The Branson Beauty (30 page)

“I guess it finally sank in for the poor guy. He looked down in the dumps.” The neighbor's name was Alan. He was tall and wiry and looked as if he hadn't shaved in days. And he made his coffee strong enough to double as an industrial-strength solvent. Hank liked him immediately.

“What do you mean, ‘finally'?” Hank asked.

Alan rubbed at his bristly chin. “Well, after the boat sank, it seemed he didn't really mind. He'd come out whistlin', give me a big wave, the couple times I saw him. Didn't seem much like a guy who'd just lost his job.” He shrugged. “But this morning, no sirree. He comes out all slumped over. Barely made it to his car. Didn't even say hi to Moses.”

“I'm sorry—who?”

“Oh—Moses. My dog. I was out walking him when Roy left.” Alan leaned back in his chair and snapped his fingers. A large beagle bounded into the kitchen and skidded to a halt in front of his master. “You like Roy, don't ya, boy?”

Moses wagged in what appeared to be agreement and then went over to his empty food bowl, snuffling around the floor for any fallen bits he might have missed the first time. He should be extra fond of Roy now, Alan said. A few days ago, the back gate had somehow come open and Moses got out. Alan searched the whole neighborhood with no luck. Moses was gone all night.

“Thank the good Lord that Roy found him. Said the silly thing showed up on his back porch looking for food. Roy brought him straight on over.” He turned toward his dog, who was now shoving the food bowl across the floor. “You'd better not ever do that again.”

Alan filled Hank's travel mug before seeing him to the door. Moses got past them both and ran out into the snow, baying in delight. The barking bounced off the frozen ground and made Alan grin. “The only thing worse is when he gets scared. Then he starts howling. Won't stop for nothing until you get him nice and safe and warm somewhere.”

Hank dusted off the snow that Moses' run had flung onto his pants and headed toward his car. He opened his door and stopped.

“What night was it that Moses got out?”

Alan scratched his bristles again. “Let's see, it was the long weekend. One of those days. All that stuff hadn't happened yet, so it must have been Saturday night. And Roy found him early Sunday morning. That was it.”

Hank raised his mug in thanks and left Alan trying to get his dog back in the house.

*   *   *

He pounded on the door again. This time, he heard feet shuffling toward it. Alyssa Sampson swung it open and stared up at him in surprise. He asked where her brother was. His car was not in the driveway.

“Tony left,” she said.

No kidding. Hank tried not to show his exasperation.

She didn't know where he'd gone. He'd sulked around all day yesterday after the funeral and then this morning moped around a little bit more before finally stomping out to the garage. He threw things around out there and then got in his car and drove off. Their parents were both at work, so he didn't have to explain anything to them, and he'd told her to mind her own business. “Jerk.”

“Did you follow him into the garage?”

“No way,” she said. “He was
really
pissed.”

*   *   *

Hank slumped against the hospital wall. He was so tired, and he could just feel this slipping away. Where the hell was Tony, and where the hell was Roy? And why the hell was Albert asleep again? The doctors weren't sure—perhaps it was “recuperative,” they had just told him. But the captain wasn't waking up, and so the questions Hank had hoped to ask were still nothing more than unsolved problems pinging around in his brain.

He pushed himself off the corridor wall and made his way downstairs. He had double-parked in the main circular drive—nobody was going to tow his squad car—so he went out through the main lobby.

“Daddy!” He heard it at the same moment the small form plowed into him, wrapping its arms around his leg. A slightly bigger form was right behind.

“Benny. Good grief. Let go of my leg. Maribel, sweetie, what are you doing here?”

“We're going to eat lunch with Mommy.” She bounced up and down and clapped her hands. “Are you here to eat with us? Grandpop said we can have Jell-O!”

Hank turned to see Duncan hoisting himself out of an armchair. “I don't know what they'll have in the cafeteria, but I figured it'd be safe to promise them Jell-O.”

