All Shots (17 page)

“The little slut took off on me,” Grant whined. “Look
what she did to me first, Calvin. Waited until I was sick and then beat the shit out of me with a two-by-four, fractured my goddamned skull, and ruptured my spleen. Left me alone in the cabin. I was there for three days before I managed to crawl to the road and get out and get to the hospital. She took off with my money and my merchandise and my blue bitch. But I lucked out. She was stupid enough to take my truck, too.”

Mellie looked relieved to understand a piece of what was happening. “The machines come and clean the streets, and I don’t like it.” Almost reluctantly, she added, “Holly said bad words.”

“Her truck was towed?” I asked.

“It was my damn truck,” Grant said. “She stole it.”

I said, “And the city towed it because that side of the street was being cleaned. And she couldn’t reclaim it because it wasn’t hers. So the city sent you a notice that it had been impounded. With the address where the truck was parked.”

Grant had had enough. “Calvin, I’m on private, personal business here.” He was now aiming his weapon as well as his words at the newcomer. “Get out.” He pointed the weapon at Mellie. “And you, lady, I’m telling you, get my stuff, and get it now.”

I can sense the beginning of a fight. When the potential combatants are dogs, I do my best to defuse the situation. Now, I decided to make it explode. But I wanted Mellie out of the way. “Mellie, please go get Strike’s toys right now. And everything else.” As soon as she stepped toward the stairs that began near the front door and ran up to the second floor, before she’d even begun to ascend, I said to Grant, “Look, your buddy Calvin didn’t get a notice from the city of Cambridge about an impounded vehicle. He knew where she was. How? She told him. I hate to tell you, but they must’ve been more than friends. Grant, she didn’t just put you in the hospital and dump you. She made plans to get rid of you and start her life all over with everything you had. Your truck, your merchandise, your blue bitch. And your friend, too. Calvin.”

“Not to mention my name and my credit,” Holly Winter said.

“Who the hell are you?” Calvin demanded.

“Holly Winter,” said Mellie from the staircase. “That’s everyone. Her and her and the girl.”

I wanted Calvin’s attention back on Grant. And Grant’s on Calvin. I wanted their eyes locked, their hackles up, and their hearts filled with rage. “She was shot,” I told Calvin. “She was shot to death with a Smith and Wesson .22/.32 Kit Gun.”

I got my explosion. Too enraged to settle for bullets, Calvin hurled himself at Grant and slammed into him so swiftly and so powerfully that Grant didn’t stand a chance of using his pistol. He might’ve done better with the knife he’d abandoned. But maybe not. What Calvin delivered was a full-body blow that must have knocked the wind out of Grant and that certainly knocked him to the floor. Calvin was on top of him as he crashed, and the weight of the two big men made a tremendous boom and shook the little house so hard that you’d have sworn that it had been hit by an earthquake.

But Sammy was free. With his leash trailing after him, he fled toward—damn it!—the back of the house. Trust a malamute to head for the kitchen. Frozen in terror, Mellie was still on the staircase near the front door. In backing away from the fight, I’d ended up near the couch, the chairs, and the television, which is to say that I had access to the dining and kitchen area at the rear of the house; I could have found Sammy, snatched his leash, and escaped with him out the back door. But what about Mellie? To reach her, I’d need to go in exactly the opposite direction, that is, to the front of the house. If I stepped between the couch and the front window, I’d be near the stairs and the front door; if Mellie didn’t spontaneously join me in fleeing, I could grab her by the arm and haul her outside. Calvin was still on top of Grant, but Grant was kicking hard, and Calvin was beginning to look winded. I couldn’t see Calvin’s revolver, but Grant’s weapon lay on the carpet only five or six inches from his right hand. If shooting started, any of us could be hit in the crossfire. Sammy was still out of my range of vision, but he could come bounding back into the living room any second, and I’d have lost the chance to get him out of danger.

