Dead Soldiers (28 page)

There were plenty of places for a shooter to hide, too, as Burns lived on the southeast edge of town. Across the street was undeveloped property covered with scrub oak trees and mesquite. There was a carwash down at the end of the block, but it was usually deserted in the evenings. There was only one car there now, parked at the vacuum station where someone was probably cleaning out the interior.

Burns knew he had to get out of his battered Toyota sooner or later. He could, of course, slink down and glide to the front door while trying to keep to the shadows, or he could even go around to the back of the house and get in through the door from the yard.

Or he could just open the garage. After all,
Abner
Swan was the one in danger, not Burns. If anybody needed to watch his step, it was
Abner
. Burns had never flunked Taylor Stilwell and in fact had never had him in a class. He had been gone from the college by the time Burns arrived.

Burns looked up and down the street. The houses were quiet. There was no one outside, but then that wasn’t unusual. People tended to stay in their homes after dark. They watched TV or read the newspaper. They didn’t walk up and down the block to see if there were snipers hiding across the street.

Burns got out of the car and raised the garage door. The little wheels squeaked on the tracks as it rumbled up, and Burns told himself that he would spray some lubricant on them in the morning.

No one took a shot at him, and he felt a little silly for having even thought there was a chance of something like that.

He got back in the car and drove into the garage. Before he got out, he grabbed his baseball glove. The ball he’d hit over the fence the day before was lying in the floor, so he got that, too. Then he got out of the car and pulled down the overhead door.

The door from the garage into the house was located between the washing machine and a stash of Pepsi One in two-liter bottles. Burns bought it on sale and kept it in the garage so he’d always have some available. When he put his key in the door lock, he noticed that one of the bottles was lying on its side. He must have knocked it over when he left for practice, though he didn’t remember doing it. He bent down and righted the bottle.

He stood up and turned his door key. There was no resistance, as if the door hadn’t been locked. Burns tried to remember if he’d locked it when he left, but he couldn’t. He usually did it automatically, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t forgotten to do it.

He opened the door, went into his kitchen, and flipped on the light.

Steven Stilwell was sitting at the breakfast table. He looked perfectly at home, as if he lived there instead of Burns. The only thing odd about him was that he was holding a pistol. The pistol was pointed straight at Burns.

“The lock on that door is pretty useless,“ Stilwell said. “I just wiggled the handle really hard a few times, and it opened.“

“I didn’t know that,“ Burns said.

“Well, it’s true.“ Stilwell motioned at the kitchen with his free hand.

“I’ll get it fixed.“

“I don’t think you’ll be doing that. Did you know this harvest gold crap is really out of style?“

“It came with the house,“ Burns told him, looking at the pistol rather than at his refrigerator, his stove, his sink, or his cabinet tops.

“You should have bought new stuff.“

“I couldn’t afford it. And the old stuff worked, so I figured, why bother?“

“Well, it’s sort of like the deal with the door lock. It won’t matter to you much longer whether it works or not.“

Burns didn’t like the sound of that.

“Why?“ he said.

“Because,“ Stilwell said, “I’m going to kill you.“

B
urns wasn’t an especially heroic sort, and he knew that Stilwell meant what he said. But for some reason, Burns wasn’t worried.

Maybe it was because it was hard for him to believe that Stilwell would actually pull the trigger of the pistol. Stilwell was, after all, a supposedly mild-mannered guy who sold antiques. Burns had been to his store and talked to him about old radio shows. Could the man who had given Burns a tape of a Shadow episode shoot him in cold blood? Burns didn’t think so.

On the other hand, Stilwell had already killed Matthew Hart, taken a shot at Mal Tomlin, and wounded Don Elliott. Burns found that he was worried, after all.

“It wouldn’t do you any good to kill me,“ Burns said. “I’ve already told Boss Napier that you were the one who shot Hart and Elliott.“

“As soon as I realized I’d mentioned that toy soldier by Hart’s body, I knew you’d figure it out sooner or later. I should never have taken the soldiers, but I liked the idea of leaving them by the bodies. They’d be a sort of symbol.“

Being an English teacher, Burns could appreciate symbolism.

“Cute,“ he said.

Stilwell nodded. “Too cute. I should have known that. When Mary Mason came by this afternoon and told me she was sorry she’d
sicced
you on me, the conversation you and I had about the soldiers came back to me. It was too late for me to do anything about what I said, of course, but I thought I might be able to get to you before you put things together. Mary mentioned that you were going to see the
Codys
, so I thought I’d get you while you were there. But you got lucky and left a little too soon for me. So I tried to cause an accident. That didn’t work either. I should’ve stopped my car after you went off the road and shot you then.“

“Yeah,“ Burns said. He was sweating a little, though his house was cool. He could hear the air-conditioner running. “But you didn’t. Now it’s too late.“

Stilwell looked calm and relaxed sitting there in
Burns’s
chair. A little scruffy, true, but then he always looked a little scruffy. He smiled.

“It’s never too late for some things,“ he said. “Not for revenge.“

“That’s what all this is about, isn’t it. You blamed yourself all those years for your son’s death, and now you’re blaming someone else, and you think they deserve punishment.“

“It was their fault Taylor flunked out. The kid screwed up. He knew it, and he asked for a chance. They wouldn’t give it to him.“

“None of them? Not even
Abner
Swan?“

Abner
Swan was a notorious softie. He’d never heard a hard-luck story he didn’t fall for.

