A Blind Eye (21 page)

T
eresa Fulbrook ran her fingers through her hair as she used the blow-dryer. Her platinum spikes had given way to soft curls of a deep black that, as best she could recall, approximated the natural color of her hair. She smoothed the hair, pulled a pair of scissors from the kitchen drawer, and, using her reflection in the kitchen window, snipped a few minor adjustments. She patted her head in several places and then returned the scissors to the drawer.

Tommie de Groot spun the open cylinder of the Colt revolver. “Kill two birds with one stone,” he was saying. “Get these busybodies off your back, and get rid of the only two people seen me shoot that professor guy. Pretty neat if you ask me.”

Teresa opened her mouth to speak, but a movement in her peripheral vision held the words captive in her throat. She walked quickly to the window.

“Gordie’s home,” she said.

Tommie stopped fiddling with the revolver and stashed the gun in his bag.

He walked to her side. “Thought he was working tonight.”

“Maybe he’s sick,” she said. “He’s been under the weather lately.”

They stood hip to hip and watched the white Ford pickup truck roll to a stop thirty feet away. Gordie got out, heading for the side door in a crablike shuffle.

Gordon Fulbrook was fifty-six, eleven years her senior. Bald in front except for a wiry black circle that clung stubbornly to the front of his scalp. An awkward man and a lifetime bachelor, he’d succumbed easily to her tender ministrations. At the time, she’d never met Mama May and assumed that Gordie owned the farm, a misconception her prospective husband never bothered to correct. By the time Mama May returned from wintering in Florida, they’d been married for a month and a half. The fountain of carnal delights in which Gordie had been bathing dried up in a hurry when his new bride learned that all six thousand acres belonged to his shovel-faced mother, with whom she shared a mutual hatred far beyond the scope of their actual relationship.

Unlike his mother, he was small. “Small all over!” Teresa used to shout at him in moments of rage. Five foot six, same as her. Maybe a hundred fifty pounds dripping wet. Lost a couple more pounds every year.

He burst through the kitchen door. Stopped dead in his tracks.

“You done your hair.”

“Yeah.”

“I never liked that other shit anyway. Kinda thing didn’t look right on a family woman your age.”

“So you said.”

“Where’s the girls?”

“At your mama’s.”

He turned his head. Took in Tommie standing next to the two bags on the kitchen table. “Goin’ somewhere?”

“Taking Tommie to the Chicago airport.”

“That so?”

“He got a good deal on a midnight flight.”

“Good deal, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“That how come there’s no money in the bank? He got such a good deal.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I decided to go out to lunch with Perry and the boys. Didn’t have enough for lunch and the cake I promised the girls, so I stopped by the ATM for a little cash. Machine wouldn’t give me a damn thing.” He looked at the bags again. “I go inside, they tell me you closed out both accounts.”

“I made you lunch.”

He crossed the floor. “Where’s the money?” he demanded. “Twelve hundred from the checking account. Eight thousand four hundred from savings.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He looked over at Tommie. “You and your pinhead brother here think you’re gonna walk out of here with—”

She slapped him in the face. Hard. Sending him staggering backward. He touched his cheek and then folded both hands into fists. Whatever he was planning next was stopped by the push of cold steel behind his ear.

“Go ahead,” Tommie breathed. “Do somethin’ stupid.” He grabbed Gordie by the collar and forced his face down onto the kitchen counter. He looked to Teresa for encouragement but found only veiled caution in her eyes.

Face pressed against the counter, Gordie began to prattle. “Jesus, Teresa…come on now…make him put that gun away. Somebody could get hurt here.”

“Shut up,” she said.

“The money’s not a problem. If you need the money—”

“You remember Doug?” she asked.

“Doug?” Gordie stammered. “I don’t know any—”

“In Omaha?” Tommie asked.

“That’s the one,” she said.

Gordie started to blubber again. Tommie dug the barrel in harder behind his ear.

“Nobody knows nothin’ about that one but us,” she said. “This one gotta be just like that. Nice and clean.”

Tommie nodded his understanding. He put more pressure on the back of Gordie’s neck. “Don’t you move, you son of a bitch. I’ll blow your brains all over the damn wall, don’t you think I won’t.”

