Page 51 of The Murder Inn

THE BIG GUY closest to me gripped his neck and collar like he was choking on a piece of food. His face flushed red, the color spreading downward fast. I had just enough time to lunge forward and grab him as he collapsed sideways out of the bench seat. As I lowered him to the ground, I looked up and saw the other man beside him slump face-first into his plate of food, out cold.

Café diners were out of their seats all around me, chairs scraping, gasps of horror and surprise. As panic thrummed through me, I heard the innocent citizens of Gloucester offering up a gaggle of perfectly ordinary explanations for something I knew had come straight from the realms of impossibility.

“Oh God, he’s choking!”

“He’s having a heart attack. Someone call 911!”

“Does anyone know CPR?”

Others were making for the doors, their plates forgotten.

“OK, honey, let’s go. Grab your toys. Let’s give those guys some space.”

“He’s fine. He’s fine. He’s just playing a game. Grab your blankie. Let’s go.”

The man in my arms was convulsing and foaming at the mouth as I dragged him into the aisle and rolled him onto his side. Helplessly, I thumped his back, tried to clear some of the foam from his airway with my fingers. Even from my vantage point, crouched over the huge construction worker, I could feel the vicious, electric tension between Vinny and Driver as the two men were surrounded by helpful strangers.

Vinny backed his wheelchair into the next aisle. Driver exited the booth and crouched beside me.

“Get the other guy,” I told Driver. “Check if he’s still breathing.”

Driver didn’t move. He was so close I could feel his breath on the rim of my ear.

“What are you doing? Get help!” I yelled at him.

“I’m gonna kill everyone in your house,” Driver said.

He patted my back, two hard thumps, and rose to his feet. As far as the people around us could tell, he probably looked like he was telling me he was going to go flag down a car, the pats a reassuring gesture. But I knew what they were. They were loaded with the certainty of a man who’s as good as his word.

Norman Driver was going to kill everyone I cared about.

I had his personal guarantee.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

SHAUNA NOTICED THE car following hers as she headed out of a gas station in Ipswich, taking Route 133 back toward Gloucester. She’d spent the rest of the day before lying low, thinking and plotting, conserving her energy for what lay ahead. She imagined Henry had been trying to contact her, but she kept her phone off so that her mind was clear and her location couldn’t be tracked. Then she’d spent the night in the car near Daniel Boone Park, sleepless, watching the still, flat water through the windshield and thinking about Norman Driver and his crew.

The man tailing her was young. He was close enough that Shauna could make him out in the rearview mirror; his short, scrubby beard and sunglasses. He held the steering wheel of his truck with one hand and dialed a cell phone over and over with the other, cursing and shaking his head when whoever he was calling didn’t answer. When Shauna could see the spire of City Hall in Gloucester, the young man fell back a little, somehalf-formed instinct reminding him perhaps that the best kind of tail didn’t involve the threat of running up the back of the mark if she stopped suddenly at a traffic light.

Shauna wondered how a man who looked to be in his twenties came to be working for someone as criminally advanced as Norman Driver. Did he see himself reaching “boss” status when he got to Driver’s age, with a crew of underlings dealing drugs or running women or hitting banks or whatever? Or was working for Driver just a temporary gig, the same kind of desperate grab for good money at minimal effort that drove college girls to moonlight as exotic dancers? As Shauna led the young man into Dogtown Commons, the open view of the marshlands yielded to thick winter woods. She took a dirt road past a collapsed farmhouse and pulled over, watching as the young man’s truck stopped a hundred or more yards back.

Shauna reached down and cranked the heater up. Warm air gushed over her, and soon the windshield was beginning to fog against the icy morning. The vehicle had a good heating system, just one of many features she knew cops valued in their vehicles, a desire born of long nights on stakeout. It also had good suspension, sound gas mileage, and plenty of cup holders—all requirements Mark had demanded of their vehicles over the years. Shauna gripped the wheel and watched the mirror, looking for her follower, wondering if the receiver of his frantic calls had finally picked up yet.

She unclipped her seat belt.

It was three full minutes later that she heard the faint crunch of his boots on the fallen leaves, perhaps twenty yards behind. Then she heard the shunt of his pistol action only a couple of yards beyond the driver side door.

Shauna heard the gunshots puncture the side of the car and smiled. He’d shot twice into the door, it sounded like, before even opening it. Seemed like he was indeed an ambitious baby-criminal hoping to rise through the ranks. Shauna pushed the trunk lid open and stepped out quietly, taking the shotgun with her. She stood behind the boy and, while he tore open the driver’s side door of the car, she waited for him to put it all together: the empty driver’s seat, the flopped-down panel in the middle back seat leading through to the trunk. The path through which Shauna had made her escape. Another cop feature. Bill would have attended enough road accidents in his career to know how useful an escape route through the trunk could be. The young man with the gun turned around just as Shauna was trying to decide if she should say something powerful, a movie villain’s one-liner, like “See you in hell.” Something that would make it all clear for him: how ignorant, selfish, and wasteful he had been to arrive where he was now at the end of his life, alone with her in these woods.

In the end, she said nothing. The boy opened his mouth in shock, taking in the sight of the gun in her hands, and Shauna could see he knew very well how stupid he had been.

She shot him in the chest.

Desert Outside Bagram, Afghanistan, 2010

Nick allowed himself to be pulled and shoved away from Karli Breecher. Some part of his mind couldn’t comprehend that Rick Master had just shot her, that she lay writhing on the ground outside the goat farmer’s house while Master tended to thewound he’d just created. Nick was walking in a nightmare, begging himself to wake up, his jaw clenched and step locked as Roger Dorrich pushed him back up the hill. They stood side by side, spraying their own truck with gunfire from the guns they found in the house, and Nick felt blinded by the flashes in the dark. Before he could catch up with his own mind, try to decipher what was happening and what would happen next, he was back at the house, standing alongside Dorrich, as Master applied field dressings to Breecher’s stomach.

“You shot her,” Nick panted, his voice sounding completely foreign to him. Numb. “I… I don’t understand what’s happening. What are you—”

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