The most likely victim was, however, Holly Winter, who had flattened herself against the wall beneath the staircase, only a few feet from the brawl. She was far better positioned than I was to rouse Mellie from her frozen state and take flight through the front door, but she was, if anything, even more paralyzed than Mellie. Her back was to the wall, and her eyes were dark pools of fear. If she’d kept her head, she could have bent down and seized Grant’s semiautomatic or at least stretched out a foot and slid it out his reach; she could have helped Mellie; or she could simply have bolted out the door. Instead, she directed all her energy toward squeezing herself against the wall. She looked, and probably felt, as if she were perched on a narrow rock shelf high on a mountain, with her back pressed against the illusory comfort of a cliff and with her feet only an inch or two from a thousand-foot drop to death.

My only weapon was my dog-trainer’s voice. “Mellie, go upstairs!” To encourage her, I waved and pointed upward. Mellie looked bewildered, but to my relief, she finally awoke from her trance and began to climb the stairs. Would she have the sense to hide under a bed or take refuge in a closet? I didn’t know, but I simply couldn’t go after her. “Holly!” I said sharply. “Holly, get out! Go! Run!” I gestured to the front door. Holly Winter remained frozen. Desperate, I picked up one of the bright pillows from the drab brown couch. It was a small pillow and heavier than I’d expected. I took careful aim, and, with the skill I’d learned tossing dumbbells in obedience, hurled the pillow and hit her directly in the face. “Get out!” I ordered her. “Go!”

Grant’s fingers inched toward his pistol. Calvin was shouting, “You bastard! You son of a bitch, I’m going to kill you!”

Holly Winter finally left her imaginary rock shelf, descended her mountain of the mind, and bolted through the front door.

Two safe: Mellie and Holly. Two to go: Sammy and me. Feeling my body relax, I was moving toward the kitchen when a patch of bright yellow caught my eye. Veering around, I saw to my horror that Mellie was coming back down the stairs. In her hands was a big yellow gym bag—the bright, eye-catching yellow I’d glimpsed. Tucked under one of her arms was a dog toy, a medium-sized duck that I recognized as a cousin of Pink Piggy’s. Damn! Mellie had been repeatedly told to get the dog toys, and, at the worst possible moment, she’d done what she’d been told.

I heard the gunshot while I was still staring at Mellie. The sound reverberated through the little house, and Mellie’s immediate and terrified screams seemed to match the pitch of the reverberation and to play hideous variations on the theme of violence. Blood was flowing from Calvin’s belly. Grant, struggling to rise, had reclaimed his semiautomatic. From the street, I heard a crash I couldn’t identify, not the metallic bang of one car smashing into another, not sirens, not human voices shrieking for help. Hadn’t Holly had the sense to summon the police? Or to bang on doors? Hadn’t she…?

Grant was upright and aiming the weapon at Mellie. I knew he’d kill her. And Calvin, of course. And me. And Sammy? I knew very little about semiautomatic weapons. The principal fact that had stuck in my brain was that a semiauto held more rounds than a revolver. If Grant started shooting, he might not stop, and he’d have plenty of ammo for all of us.

The front door of the little house shot open, and a roaring mass of gray muscle rocketed in and smashed full speed into Graham Grant, who, for the second time that night, was body-slammed to the floor with such stupendous force that the little house shook. Once again, Grant’s pistol dropped from his hand. This time, though, instead of hitting the carpeted floor, Grant’s head struck the baseboard of the wall beneath the staircase. All color drained from his face, all but the fading purple and blackish green of his old bruises and the dark traces of those raccoon circles around his eyes.

Sammy! How had Sammy managed to get out the back door, circle around, and enter from the front through the door that Holly had left ajar? How had danger ever registered on Sammy’s carefree puppy brain?

I had to act. For all that Grant had the look of death, he could revive. Calvin, too, was comatose, but he might rouse himself. In seconds, I had that semiautomatic in my hand. Covering Grant, I got Calvin’s revolver.

Only then, as I rose, did I take a good look at the dog who had saved us. He stood at my left side, his glowing dark eyes on my face. The likeness that had fooled others, the resemblance between father and son, had, for the first time, tricked me. “Rowdy,” I said. “My Rowdy. I should have known.”

“Her name
was
Holly Winter,” said Holly Winter, who
had a fleecy pink Ballet Barbie blanket wrapped around her shoulders but was shivering anyway. “I got that much right.”