“Taylor never got to Swan. He went to Hart to ask if he could retake a test, maybe improve his grade. Hart laughed at him.“

Burns wasn’t surprised to hear it. And in fact, he wouldn’t have blamed anyone who didn’t allow make-up work or “extra-credit assignments,“ as some called them. Students were supposed to do the work when it was assigned, not later. They were supposed to pass the test when it was given, not take it later. To give one student special treatment was to cheat the others.

On the other hand, laughing at students who requested such help was just wrong. Burns had never done it, and he was sure Elliott, Tomlin, and Swan wouldn’t have, either. They would all have offered some kind of suggestion that would have allowed Taylor to salvage his semester. Or at the very least, one of them would have. Swan for sure, but probably Mal and Elliott as well.

“He should have talked to his other instructors before he gave up,“ Burns said.

“Why? So they could have a good laugh? Bunch of assholes.“

“They might have been able to help.“

“Well, they didn’t. So Taylor enlisted in the Army, and he died. It was their fault.“

Burns could have said something about fathers who put too much pressure on their kids. Or he could have said that people have to take responsibility for their own actions. But he knew it wouldn’t do any good. Stilwell would never have listened, or if he’d listened, he wouldn’t have heard.

“You’ve been a friend to the college for a long time. What happened?“

“I finally realized that those teachers killed my son. He died like all those other young kids you hear about in the news every day now, and it was their fault.“

Burns could tell that Stilwell wasn’t going to be reasonable. He’d passed beyond reason several days ago, if not longer.

So Burns just changed the subject. He said, “I think harvest gold is a nice color.“

“Maybe it was, thirty years ago,“ Stilwell said. “Not now. And don’t think you can change my mind about what I’m about to do. I’m already going to prison for killing Matthew Hart, so killing you won’t change much.“

Burns tried to give Stilwell an out.

“I wondered if you meant to kill him. I thought maybe you just wanted to scare him.“

“No. I wanted to kill him, and the others, too. I’m just not a very good shot, and I was farther away from them. A .22 isn’t all that good for distance shooting, anyway. I probably would just have wounded Tomlin and Elliott if I’d hit them where I intended. But that would have been good enough.“

“How about me?“

Stilwell moved the pistol barrel. Not much. Not more than an inch. It was still pointed at Burns.

“You might have noticed that this isn’t a .22,“ he said.

“It looks big. And old.“

“That’s right. It’s one of my antiques, a Colt’s
Bisley
model, the 1894. Named after a place in England where shooting competitions were held. It’s old, but it works just fine, and it’ll make a pretty big hole in you. Even at a distance.“

Burns was getting more and more worried. Stilwell was still calm, still talking in a casual, conversational tone as if they were two pals talking over old times or a movie they’d seen, but this wasn’t a friendly chat. Stilwell really was planning to shoot him.

“I liked those two episodes of
The Shadow
. I’d like to hear some more.“

“That’s not very likely, is it,“ Stilwell said. “Not very likely at all.“

Burns looked down at his T-shirt and shorts. He was wearing his softball glove on his left hand.

“If I’m going to die, I’d like to be a little better dressed.“

“Been playing baseball?“

“Not baseball,“ Burns said. “Softball. See?“

As he said the last word, Burns turned his gloved hand around and showed Stilwell the ball that he held in his glove.

“You any good?“ Stilwell asked.

“Not very. How about you?“

As he asked the question, Burns flipped the softball to Stilwell.

There are several things a man who’s holding a pistol can do when a softball is tossed to him unexpectedly. He can pull the trigger, he can get out of the way, or he can try to catch the ball.

Stilwell clearly hadn’t expected anyone to lob a softball in his direction. He pushed back in the chair and juggled the pistol as if thinking he could catch the ball and keep control of the gun.

Burns didn’t wait to see what happened. He flipped the light switch and in the sudden darkness dived to his right, in the direction of the den.

Burns had seen movies in which guys dived to the floor, rolled smoothly into a somersault, and came effortlessly to their feet, ready to run or fight or do whatever else the situation might call for.

Those guys were probably professional stunt men who had more practice at diving to the floor than Burns did. He landed hard on his right shoulder and didn’t even try a somersault. He just kept on rolling.

There was no wall separating the den from the kitchen and breakfast area in
Burns’s
house, so he rolled right off the tile floor of the breakfast area onto the carpet of the den.

Stilwell fired the pistol at that point, and Burns heard glass shatter. The muzzle flash briefly lit up the room, but Burns didn’t pause to assess the damage. He just kept rolling.

There was another shot, followed by quite an explosion, and Burns was showered with glass from his TV’s picture tube. He ignored the glass, made a turn to the right, and rolled into the short hallway leading to his front door.

As soon as he felt the cool hallway tile under him, he got up and ran to the front door. He stuck out his arm so he wouldn’t hit the door, and when he touched it, he dropped his hand to the knob, turned the lock, opened the door, and ran outside.

His ears were ringing from the gunshots, but he could hear the garage door going up. He ducked behind a
pittisporum
bush, but Stilwell was no longer interested in shooting him. When Burns peeked from behind the bush, he saw Stilwell running down the street, heading for the carwash.

The car that Burns had seen parked at the vacuum station was still there. Nobody noticed if a vehicle happened to be parked at a carwash, and that was where Stilwell had left his getaway car.

Burns didn’t want him to get away. He ran into the garage, grabbed his cell phone from the Camry, and hustled down the street after Stilwell.

Burns had seen his students manipulate their cell phones as they walked the hallways of HGC, and he was always amazed at their manual dexterity. They could hold the phones in the fingers of one hand while punching in numbers with the thumb of the same hand. Burns couldn’t do that even while he was standing still, much less while he was running down the street, so he stuck the phone in the pocket of his shorts and kept on trucking.