Chapter Twenty Nine
Sandy and I were in bed when I heard the sound.
We’d been living together for two weeks, and things were going so well that I was actually concerned. I’m the kind of person who is suspicious of good news and comfortable with bad news, so Sandy’s optimistic, supportive, loving presence naturally had my pessimistic radar on high alert.
As Sandy I spent more time together, things just seemed to click between us. Not just physically, either, but the part where we enjoyed each other’s presence and did ordinary things like painting the kitchen or buying groceries or watching the news together felt life-affirming in an ordinary and at the same time extraordinary kind of way. Sandy had the habit of coming over to me when I was doing something like washing the dishes, or working on my car, or sweeping the pine needles off of the deck, and she’d take my hand and then look deep into my eyes, and give me the gentlest, softest, most loving kiss imaginable. I’d never been kissed that way before. Then she’d go back to what she was doing, and I would too, aside from thinking about that kiss for the rest of the day.
At any rate, Sandy and I were in bed together when I heard the noise on the deck. I rolled over to check the time on my cell phone, and the display said it was 4:10 a.m. I thought about ways that I could get the seagulls to stay off my deck, but it didn’t really matter just then. I heard another noise on the deck, louder this time, and I wondered if a raccoon was out there dueling with the seagulls. I pushed the bedsheets off, sat upright, and put my feet on the floor.
“What’s up?” Sandy asked.
“Seagulls fighting on the deck again.”
“It’s the middle of the night, Del. Even the seagulls are asleep.” She tugged the chain on the small lamp on her nightstand, bathing the room in soft light.
“I’ll be right back,” I said.
I heard Sandy say “Just a minute,” but I kept moving.
I used the light that spilled from the bedroom doorway to navigate the furniture in the living room. I felt the cool surface of the oak flooring against my bare feet and thought about how a big area rug wouldn’t be such a bad idea on top of the oak. I flipped the light switch that lit the Christmas lights over the deck, and then unlocked the sliding glass door. I pushed the door open and heard the noises that I often hear when I’m on the deck: the sound of the surf, the hiss of the wind moving through the fir trees at the top of the hill, the delicate wind chimes on my neighbor’s balcony. I didn’t see any seagulls or crab entrails, and I assumed that a raccoon had to be on the deck somewhere. Maybe he was on the other side of the picnic table.
Then I noticed a shape that I didn’t recognize beside the charcoal grill. In my half asleep state, I wondered if a black bear had wandered out of the nearby forest onto the deck.
“What the hell?” I said.
At that point, the bear shape by the charcoal grill stood up and turned into Anthony Peck dressed head to toe in dark clothing. He pointed something in my direction that looked like a short baseball bat, and I instinctively took a step back.
“Don’t move,” he said quietly.
I rarely take orders from other people, but this time I did.
“Any sudden moves, I’ll shoot,” he said. “Understand?”
“Yeah.”
“We’re going inside,” he said. “Turn around slowly.”
I turned to go back inside, and I saw the light spilling from my bedroom onto the living room floor. I paused, and then I felt the cold metal of Peck’s silencer pressing against the skin between my shoulder blades.
“Go,” he said. I stepped back through the doorway. Once we were in the kitchen, he told me to stop, and then I heard the door slide closed behind me.
“Are you alone?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I want to see for myself,” he said. “Move slowly.”
I felt the pressure of Peck’s silencer on my back as we went across the living room. My heart was pounding as we approached the opening for my bedroom. If Sandy was still in the bed, I’d have to make a try for the gun.
The bed had obviously been slept in but was now empty. Sandy had been with me only moments before. I wondered if she’d realized what was happening and was hiding under the bed, or perhaps she’d just gone into the bathroom.
“All right,” he said. “Next room.”
I took three steps to my right and then reached into the darkened doorway of the guest bedroom to flip the light switch. The room was sparsely furnished with a bed, a rocking chair, a standing lamp, and a bedside table. A rack of free weights was over against the far wall.
“Okay,” he said. “Next room.”
I took a few steps and then reached into the doorway to the bathroom. I flipped the light switch on. Empty.
“Back into the living room,” he said. “Slow.”
He followed me towards the living room, and then prodded me in the direction of the sofa.
“Sit down,” he said.
I took a seat on the sofa. He stood by the recliner and reached into one of his coat pockets with his free hand. He tossed a pair of handcuffs onto the sofa.
“Loop them through the arm of the sofa and put them on,” he said.
“Go to hell,” I said.
He adjusted the aim on his pistol slightly and pulled the trigger. I felt a tug on the side of my head as the bullet cut through the hair over my ear. The gun had made a sound like a stick snapping when he’d pulled the trigger.