Teresa walked quickly to the refrigerator; she got up on tiptoe to reach into the cabinet above. Came out with a white plastic bag. Meijer’s Markets. Brought it to her mouth and blew inside, checking that it was airtight, then pulled the duct tape from her bag and walked over to the counter, where Gordie was still mumbling. “Ain’t no need for any of this, Reecee,” he was saying. “You want the money, it’s yours. Ain’t no need to go and do something—”

With one hand, Tommie grabbed Gordie by the back of the hair and jerked him upright. He used the other to stuff the revolver into his own back pocket before looping his arms around Gordie, pinning the smaller man’s arms against his sides.

When Teresa slipped the Meijer’s bag over his head, Gordie went wild, thrashing so violently he sent both Tommie and himself crashing to the floor, where they rolled about in a frenzy of straining limbs until Tommie finally got his legs around Gordie and rolled him chest-up. Teresa dropped quickly, landing on Gordie’s sternum with her knees, driving the air from his lungs with a whoosh. As he fought for breath, she ripped off a piece of tape and wound it tight along the lower edge of the bag, sealing the plastic around his throat. And then another. Then a third. Two deep breaths and he was out of air. The white plastic was plastered against his face now. Drawn into his nose and mouth cavities by his desperate attempts to breathe, the plastic welded itself to the contours of his face, making it possible to watch his final moments of bug-eyed agony through the thin plastic veneer.

Another futile breath, and his nervous system went on automatic pilot. Flopping across the floor like a fish on a riverbank, Tommie welded to his back, Teresa riding his heaving chest like a bronc rider, until finally he stiffened and, with a sound not unlike a rueful sigh, suddenly lay still. Above their labored breathing, the refrigerator clicked on, scaring the hell out of both of them. Took a minute before anybody breathed.

Tommie unlocked his ankles and dropped his feet to the floor. She looked down into Gordie’s purple, contorted face. He’d vomited all over the inside of the bag.

“Might have been better if you’d just ate that lunch I packed,” she said.

“What do you mean it’s not enough?”

“He says it’s too tenuous. Thinks we need to see the woman for ourselves before he starts sending agents our way.”

Corso set the phone on the nightstand. He checked the clock. Nine minutes after eight. It had taken an hour and a half to get themselves patched through to Special Agent Molina’s pager. He’d called back immediately. He’d been in Nyack, New York, attending a retirement dinner with his wife and, thus interrupted, had been somewhat less than enthused by Corso’s information. “Nothing I can do with that,” he’d said. “Not even the same name. It’s too much of a stretch. Plane flights coming out of my budget, you’re going to have to do better than that.” When Corso began to protest, Molina interrupted him. “I’m not careful, I end up with a credibility problem, like some people who shall remain nameless.” Nothing much Corso could say to that, so he mumbled an apology and broke the connection.

Corso breathed a sigh. He looked over at Dougherty. “So we try to get a peek at whoever shows up in the park tonight.”

“Be best if we got there first,” Dougherty said.

Corso retrieved his jeans from the floor and buckled them around his waist.

“No contact,” he said. “We’re just going to look.”

“Absolutely.”

“Dress warm. We’re going to be out there for a while.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Me neither.”

T
he sky was a blanket of gray. The air fifteen degrees warmer than the night before. The change in temperature must have been what sent the fog rolling in from Lake Huron, forming a moving carpet above the river and wrapping the town in gauze. Beneath the muted glow of the streetlights, Main Street, Midland, Michigan, was little more than a series of glowing pools, strung along the river like pearls, winding south with the fog and the water for as far as the eye could penetrate.

The well-tended shrubs and bushes of Emerson Park stood tentative and unsure of themselves, like half-finished sketches, as Corso and Dougherty moved slowly down the park’s long central path, their heads swiveling, their eyes searching for patterns among surrounding greenery.

“Feels like one of those English horror flicks,” Dougherty whispered.

“Yeah…except I’m way more scared than that,” Corso said.

She jerked hard on his elbow. “Don’t say that, Corso. I start hearing a guy with a death wish saying he’s scared, it makes me nervous.”

He stopped. Looked hard into her eyes. “I’ll walk you back to the room.”

She shook her head. “Anyplace you’re going, I’m going.”

He knew better than to argue. Instead he took her by the hand and pulled her off the path, angling away from the lights out into the semidarkness of the lawn, and then finally into the deep gloom among the shrubs that separated the family picnic area from the river. They duckwalked their way among the twisted roots until they had a clear view of the path, then squatted in the darkness, surveying the concrete walkway running along the edge of the water.

Their hideaway was at the high point of the path. To the right, they could see for forty yards. The path was deserted. To the left, for twice that distance, nobody was in sight. “We wait,” Corso whispered. Dougherty pulled her cape beneath her and sat down on it.

