“Do you hear me,
Mick
?”
She spat that
Mick
at me as if it were the worst thing she could possibly do to me without actually shooting me.
Mick. She called me Mick. Nobody calls me that. Nobody. Not since Richard—Not since I killed Richard. Rick and Mick. Nobody. I nearly cried out.
“All right.” My voice shook. I couldn’t control it. “If that’s the way you want it.”
Nobody! It would’ve been better if she’d shot me. No simple little hunk of lead would hurt like this.
But when I turned for the door, I caught a glimpse of her purse out of the corner of my eye. It lay on the floor a few feet away from her nightstand.
Shot me,
I thought. With her .357. Which she kept in her purse.
What was it doing on the floor?
If she’d accidentally pushed it off the stand, it wouldn’t have fallen that far away.
All of a sudden my skin began to crawl with intuition. A burning sensation mounted in the back of my head. Something was trying to get through to me. Reach past the stuff in my blood, make sense to me.
I struggled for it. Something—
I wanted to beat my head on the wall. I was too drunk. I couldn’t think.
I had to think.
She’d called me Mick?
The pain was killing me. I couldn’t stop it. I had to stop it. Had to think.
Ginny got her hand blown off because she didn’t want anything to happen to me.
Think!
Her purse was too far away from the nightstand. It couldn’t have fallen there accidentally. Someone must’ve knocked it or shoved it aside.
Why?
Think.
She needed me. I had to be sober!
But I wasn’t sober. I was standing there like a lush, with a bottle of anisette in my pocket and my hands clenched in front of my face. Seconds slipped away from me, and I couldn’t bring them back.
Hands clenched.
Clenched the way I’d clenched them around Kirke’s arm a couple of days ago.
Why had I done that?
Because Kirke said Alathea was a little whore.
I almost screamed—
—and everything came into focus.
We hadn’t told Kirke that this case had anything to do with sex. We hadn’t said a word about that to the school board.
How had he known?
Kirke!
That’s why he’d tried so hard to persuade me to drink with him. He knew I was getting close. He wanted to keep me with him until he figured out some way to kill me.
Then a horror of my own landed on me so hard I almost dropped to my knees.
Kirke knew that Ginny was in the hospital. Stretto had told him what happened to her. He knew she was here.
I had no idea what to do. My intuition didn’t stretch that far. I’d left the .45 in the Olds. And I was too far away—
Against the wall beside the door stood a steel armchair with a green vinyl seat. I put my hand on it to hold myself up.
Then it all came together at once—intuition, rage, fear, love. I snatched up the chair, and with one sweep of my arm I threw it at the curtain near the head of her bed.
It hit something behind the curtain. I heard a muffled curse. A gun went off. The slug plowed into the ceiling.
Ginny and I moved simultaneously. She flipped out of bed and sprawled flat on the floor, reaching for her purse. I jumped over her, dove headlong across the bed into the curtain.
The chair had torn the curtain. It came down under my weight. I landed half on the chair, half on a struggling body. It twisted frantically under me, trying to get up.
The curtain hid him. I didn’t know if he still had his gun. But I didn’t care. I just hammered at his veiled shape with my fists. The third time I hit something hard that must’ve
been his head. He slumped under me, stopped moving.
I didn’t stop. I heard Ginny shouting, “Don’t kill him! He knows where Mittie is!” But the pressure was too strong, and I couldn’t stop.
I pounded at him with everything I had until another gunshot crashed through the room.
Unsteadily I rolled off him. Got up.
Ginny stood beside her bed with her .357 pointed at the ceiling. The IV tube had been ripped out of her arm. Blood dripped slowly from her elbow.
There was nobody in the other bed.
I swallowed hard, managed to ask, “Kirke?” I hurt everywhere. My knees felt like mush, and my head floated sideways. I had to hold onto the bed frame.
Ginny nodded. Then she put her gun down on the nightstand. For a second she looked like she might faint. But she fought it off. “Oh, God, Brew,” she breathed. “I thought he was going to kill you.”
