There was more prey nearby, but the lion couldn’t see it.
But the cat heard the click-slam of a door being thrown open and footsteps racing toward it. Then there was another two-legged creature in the doorway of the room, joining the one that was just picking itself up.
“Oliver, where’s Danny?” Lauren shouted, her eyes scanning the room and not finding her son.
“Here I am, Mommy,” the boy called from the closet, not two feet from the cat. He started to open the door to run to his mother.
The mountain lion immediately knew which of these creatures it would take first.
But that was when the deputy chief flicked his Zippo lighter and turned the broom’s bristles into a blazing torch.
Ron could wait no longer. He threw his shoulder into the Gosden’s front door with all his strength. The deadbolt held and so did the hinges, but the hollow-core door split right down the middle. The chief fell to his knees as it gave way. He quickly looked up to see if the big cat was bearing down on him. It wasn’t. He was safe for the moment.
But there was an ungodly racket of screams, shouts, and snarls coming from the bedroom wing of the house.
Corrie got there first, having slipped easily through the slash made by the cat in the screen door at the rear of the house. She saw Deputy Chief Gosden holding a flaming broom, backing the cat into a corner as it snarled and snapped at him, trying to bat the broom from his hand.
But the deputy chief held tight, and suddenly a little boy burst from a closet in the opposite corner and ran screaming to his mother. The cat made a lunge for him and got its face singed for its trouble. The child made it to his mother’s arms, but the flames on the broom had almost consumed their fuel and the fire was dwindling, ready to expire.
“Deputy Chief!” Corrie yelled. “Stand clear, give me a shot!”
But before the fire went out completely, Oliver Gosden roared and charged the cat, intending to drive the broom handle right down the animal’s throat.
The cat may have been old, but it was still far too quick to be taken by such a clumsy attack — and it, too, was enraged. It coiled itself into a compact ball and sprang from its rear legs. The big cat cleared the burning end of the broom … and there was Oliver’s throat right in front of it. The mountain lion opened its jaws and turned its head to rip away its prey’s soft exposed flesh in one savage bite.
Ron skidded into the doorway of the bedroom just as Corrie Knox fired her Winchester. He saw the top of the lion’s skull cleave off as the round caught the animal in mid-air. It was, without question, a killing shot. But the slug didn’t have the stopping power to knock the big cat aside. The lion’s momentum carried it straight into the deputy chief and slammed him backwards to the floor.
Even in death, the cat’s jaws still closed around Oliver’s face.
Daniel Gosden screamed, but the three adults in the room raced forward to aid the fallen man. Ron and Corrie levered the mountain lion’s jaws open, and Lauren by herself dragged her husband, who outweighed her by eighty pounds, from beneath the cat’s carcass.
At that moment, everyone finally heard the sirens of the emergency vehicles that were just then pulling up out front. The neighbors hadn’t opened fire, but they hadn’t sat by idly, either.
Ron looked at Oliver, the dead mountain lion, and then at Corrie.
“We ever need a SWAT officer around here, I know who I’m calling,” he said.
Corrie Knox’s shot had deflected the mountain lion’s head just enough. Oliver Gosden suffered puncture wounds to his right cheek and the tissue just inside his lower jaw. Getting slammed to the floor had produced a moderate concussion. The lacerations to his calf were cleaned and bandaged on site. It wasn’t until the following day, when the deputy chief regained his senses, that anyone realized two of the metacarpals in his right hand had been fractured as well.
Corrie Knox insisted she was fine. She sat down in an easy chair in the living room and let a paramedic take her pulse and check her heartbeat, but she insisted nothing was wrong. She even tossed back a shot of scotch Lauren brought her, though she said she didn’t usually drink hard liquor.
But there was a twitch at the corner of her left eye that wouldn’t stop. Corrie wasn’t even aware of it, denied having it until one of the paramedics held up a mirror in front of her.
The paramedics insisted on taking her to the hospital for observation.
Ron added, “Wouldn’t want it to ruin your jump shot. Not when we’ve got that one on one game coming up.”
The game warden rode in the same ambulance with the deputy chief, Lauren and Danny following immediately behind in the Gosden family car. While the cat’s body was being bagged, Ron called Clay Steadman. He told the mayor of the mountain lion’s demise.
He also told him who had killed Isaac Cardwell, and when the mayor wanted to be in on the arrest, the chief of police told him no.
“This is my job,” Ron said. “We’re going to do it my way.”
Ron’s way was to be as careful as he could. He had units block off all the streets approaching Art Gilbert’s house. Gilbert’s three closest neighbors were contacted by phone. Over the course of ninety minutes, at irregular intervals, they quietly got in their cars and drove away. Ron gave his people their orders, and at exactly midnight he drove onto Art Gilbert’s property.
Ron’s patrol unit set off motion detectors. Floodlights came on, making the vehicle a perfect target.
The house wasn’t as grand as any of the estates or mansions at which Gilbert had toiled, but it was a cozy, well-maintained home nonetheless. A wood frame structure painted a pearl gray with a charcoal roof and trim, it was bounded on two sides by screened-in porches. The grounds weren’t large, but they were as impeccably landscaped as any property in town.
Uneasy but undaunted, Ron got out of his patrol unit and walked toward the house. As he did, he tripped another motion detector. Another light came on. It pinned the chief like a bug on a board. Ron’s hand went to his handgun, but he didn’t pull it from his holster.
“What can I do for you, Chief?” Art Gilbert called from the darkness of the near porch.
Ron could barely make him out. Gilbert was little more than a denser inkblot in the blackness of the porch.
“Step outside where I can see you. That’ll do for a start, Mr. Braddock.”
For a moment there was no response to Ron’s use of the man’s real name. The timer where Ron parked his patrol unit clicked off the first floodlight. Ron knew if he stood still he’d soon be in darkness himself.
