The Big Keep: A Lena Dane Mystery (Lena Dane Mysteries) (30 page)

“What treatment?” I said innocently.

Fast as a snake, he darted forward and smacked me across the face, immediately returning to his spot next to the desk. Nate stepped forward but I snagged his wrist and clamped on, dragging him back to stand next to me. “Ease up, tiger,” I said to Nate. “It’s in my bag,” I told Ricardo, pointing to the messenger bag that had fallen off the couch and onto the floor when I’d stood up to face off against Conrad.
 

Ricardo eyed me, with my big pregnant belly, and then Nate, and decided I was the lesser threat. He pointed the pistol at Nate’s forehead and said to me, “Get it out.”

I sighed and laboriously lowered myself to the floor, making a big production of how difficult it was. It wasn’t much of a stretch. I dug through the bag and found the folded script treatment from Starla.
One shot at this, Lena
. I tossed the folded papers on the desk between us.
 

Ricardo glared at me. “
That’s
your big plan? Make me reach for the paper so you can, what? Attack me while I’m still holding a gun on you and you’re six months pregnant?” He shook his head in mock disappointment. “I expected better of you. Pick it up and walk it to me. Slowly.”

I shrugged, stepped forward, and picked up the paper. To stall Ricardo, I said, “You should know that I’ve read through the whole thing and there’s no mention of an accomplice.” I took a slow step toward him. And then another. When I was close enough to extend my arm and hand him the papers, I elected to inch just a little closer instead. I held out the script treatment, putting on my best poor-scared-female expression. Which wasn’t much of a stretch, either. If this didn’t work...

Ricardo looked at the papers, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the barrel of the gun drift just a little bit away from Nate. That was the moment I wanted. I thrust the papers at his stomach–and buried Conrad’s bronze letter opener right in the guy’s belly.
 

Ricardo let out a howl of pain, moving the gun toward my head, but I had already pulled out the letter opener with a vicious twist, and he stumbled to keep his balance. The gun went off, and a slug buried itself harmlessly in the crown molding. “Nate, get help!” I yelled, and the kid took off running for the door. I darted in the opposite direction, staggering to my feet and grabbing the desk on Ricardo’s other side, so that he had to choose between turning toward Nate or turning toward me. He picked me, but by the time he swung his gun hand around again I was ready.

I leaned left, grabbed the table with my free hand for balance, and flailed my right leg up, kicking him dead-on in the wrist. I was gonna owe Danny an apology. Ricardo cried out as the gun went flying out of his hand, and I remembered the letter opener still in my left hand. I lurched forward and stabbed his hand as hard as I could with the blade, pinning it to the desk. That should even up the mobility problem a little.

Ricardo screamed with pain, but I was too big and clumsy to get back out of his way fast enough, and and he managed to throw a great roundhouse to my neck with his left hand. I flinched away from it it, curving my body so the punch pushed me inward toward his chest. Pain radiated through my neck as I fumbled his second gun out of his holster. Just as I pulled it out he threw a wild backhand that knocked the gun out of my hand and sent me on my ass. Ricardo turned to the desk and pried the letter opener out, blood still streaming down his front from my first stab. He took one halting step toward me, eyes wild, blade held high, but by then I had scooted on my butt all the way over to the Browning. I turned the muzzle and shot him twice in the head.
 

The room was suddenly, terribly silent, and I could hear the ringing in my ears.

To my own surprise, I burst into tears. I laid back and let the tears fall, fighting the adrenaline that still coursed through my blood, and felt for the baby. Between the fall, and the stress, and the fight....she wasn’t moving. I felt like my entire body had hardened into stasis, unable to resume until I felt something from her.

That was how Nate found me, a few minutes later: lying on my back in front of the desk with tears drying on my cheeks and a dead body cooling beside me. I could hear the sharp wail of police sirens in the distance. Someone had heard the gunshots.

“Lena?” Nate yelped from the doorway. He ran to crouch next to me. “Are you okay? What happened? Lena!”
 

“Shhhh,” I said, holding up a hand and staring at the ceiling. “Wait.” There was another long, empty moment, and then I felt it again: the faint, cheerful kick coming from inside. I smiled at Nate, who was looking at me the way you look at a crazy person. “There,” I said happily. “Now it’s over.”

