A flash lit the darkness, followed by an explosion. My right side went hot. I'd been shot.

I turned, to run. The wound in my side had a thousand tentacles, each one clutching a dagger. Pain in my legs now, pain in my arms; too much pain to run. I fell.

Then he was on me. His boots kicked at my arms and my head. I rolled onto my right side, trying to protect the wound. He kept kicking, again and again. I raised my left arm, to fight off the blows. He kicked it down and danced back, a black shape crouched against the charcoal sky.

I rolled away, somehow got to my feet. He came at me low, breathing heavily. He was tiring. I slapped out with my left hand, hit his head, caught his hair. It was oily, greasy, and long. My right side was on fire, but there'd be more pain, more bullets, if I let go. Death would come.

He thrashed away.

I turned, to run. It was all I could do.

His hands were too fast. He caught me around the waist. The hard metal of the handgun beat at the wound on my right side, once, and again.

Enraged at the pain, at the life that was leaking out of me, I beat at the side of his face with my left fist. Something crunched. Maybe his nose, or his cheek. He screamed. It was the loud wail of an animal. I swung at the sound of him. He moaned. His hands let go. He fell.

He still had the gun.

Hugging my right arm against the blood at my side, I began to run. Each footfall sent an iron rod of fire into my right side. I wanted to scream at the jarring and the pain, but to cry out would draw him right to me in the dark. My only chance was to reach the trees back of the fields before he recovered enough to come after me.

After a minute, after an hour—time was lost; there was only pain—I found a tree, then another. I was in the woods. I clutched at their thin, spindly shapes, one to the next, finding my way deeper into the woods with my good left arm.

The darkness would hide me, if I stayed quiet.

I heard something, stopped and held my breath. He was thrashing nearby, loud. I tugged off my belt and cinched it around my left hand, metal buckle dangling a foot at the end. It was the only weapon I had.

His footfalls faded, and then they were gone. I started up again, careful to feel ahead of me for the next tree. He could have stopped, to strain for the sound of me.

Each step was a new hammer blow to the wet wound in my side. Pain was good, I had to believe. Pain would keep me moving. I would live if I could do the pain.

A tree root seized my foot, and I fell hard to the ground. Panicked, I lurched up. He'd heard me now. I started to run, hit a tree, went down. I bit at my lip until I could taste blood, but I made no noise. I got up, went forward.

A hundred more times I fell, got up, and fell again. Then I had no strength to get up anymore. My whole right side was drenched, wet down to my shoes. Maybe there was no more blood. It was all right. I would lie still, and the darkness would keep me.

*   *   *

Someone came, and took my good left hand. I had no strength; I could only breathe. My arm jerked, there was an explosion—and then the person went away without helping me at all. I wondered if I'd been shot again, and was supposed to bleed to death, in those black woods.

I had the thought that I should laugh.

Surely there was no more blood.

CHAPTER 43.

Something small dragged itself across the skin of my hand.

I blinked my eyes until they'd cleared enough to see a fuzzy rectangle of light high up, past my feet. I blinked some more. Hospital light. Hospital bed.

A technician was swabbing my left hand. She finished and stepped away.

“What's that for?” I asked, through a mouth full of cotton.

A different woman came to stand next to my neck. “Gunshot residue,” she said.

“Then swab my side. That's where the bullet went in.”

“You're damned lucky, Vlodek Elstrom, you didn't put that bullet into your heart.”

I strained to look up at her, but her face was a blurred circle in the glare of another fluorescent fixture, this one mounted right above my head.

She moved back so I could see her. She was attractive, in her early forties, Nordic blond and blue-eyed. She wore a tan uniform shirt, dark green trousers, and a black leather gun belt.

“You're a cop?”

“Of course I'm a cop. We get called on gunshot wounds, even if they are self-inflicted.”

“I didn't shoot myself, damn it.” I grabbed the bed rail with my left hand, to pull myself up, but my foot tugged back from the end of the bed. “You cuff suicides up here?” I said.

“When requested.”

“I didn't put a bullet anywhere. It was put into me.”

“By who?”

“I don't know.”

“Would you like a lawyer?”

“I want to speak to your superior.”

“I am the superior. I'm the sheriff, Ellie Ball. I'm also the newest friend of a Lieutenant Plinnit, down in Chicago. He responded right away to the inquiry I sent. He's quite interested in your, ah, accident, and is on his way up here.”

It explained why I was cuffed to the bed frame. Plinnit.

“It was no accident. It was no suicide. I was shot.”