He said, “I know you killed Isaac Cardwell, Mr. Braddock. My deputy chief knows, too. So does Mayor Steadman — and so do all the police officers who have your house surrounded right now. If you come with me now, peacefully, things will work out as well as they possibly can. When we get to the station, I’ll let you call a lawyer, or make your statement, before I put you in a cell.”
“How did you find out?”
The timer shut off the second light, leaving both men to continue their dialogue in the dark.
Ron hadn’t really articulated his thought process for himself before that moment. He had to work it out before he could answer Gilbert. Braddock. He wasn’t even sure what he should call the killer.
“The first thing that struck me,” Ron began, “was an inconsistency. I couldn’t reconcile how a guy who looked like you — a seemingly upright, maybe even uptight, guy — could keep working at Jimmy Thunder’s place after he’d heard about something as heavy as money-laundering going on. It didn’t seem to fit. You remember how I asked you about that? But then it just wasn’t a flinty live and let live attitude, or loyalty to a client, was it?”
“It was loyalty to my son,” Braddock said flatly.
“I was glad to have your help at first, pointing the finger at Didi DuPree and, later on, at Colin Ring. I couldn’t believe my luck having someone close to Jimmy Thunder who could feed me information. It seemed too good to be true, and it was. Your little tidbits were meant to distract me from thinking about you. And for a while there, it worked.”
“You still haven’t told me how you found out.”
“Your work had a lot to do with it. You’re so damn good. Everything you touch, you make beautiful. Lawns, shrubs, flowers, trees. Every
living
thing.”
The chief thought his man might respond to his last comment, but he didn’t.
Ron continued, “Then people kept making these comments to me, or at least in my presence. Taken separately, they didn’t mean much. But at some subconscious level they meshed, and when they did it came at just the right place and just the right time. And I knew it had to be you.
“The first thing I heard was from my father, of all people. He told me that Isaac Cardwell’s death wasn’t the work of your run of the mill, shit-for-brains racists. He said the picture he saw of the crucifixion was too
artistic.
“Then Ezra Tilden spoke out at our town meeting. He said he thought the killer should also be crucified, but it should be to a
dead
tree, so no living thing would be hurt.”
That drew a grunt from the porch.
“Finally, Clay Steadman told me you’d have made a great film director because you have a natural sense of visual composition. And the last time I saw the tree where you nailed Isaac Cardwell, there were four boys there staging a mock crucifixion, and I got to see just what a powerful image it was. A living person being nailed to a
dead
tree. It was only a few minutes later that everything clicked for me.”
Ron paused to let Braddock respond, but the man remained silent.
“You killed a wonderful man in Isaac Cardwell but you couldn’t bring yourself to drive nails into a healthy tree. Or maybe it was just that instinct you have for making a visual statement. Either way, it put me on your trail.
“I found out you arrived in town after Jimmy Thunder did. You followed him here. I talked to Thunder’s next-door neighbor. You solicited their business, then let Jimmy see the wonders you worked for them. So he came to you. That was a very nice touch. The murder weapon you threw off the Tightrope is in a crime lab in Sacramento right now. It won’t surprise me at all to hear it has your fingerprints and tissue samples from Isaac Cardwell’s head on it. You never thought anyone would find it. Today I found a videotape of you buying the kind of nails used in the crime. Finally, tonight, I received a phone call from someone who identified you as Roger Braddock’s father.”
Now, Ron heard a sob come from the darkened house.
“I think you better come out now, Mr. Braddock,” the chief said.
Arthur Gilbert Braddock didn’t come out, though. He started shooting. He missed Ron, but he got him moving. That tripped the motion detectors and turned on the floodlights. The chief was an easy target now, even as he dove for cover behind a neatly clipped row of hedges.
Ron wasn’t the only one whose position was exposed. The beams from half a dozen police searchlights inundated the Gilbert house in a glaring wash of light. The white haired man stood revealed, tears running down a face twisted in despair and agony. He continued to fire a semi-automatic handgun until he ran out of rounds — but every shot was directed into the floor of the porch on which he stood.
The officers of the Goldstrike PD held their fire. Their orders were to shoot only if they were taking fire or an officer went down. Seeing that their chief was unhurt, they showed flawless restraint, not firing a round.
There wasn’t an officer among them who could have fired on Art Gilbert.
None of them believed in assisted suicide.
When his gun was empty, Gilbert ducked back into the house.
Ron ran after him. He wanted to take the man alive. Sergeant Stanley and several more officers were on the chief’s heels. Every cop had his weapon drawn. They crossed the porch and entered the house through the kitchen.
A light went on in a room just ahead. There was a scramble of grunting bodies as the cops pressed themselves against walls and ducked behind kitchen cabinets and appliances. There was no telling when somebody who wanted to end it all might change his mind, get mad, and decide to take someone else with him. But no shots were fired. Respiration and heart rates slowly fell back into normal ranges. Sweat cooled and trigger fingers relaxed marginally.
Ron poked his head around the corner.
Gilbert sat in a wing chair next to a fireplace. He had a gun in his lap. Not the semi-auto he’d had on the porch, but a revolver. Presumably loaded. Ron gestured to his people to stay back, and then walked into the room. He took a seat opposite Gilbert.
Arthur Gilbert Braddock pointed his weapon directly at Ron’s head.
Ron had his own weapon in his hand, but didn’t respond — and he prayed that nobody would open fire from the kitchen.
“You’re just not going to shoot me, are you?” Art Gilbert asked.
Ron shook his head and said, “I’ve already killed one man. I hope to God there won’t be a second.”
Gilbert nodded, and pointed his gun at his own head.
“Have to do it myself, then.”