She, Mellie, Rowdy, and I were sitting on the steps of Dr. Zachary Ho’s porch. We were in that order, with Rowdy between Mellie and me, and with Mellie serving as a buffer between Holly and, doG forbid, the dog. The Barbie blanket was on loan from a neighborhood child who’d pressed it on Mellie, who, in turn, had insisted on wrapping it around Holly. The EMTs had offered emergency blankets, but Mellie and I had refused them in favor of a couple of old blankets I’d had in Steve’s van. The night wasn’t all that cold, and we’d been in greater need of soft comfort than of physical warmth. Rowdy gave both. Mellie was snuggled up against him, as was I. Mellie was clutching the crucifix that hung around her neck and a rosary as well. I was clutching Rowdy. Holly Winter had accepted the EMTs’ offer but had the emergency blanket clenched in her hands, where it did nothing for her violent trembling.

The narrow street was even more crowded with official vehicles of all kinds than it had been on the day I’d discovered the body of…Holly Winter. Ambulances had made screaming departures with Grant and Calvin, who’d both been alive but might get to the hospital DOA for all I knew. I can’t say that I particularly cared. All I wanted was to go home, but the gridlock made it impossible to leave in the van, and I had no other way to transport the dogs. Also, I couldn’t desert Mellie. Neighbors kept asking her to stay with them, but so far, she was insisting that she wanted to sleep in her own bed. On the topic of neighbors, the sight of so many people milling around and standing in groups, together with the misleadingly festive illumination from the cruisers and the lights of every nearby house, created the impression of a late-evening block party minus the food and fun.

“Shit,” Holly said stiffly. “Needless to say, I am very sorry.”

“Don’t say bad words,” Mellie told her.

“There’s nothing needless about apologizing,” I said. “Apology accepted. Your teeth are chattering. I think you should wrap that emergency blanket around your shoulders. Or I’ll get you a regular blanket from my van. Maybe you should go to the hospital. The EMTs offered to take all of us. Or to one of the neighbors’ houses. You’re shaking.”

“It’s a normal physiological reaction to stress,” she said.

“No one said it was abnormal,” I pointed out.

Mellie responded better than I did. With her rosary still in her hand, she put her arm around Holly and said, “Every-body feels sad sometimes. And angry.”

“I’ll be fine once I understand exactly what happened.”

“Now you understand what didn’t happen,” I said. “That’s a start. My husband and my father and my stepmother and I are not engaged in some conspiracy to use dogs as body packers. That’s the term. Smuggling drugs in the intestinal tracts of dogs. Or people.”

“Drugs are bad,” Mellie said.

I said, “But I can see…well, some of the pieces you put together are right. Sort of. Maine does have a long history of smuggling. Pirates. Prohibition. But why would anyone use body packers? The border with Canada is mostly wilderness, and the coastline, I happen to know, is three thousand four hundred seventy-eight miles long. I had to memorize that in school. I do come from Maine. You got that right. And Gabrielle, my stepmother, does own a wood lot where someone was growing marijuana. But not Gabrielle. And when you saw me with Kevin Dennehy, you misinterpreted what you were seeing. Kevin is my next-door neighbor.”

“The databases—” she began.

“The house belongs to his mother, and the phone is in her name. They live on Appleton Street. You were at my house. You know that it’s on the corner of Concord and Appleton. Kevin and I have been friends for years. That’s all. And Kevin is the last cop in the world to take bribes or cover anything up.”

“The Maine Drug Enforcement Agency is worried about methamphetamine,” Holly said.

“Maine’s favorite drug is marijuana.”

“Maine is considered to be a potentially ideal environment for manufacturing methamphetamine,” she said pedantically. “And there’s a market. It’s mailed from Arizona. Southern California. That’s where Holly Winter was from. Arizona. I talked to her father. He said that Holly was in Maine.”

“I heard that Grant was in the Southwest,” I said. “They must’ve met there. They went to Maine. They were dealing drugs. You got that right, too.”

“Not really.”

