Kill Smartie Breedlove (a mystery) (26 page)

“Ah. Okay. Thanks anyway.”

“Right-o, sport,” said Bean.

\\\ ///

26

S
hortly after three in the morning, Shep trudged through his front door and slumped on the sofa with his arm across his eyes, heartsick and weary, drifting, then dozing, then wrenching into a state of wide wakefulness.

His phone was ringing. He fumbled it out and mumbled, “Yeah.”

“Please. I need help.” The voice was trembling, pocked with tears.

“Smartie?” Shep sat forward on the sofa and rubbed his hand over his face.

“Mr. Hartigate, I’m scared. Please, come and get me.”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Kara. Kara Lynn Sweet. What’s so funny?”

“That didn’t take long, did it?” Shep laughed, looking at his watch. Ten after four.

“What do you mean?”

“I knew Barth was on call 24/7, but I didn’t think you’d do the graveyard shift.”

“You said to call if I got in trouble, and I’m in trouble.”

“Ya don’t say.”

“This guy’s been messaging me. He was watching the web cam, and he said he was coming over. I don’t know how he got my address, but he’s been out there in the hallway, pounding on my door, yelling at me to let him in.”

“Sounds like a job for 911,” said Shep. “Need me to give you their number?”

“I called the cops, but when they got here—I don’t know. He wasn’t out there, and they said there was nothing they could do. Please, Mr. Hartigate, I just want to go home. All you have to do is take me to my car. Down in the parking ramp. So I can go to my parents’ house.”

“Why don’t you call your dad to come and get you?”

“And say what? How am I supposed to explain?” Her voice crumpled into itself. “You know what? Forget it. I knew you were just looking for a piece of ass.”

“Kara, wait. Kara?
Kara
. Are you still there?” Shep waited for a moment and then swore and was about to click off when she sniffled and said, “I’m here.”

“Stay put. I’m on my way.”

Shep pushed his fingertips against his forehead as he dialed Claire’s cell.

“Hartigate,” she moaned after three or four rings. “You better be on fire.”

“I need you to check and see if a unit was sent out to this address on a four-fifteen a little while ago.”

He gave her Kara’s address, and Claire told him to hang on.

“They responded,” she came back after a brief silence. “The guy was gone already.”

Shep swore softly. “Okay. Thanks, Claire.”

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing. I appreciate your help.”

“Shep—”

He clicked off and contemplated putting on his gray suit. Janny called it his “dick shtick.” The starchy white and steel gray made him feel uniformed, acclimating him for his daily tasks the way a wet suit did a dive welder. It felt odd holstering his .45 over a plain tee shirt, but Shep decided not to take the time to change.

He grabbed his keys and wallet from a bowl on a table in the foyer and headed for the driveway, realizing as he opened the door that the Range Rover wasn’t there. Shep stood for a moment, then went back to the bedroom and came out a few minutes later, cinching a necktie under the collar of a white shirt.

Hitting the garage door opener on his way out through the kitchen, he pulled on his gray jacket and mounted the bike, but as he hitched up the kickstand, something caught the corner of his eye. He hitched the kickstand back down and went to the shelf where his helmet had long since gone dusty.

On it was a pink Post-It note: “WEAR THIS! None of your lame excuses are bigger than how much I love you.”

“Y
ou’re sweating,” said Kara Lynn when she opened the door at her apartment. “And your face is red. You look like you’re about to have a friggin’ heart attack.”

“I just climbed seven flights of stairs looking for your boogey man,” Shep said irritably. “Are you ready to go?”

Kara leaned out into the hallway, peeking down one direction, then the other. She shouldered her Hello Kitty backpack and followed Shep to the elevator. The cable dropped them downward with a nasal whine, a lighted bar above the door marking their progress floor by floor with a series of glottal pings.

Shep stood quietly watching Kara, who quaked inside her thin jacket like a small, soft blade of dry grass.

“You really are a nice guy,” she said suddenly.

He looked at her without saying anything. Waiting for it.

“I’m not a bad person,” she whispered.

“What did you do, Kara?”

“He just wants to talk to you.”