Hank detached Benny from his leg and reflexively swung him up on his shoulders. He immediately yanked Hank's hat off and threw it at his sister, who paid no attention and kept staring up at her father.

“Can you come? Please, please, please?” She bounced with each “please,” her dark hair swinging around her shoulders and the ball on the top of her snow hat bobbing every which way. “It's a restaurant. You love restaurants. And we'll behave. We already promised Grandpop. Please?”

“You haven't seen them in almost three days,” Duncan pointed out. Hank glared at him.

“I know that. I haven't exactly been out partying it up, you know.”

“You can spare a half an hour.”

No. He couldn't. In a half an hour, Stanton could be across state lines. Sampson could be holed up in a mountain shack somewhere, never to be seen again. He had to go. He gently swung Benny off his shoulders and set him next to Maribel. He crouched down so he was at their eye level—their enormous, long-lashed, chocolate-brown eye level. And then he broke their hearts.

“I can't. Daddy has to go. I have to go catch the bad guys. They're going to get away if I don't go right now.”

Their eyes filled with tears. “When are the bad guys done? When will they go away?” Maribel whispered. “When can you come home?”

“Soon,” he said, praying it would turn out to be the truth as he hugged his kids. “Very, very soon.”

Childhood was an accumulation of little moments in the memory, his grandmother had told him once. You stack them all up and at the end you have a foundation that holds or that doesn't, because some of those memories become cracks that widen and deepen and eventually break apart. Hank prayed he wasn't creating one right then.

He stood up. Duncan was still glaring at him.

“I already feel bad enough,” Hank snapped. “I don't need a guilt trip from you.”

Duncan snorted. “I don't have enough to go around.” He pulled his new phone out of his pocket and waved it in the air with the time displayed. “She's late. Again. It's a wonder you two ever made time to conceive kids in the first place.”

Hank decided that leaving was wiser than responding and turned to go. A loud boom and gunfire stopped him.

*   *   *

The two men stared at each other, and then looked up at the lobby TV, which was tuned to a twenty-four-hour news channel reporting on fighting somewhere, complete with footage of explosions and clattering machine guns. An elderly hospital volunteer, blushing furiously, was struggling with the remote. She finally turned the volume down, and the sound of war faded into the background once again.

“Sounded like a bomb went off,” Duncan said.

“Yeah…” Hank stared at the TV and then at his father-in-law. And then at the smartphone in Dunc's hand. “Yeah…”

He pivoted and ran through the lobby doors and out to the squad car, leaving his family staring after him.

 

CHAPTER

28

He stomped through the woods behind Albert Eberhardt's house. The snow was crusty and made for hard going. He stopped at every tree in a hundred-foot radius until he found what he was looking for—a rope, half buried in snow, but still tied tightly to a hickory tree about seventy-five feet from the captain's back door.

He snapped photos with his phone and was heading back to his car when it rang in his hand.

“It's Stanton,” said Sheila.

“I know … wait, how do
you
know?”

She had taken several pictures of Gallagher's office when they took Terry Cummings into custody.

“I didn't know you'd done that.”

“'Course not. I'm good.”

One of the photos was a shot of the broken poster board Hank had picked up off the floor. She had just spent the better part of an hour staring at it.

“The full thing has to read
The Branson Stanton Theater. Coming to the Strip
, and then probably a date of some kind,” she said. “They promised him his own show.”

That made sense. He'd sabotaged the boat in exchange for his own theater. And he'd had to kill to make it happen. But now his dream was in the trash. So where was he?

“Is there anything else on that poster board, Sheila? Anything about a location?”

“Nope. I've enlarged it until I can see the dots from the damn printer, but there's no other text on it … wait. Does Gallagher own property on the Strip? I'll call you right back.”

Hank jumped in his car and was going sixty down the winding rural road near Eberhardt's place when Sheila called back. Gallagher Enterprises did not own any property on the Strip, but there was one place currently up for sale, something called the Country Song Theater. Slick Billy Tuner had to sell it in his divorce settlement three years ago, and it had been vacant ever since, she said.