Slowly I came back under control. Reaching down, I pulled away the curtain. Just making sure I hadn’t hit him too hard.
I’d battered him pretty good, but Kirke was still breathing.
The whole room stank of anisette. One side of my jacket was soaked, and I had a pocket full of broken glass.
A
cton got an address out of Kirke. I don’t know how, and I don’t want to know. All I cared about was that Acton took me—and about eight other cops—with him when he went to check out that address.
It was a long way up Canyon Road toward the mountains. But Acton drove like a bat. We must’ve set a record getting there. The sky was turning pale, but the sun hadn’t yet climbed over the mountains when we reached the house.
It sat in a little valley between two hills, completely out of sight of its neighbors. It was a rich man’s place, a sprawling ranch-style house complete with everything except its own airstrip. But right then none of us felt much like admiring it. Acton broke the door down, and all ten of us went charging in.
We found Mittie alive. Hungry, strung-out, and frantic—but alive. One of the cops took her back into town to the hospital while the rest of them searched the house.
I didn’t do any searching. Once I knew that Mittie was safe despite all the stupid things I’d done in the past twelve hours, a lot of the tension inside me snapped, and I had to sit down.
After a while Acton came and stood in front of me with his hands in his pockets. His fingers jiggled keys or coins or something.
I said, “You weren’t surprised to see who it was.” Which was true. When he’d reached the hospital and seen Kirke, he’d looked like he’d known it all along.
He said, “Naw. I spent half the night talking to the school board. Scurvey and Greenling both said they got their note paper from him. He’s the board secretary. He’s supposed to provide things like note paper. Tearing sheets in half is an
old habit of his. Didn’t prove nothing, but it sure as hell made me suspicious.”
I nodded tiredly. Then I said, “You’ll have to find her father.”
“Naw,” he growled again. “He turned himself in around two thirty this morning. He babbled something about killing the man who set that bomb. I wanted to talk to him, but right about then we got this call”—he grinned sourly—“about a shoot-out at the hospital. He’s still sitting in the cage.”
“He used my gun,” I said. “He didn’t carry one. It’s in the glove compartment of the Olds.” Then I said the only thing I could think of to help Ted Hangst. “He was covering me. Last had a gun on me, and Ted was trying to keep me from being blown away.”
Acton nodded. I could see that he was going to accept my story without worrying about it. Another piece of tension faded, and for a few minutes there I almost went to sleep.
But then the cops started finding things. The note paper didn’t give them any trouble. The desk in the den held a stack of neatly torn half sheets. Same watermark as all the runaway notes. That and the fingerprints in the house gave the cops the kind of evidence courts love. Nine counts of kidnapping and seven of murder.
And after some more diligent searching that made the house look like it’d been used as a test site for high explosives, Acton’s team found the heroin and the money. Not a particularly big cache of junk. Kirke probably had to drive down to Mexico every three or four months to stock up. But it was enough. The money came out to over a hundred thousand dollars. It was all Kirke had left after paying for housing, junk, food, clothes, and Sven Last. Obviously he kept it in cash so that it wouldn’t show up in his financial records. Which explained why Smithsonian thought he was clean.
Acton rubbed his hands together. “This bastard’s going to get the gas chamber.”
A couple of cops stayed behind to keep an eye on things until the print-and-picture boys arrived. The rest of us piled into the cars and went back to Puerta del Sol.
Acton dropped me off at the hospital. The sun was up now, and all that crisp morning light made me squint. But for once in my life I was glad to see it. Nights like that last one I could do without.
It was nominally too early for visiting hours, but the hospital staff didn’t make me wait. By then Ginny and I were celebrities—if that’s the right word for it. The head nurse made an exception for me and took me up to Ginny’s new room.
This time when she saw me Ginny smiled. It lit up her whole face.
I sat down in one of the chairs against the wall, and for a minute or two we didn’t say anything. We just smiled at each other.