38. The Worst Thing

Nate came rushing in a moment later, with no regard to his personal safety, of course. I tried to get him to turn back right away, so he wouldn’t see the dead guy, but it was too late. I told him to get my bag for me, and out in the hall I called Cristina. The police were at the door by the time I hung up.
 

Only fifteen minutes into making our statements, Cristina burst through Conrad’s front door and threw her arms around me, a very uncharacteristic move for Cristina. I breathed in her familiar perfume-and-blood smell, and she finally pulled back to fuss at the two uniforms interviewing us. She had no jurisdiction here – Malibu has its own sheriff’s department – but that didn’t stop her from snapping, “Can you not see that this woman is pregnant? Get her into the living room! Give her a chair!” It made me smile, and I was grateful.
 

Another half an hour after that, after I’d been through the story two more times, I saw the flash of headlights through the living room window as Starla pulled into the driveway, home from her ice cream trip with the kids. I was sitting in an armchair, while Nate was being interviewed on the couch, but when we saw the headlights he met my eyes in a panic. “What do we say?” he mouthed. I suddenly wanted to be anywhere else, but that wouldn’t have been right. It was my case and I was finishing it. I pointed a finger toward myself.
I’ll handle it.
 

“Lena?” Starla said hesitantly, stepping into the living room a moment later. “What’s going on? They said that Conrad...but that can’t be true, can it?” Tears started to slip down her cheeks. On the couch, Nate stared miserably down at his hands, and the two uniforms found a reason to study their pads. Cristina looked steadily at me and nodded, giving me permission to explain.

“I’m sorry, Starla, but Conrad is dead,” I said gently. “The shooter came here to kill Nate, and me, and he thought Conrad was in the way.”
 

The police officer who had been asking me question raised his eyebrows slightly, knowing that that wasn’t the whole story. It was close to the truth, though, and I didn’t see why Starla needed to know that her brother had paid someone to kill her boyfriend.
 

“Everyone’s dying,” she whispered. Starla crumpled to the floor, right there where she was standing. “Oh, God,” she said softly, after a long pause. She looked lost and small. “How did I get here?”
 

I was at a loss, and nobody else said anything. Then Nate got up from the couch and stepped silently over to where Starla sat. He sank down on the carpet next to her and quietly took her hand, holding it on the floor between them. And they just sat there like that, until one of the cops bustled in and broke the spell.

After that, Nate and I spent a miserable day and a half in LA, talking to cops and lawyers and even a Malibu assistant district attorney. They let us take a break long enough to call Tom and Toby and my dad to let everyone know we were fine, and then it was right back to the questions. I knew they were pushing us because we were from out of town, and once we got back to Chicago it would be a lot harder to follow up, but it was still exhausting. It annoyed everyone that Nate and I didn’t know who Conrad had hired to kill Jason, but after hours of interviews they all had to admit that we probably weren’t holding anything back.
 

We did learn one new thing. The shooter’s name was actually Alan Sorrelson, 52, originally from Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Sorrelson was an ex-soldier, like Mason Taper, which is how his fingerprints came to be on file. He had attended West Point and become a sniper for the US Army, working his way all the way up to lieutenant colonel. The commander I spoke to said that Sorrelson was smart, efficient, and good at giving orders, but was not particularly well liked. Something to do with being cold and ruthless. On paper, Sorrelson had been honorably discharged after his third tour in Iraq, but privately, the commander told me, he just scared the hell out of people. Not a good situation, in a group of people who have to be able to count on each other.
 

At some point during the five years between his discharge and Mason Taper’s capture, the two men had met and become a killing team. When Nate and I finally left, the police were just starting to run Sorrelson’s DNA profile against unsolved homicide evidence in the US. I wished them luck and got the hell out of there.
 

Cristina drove me straight from the Malibu sheriff’s station to an obstetrician who was a friend of a friend, insisting I couldn’t fly home until I was cleared by a doctor. They ran every test that anyone could think of on the baby, including an ultrasound. On the outside, I was a little bit banged-up, with another black eye and a slightly twisted ankle, but on the inside, somehow, everything was perfect.
 