He came at the Strip from the north and slowed down once he hit the water slide amusement park. It was still frigid, so traffic was almost nonexistent, but he eased off the gas anyway. The Country Song Theater was almost at the end, on the south side of the street. The big landscaped island along the curb was overgrown and blocked much of the building from view. He pulled around it and into the unplowed parking lot. He was hoping to see one car. He got two.

*   *   *

The theater was a medium-sized rectangular box of a building, with nothing to distinguish it from an industrial warehouse except for the twenty-foot plywood guitar attached to the front façade. Well, semi-attached. Hank doubted it was meant to point neck down and block access to the two front doors, which were secured with a very large padlock and decorated with various code enforcement warnings.

Roy's old Toyota Camry was parked halfway to the theater's big front doors, right about where the snow got too deep to drive any farther. Hank could see Roy's footprints going up to the entrance, then turning and going around toward the back of the building.

Behind the Camry, angled to block it in, sat a beat-up Chevy. Tony had beaten him here. And his tracks didn't bother with the guitar entrance. He had gone straight around the back.

Well, that upped the ante.

Hank followed. He tried for stealth, but he couldn't keep the snow from crunching under his boots. He took his gloves off and stuffed them in his jacket pockets. He wanted to have his fingers ready to fire his gun, just in case.

He edged along the side of the building and stopped at the corner. Both sets of tracks went that way, but he heard nothing. He held his breath so it wouldn't billow up into the air and give him away, and peered around the corner.

Nothing. Except tracks that led from a locked back door into the woods behind the theater. Why couldn't they have just broken into the damn building? Hank groaned, which sent a huge smoke signal of a breath into the air above his head. More kept coming as he pushed himself off the building and started after the tracks in the snow.

As he walked into the woods, the stink of the cold got stronger. It was a peculiar mixture he was becoming too familiar with—the scent of vegetation and animal piss trapped under old snow and inhaled through his snot-filled nostrils. His nose was in better shape than his ears, however. He suspected his hat was still on the hospital lobby floor where Benny had thrown it.

As he entered the trees, the ground began to slope downward. His feet broke the icy crust of the snow and had trouble coming out again with each step. From the tracks, it looked as if both Roy and Tony had the same problem. He made it about another hundred yards, and then the footprints changed. The ones he assumed were Tony's—lighter step, smaller foot—suddenly broke into a run. He looked ahead and saw that, twenty feet up, Roy's did the same. Must have been where Roy figured out he was being followed and took off. As quickly as a fifty-six-year-old, 270-pound man with a bourbon habit could manage. And Tony was in pursuit.

Hank stepped up his pace. The terrain got steeper, and he slipped and fell, landing hard on his right side. He stumbled to his feet and shook his arm in pain. Ten feet on, he saw where Roy must have done the same thing. A big, churned-up thrashing of snow and ice. But he had made it back on his feet. Both sets of tracks kept heading down.

Hank was practically at a run by now. To add to the difficulty level, the sun was setting to his right and scattering long, perpendicular tree shadows in his path. Both his nose and his ears had lost all feeling. His fingers were close behind.

He tripped again but managed to stay on his feet by skidding forward and catching a tree branch—one of the last tree branches there were before the narrow open strip at the water's edge. He hadn't realized they were so close to Lake Taneycomo. It stretched along the south side of the Strip for a bit as it curled past town. Hank had always thought of it more as a river than a lake as it ran east, thin and long, down from Table Rock Dam.

Right now, though, it was just the end of the line. Roy stood on the shoreline to Hank's left, and Tony stood to his right. Tony was yelling. Hank managed to force the numb fingers of his left hand into his pocket and pull out his phone. He hit the recording function and moved closer.

“… the best thing to ever happen to me,” Tony shouted. “She was everything. She was perfect. And you killed her.”

Roy had his hands out in front of him. “Look, kid. She was the one who got in the way. She wasn't even supposed to be there. Definitely not. Not part of the plan. She interfered. It had to happen that day. That was the deal, and—”