“I won’t ask again,” he said. “Put them on, and put them on tight, or I shoot you as you sit.”
I turned to the side, slid one arm through the opening under the arm of the sofa, and put the handcuffs on myself.
“Tight,” he said.
I closed the jaws on the handcuffs forcefully. The metal was colder than I thought it would be. I guess he’d been out on the deck for a while.
“Play time’s over,” he said. “Now it’s time to pay the tab.”
“I was never playing,” I said. “I told you to leave me alone and you wouldn’t. I warned you.”
“You did, didn’t you?” Peck said. “Still. Look where you are and look where I am.”
“It’s a setback all right,” I said flatly. “I guess this means that we won’t get to be buddies now.”
“Your stunt at the restaurant cost me dearly,” he said. “The investing syndicate is finding someone new to finish the casino. I’ve been subpoenaed to testify in Oklahoma City. And the organization I built with my own sweat is being run by attorneys now. Did you think I’d let it go?”
“The wheels of justice grind slowly,” I said. “But they do grind.”
“This isn’t about justice,” he said. “It’s about money. It’s always about money.”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“Twenty years ago your father borrowed all the cash I could scrape together so that he could prop up his car dealership, and then he wouldn’t return it when I needed the money back to cover my own debts. When I couldn’t pay, I got this.” He lifted his shirt on one side and showed me a horseshoe-shaped scar on his ribcage. “They held me down and a blacksmith burned me with a red-hot horseshoe. They gave me two days to pay or they said that they’d wrap me in barbed wire and drop me down a dry well.”
“Hope you had your tetanus shot,” I said.
“Always with the jokes,” he said. “Well, my associate Randall and I tried to talk to your father, but he didn’t take my request seriously. We went by to see him at his dealership, but he said that business was bad and he just didn’t have any cash on hand. All he had were cars. He told me that he could sign all the car deeds over to me, the house deed, all of that over to me, but that wouldn’t have helped me. It would have taken too long.”
“You threatened him.”
“That’s right. And the next day we went to your house to talk to him again, to see if there was some way he could hold an auction or take out a
bank loan using the cars as collateral, but he said it would take a week or more to do something like that. I tried to explain that I didn’t have that kind of time.”
“That’s your excuse for what you did?”
“I told Randall to get his gun from the car. Sometimes that’s enough to make someone think creatively. They realize that the time for excuses is over and suddenly they remember they actually do have the money. In this case it had the effect of sending your parents over the edge. Your mother thought I was going to kill your whole family and started begging me to spare your life. When Randall went outside, your father grabbed her hand and they ran upstairs to get a gun.”
I closed my eyes and leaned back against the sofa.
“When Randall came back into the house, I told him that your parents had gone upstairs to arm themselves, and he followed them. He fancied himself a gunslinger, you see. Holster strapped to his leg and all that. I heard screaming and shouting upstairs, and then gunshots.”
“You bastard,” I said.
“I just wanted what was mine,” he said. “I wanted to scare them, not kill them. What good would it have done me to murder them? They had my money.”
“You evil son of a bitch.”
“Your father called the play when he went for the gun,” Peck said. “If he’d given me my money back, or kept his cool, it wouldn’t have been a problem.”
“You called the play when you told Burton to get his gun,” I said.
“I never knew what happened to Randall when he disappeared from the driveway,” Peck said. “I wondered if he had tangled with you or your brother, but I heard the gunfire coming from the woods and decided that my best course was to leave and let him fend for himself. I guess you were better at killing than he was, which says something about you. Not many twelve years olds are stone cold killers.”
“He was going to beat me to death with a shovel,” I said. “I didn’t have a lot of choice.”
“Really?” Peck said. “I understand that you emptied a forty-five into him. Seems like a shot or two would have been enough.”
“He seemed like he needed it,” I said “In for a penny, in for a pound.”
“You really are a nitwit,” he said. “I can’t fathom how you managed to make so much trouble for me.”
“Did your lender put a barbed wire jockstrap on you and drop you down the well when you couldn’t pay?”
“I didn’t give him the chance,” he said. “My lender had me backed into a corner, so I learned how to fight dirty. I have you to thank for that education, since you took your father’s gun that day and used it to shoot Randall. If you’d left the gun where it belonged, your father would likely have killed us both.”
“That would have been a special day,” I said. “To be sure.”
“You’re really something,” he said. “One small move of my trigger finger and I could spray your head all over that wall. Yet you still keep going with the disrespect and attitude.”
“What difference does it make?” I said. “You want me to grovel before you pull the trigger? I won’t do it.”