“And Calvin was involved. He’s from Maine. His accent? Down East. So, Holly obviously found him more attractive than Grant. Who wouldn’t? And she put Grant in the hospital and took off with everything he had. His dog, his truck, his money, his meth. And she stayed in touch with Calvin. But you know, in a way, you were right about body packers, except that she didn’t use dogs. She used dog toys.”

“Strike can’t have her toys,” Mellie said. “They can make her sick. And don’t talk to anybody! A bad man wants to hurt Strike.”

“The bad man can’t hurt her now,” I said. “He can’t hurt anyone anymore.”

“And she stole my identity because…what could be easier than stealing the identity of someone with your own name?”

“She knew who I was,” I said. “Grant used to show Alaskan malamutes. He bred them. Then he hit hard times. Drugs. His marriage broke up. He abandoned his dogs. She must have heard about me from Grant.”

“His dogs. The least of it,” Holly said.

“From your viewpoint maybe. But I think she really loved the dog. If he was a threat to Streak…Strike, then maybe that’s when she’d had enough. And if they were actually making meth, the environment would’ve been toxic. The dog could’ve been poisoned.”

“You’re very charitable,” she said snidely.

We fell silent, mainly because we’d have had to shout to make ourselves heard above the roar of an approaching motorcycle. It wove its way through the jam of cruisers and turned into Mellie’s driveway. Even from two houses away, I recognized it immediately: the Harley-Davidson Screamin’ Eagle Ultra Classic Electra Glide, the Alaskan malamute of motorcycles, the vehicular twin of my own Rowdy. I recognized Adam immediately. Every light in Mellie’s house was on, as were the streetlamps, of course, and porch lights up and down the block. The unnatural brightness and the flashing lights of the cruisers made for a theatrical effect that gave Adam a stronger resemblance than ever to Moses. In this setting, however, he favored Charlton Heston’s portrayal more than he did Michelangelo’s statue. Since he’d originally been looking for what I now guessed was either methamphetamine or drug money that he’d expected to get from the third Holly Winter, as I guess I’ll call her, I couldn’t understand why he’d voluntarily entered this macabre street festival, with all its cruisers, its unmarked law-enforcement vehicles, and its uniformed and plainclothes personnel. As I watched, I half expected Adam to hurl a grenade or stage some other kind of violent attack and half expected the police to slap handcuffs on him and confiscate the gorgeous Harley.

Two halves make a whole. Therefore, I was wholly wrong. After conferring with some authoritative types in plain clothes, Adam came striding down the sidewalk. When he reached Dr. Ho’s porch, he nodded to me, held out his hand, and said, “Al Papadopoulos. Special agent, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Gabrielle sends her regards.”

“Names are so confusing, aren’t they?” I said. “I mean, Adam. Or is it Al? What’s in a name, anyway? It’s hard to remember which is yours, I guess. Unless your name is Holly Winter. In that case, it’s easy, since there are so many of us. Our only trouble is keeping track of who’s who.”

“Just doing my job,” said Al. “Sorry. The malamute. The name Holly Winter. Calvin Jones getting a couple of calls from pay phones in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That little misunderstanding about Gabrielle’s wood lot. I had to check you out.”

“Her name really was Holly Winter.” I was still finding the truth hard to grasp. “She didn’t borrow mine. That actually was her name.”

Holly Winter and the DEA agent spoke simultaneously: “Yes.”

“She knew who I was,” I said. “Malamutes. Rescue. Where I live. Back there”—I pointed toward Mellie’s house—“Grant said that he was sick and that she beat him up and put him in the hospital. She fractured his skull and ruptured his spleen. Or so he said.”

“Basilar skull fracture,” Al said. “That was the least of what she did. He was in the hospital for four days. Got out a week ago yesterday. Then he was back in. The ruptured spleen didn’t show up on the X-rays the first time around, so they missed it.”

“Tough cookie,” said Holly Winter.

“Which one?” I asked.

“Her,” said Holly. “Holly Winter. You, too. QED.” She paused. “Which was to be demonstrated.”

She had a gift for getting my hackles up. “I didn’t actually require the translation,” I said.

“I’m trying to thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” I said.