“Mind if I record this?” She pulled a bed tray over and set a small recorder on it.

I rattled the cuff chain with my left foot. “Obviously, you can do whatever you please.”

She spoke the date and then the time—5:15
P.M.
; I'd lost almost the whole day—named the hospital, and identified a deputy, standing against the wall, as a witness to the proceedings. “Mr. Elstrom has consented to this interview without presence of counsel to represent him,” she said to the recorder. “Right, Mr. Elstrom?”

“Why is this necessary?”

“Lieutenant Plinnit asked that your statement be taken promptly. He said he was worried you'd find another gun and finish the job.”

“How did you find me?”

“One of our locals was driving by at daybreak, and recognized Ralph's truck parked out in the middle of nowhere. He couldn't find Ralph, but he did hear you, moaning, not far off the road.”

Even through the drugs, I had an inspiration. “I'll bet you didn't find the gun.”

“Actually we did, right where you dropped it. We're testing it now.”

“So you're arresting me for attempted murder on myself?”

“I'm merely taking a statement, Mr. Elstrom.”

“Then remove the cuff.”

“You're being held as a courtesy to Lieutenant Plinnit. He said he wants to arrest you. He'll detail his charges against you when he arrives tomorrow morning.”

“What charges?”

“Suspicion of murder.”

“Who got killed?”

“You can ask the lieutenant.”

“I need to call my attorney.”

Ellie Ball and her deputy left the room.

I called Leo's cell phone. “Where are you?” I asked when he clicked on. Loud accordion music was playing at his end.

“I just got home from Los Angeles. Ma has the stereo guy over. He's setting up huge television speakers in the basement. I want to cry.”

“I'm in Hadlow, Minnesota.”

“Doesn't sound as good as L.A.”

“I've been shot, and I am leg-cuffed to a hospital bed.”

“Definitely not as good as L.A., though I hear those movie star types go for cuffs.”

“I'm serious.”

“You're not.”

I gave him a one-minute summary.

“I don't understand,” he said.

“Neither do I, but I'm medicated and in deep shit.”

He said he was on his way back to the airport.

*   *   *

“No surprise, Mr. Elstrom,” Sheriff Ellie Ball said when she came back in. “You had residue on your left hand.”

“I fired no—” I stopped, remembering the touch of someone's hand as I lay on the ground in the woods. I remembered the explosion.

Someone had fitted my hand to a gun—and fired.

“Son of a bitch,” I said.

“I thought you'd say something like that,” she said. “What were you doing in those woods? Nearest house is a half mile away.”

I'd stumbled far enough from the shack for her not to make the connection. She would, though, when she learned I was in Hadlow tracking Darlene Taylor, and I had no doubt that she'd find that out. Hadlow was a small town.

“I'll wait for Plinnit,” I said.

She clicked off her recorder and headed for the door.

“By the way, Chief…?” I said. My pain medication was wearing off.

“It's Sheriff,” she said. “Sheriff Ellie Ball.”

“By the way, Chief. Something you've neglected: I'm right-handed.”

My pain meds were in full retreat now, chased away by the hot fire from the hole in my side.

“So what?”

I wanted to scream for a nurse, but first I wanted to scream at the sheriff.

“I want you to ponder how the hell I got gunshot residue on my left hand when I'm right-handed.”

“Oh, I thought of that, Elstrom. I'll consider it again, and out loud, if you'd like. You had to use your left hand, if your intent was to wound your right side.”

“Where's the sense in that?”

“To make it look like you didn't shoot yourself. I'll tell the nurse you might need a pill,” she said and walked out.

CHAPTER 44.

A riot of color moved next to me, no doubted a cheery nurse in a cheery tunic. I rubbed at my eyes, to see through the fog of drugs they'd used to quiet me for the night.

“Morning, Killer,” Leo said.

His shirt was brighter than the blue of any sky, except in those spots where it was orange, or red, or green, or pink. A riot of color, for sure—and of relief.

“They've cuffed me to the bed, Leo.”

“At the direction of Lieutenant Plinnit, who is outside, dying to talk to you.”

“You've kept him away?”

“I told him I'm here because John Peet is addressing the Supreme Court.”

“Dressed like that? You, a lawyer?”

“I never used the
L
word. I merely said I was representing you. As far as the clothes, I implied I practice in Miami.”

“Practice?” I repeated, not understanding because there was still a residue of drugs. “In Miami?”

He stepped back and did part of a dance thrust. “Samba,” he said.