There was a clattering noise on the deck. Then I heard the squawking that often accompanies fights between seagulls when a crab dinner is at stake.
Concern registered on Peck’s face. “What the hell is that noise?” he asked.
I shrugged. I looked through the sliding glass door and saw the faint silhouette of a large raccoon moving on the deck railing. The raccoon paused, leaned forward, and then dropped onto the deck behind the picnic table. The thump of the raccoon landing on the deck was accompanied by the raucous explosion of noise produced by enraged seagulls.
Peck walked over to the sliding glass door. He glanced back at me before opening the door to see what was going on outside. When he slid the door open, Sandy stepped soundlessly out of our bedroom in her red silk pajamas and aimed her shotgun at Peck’s back.
Peck slid the door closed. He must have seen Sandy’s reflection in the glass, because he began to turn around quite fast. Sandy cut down on him with the shotgun, blowing him through the sliding glass door and obliterating the door in the process. Peck landed on his back in a hail of broken glass. I watched him grab his pistol off of the deck and start to sit upright. Sandy stepped forward and chambered another round. I heard Sandy yell at Peck to drop his weapon, but Peck started pulling against the bench to try to regain his feet. She yelled at him to drop his weapon a second time as he stood upright and began to turn towards her with the gun. Sandy fired again, blowing Peck backwards against the deck railing. Peck rebounded off of the deck railing, gun still in hand, as Sandy stepped forward and fired a third time, sending Peck crashing through the deck railing and falling to the grass below.
After the thunderous explosions of the shotgun, it seemed absurdly still in the house. My ears rang from the gunfire.
Sandy laid her shotgun on the kitchen counter and then came over to the sofa.
“You okay?” she said.
“Never better. You?”
“My ears are going to ring for a week,” she said.
“I can’t hear you,” I said. “My ears are ringing.”
She smiled grimly. “I told you it wasn’t the seagulls,” she said. “You should have waited.” She had her hands on her hips and gave me the stink eye to indicate her disapproval.
“No argument,” I said. “However, the seagulls did come eventually. You have to give me that.”
“What if I hadn’t been here?”
“I’d have died happy, knowing that you love me.”
“I haven’t actually said that I love you yet,” Sandy said.
“Actions speak louder than words,” I said. I gestured with my chin towards the blown-out sliding glass door. Gun smoke hung heavy in the air. “If that wasn’t an act of love, baby, I don’t know what is.”
“I would have done that to Peck even if you weren’t here,” she said. “Just on principle.”
“Come here,” I said. She sat down beside me and put her head on my shoulder. Is it possible for a moment to feel perfect? Yes. I think that it actually is.
“Tell me about your hobbies,” I said.
“Did you finally notice the specialness of my whole package?”
“I noticed it a long time ago.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re handcuffed to the sofa and want me to free you from captivity.”
“It hurts me when you’re so suspicious of my motives,” I said.
“Right. If your hands weren’t chained to the sofa, you’d probably be trying something lewd right now.”
“If I lay on my back, we can try something lewd anyway,” I said. “Handcuffs or no handcuffs.”
She crossed her arms over her chest and eyed me with mock disapproval. “You’re a randy one, aren’t you?” she said.
“Under the circumstances, it would be a crime if I wasn’t,” I said.
“I know what you mean. When Peck handcuffed you to the sofa and fired a round past your head, I’m going to have to admit, I was pretty aroused. Shocked, yes. But aroused at the same time.”
“What? Wait. Are you still mad at me for teasing you about your brass knuckles and riot gun?”
“Now that I think about it,” she said. “I guess this is as good a time to start a family as any. Just stretch out on the sofa and I’ll unleash the bustle.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Who said anything about starting a family?”
“So are you saying that we don’t have a future together?”
“No. That’s not what I meant at all,” I said. “I just mean that kids are a huge responsibility and we need to think about it.”
“You’re so gullible,” she said. “That’s one of the things I like about you.”
She got up from the sofa, and I watched her walk across the living room towards the bedroom door. “I’m sure that some of the neighbors called 911. Guess I better get dressed before the police get here. I don’t want them to think we had an
orgy that got out of hand.”
“Could you help me get out of these handcuffs?” I said.
She looked over her shoulder. “Sure,” she said. “Do you have a hacksaw or bolt cutters?”
“No.”
“Then I guess I’m going to have to go outside and search Peck for the keys. What’s left of him, anyway.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“It’s all part of the service,” she said. “You’re the genetic lottery winner. I’m powerless to resist.”
“You’re never going to let me forget that conversation, are you?”
“Not in this lifetime, sweetie.” She gave me the dazzling smile, batted her eyelashes at me, and blew me a kiss.
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Dave Kearns
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