barrel. It was the kind of range that took shooting ability out of the equation. Even if the whiskey bottle on the railing had started out full, he wasn’t going to be able to miss if he pulled the trigger.
I stayed as still as I could. My mouth had dried out as quickly and completely as desert sand after a cloudburst, and I could feel my heartbeat picking up, the blood beginning to pound in my temples and wrists, my leg muscles trembling the way they do after a long run.
“Listen,” I began, but he cut me off immediately.
“I could kill you,” he said. “Could have as soon as you came around the corner.”
I didn’t try to talk again. I’ve had guns pulled on me before, and I’ve even talked a few men into lowering them in the past, but this didn’t feel like a situation where that was an option. There was no quality of indecision to Jefferson, and also none of the boiling emotion you usually get when someone pulls a weapon. He spoke and sat like an actor trying to finish a scene alone—everyone else might have left, turned the lights off onstage, even, but he knew his role, and he was damn sure going to finish it.
“Wouldn’t do any good to kill you, though, would it?” he said. “You didn’t come alone.”
Now I felt like I
“At least he has a reason,” he said. “You got nothing but greed.”
The gun moved again, a twirling flash, and in the darkness I wasn’t sure what he was doing with it, only that it was moving, and instinct forced me into motion. As I heard the clicking sound of the hammer being pulled back, I made a stumbling, awkward lunge to the right that would have accomplished absolutely nothing had Alex Jefferson’s son fired at me instead of jamming the barrel of the gun into his own mouth and pulling the trigger.
The bullet exploded out of the gun with a sound loud enough to make everything else in the world temporarily disappear, and then it punched through the back of Matthew Jefferson’s skull and scattered his brains into the pond. His body rocked back, following the path of the bullet, but then his shoulders caught on the railing and threw him forward. He slumped off the bench and fell, landing facedown at my feet, a pulsing crater where the back of his head belonged.
I think I tried to shout, and maybe I even succeeded. If I did, though, I didn’t know it. All I could hear was the gunshot, still echoing through my head, even louder now. I looked down at Jefferson’s son, blood pumping out of what was left of his skull, and then I was scrambling backward, climbing over the gazebo railing without taking my eyes off the body. I fell over the railing and landed awkwardly in the bushes below, fought my way out of them, and staggered up the hill. When I reached the barn I fell on my ass, sat with my back against the weathered boards, and stared at the gazebo.
He had not shot me. The gun had been pointed at me, held just a few feet away, and then it had been fired. He had not shot me, though. I had not been shot.
“You didn’t get shot,” I said aloud. “You did not get shot.” I’d hoped the sound of my voice would calm me, but instead it made the shaking start. It worked its way through my hands and into the rest of my body, and I forced myself to get back to my feet and walked through the gardens to the stone path. I stood there, taking deep breaths, until the shaking stopped, and then I reached into my pocket and took my cell phone out. The first time I tried to open it, my hands weren’t steady enough, and I dropped it into the grass. The second time, I managed to punch in the three numbers I needed.
I told them what I needed to tell them. The dispatcher wanted to keep me on the line until the police got there, but I hung up. I walked slowly back up to the gazebo, feeling a need to see the body again—maybe to reassure myself that it wasn’t mine.
The blood had spread, pooling around the body. The gun had tumbled from his hand when he fell and lay beside him. Even outdoors, with a steady breeze blowing, the smell of the blood was powerful.
“You’re a millionaire,” I said to the corpse. “That’s what I came to tell you. I don’t know who the hell you thought I was, but that’s what I came to tell you.”
It got hard to look at him then, and I turned away and refocused on the pond that had swallowed a piece of his skull. The moonlight reflected on the whiskey bottle that remained where the dead man had sat, and I saw the bottle was resting on a piece of paper, pinning it to the railing. I stepped closer and saw it was that apple-shaped stationery upon which Kara Ross had written my note.
6
The sheriff’s department sent the first car, driven by a deputy who looked about fourteen. He shuffled around in the parking lot nervously, talking into his radio, and when I called out to him he jumped like I’d fired a shot into his car.
“There’s a body down there,” I said, walking up out of the shadows and into the parking lot. “And a lot of blood. You processed any death scenes before?”
He shook his head and took a hesitant step backward. The damn kid was afraid of me.
“Is there anybody else on the way?”
A swallow and a nod, and then, “Yessir. State police.”
“You want to just wait on them?” I said, my voice gentle.
“Sure. Why don’t we?” He realized then how this might look to the state cops, him standing up here with me in the parking lot, having not even seen the body, and said, “Well, maybe I should . . . you know, secure the area.”
I nodded slowly. “Okay. Follow me.”
We were halfway down the path to the gazebo, the kid stumbling in the dark, when he was saved by the sound of another car pulling into the gravel lot. We both turned, and I saw that it was an unmarked car. A Taurus, just like Joe drove.
“State police?”
“Yeah.” The kid sounded relieved. He started back up to the parking lot. A cop in street clothes climbed out of the unmarked car and walked down the slope. He met us at the corner of the orchard barn, in the glow from one of the few outdoor lights.
“We got a suicide down there,” the sheriff’s deputy said, his chest filling a bit, trying to impress the varsity.
“Uh-huh,” the plainclothes guy said. “Kinda figured that, you know, when dispatch told me to come take a look at a suicide.”
The kid’s chest deflated.
“And who’re you?” the new cop asked me. He was an unremarkable man in every way—average in height and build, not handsome or ugly, just one of a thousand guys you’d pass on the street and hardly spare a glance.
“Name’s Lincoln Perry. I called it in.”
“Found the guy?”
“Saw him do it.”
“Ah.” He nodded and slipped a small tape recorder out of his pocket. “Lincoln Perry. Good name. I’m Roger Brewer, state police.”
He turned the recorder on and spoke into it, giving his name and the date and time, then stating our location and what he’d been told by dispatch and by me. That settled, he held the recorder against his leg and nodded at me.
“Lead the way.”
They followed me around the side of the barn, and when we got into the darkness, the state cop produced a