The OB cleared me to fly, and Nate and I spent another few hours arranging flights and saying goodbye to Starla and the twins. We took the kids to In-N-Out Burger, where Nate ate so many burgers that for a second I really thought
I
might throw up. Starla hugged us both and tearfully asked Nate to keep in touch. Cristina had gotten her the name of a good family therapist, who’d agreed to see them already that afternoon, so I felt a little better about abandoning her.

“I can’t even begin to think about this yet, really,” she said to me, eyes still red and puffy. I just nodded, and she looked over at Nate. I could see her struggling not to cry again. “But I do know that wherever you end up, you have a place here with your sister and brother, whenever you want. I’ll buy the plane tickets.”
 

The flight home was packed. There was a heavyset guy wedged in the corner of our row, snoring lightly over the sound of the airplane. Nate had insisted on giving me the aisle seat, in case I got sick, and folded his gangly body in the middle. Then he just sat still, looking straight ahead. It was the first time we’d been more or less alone since the gunfight, and I kept peeking at him out of the corner of my eye, afraid he might cry or start to shake or something. I opened my mouth to speak about six times, but even I didn’t have a joke or quip or anything to make it better, so I just closed it again and flipped through the SkyMall catalogue over and over until my eyes glazed.

About two hours into the flight, Nate finally turned sideways in his seat, leaning his cheek against the headrest.
 

“Lena?”

“Mmm?”

“Were you scared?”

I closed the magazine and put it in the seat pocket in front of me, looking over at him. “When Sorrelson had the gun out, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

I paused and thought it over. “Yeah, I was scared. But that wasn’t the worst thing I’ve been through, which helps. It makes you calmer, somehow. More still.”

“Was that guy Cleary the worst thing?”

I could tell the question was important to him. “Yes, Nate. He was the worst thing.”

“Does it still bother you?”

I smiled a little. “See, this is why I enjoy hanging out with kids. They just ask the not-completely-kosher question they’re thinking about, instead of all the doublespeak.”

“I’m not really a kid anymore, though,” Nate pointed out.

“No,” I said thoughtfully, “I guess you’re not.”

We sat in silence for a long time, until finally I decided he deserved an answer to his question. “Nate, the thing that happened to me with Cleary, that hurt me. It hurt me in most of the ways that a person can be hurt. And I would be lying if I said I didn’t still have nightmares about it, about those girls.”

“What makes it better?”

I paused while the flight attendant wheeled a beverage cart past me, carefully tucking in my elbows. “Time, I guess,” I said thoughtfully. “There aren’t really any shortcuts for this kind of thing. No tricks, no secrets. You just wait. And you use it, to make you stronger for the next time you need to be strong.”

“Well...I’m sorry that happened to you.”

“Thank you, Nate.”

We flew on in silence for a long time. Then, “Lena?”

“Yes?”

“This whole thing, with Jason Anderson and Conrad and the gun, I hope all this is the worst thing I go through.”

I put an arm around him and kissed his forehead. “Me, too.”

When Nate and I dragged ourselves through baggage claim at O’Hare, headed towards our carousel, two men stood up from the nearby row of benches. My father stepped forward first and hugged me for a long time, muttering a prayer of thank you under his breath. It was strange to see him outside his little world of the comic book shop and his apartment. I patted his back and hung on tight. “I’m okay, Daddy.” He finally let go and stepped back, swiping at the tears in his eyes. Then he reached over and hugged Nate, too.

“Your sister wants you to call her immediately, Firecracker,” he said over Nate’s shoulder. “I’m gonna drive Nate home now, so you two can talk.” He released Nate and looked at Toby, who moved up and wrapped his arms around me.

“Hey,” he said in my ear, his voice breaking. I nodded into his shoulder, starting to cry now myself, and my dad picked up Nate’s backpack and started to lead Nate away. Still hugging my husband, I reached out, and Nate clasped my hand, squeezing tight. Then we let go and the two of them walked away.
 

Toby pulled away first, taking a step back to place one hand on my belly. I remembered my news. “She’s been kicking like crazy!” I sobbed, crying hard now. “I’ve been feeling it for like a day and a half!”