The Wrong Man (67 page)

Who am I? she suddenly asked herself.

There was a moment, she remembered, shortly after her father had died, that she had truly been scared. It wasn’t so much the fear of being left behind; it was instead a fear of not being able to live up to what he’d wanted her to be. She tried to imagine that her dead father would have wanted her to be precisely in the position she was, with her head up against a wall, the night surrounding her, the damp ground seeping through her coveralls. He would understand taking a chance to protect others. He always wanted her to take charge, whether it was for good or for bad.
You’re the captain,
she could hear his voice in the darkness.

Hope thought that in that moment she was truly on the verge of madness.

Clear your mind, she told herself.

She pulled the balaclava down over her head, so that her face was obscured.

She reached inside the backpack and removed the gun from its plastic bag.

She slid her finger around the trigger. It was the first time in her entire life that she’d actually held a handgun. She wished she had more experience with weapons, but was surprised to feel a certain electricity flowing from the steel handle into her hand, an unfamiliar, almost intoxicating power.

Hope scrambled to the edge of the carport and listened to angry voices coming from inside the home as she waited for the right moment to arrive.

“I need to know what’s going on,” Michael O’Connell burst out. Every word he spoke was laden with years of hatred for the man smugly rocking in his lounge chair across from him, and with all the weight of his love for Ashley. He could feel his heart racing; it nearly made him dizzy with rage.

“What’s going on? You’re here, shouting about some girl, when you ought to be a whole lot more worried about whoever it is that you’ve made into an enemy,” his father said, waving his hand in the air.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t burnt anyone.”

The old man shrugged infuriatingly. Michael O’Connell took a step forward, fists clenched, and the older man finally pushed himself out of the chair, squaring his shoulders to his son. “You think you’ve gotten old enough and strong enough to take me on?”

“I don’t think you want to ask that question, old man. You’re looking a little paunchy and out of shape. That fake back injury of yours might start acting up for real. What you were good at was beating up on women and kids, and that was a real long time ago. I’m not a kid anymore. You might think hard about that.”

The chill in his voice caused the older man to stop. He puffed out his chest and shook his head.

“I never had any trouble handling you back then. You may think you’re all grown up, but I’m still a whole lot more trouble than you want to try to take on. I can still crush you.”

“You were a weakling then, you’re a weakling now. Mom used to hold her own against you. In fact, if she wasn’t drunk, you couldn’t even have beaten her. That’s how it really happened, isn’t it? The night she died? She was too drunk to fight back, and you saw your opportunity and that’s when you killed her.”

The older man snarled.

“I should never have lied for you. I should have told the cops the truth all along,” Michael O’Connell said bitterly.

“Don’t be pushing things,” the father replied coldly. “Don’t be going places where you got no right to go.”

As their words dropped in volume and increased in hatred, the two men had closed to within a few feet of each other, like dogs in that instant before growls turn into a fight.

“You think you could kill me and get away with it, like you did her? I don’t think so, old man.”

The father suddenly jerked forward and slapped his son hard across the face. The sound of the blow echoed in the small room.

Michael O’Connell grinned savagely. He shot out his right arm and seized his father by the throat. Closing his hand around the old man’s windpipe was instantly satisfying. As he could feel muscles contract, and tendons start to crush beneath his grip, he felt a passion that almost overwhelmed him. Panicked, the older man grabbed at his son’s wrist, digging his fingernails into the flesh, trying to pull free, while he felt the breath quickly choke out of him. As his father’s face turned a deeper red, Michael O’Connell suddenly pushed him back, releasing him. The older man slammed against a coffee table, spilling its contents. He grabbed at the arm of the lounge chair as he fell to the ground, pulling it over, and lay back, gasping on the floor, his eyes wide with surprise. His son laughed and spat at the older man.

“Stay there, old man. Stay there forever. But hear me on this: if you ever get a call from Ashley, or anyone connected to Ashley, and you promise them you will help them in any way, I will come back here and kill you. First I will hurt you, so that you will be begging for me to stop. And then I will kill you. Do you understand that? I’d like to kill everything in my past. It would make me feel a whole lot better. And the place I’d like the most to start with is you.”

The father remained on the floor, frozen. The son saw fear spread throughout the old man’s eyes and, for the first time that night, thought that the drive north had been worthwhile.

“You need to hope that you never see me again, you pathetic old man. Because the next time, you will end up in a box in a hole in the ground, which is where you belong. Where you’ve belonged for years.”

Michael O’Connell turned and, without a single glance back, went out the side door.

The cool night air hit him like another bad memory, but all he could think of was what game Ashley had invented, and why she had thought that his father could help her. Someone had been lying.

He slid behind the wheel of his car, fired up the engine, and decided he needed the answer to those questions immediately.

Hope had listened to the argument, then the clatter of a short fight. She gripped the automatic in her hand tightly, holding her breath when she saw Michael O’Connell lurch through the door and stride to his car only a few feet away from where she was hidden. She waited for him to back down out of the driveway, then accelerate rapidly into the night.

The next moment, she knew, was critical.

