Private Heat (35 page)

“Oh my God,” Karen wheezed in a high-pitched voice.

“Let her go,” I said. “You can walk away.”

“I don't believe you.”

“I'm not a policeman.”

“I want your car keys.”

“There's a set on the key rack by the door.”

“I'm taking the bitch with me,” he said.

I said, “Not in this lifetime.”

“It's your fault if I kill her,” said Paulie.

I racked the hammer on the Commander with my left thumb and lined up the sights on the part of Paulie's elbow extended beyond the side of Karen's body. “It's my fault if it takes more than a heartbeat for your carcass to hit the floor.”

“I'm going to cut this bitch so she looks just like me.” He raised the knife to Karen's face. I took the shot. His hand popped open like it was spring-loaded and his forearm flew to the side. The knife bounced off the edge of the counter, did a flip, and stuck point first in the dining room floor.

Wendy stood up to the right of and behind Paulie, holding my long-handled cast-iron saucepan in her hands. She swung for the fences and clocked him squarely on the back of the head. A dull metallic thud accompanied the sickening tick of the impact of the pot on Paulie's skull. Paulie went down to his knees.

Karen twisted free. “Shoot the bastard!” she screamed. “He bragged about killing Randy.”

Paulie made a leaden search for the knife with his left hand. He struggled to raise a knee to get a foot flat on the floor. Wendy studied me with a question on her face. I lined my sights with the top of his head. Wendy backed up and stuck her hand out to guard against the splash. I took up the slack in the trigger. He got a solid foot on the floor.

Karen seized my shoulder in both hands and shrieked. “Shoot him! Shoot him! Shoot him!”

My sight picture was gone. I took my finger off the trigger and thumbed up the safety. I looked up at Wendy, closed my eyes, and nodded in the affirmative.

I heard the impact, and Paulie crumpled to the floor. “Tape a plastic bag on that, you creep,” said Wendy.

“Should have hit him with the fry pan,” I said.

“Much too cliché,” she said.

“Lift up your chin and let me have a look,” I said to Karen.

Karen lifted her chin. An inch-long gash gaped apart just under the hinge of her jaw. The blood oozed but didn't pulse.

“That's going to take a couple of stitches.”

Karen put her hand to her neck. Her eyes went wide as she looked at the blood on her hand. “You nearly let him kill me!”

“No,” I said. “I just didn't think that Paulie with a gun was going to be any more charming than Paulie with a knife.”

Wendy picked up the telephone. Paulie made a pair of lurching spasms. I turned away and eased the hammer down on the Colt and shoved it in my hip pocket. I turned back just in time to grab Karen's wrists as she tried to plant the knife in Paulie like a tent peg.

“Let me kill the bastard,” she said. “He killed Randy and laughed about it! Said he killed him, and laughed. He said I had to sit quiet while he killed me, because if I made any noise, he'd start with the boys and kill all of you.”

I pressed the edge of my thumb into the space between her second and third knuckles and her fist opened. The knife fell. I backed her up and sat her on a kitchen chair. “He knows the answers to a lot of questions,” I said.

On the telephone, Wendy waded through three attempts to explain the circumstances. Finally she said, “You're an idiot. I want to talk to your supervisor.”

Paulie groaned and pushed himself up on his good elbow. I pushed his shoulder back down to the floor. There was a saucer-size puddle of blood under his right elbow. “Stay down, man.” I said. “Cops and an ambulance are on the way.”

Ben appeared at the stairs in gray cutoff sweats and a white T-shirt. His room is next to the guest room. “Hey, what's going on?” he said. Rusty got up to greet Ben but made a “yip” and limped on his forepaw.

Paulie pushed himself up again. I stepped over him and got my shoulder behind a short, straight right. It caught him in the side of the head just
in front of his ear. He stopped but he didn't go back down. I snapped him straight shots while he slowly deflated back down to the floor.

Ben had me by the arm. “Hey, Pop! I think he's out.”

I stood up and found my left hand full of Paulie's greasy blond hair. Karen snatched the pistol out of my hip pocket, stuck it between me and Ben, and pointed at Paulie's prone body. Ben jumped back. Karen squeezed the trigger until the barrel shook. I grabbed the weapon over the top and twisted it up and out of her hands.