Tommie de Groot lowered the binoculars. Two hundred yards across the foggy park, the pair of outlines beneath the bushes sat invisible to the naked eye. If he hadn’t watched them creep into place, even with his deer-hunting binoculars he might never have found them in the gloom. He closed one eye, as if aiming. “I had my rifle, I’d put one right through her into him.”

“We need ’em alive, remember?” Teresa whispered. “Else we’ll never know what’s behind us.” She leaned in and whispered in his ear. “You don’t know what’s coming for you, you don’t know what to do next. How deep to dig in. How far to run.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “I been running all my life,” she whispered. “Running away from people and the things they done to me. Running away from the things they made me do. It’s all the same. You just take out the garbage and move on.”

When Corso reached out and squeezed her arm, Dougherty moved nothing but her eyes. To the south, a solitary figure emerged from the haze, walking fast like she was out for some exercise. As she passed under the wooden stanchion that marked the park’s boundary, she slowed her pace, as if impeded by the slight incline.

Corso bent until his chest was scraping the damp ground, peering out from under the branches at the approaching woman, whose loose-fitting jacket and raised hood made it difficult to see her features.

As she moved along, she gazed out at the river, leaving Corso to peer at the side of her hood as she walked closer and closer to their hiding place. Twenty feet from where they crouched, she turned and began to walk back the other way. Kept going until she disappeared into the fog again. They waited in the darkness. The river gurgled twice, the blatt of a truck rolled in from the road, and then all was silent.

Corso started to rise. Her hand on his arm held him down. The stroller was back. Her dark silhouette displaced the silvery air. She came their way again, still gazing at the ruffled black water as she ambled back up the incline. She stopped and leaned out over the rail. Checked her watch and looked upriver. Corso checked his. Five after ten.

The sound of voices split the air. Something about a doctor’s appointment on Tuesday. When the woman turned toward the sound, Corso got a brief glance at the side of her head. Whatever color her hair was, it wasn’t white. Either the caller had been mistaken, or this wasn’t her. A cold wave of disappointment rushed through his body.

An elderly couple gradually emerged from the fog, chatting as they walked along at a brisk pace. The woman at the rail turned her back on them as they passed.

“Evening,” said the older woman as she walked by. No answer. They walked a dozen paces before she leaned close and whispered something in the man’s ear. As they disappeared around the bend, the man looked questioningly back over his shoulder at the solitary figure standing at the river’s edge.

The odors of stale sweat and nicotine came to Corso’s nostrils in the moment before he heard Dougherty whimper and felt her shift her weight on the ground. He saw the gun first, pressed against her temple, and the hand across her mouth, the long fingers seeming to wind completely around her head. The face took him a minute. Wasn’t until he heard “Don’t you fucking move” that he recognized the shaven and shorn version of Tommie de Groot. “Get out,” de Groot told him. “Get out from under here right now.”

When Corso didn’t move, de Groot cocked the hammer. Dougherty’s eyes got to be the size of saucers. “I’m going,” Corso said.

He crawled out onto the strip of grass separating the path from the shrubbery. She had her hood down now. Her hair wasn’t blond. Wasn’t spiked. But it was her all right. Her small exotic features had aged gracefully. Mrs. Ethnic Housewife, Anyplace, USA. Only the shark in her eyes and the gun in her hand said otherwise.

“Over there,” she said. “Lean against the rail.”

“Move it,” Tommie growled from behind.

Corso felt the icy touch of fear running up and down his spine like steel ball bearings. He had no doubts. The only way they were coming out of this was dead. They had nothing to lose.

He put his hands on the icy rail, just as Dougherty was slammed in next to him. Her mouth hung open. Her eyes were beginning to fill. Corso heard a ripping sound and looked back over his shoulder. Tommie de Groot stood a pace back, his revolver aimed at Corso’s head. Teresa Fulbrook had her hands around a roll of duct tape and was about to tear a five-foot section with her teeth.

Corso looked over at Dougherty. She read the terror and desperation in his eyes.

“No,” Corso said. “We can’t let them take us.”

Before she could process the information, Corso had thrust himself off the rail and was rushing toward the barrel of the unwavering gun.

“No,” Teresa Fulbrook screamed, dropping the tape and reaching for her gun. She’d only moved a few feet when Tommie shot Corso about a foot above the left knee. The sound of the report was swallowed whole by the fog. Corso went down in a pile of arms and legs. When Teresa snapped her head around, all she saw was the back of a cape fluttering in the breeze as Meg Dougherty vaulted the rail and splashed into the dark river below.

