Grave Situation (50 page)

Herb heard the rattle of the
doorknob, watched it turning. There came a gentle nudge at the
door. He wondered if the cops would kick it in.

A muffled voice came to him.
“Mister Matteau? This is Police Chief David Brantford. We spoke
last night. Can you open up, please?”

Herb released a breath. He felt
crippled by indecision.

It’s all over now.

He was cornered, unable to escape.
Life behind bars awaited him. Caged like an animal. No matter what
he couldn’t let that happen.

He dashed to the kitchen and picked
up the revolver from the table. He’d intended to end this, but
there was something he wanted to do first. He tiptoed back into the
living room.

Gun in hand, he used his other to
pick up the phone. Clumsily, he stabbed at numbers. When he heard
the voice of Slick’s mother, Herb winced.

“Hello, Missus Eagles.”

“Hello, Herbie,” she greeted. “How
are you doing?”

Herb swallowed.

Not so good.

He licked his
lips.
“I just called to tell you that I’m
sorry.”

There was a pause. When she spoke
again, there was a note of interest in her voice. “Sorry for
what?”

Herb shut his eyes, feeling an ache
in his heart.

For
everything
, he wanted to tell her.
For Stephen. For all the pain I
caused.

“Sorry for what,
Herbie?”

Without another word he hung up the
phone and wrenched the cord from the wall.

Allan walked to the front
lawn.

“I’ll check around back,” he
called over to David and Sam.

As he rounded the side of the house
and reached the backyard, he caught sight of a blue pickup truck
and stopped abruptly.

All at once, a sick comprehension
appeared as a slow widening of his stare, a parting of his mouth.
His mind flashed on part of Greg O’Dell’s story the morning he had
found his work partner, Brad Hawkins, dead.

“I’m going to check out a truck
sitting here on the waterfront.”

Greg looked at the time. 5:01 am.
“What’s your location?”

“I’m coming up to the Impark lot
by ECTUG.”

“Anyone around?”

“No one outside that I can see.
The dome light is on in the truck. Only see one person inside that
I can tell. Could be someone beside him.”

“Is the person male or
female?”

“Male. Guy is probably drunk and
came down here to sleep it off.”

“Do you want backup?”

“No. I can handle it.”

There was no question
now.

It’s him.

Allan reached inside his coat and
unholstered his pistol.

Herb stared at the revolver in his
hand. This was the moment of decision, the time to finally bring
this nightmare to an end.

He closed his eyes
momentarily.

If I walk in darkness without one
ray of light, let me trust the Lord, let me rely upon
God.

Steeling himself, he cracked open
the back door.

Allan heard the creak of a door and
then saw a big man step out. When he noticed the revolver in the
man’s hand, he automatically brought up his own weapon to the high
ready. With leaden steps, he moved out onto the lawn, aware that he
was leaving his cover and putting himself in the open.

“Freeze
!” he ordered. “Put down the
gun.”

Slowly, Herb turned to the man on
the grass. The stranger’s hands were stretched out in front of him
and in them he held a black pistol aimed right at Herb. Across the
twenty feet between them, their eyes met.

Herb didn’t move.

It was funny, he thought; yesterday
morning, when he had last faced the same threat from Slick, he felt
scared. Now he felt an odd calmness, a stillness of mind and
emotion. A lifetime of heartache was near a close.

“Put down the gun,” the man
repeated. “It’s over.”

With exaggerated slowness, Herb
swiveled his head from one side to the other.

“You don’t want it to end like
this.”

Herb kept the revolver by his leg.
Though his eyes were serious, he managed a thin smile.

“And what are my options?” he
asked in a dry tone. “Surrender and let you put me in
prison?”

Allan’s finger
tensed on the trigger. All at once, a gallery of troubling images
filled his mind—the mother of Brad Hawkins doubling over in the
doorway of her home and emitting an anguished wail when informed of
her son’s death; Cathy Ambré in Allan’s arms, clinging to him in
quiet despair; the young woman later laying atop her bed, the
victim of a successful suicide attempt; her imploring postscript on
the note she had left him:
Please find my
sister
; and finally Phillip Ambré
identifying his other daughter at the morgue.

If there had been no witnesses, he
was certain that he would have shot Herb without a second
thought.

Stay
calm
, he told himself.
Keep it professional.

“That’s pretty much how it works.”
He fought to control the feeling in his voice. “Life is but
choices. You chose to take four innocent lives and under our laws
that’s totally unacceptable.”

Herb didn’t respond.

“Drop the gun,” Allan hissed with
palpable anger.

Sam came running around the corner
of the house, followed by David, who was huffing. Herb snapped his
head toward them, as if startled.

“He has a gun,” warned
Allan.

At this, the two men drew their
pistols and brought them up to a firing position.

“Drop your weapon, sir,” Sam
yelled. “Drop it now.”

Allan saw Herb brace himself.
Intently, he watched Herb’s gun hand, the flexed muscles of his
arm.

“Drop your weapon,” Sam ordered
again, louder.

Allan motioned the constable to
keep in control. “Easy, Sam,” he called out. “Let’s not exacerbate
things here.”

Sam shot Allan a nervous glance.
After a few seconds, he nodded his acquiescence. Once more Allan
focused on Herb.