“What's the matter with that thing?” Karen asked as she relinquished the weapon. “It worked for you!”

I sat her back down. Blood had run down the side of her neck and soaked her robe.

“Hammer's down,” I said. “It's a single-action pistol.”

“Damn!”

I bent over, picked up the knife, and threw it into the sink. “Ben, go see to the dog,” I said and retrieved a clean, folded dish towel from the drawer next to the sink. I pressed it over the wound on Karen's neck. “Hold that,” I told her, “and put a little pressure on it.” I put the pistol back in my hip pocket. “And for God's sake, quit jumping around.”

“Yes, I will stay on the telephone,” said Wendy. She rolled her eyes around. “Thank you … yes. … I'll tell you when they get here.”

I got out another dish towel and tied it tightly around Paulie's elbow. In the junk drawer I found plenty of nails, hand tools—even a doorknob—but no twine, rope, or duct tape. I picked out a roll of masking tape but it didn't look promising. Karen was up again. She kicked Paulie. He didn't react. She backed up and stepped into a second kick, then looked at me. I shrugged. She kicked him again.

In the next drawer down, I found a roll of outdoor Christmas lights. Karen had run out of gas. She didn't struggle when I backed her into the chair again. Her cheeks were wet with tears, and the towel I had given her was sodden. I got her another towel. She wiped her face, folded it, and then held it to her neck. I hog-tied Paulie with the lights and finished with a loose loop around his neck that I tied off to his feet. He was breathing regularly. I didn't know if he was really out or just playing possum. He wasn't doing any groaning or struggling.

“They're here,” said Wendy. She laid the telephone on the counter and ran for the bedroom. I looked out the window, and an ambulance with its emergency lights on was stopped on the road at the end of my drive.

A state police car shot into the drive with its single red roller on. The ambulance followed the patrol car down the drive. The plug for the Christmas lights was on the floor next to an outlet. I plugged it in. They were the blinking kind. Paulie looked very festive.

Karen laughed. Ben sat on the floor holding Rusty in his lap. He laughed, too. Rusty looked at the flashing package on the floor and twisted his head. I went down to the front door, pulled it open, and stepped out onto the porch.

The officer—Sheridan, it said on his name tag—motioned the ambulance crew to follow us in. Sheridan looked to be in his late thirties. He stood poker straight, wore his face clean shaven, and struck me as the old-time polite and professional state police type. “After you,” he said.

I turned and saw Wendy standing at the top of the stairs. She'd pulled on a pair of slacks and a sweatshirt embroidered with a rampant unicorn. The mane and tail were made of bushy strands of yarn.

“I went out on the deck,” Karen told Officer Sheridan while the ambulance crew—a woman in her late forties and a young fellow in his early twenties wearing starched white shirts and police trousers—examined and bandaged her neck. “I came in to make some tea, and when I was getting a spoon out of the silverware drawer, Paulie came in through the slider and grabbed a knife out of the drawer. He dragged me over to the sofa and cut my nightie.” Karen swallowed her sobs while the ambulance crew strapped her onto a gurney. “The dog came up with his Frisbee, and Paulie kicked him. …” She continued the story as they wheeled her out.

I watched Paulie while I waited for the officer. Blood and hair matted on the top of Paulie's head. The side of his face seemed to swell as I watched.

“Now there's a pretty package,” said Officer Sheridan.

“Present for Lieutenant Dunsel,” I said.

“That the guy everyone was looking for yesterday?”

“One of them.”

Officer Sheridan flipped his pad to a fresh page and we told him our story. A county patrol car arrived with a county fire ambulance close behind. A sergeant and a patrol officer knocked on the door. I let them in. They handcuffed Paulie and I rolled up my Christmas lights.

Paulie didn't resist, but he didn't help. His eyes were open and he stared aimlessly around the room. He didn't speak or respond to questions. It took both the ambulance attendants and the county officers to load him on the gurney. Officer Sheridan bagged and tagged the knife and the towels that Karen had used.

“Where did they take Karen?” asked Wendy.

“They said Greenville was closest,” said Officer Sheridan.

“Where are you going to take Paulie?” I asked.