I didn’t want to do anything else. But after a while I started to feel like I was in danger of making a fool of myself. “All right,” I said. My voice was so husky it almost made me laugh. “All right. I can’t stand the suspense. After what I’ve been through, I want to know how you figured out this case.”
She looked beautiful to me. Even her broken nose was beautiful. “What makes you think I figured anything out?”
“You were right on the edge of it.” That was something I knew for sure. “At the time you were too tight to get it. But I’ll bet you had the answer when you woke up after surgery. You probably tried to call me, but you couldn’t track me down.”
She nodded. I was right, of course. Intuition didn’t have anything to do with it. I just knew Ginny.
“I missed something obvious,” I went on. “I’m going to go crazy unless you tell me what it was.”
She leaned back against her pillows, looked up at the ceiling. Fistoulari thinking. “I missed it, too,” she said after a moment. “It wasn’t Stretto or Scurvey. We were pretty sure of that. And you were sure it wasn’t Greenling. I was willing to believe you. So it had to be Kirke or one of the secretaries.
“Finally it all came down to the way Kirke ran that office. Each of those girls was kidnapped during the day. At dif
ferent times during the day. By somebody with the authority to make the girls go with him. Somebody who could supply a good excuse for himself if he got stopped. That excluded any fiancées or husbands. It had to be somebody who actually worked for the board.
“But each one of those little kidnapping operations must’ve taken a fair amount of time. Drive from the office to the school. Pick up the girl. Take her out to that house on Canyon Road: Run back to the office. That’s what we missed.
“Kirke was the only one who could arrange so much time away from the office during the day. If one of his secretaries had disappeared for that length of time, he would’ve nailed her to the wall. The way he ran that place, he was the only one who could get away.”
Well, I was right about that too. I’d missed something obvious. Axbrewder the genius. Some days I’m amazed to find that I’ve put my clothes on straight.
Ginny was looking at me hard. I didn’t understand it until she started to say, “I’m sorry I called—”
I interrupted her. “Forget it. I was in a fog. You had to get through to me somehow.” Then I grinned. “And you knew Kirke didn’t know my first name.”
For a minute she blinked back tears, and I couldn’t think of anything to say.
There was a knock at the door. Ginny nodded, and I said, “Come in.”
It was Lona.
She wore a vaguely startled look, as if she couldn’t quite believe what had happened. At first she had trouble finding her voice. Then she said, “I wanted to tell you. I just talked to the doctor. He said”—she swallowed convulsively—“he said Alathea is getting stronger. Her vital signs are stronger. And steadier. He said that probably means she’s going to come out of it. Maybe soon. He thinks she might be all right.”
After that I couldn’t see for a while. My eyes ran, and everything blurred.
Ginny said, “I’m glad. She’s a wonderful girl.”
Lona said, “You didn’t find her. You didn’t save her.”
When Ginny didn’t answer, I knew Lona was talking to me. Blindly I said, “I know. She saved herself.”
For a moment Lona remained silent. Then she said, “You caught the man who was responsible. That’s what Richard would have wanted you to do.”
I had to cover my face with my hands. When I got myself back under control, Lona was gone.
Ginny smiled at me like the sun.
I got to my feet. She’d had a rough eighteen hours—she needed rest. And Ted would need me to tell the cops my side of the story. He might even need me to post bail.
But before I left there was one thing I had to do.
I walked over to Ginny and bent down. Deliberately I gave her the best kiss I had in me.
It hurt my cut mouth, but I didn’t care because she wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me back. Hard.
When we stopped, I was grinning like a crazy man. I practically floated as I turned away, started for the door.
Her voice stopped me. “What’re you going to do now?” she asked. “Go have a drink?” She didn’t sound angry or accusative. There was none of that in her tone. Just pain.
“No.” I faced her again so that she could see I was telling her the truth. No big promises or predictions, just the truth about how I felt. “I’m going to put that off for a while.”