In the moment between the first floor ping and the opening of the steel doors, Shep seized her by the back of her slender neck and flung her up against the wall. As he jammed the helmet down over his ears, gun thunder echoed through the cement corridors of the parking ramp, reverberating off the low ceilings and slanting floors. Kara screamed and tried to wriggle away, but Shep held her, covering her body with his own.

When he felt the first four shots in a tight cluster below his left shoulder blade, he knew he’d figured things wrong.

It didn’t surprise him that Suri had pulled off the perfect
Red Harvest
, but until that moment, Shep would have bet paper money that Barth would be using Smartie’s gun for the multi-task of killing him, disposing of Kara and setting up Smartie as the raving, jealous lover, who was probably scheduled to kill herself shortly before the police got to her. But over the years, Shep had taken a number of pills through Kevlar vests. Bullets from a .38 carried the burning ache of a bee sting. This felt more like being hacked in the back with the harsh end of a claw hammer.

The next slug strafed the back of his helmet, slamming the front of his head into the back of Kara’s head and the front of Kara’s head into the unforgiving metal wall. She went limp in his arms, and Shep let her slump boneless to the floor, leaving a smear of blood from her broken nose and teeth.

He tried to draw his weapon from his shoulder holster. In his mind, he saw himself wheel and fire at eye level before he took a round in the face. But his arm refused to rise that far. When he turned his body, the agony was blinding, blackening. He managed to get a round off, and it caught Barth in his shoulder. A flicker of sideswiped irritation ticked across his face.

“Drop your weapon,” Shep attempted, but it sounded more like a plea than a threat.

“Drop your weapon!” A stronger voice echoed from the half-lit cave of the parking ramp. “HPD! I said drop it!”

Barth popped Shep in the kidney again as he turned, and it cost him a vital split-second. The officer’s first shot opened a hole next to Barth’s Adam’s apple. The second struck above his right eye, arching him back, dropping him to the cement floor. As his looming shadow went down and blossomed like an oil spill on the concrete, Shep saw Claire, still in Isosceles stance with her gun in both hands, incongruently garbed in scant silk pajamas, a trench coat and motorcycle boots, red hair wild, body wired tight, big eyes demanding
what the hell
.

Shep had never seen her look more gorgeous.

The doors slid closed between them, and the elevator crawled back up into the building like a squat, grumbling beetle up a drainpipe.

Shep leaned on the wall, but his legs wouldn’t hold him. He slid down next to Kara. She moaned a little, and he reached out to her, but the movement brought a siege of jackknives in his back. Working the helmet off his head, he studied the bullet sear that scored the outer shell half a click from his brain pan. Shep closed his eyes and felt Janny’s arms around him. He sat for a moment, regrouping, quietly croaking her name through the pain.

Drawing shallow, rasping breath, he worked his gray jacket off, then his white shirt. He struggled the weight of the bulletproof vest from his shoulders, forced himself up to his knees and hit the third floor stop on the elevator. Sirens closed in below, covering the bubbled noise of Kara’s crying and cussing.

“My face,” she whimpered, only it sounded like “
by faith
.”

As the elevator doors eased open, Shep got clumsily to his feet. Pushing and pulling for every exhale and inhale, he stumbled out into the fluorescent light of the third floor hallway and hit the button that would close the doors and drop Kara back down to meet the police unit.

“Asshole,” she bawled. “Look what you did to my face. What am I supposed to do now?”

Shep gritted his teeth and told her. “Apply some fucking physics.”

\\\ ///

27

T
he glass walls were streaked with the beginnings of sunrise when Shep got off the elevator at the offices of Salinger, Pringle, Fitch & Edloe. Suri’s face washed with relief when she saw him.

“Is he dead?” she asked.

Shep nodded.

“Thank God. It’s over, it’s over.”

Her knees buckled, and she had to lean against the wall until Shep got his arms around her. Because he needed his arms around her, needed her open mouth under his, needed the jagged agony of her strong hold on his battered ribs as she kissed his raw lips and sweaty neck and clenched jaw. For a moment, he didn’t care about anything else. But then it was a moment later.

“Suri,” he said, kissing the corners of her eyes, “we have to go to the DA now.”

She pushed back from him, collecting herself.

“No, it’s all right. There’s no need for that, Shep. I’ve carefully managed the evidence from the beginning. Everything will be on Barth. All we have to do is keep mum, you and I, just keep our wits about us and continue business as usual.”

