Slugfest

sounds continued. I thought I saw movement in the reeds, so we crouched down and waited until it passed. Two glowing yellow lights emerged from the reeds and I held my hand over Lucy’s mouth to stifle the scream.

“Raccoon.”

There was a storage shed twenty-five yards behind us, a custom-made version of the expensive prefabs sold at the show. I motioned to Lucy to creep back to the shed and stay hidden until we knew what was going on. And we did that until her cell rang.

“Where the hell are you?”

Lucy handed me the phone. “It’s for you,” she whispered.

It was Stancik. He’d tried my cell, but it had been busy. He was returning Lucy’s call.

“I heard from Emma. She’s hiding somewhere on the Moffitt property. She thinks a man named Mr. Rose killed her father,” he said. “She’s terrified.”

“I can identify with that. Except I think Wrentham is still alive. I can hear him breathing. And I think Mr. Rose is Marty Shepard, the Bambi-no guy.”

“You’re right. We found his wife stranded in a ditch off the Hutchinson Parkway. She was babbling about a red dragon flying through the air that caused her accident. I think she must be drinking that crap they’re selling. Where are you?”

“On the right side of the Great Pond. Wrentham’s on the phone—not with us. I’m not sure where he is except there are frogs there.”

“Where the heck is the Great Pond?”

“Didn’t they give you a map when you entered?”

“Only one guy was at the table; the rest were scrambling around the parking lot. A lot of ticked-off people walking around in the dark, trying to find their cars.”

“Okay, forget the map. It’s the large pond in the center directly opposite the terrace where the band is playing.”

“Stay put, you lunatic.”

“Did he just hang up on you?” Lucy said. I didn’t bother to answer. I handed Lucy her phone and pressed my own to my ear. I still heard breathing. That was good. I tried to think of something positive to say.

“Hang on, Lincoln. There’s a beautiful woman here who wants to go to bed with you.” It was the only thing I could think of to keep his spirits up. The last thing I wanted to do was mention his daughter. For all I knew she was lying on the ground beside him. The beautiful woman remark got us a grunt and I took that as a positive sign.

When we got to the shed, Lucy reached for the doorknob, but I grabbed her hand first. I wanted as much notice as possible if I was walking into a space already occupied by a killer. On my hands and knees, I crept to a side window and half stood to peer in. The shed looked unoccupied. Just then something drifted onto my hair and made me look up.

“Jeez!”

Standing over me with a flaking, rotten tree limb in her hands was Emma Franklin, poised to take a crack at my skull.

Sixty-one

Emma dropped the branch and her hands flew to the sides of her head. She mouthed I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was you over and over again until I took her by the shoulders to quiet her down.

“It’s okay. It’s okay. Keep quiet. Your dad’s going to be fine.”

The three of us scurried inside the shed, took a deep breath, and crossed our fingers for Stancik to find us before Shepard did.

“Are the police bringing a lot of men?” she whispered. It was a child’s question. Presumably they’d alerted the local authorities, but where the heck were they? Where were they when we spoke? I didn’t know, so I didn’t say.

“Why did you leave?” I asked, once she was breathing normally.

She’d gotten another call from “Mr. Rose” just as we entered the Moffitt property. He’d seen her arrive and said he was ready to make the drop-off if she’d meet him on the far side of the Great Pond.

“My dad said we should meet him so that we could reason with him. Explain that the product hasn’t been completely tested yet, and there could be serious problems.” So much for reasoning.

He’d already dispatched Garland and Shepard was expecting Emma to be alone, not accompanied by a man claiming to be the scientist who’d created Bambi-no. Emma said Shepard/Rose was unmoved by Wrentham’s concern for the planet. He said he’d been selling a diluted version for three years and no one had died yet and that was good enough for him.

“He said he could make a fortune in the two or three years it was available before the government pulled it off the market, and after that who cared? Marty Shepard would be living on an island by that time—preferably somewhere in the Caribbean, where they had really good baseball players. Who’s Marty Shepard?” Emma asked.

At that point Shepard had revealed the Louisville Slugger he’d had hidden under his coat and moved in the girl’s direction. Her father stepped in and took the blow, one crack on the side of his head that took him down fast. The girl ran off and hid until she thought it safe to call Stancik. I handed her my phone.

“Talk into the phone, Emma. Your dad will be able to hear you. Whisper. Tell him you’re okay. It’ll help him to hang on until the police arrive.”

Emma, Lucy, and I sat huddled in the shed, Emma cooing into the phone, her estrangement from her father forgotten. In the distance the party noises were growing fainter as revelers either went indoors or left. Someone once said time is too slow for those who wait. Maybe it was a poet. Maybe it was an old rock and roller. In any event, it was too slow for us.

“Think I should turn the flashlight on?” We ran the risk of Shepard seeing us, but how long could we just sit while the life ran out of Lincoln Wrentham? Three votes for yes. We took an inventory of the shed. A tractor and a classic wooden canoe dominated the space.

“Can there be two slower vehicles than these?” Lucy said. “I thought rich people had Jet Skis and cigarette boats.”

“They’re at her other house. It’s not so bad. That’s a top-of-the-line tractor. It costs more than my car and can probably go twenty or twenty-five miles an hour.”

“Is that fast enough to outrun a crazy man?”

“Depends if it’s a crazy man with a gun or a crazy man swinging a baseball bat,” I said.

The problem was, we’d be exposed. And I wasn’t sure the tractor could go at top speed with three people hanging on. The canoe was even slower but we might be able to crouch down and hide in the hull. It was only a mile or so, but either option was preferable to running back to the house in the dark.

We didn’t have time for another vote. The shadows rippled outside the window and we killed the light. I told Lucy and Emma to stand on either side of the double doors and gave them hunks of Anzalone tumbled stone ready to use as weapons. Where was J. C. with her door bar when I needed her? I got on the tractor to see if the keys were there and I could figure out how to start it.

Shepard kicked in the double doors and stood silhouetted in the doorway with the faint light behind him illuminating the bugs and mosquitoes circling him. He was holding a baseball bat.

“You in there, little girl? I don’t want to hurt you. I just want that formula. Your boyfriend said it was on a flash drive. Just toss that sucker out and I’ll go away, I promise.” Right.

He stepped into the shed and Emma, nervous, struck first, but she didn’t make contact. He turned and raised the bat to strike her, and from behind Lucy connected with a sharp blow to the back of his head. She screamed while doing it and then dropped the brick, which wasn’t heavy enough to put him out of commission for long. He was on his knees but getting up, so I turned on the tractor, temporarily blinding him with the lights.

I reached for one of the paddles in the canoe, aimed the front edge of the blade at Shepard’s neck, ran toward him, and pushed hard. He clutched his throat and hit the deck again, falling to his knees. The three of us jumped on the tractor and tore ass out of the shed, running over some part of Shepard’s body in the process.

Halfway to the main house the spotlights turned on us and we were guided back to safety.