And then it was silent. Nothing but the cold and the darkness and the pressure in her ears as the current bumped her along the bottom, where her hands could find no purchase among the slimy rocks, where she struggled to get her feet beneath her, to push, to kick, anything to get her head above the rushing water, out of the cold blackness and into the light, to stop the scream that was building in her ears and the red-hot coals that filled her lungs as she rolled along the river bottom, banging a knee and then her head as she somersaulted through the inky water, out of control…out of air…. In her final throes, she began to flail…felt a hand break water and splash…felt the cold night air on her wet skin…felt…

She used her teeth to rip off another yard of duct tape. Used it to bring Corso’s elbows together behind his back, then rolled him over and checked the tape covering his eyes and mouth again. Didn’t want him to bleed to death, so she wound two more strips tight around the hole in his leg. The sounds of boots brought her eyes up.

Tommie was out of breath. He rested his hands on his knees and worked some oxygen through his lungs before he spoke. “She never come up. I followed her all the way till I heard people. Never seen a sign of her at all.”

“Just another tourist fell in the river and drowned. Happens all the time,” she said, getting to her feet. She kicked the unconscious Corso in the ribs. “Tape or no tape, this one’s gonna be trouble once he wakes up.” She looked around. “We’ll drag him in the bushes. You stay with him. I’ll get the car.”

…a hand on her wrist, pulling, slipping off, losing its grip, then another set of fingers entwined in her hair, breaking her momentum, spinning her in the water until her knees scraped across the top of a rock and she could use the last of her strength to lever herself upward, gasping, spitting water, her breath coming in convulsions as the hands dragged her from the current until only her feet remained in the water and she began to gag and choke on the night air as the voices swirled about her.

“You go call for an ambulance,” a woman’s voice said. “I’ll stay with her until you get back.” She listened to the sound of shoes crunching across the gravel riverbank and felt the steadying hand on her back. “Help is on the way, honey,” the voice said. “You just relax and we’ll get you to the hospital. Everything’s going to be just fine.”

Corso lay facedown on the floor of the car. Back-seat, with the transmission hump squeezing the air from his lungs with every bump. Tommie de Groot had his feet resting in the middle of Corso’s back. “This is done,” he asked, “where we gonna go?”

“One step at a time,” she said from behind the wheel. “Don’t want to get ahead of yourself here. Don’t want to be thinking too far down the line. Just take things one step at a time. First thing we do is we find out from Mr. Nosey Parker here who he is and what it is he knows about us.”

“You think he’ll tell us?”

She laughed a laugh he’d only heard once before. Back when he was little. Back when she’d described how she’d gotten the nun to tell her where the money was hidden. The sound sent a shiver running down Tommie’s spine.

“Oh, he’ll tell us all right,” she chuckled. “He most surely will.”

Dougherty ran her tongue across her teeth and then spit on the ground beside her face. After a moment, she pulled one knee under herself and then the other. The woman’s hand on her back pressed harder now. “You just stay still till the ambulance gets here, honey,” the woman cooed. “Everything’s gonna be all right.”

Dougherty lurched to her feet, reeling and nearly going down on the rough stones. She swayed as she looked around. The woman was a blur—sixty-some-thing, short and solid, wearing something bright blue. Some kind of hat on her head. “Oh, honey,” she pleaded as Dougherty used the metal handrail to pull herself up the four steps to the walkway. “Come on now, honey. Jack’s at the phone by now….”

Dougherty lost whatever the woman said next in the rasping and rattling of her own breath as she staggered north along the river. She tried to pick it up, to move from a walk to a jog to a run, but instead tripped herself and fell hard on the asphalt.

Four minutes and two falls later, she was back at the apex of the trail. Knees bleeding, breathing like a locomotive, she looked over into the gloom beneath the oversized bushes and then walked over to the spot where she’d gone over the rail. Nothing. Not a sound. She checked the river. The path. All the way till it disappeared into the fog. No blood, no nothing. Not a sign of Corso.

Trotting now, she skirted the bushes to the left and, once in the open, began to run across the grass toward the lights on Main Street. The picture brought her heart to her throat. Spinning tires had clawed a pair of seeping ruts into the grass. Her eyes followed the tracks across the ravaged lawn, out through the gate, to the street beyond. “She’s got him,” she said out loud, and then began to sprint. “Oh, Jesus, she’s got him.”