“You saw the name.”
“Name don’t mean shit to me.”
“Here’s all you need to know about me—I came here with an offer from Dominic. You’ve heard it. You going to take it?”
All I wanted now was out. The recorder was running, I had this whole conversation, and I could set up the meeting with Alexandra. There’d be plenty more than Alexandra there, more wires and more cops and a pair of handcuffs ready to fit around Cash Neloms’s wrists. I was close now; I just needed to get it done and get the hell out. I just needed to make it through the door.
“Sure,” Cash said after a pause. “I’ll take it, man.”
He was so casual when he said it, his face so utterly relaxed, that if I hadn’t been reminding myself to be ready to move if he looked at Darius again I would’ve died immediately. As it was, I’d been ready for the look, and when he turned to Darius I was already rising, made it out of my chair before Darius lifted the gun.
I reached under my jacket for the Beretta, and I ran straight for Cash and the swinging door to the garage beyond. I was hoping to get behind him or at least close enough to him that Darius wouldn’t fire, but that was a hopeless idea; it simply doesn’t take that long to lift a gun and pull the trigger.
Darius fired before I cleared my gun, and the bullet hit me on the right side, hit me like the thrust of a metal stake that had been forged to a glowing red heat. The force of it knocked me forward, and his second shot missed high as I fell into Cash Neloms’s legs.
I didn’t hit him hard, or even intentionally—I was just trying to make it to the door. My weight caught him around the knees, though, and while he didn’t go to the floor he did fall backward into the wall, and for a brief moment we were entangled. He came off the wall with his hands reaching for my throat, and by leaning over me like that he blocked any chance of his uncle finishing me off with another shot. By then I had my gun out, and I twisted as his hands clawed at my neck. I saw nothing but the metal desk and Darius Neloms’s feet and legs beneath it, but that gave me something to shoot at. I fired once, saw a spray of red burst out of the back of his calf and heard him scream, and then I shoved through Cash Neloms’s legs and toward the swinging door that led to the garage. He slammed a punch into the back of my neck and tore at my hand as I went by, and the Beretta came loose and hit the floor. It spun away from me, back toward the desk, but I ignored it and kept scrambling forward. Then I was out of the office and onto the cold concrete floor of the garage. I kicked the swinging door backward as I went, heard it hit something, and then another shot was fired and I felt a second searing pain burn across my thigh.
It was dark in the garage, the doors down and the light off, and I rolled away and hit something that fell all around me, didn’t realize until I touched one of them that I’d knocked over a stack of hubcaps. I pulled myself back with my hands, got my torso into an upright position, legs stretched out in front of me, and then I reached behind my back and removed the Glock from its holster. I was slow getting it out, but when Cash Neloms stepped through the door and into the garage, with a gun in his hand, he turned to the left first, reaching for the light switch, thinking that I was now unarmed.
I lifted the Glock and fired twice.
When he dropped, he went backward into the door and it swung open and his head and shoulders fell into the office, nothing of him left visible in the garage but his legs. They moved for a few seconds, heels scraping on the concrete, trying to get upright, and then they went still and it was quiet.
I sat in the pile of hubcaps with the Glock still pointed at the door and waited for Darius. It was hard to hold the gun up now, and the door seemed to be dancing in front of me, waving and undulating and blending with the shadows. I heard motion and fired again before realizing it had been the front door. Darius had just left the office and gone outside. He’d be coming around from a different direction, entering through a different door. I had no idea which way to look. It was his garage. He knew the layout and I did not and it was becoming hard to sit upright and hard to see.
The Glock dropped to my lap, not a mental decision but a physical one, my body giving out, and I twisted onto my side and reached into my pocket for my cell phone. It took two tries to get it out of my pocket. My fingers were slick with warm wet blood.
I got the phone out and open and then I dialed and spoke into it. I could not remember the address where I was, or even the road. All I could tell them was that I’d been shot and Darius was coming back for me. Several times, I said that I did not know what door he would use. That I would not be ready for him when he came.
The phone slid out of my fingers then and bounced off the concrete floor. I could not make myself reach for it even though it was close. There was blood in my mouth now and a terrible high hum in my ears and I could not reach for the phone or lift the gun.
I never heard the sirens.
44
__________
The paramedics found the recorder and gave it to the police. When they listened to that and heard what Joe had to say, it wasn’t hard to piece together what had happened. That was good, because I wasn’t in any condition to talk.
By the time I got out of surgery, the first media report had leaked, and Alvin “Cash” Neloms was being identified as the alleged killer of Joshua Cantrell. Mike London and John Dunbar were called into the investigation. Quinn Graham drove in from Pennsylvania. The tape was solid, but there was no confession. They needed more. It was Graham who suggested they focus on Ken Merriman, the freshest case and the one that had the best potential for evidence. They found a variety of weapons while searching the properties affiliated with Cash and Darius Neloms, including a handgun and ammunition that were probable matches for Ken’s shooting. They would later be proved conclusive matches.
All my concern over Darius Neloms and his unknown path of reentry into the garage turned out to be unnecessary—he’d tried to leave when he saw his nephew fall dead through the door into the office. Dragged his wounded leg along with him and went out and got into his Cadillac and drove away. About two minutes and ten blocks away, he passed out from pain and blood loss and drove up onto the sidewalk and into a telephone pole. They arrested him when he got out of surgery.
By the time the paramedics found me, I was unconscious and in shock. They didn’t get me stabilized until I was at MetroHealth’s trauma center, the same hospital that had saved Joe. In fact, I had the same surgeon, a Dr. Crandall, who was one of the specialists on gunshot wounds. My surgery was about six hours shorter than Joe’s, though. Something he could hold over my head.
Oddly, the chest wound was the lesser of my troubles. Eight inches from being my end—
The leg wound, which came when Darius fired at me as I fell through the door and into the garage, was much more serious. The bullet did some arterial damage, and the only reason I didn’t bleed out before the EMTs arrived was that I was sitting upright and the wound was on the back of my leg, which offered some level of compression and slowed the bleeding. The crime scene photographs I saw later showed a spray of blood almost six feet from my body that had been released when I leaned onto my side to reach for my phone. If I hadn’t rolled back over, pressing the wound against the concrete floor, I would’ve lost consciousness before I ever got a word out to the 911 operator.
Fall on your ass, save your life. It was a hell of thing to think about.
It turned out there was actually some talk of arresting me, too. I was a civilian, not a cop, and I’d taken a life. We tend to call that murder. The only thing that allowed me to avoid at least preliminary charges was the recording, which supported my story.
I was coherent enough to watch TV on the second day, when I stared through a fog of medication and saw an old booking photo of Cash Neloms fill the screen. He was dead, the anchor explained, but still the focus of several ongoing homicide investigations.