Sally had told her,
Do not delay. Not for one second. As soon as he exits, you must enter.

She rose up.

Hope could hear Sally’s voice in her ear.

Do not hesitate. Do not wait. Go straight inside. Don’t say a word. Just pull the trigger. Don’t look back. Leave.

Hope took a single deep breath and emerged from behind the carport. She rapidly crossed through the small arc of light to the side door. She looked down and saw her left hand close on the door handle and thrust herself into the house.

Hope was in the kitchen, but she could see through the entryway into the living room, just as Scott had described. She stood there, nearly frozen, and watched Michael O’Connell’s father begin to pick himself up off the floor.

He turned toward her. He did not look surprised.

“Mr. Jones send you?” he asked as he straightened himself up, dusting himself off. “You missed the punk by less than a minute. That was his car peeling out of here.”

Hope lifted the weapon and assumed a firing stance.

The older O’Connell looked confused.

“Hey,” he said sharply. “It’s the goddamn kid you want, not me.”

Everything in the world was suddenly exaggerated. Every color was brighter, every sound louder, every smell more pungent. Hope’s breathing seemed to echo in her ears, a cascade of rushing noise. She tried not to think about what she was doing.

Aiming directly at the old man’s chest, she pulled the trigger.

And nothing happened.

The detective carried a large box with a broken red-tape seal over to his desk. He dropped it in the middle with a thudding sound, then leaned forward with a small grin and asked me, “You know how kids are on Christmas morning? When they stare at all those packages wrapped up underneath a tree?”

“Sure. But what…”

“Collecting evidence is a little like all those presents. The kids always think that the biggest present will be the best, but often it isn’t. It’s the less-significant, less-flashy box that really holds the most valuable gift. In a sense, that’s what happens with us. It might be the smallest thing that becomes the biggest, when you finally get to trial. So, when you arrive at a crime scene and pick up this or that, or when you execute a search warrant, you need to consider all the pieces.”

“And in this case?”

The detective grinned. He pulled out a handgun, encased in a plastic bag, with another red evidence seal closing it. He handed me the weapon, and I peered at it through the transparent shield. I could see the residue of fingerprint dust on the handle and the barrel.

“Be careful,” he said. “I don’t think that sucker’s loaded, but the clip is in the handle, so I can’t be sure.” He smiled. “You’d be surprised how many near-fatal accidents occur in property rooms when people start waving around guns that are supposed to be unloaded.”

I held the weapon cautiously. “Doesn’t look like much.”

The detective nodded. “Piece-of-shit weapon,” he said with a small shake of his head. “About as cheap as you can find. Manufactured by some company in Ohio that machine-stamps out each part of the weapon and then screws it together, sticks it in a box, and ships it off to some disreputable dealer. A good gun shop would never carry crap like this. And no real professional would ever use it.”

“Still, it works.”

“Sort of. Twenty-five automatic. Small caliber. Lightweight. Professional killers—and we don’t get a whole lot of those around here as you might imagine—like twenty-two- and twenty-five-caliber weapons, because they’re easy to fit a homemade silencer to and, when loaded with a magnum bullet, do the job clean and nice. But they’d never use a throwaway gun like this. Too unreliable. It’s not easy to handle, the safety and the action both jam, and unless it’s fired at extremely close range, it’s not very accurate. And it doesn’t pack much punch, either. Wouldn’t stop a moderately sized pit bull or rapist, unless you managed to get ’em in the ticker or some other fatal spot with the first shot.”

He smiled again as I turned the weapon over in my hands.

“Or you fired it real, and I mean real, close. Like lover close.”

Again he grinned.

“And, generally speaking, it isn’t wise to get that near the person you’re trying to kill.”

I nodded, and the detective plumped back down in his seat.

“See, learn something new every day.”

I held the weapon up again, holding it to the light, as if it could tell me something.

“Of course,” the detective said, “now that I’ve told you how damn bad that weapon is, on the other hand, it seemed to do the trick. Sort of.”

44

Making Choices

H
ope realized instantly that she had made a mistake.

Her mind racing with the wildest of possibilities, she placed her thumb against the safety switch and pushed it down, making certain it was in the firing position. She lifted her gloved left hand and fumbled with the action to push a round into the firing chamber—all of which she should have had the sense to do before she’d entered the house. The top snatched back, cocking the weapon. She had a terrible thought that neither she nor Sally had even bothered to check if the gun was properly loaded.

In that second, she did not know whether to flee or continue.

O’Connell’s father, his hands starting to rise in a gesture of surrender, suddenly let loose an immense bellow and threw himself across the room toward Hope.

As she raised the gun into a firing position for the second time, he closed the distance between them. As she pulled the trigger, he slammed into her.

She could feel the gun buck in her hand, heard a snapping sound and a thud, and then she spun backward, slamming into the kitchen table, upending it with a crash, sending empty liquor bottles flying across the room, shattering against walls and cabinets. Hope was knocked to the floor, the breath almost smashed out of her. O’Connell’s father, growling visceral, terrifying noises, fell on top of her. He was clawing at her face mask, trying to get his fingers around her throat, punching her wildly.