“He's going up to County General,” said Sheridan. “That's where bad guys go when they're in the shape this one is in.”

“Thank you for coming out,” said Wendy.

“Yes, ma'am,” he said. He put his pad away, put on his hat, and left.

Wendy and I watched the police cars depart behind the county ambulance. So did my neighbors. “I'm going up to the hospital to see about Karen,” said Wendy.

“Take her some clothes. The police will bag what she was wearing as evidence.”

“I doubt that she would want to wear them again,” said Wendy. She took about three steps toward the bedroom and stopped. She turned around, and asked, “Would you have let Paulie walk out?”

“I said that I would. At the time, it seemed like I would—if he left without hurting anybody.”

Wendy inhaled and opened her mouth to speak. She had another question to ask, but the words would not take form.

“Yes, he might have,” I said, “and yes I would have, before he could hurt anyone else.”

“If it was me?” said Wendy.

“He didn't come here for you. You never would have got involved with that creep to start with. You never would have known things that were dangerous to him.”

“I was here.”

“You started out to be here a long time ago. Your mother wanted you to be a secretary. You didn't. That draft-dodging law student wanted you to marry him. You didn't. You married a combat arms mustang second lieutenant and never looked back.”

“Paulie came here.”

“Predators prey on the sick, the lame, and the innocent. When they stalk the strong, vigilant, and prepared, they lose.”

“The boys were in danger.”

“The boys live in a dangerous world. I trained and led boys in combat who were no older than Daniel, sometimes against boys no older than Ben—when I was twenty-three, and we all thought that I was an old man.”

“Bad things do happen to good people.”

“Sometimes, but there's no such thing as struggle-free justice.”

“What's going on?” Daniel asked sleepily as he staggered up the hallway from his room.

“Ha! You slept through it all!” said Ben. “Didn't you hear the shot?”

“I had my fan and the radio on,” said Daniel. “What happened?”

“That guy snuck in and cut Karen and kicked Rusty! Dad shot him bigger than shit, and Mom clocked him out with the saucepan!”

“Ben, I don't like that kind of talk,” said Wendy. She started back down the hall to the bedroom.

I nodded toward the hallway.

“Sorry, Mom,” Ben called out.

“I wonder if it's on the news yet,” said Daniel. He walked over to the television and turned it on.

“I need you to take Rusty to the vet,” I said.

“Dad, I think you had better look at this,” said Daniel.

I walked over to the television set and turned up the sound. The morning network show had cut to local news. On the screen, my ominous dark sedan burned merrily. In the background, flames engulfed Karen's house.

A police impound yard is a particularly forlorn place. Every vehicle has its story. Row on row, they are the sad and angry chapters of the urban chronicle.

“Can't remove no property from a vehicle unless the impound fee is paid,” said the guard. His close-cut silver Gloucester beard frosted the line of his jaw and stood in contrast to his deep ebony complexion. He sat at a battered wooden desk that served mostly as a place to rest his feet as he balanced on the rear legs of a one-armed steel office chair.

“The car is burned to a crisp,” I said. “I just want to take a couple of pictures for the insurance company.”

“You have to go down to the police desk and pay them,” he said. He settled all four legs of his chair onto the floor, and forty excess pounds of body weight tugged at the buttons of his rumpled blue uniform. “They give you a receipt and you bring that to me. We close at five-thirty.”

“The insurance company will take care of that,” I said. “It might be a couple of days, but I have to send them the pictures.”

His visored police-style cap sat slightly askew. He took it off and revealed a bald pate that he wiped with his hand. “Used to be open all the time but now we ain't. Now we lock up and they bring a bunch of scruffy dogs and turn them loose in there.”

I fished out my ID case and held it open for him to inspect. “I don't want the car,” I said. “I just want pictures for the insurance company.”

The hat went back on at the practiced angle, and from the top desk drawer he extracted a pair of half-cut glasses like Marg wore and perched them on the end of his nose. “Cops said anybody asks about that car, I have to call this number they gave me.” He squinted his eyes and bobbed his head forward and back until he had the focus on my ID. “Arthur Hardin,” he said and looked up over the half glasses to my face. “Still want to see the car?”