I need to talk him down
somehow.

“We’ve learned everything,” he
told him. “The grave robberies that your friend, Stephen Eagles,
was involved in. The trafficking of plastinated body
parts.”

“Sick, isn’t it?”

Allan gave a small nod. “Yes.
According to the ringleader, murder was never part of it. You chose
to do that on your own. Help me understand something—what I haven’t
figured out is why you started killing people? You have no criminal
record, no history of violence that we could find. What sparked all
this?”

Herb flinched. He knew that there
were no adequate reasons to justify what he’d done. He had murdered
four people and worst of all, his best friend.

At length, he said, “I know it’s no
consolation. But I never once enjoyed it.”

“Then why?”

Herb twitched his heavy shoulders.
“I don’t know. My mind hasn’t been right lately. Before this I was
a fairly good person.”

The man seemed to consider him.
“Last month you were fined for an environmental mishap.”

Herb paused.

“It’s immoral what the fucking
government did to you. It wasn’t your fault what happened. Big
industry has been polluting the environment for decades, but
nothing has been done about it…”

“Front page news here,” he said
quietly. “The fines crippled me financially. I ended up losing
everything. The papers never reported that side of the
story.”

“And the fairly good person you
once were suddenly wanted to get back at the
government?”

Herb inhaled. “Our government is
full of self-serving con-men and morons. It easier for them to ruin
one man, than it is to come down on the real environmental
polluters.”

“Despite what they did to you, it
still never gave you the right to go out there killing
people.”

Ashamed, Herb lowered his
eyes.

“I know that,” he mumbled weakly.
“I wish Stephen never offered me that job. None of this would’ve
ever happened.”

“You’re blaming your friend for
all this?”

Herb felt the first spark of anger.
“Not at all. I take full responsibility for my actions. It was my
decision to do what I did. Not his.”

Allan scrutinized the
expressionless gaze.

“Why Trixy Ambré?”

The reply, when it came, was slow
in coming. “Because she was an easy victim.”

“What about Brad
Hawkins?”

“He came by as I was about to
leave. Wrong place, wrong time.”

“Did he witness
anything?”

“No.”

“Then why kill him? Still on your
high?”

Herb drew a breath. “I’m not sure
what this ‘high’ is, as you put it. I was going to let him go. But
then he decided to write down my plate number and my description in
his book. All that might’ve ended up in your hands.”

Allan could feel his own
pulse.

The missing notebook.

“And what about John Baker?” he
asked. “What did he ever do to you?”

“He asked me for a
ride.”

“Pardon me?”

“I met him one day on the road out
here.” His expression seemed to become reflective. “He was sitting
on the ground by the ditch. There were cans spilled over the road
from a garbage bag he had been carrying. I thought something
happened to him, so I stopped to see if he needed help. He asked
for a lift into town, so I gave it to him. It was after I dropped
him off that I began to have these bad thoughts.”

Allan thought he detected a painful
timbre in Herb’s words. There was also an eerie resignation about
him, he found, one that unnerved him.

Will he drop that gun? Or does he
have a death wish?

“I was told your friend, Stephen
Eagles, met you yesterday morning with intentions of killing
you.”

Herb’s grip tightened on the
revolver. He could feel sweat on his forehead, the pounding of his
own heart. It was a moment before he could speak.

“He
was
going to kill me,
but couldn’t bring himself to do it.”

“But you easily brought yourself
to kill him.”

Herb gave a mirthless smirk. “It
was more difficult than you know.”

In his shoulders, Allan began to
feel the strain from holding his pistol out in front of him for too
long.

“Do you have any idea of the lives
you affected?”

“I can only imagine,” Herb said
simply.

“Drop the gun,” Allan said again.
“You’re outnumbered. Do the right thing this time. Try to make some
amends for your actions.”

A breeze swirled around them.
Shutting his eyes, Herb lifted his face toward the warmth of the
sun. He thought of his mother, of his father, of the joyless home
they had shared. He knew his own life was done now. In the
newspapers, on the television, they would call him a murderer, a
madman. That, he understood with a deep regret, would be his
lasting legacy.

How had he let this
happen?

He opened his eyes and gazed at the
crab apple tree on the crest of the north pasture. He wondered if
he’d meet his father again in the afterlife.

“You told me that life is but
choices,” he said at last. “From where I’m standing, I see you
having two choices right now. One, you could kill me. Or two, you
could let me kill you.”

“Don’t
do this.”

Herb took one long breath of fresh
country air. He would miss it here. The smells. The scenery. The
tranquility.

His finger grazed the trigger. Ever
so slightly, his hand trembled again.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for
us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

“Tell the families of those people
that I’m sorry.”

Every muscle in Allan’s body tensed
as he prepared himself.

Four shots rang out.

It took only a second, but for
Allan, everything became slow-motion fragments—the gun rising
toward him, his own reaction appearing too sluggish, the panicky
double tapping of his finger on the trigger, the two shells
twirling from the ejector port of his 9mm, the red stain appearing
on Herb’s shirt, the revolver falling from his hand.

Gun still on his target, Allan
stared at him through a wisp of smoke curling from the muzzle. The
sound of his heart pounded in his ears. He slowly approached Herb
and in the periphery of his vision, he saw David and Sam doing the
same.