“Business as usual?” Shep gripped Suri’s head between his hands. Burning in his wrists was enough love and hate to break her neck. “Business as usual would have been Barth walking through that door instead of me.”

“You know that’s not what I wanted. He had to be gotten rid of, Shep, and you wouldn’t have done it any other way.”

“If we go to the DA,” he said, “if you come forward voluntarily, you’ll have that in your favor. You can argue the mitigating circumstances.”

“I won’t need to argue anything if we just
keep mum
.”

“Suri, it is going to come out. One way or another.”

“But not this way.”

She took his hand and pressed the listening devices from her home office into his palm.

“Friends close, enemies closer,” he observed.

“What does that make us, Shep?”

“I don’t know anymore.”

“All I’m asking you to do is keep quiet. Like you have in the past.”

“I’m not going down that road again.”

“You have no choice.”

“I’ll find another way to get the evidence.”

“zYou’ll be in prison for rape and murder.” Suri waited. Allowed him to gauge the steel in her voice. “I will use your DNA, your blood, the bite mark, sizeable deposits to your personal accounts. My testimony will make you complicit in everything Barth did. I’ll tell them that when I tried to come forward you assaulted me and killed Barth in cold blood. It’s not worth it, Shep. You’ll lose what little you have left. The modicum of respect you’ve managed to recoup. Your wife’s money. The opportunity to see Charlie grow up.”

“None of that will mean shit if I crawl back under that rock,” said Shep. “I wouldn’t even want Charlie to know me.
I won’t do it, Suri.”

“Yes, you will.” She spoke softly, spoke the words into his mouth. “Because you want me, Shep, and this is the only way we can be together.”

Suri took his closed fist and held it against her heart. Her pulse fluttered against the back of his hand like the wings of a hummingbird. Shep looked into her dark eyes, searching for the flash of gold, finding only raw fear and unedited resolve. Over her shoulder, all of Houston was coming alive, the soaring skyline, the teeming anthill of traffic. Rust-colored sunrise crawled through the steel beams and broken bayous of Shep’s beautiful city.

“I want you, Suri,” he whispered in her ear. “But I could never fall asleep next to you again.”

R
ather than open the kitchen door when Shep knocked, Libby called through the curtained window, “If you’re here to apologize—”

“Open the goddamn door. I think my ribs are broken.”

The curtain moved a little, revealing a brief flash of her eye, then the door flew open, and Libby moved him to a kitchen chair with the jaded calm bred by all those years in the ER.

“Sit here. Off the shirt. Where’s this blood coming from?”

“Somebody else. I was wearing the vest.”

“Praise God and pass the Kevlar. Lean forward. Deep breath,” said Libby, and Shep clenched and groaned as she palpated the ribs on the left side of his torso. “Is there a stabbing pain when you inhale? Here? How about here?”

She fetched a blue canvas tote from a coat tree in the hall and hooked a stethoscope into her ears. Shep propped his elbows on the kitchen table and rested his head in his hand while Libby gave his blood pressure and pulse the once over.

“Would it do any good to say you need this X-rayed?” she asked, and when Shep shook his head, she sighed and flipped out her cell phone.

The kitchen fell quiet while she waited for someone to pick up. In the silence, Shep experienced each beat of his heart as a dull, aching echo.

“Sandy, it’s Libby. I’m sorry to bug you at home. I’ve got my jackass brother here, and he’s been Kevlar popped below the left scapula. There’s at least one rib fracture, and I’m—yes, I know, but he won’t go in. Discoloration, stabbing pain. Respiration is a little shallow, but his vitals are good. I just want to make sure I’m not missing flail chest. Okay, hang on. Let me get him on his feet.”

Shep stood with some difficulty, and Libby set the phone aside, spanning her hands across his back while he breathed and swore. She whisked two Kleenex from a box on the counter and instructed him to cough while she listened to his chest with her stethoscope. She examined the tissues and retrieved her phone.

“No visible disarticulation. No bloody sputum. Cough sounds clear. I’d describe him as alert. Among other things.” She wrote on a pad attached to the side of the fridge. “All I have is OTC naproxen. How many milligrams? Okay. Thanks, Sandy.”