Head Shot (A Thriller): A Crime and Suspense Thriller (19 page)

Sixty-Seven

Lieutenant Benjamin Soergel was standing next to Ray Mitchell’s vehicle when he heard the phone ring.  He glanced into the car and saw Ray’s cell phone vibrating with the call.

Soergel glanced over at Mitchell, who was standing about fifty yards away at the front doors of Rodgers Bay's only hospital, St. Mary's.  The detective was in deep conversation with Chief Lenzen.  Soergel had stayed by the car, feigning the need to smoke a cigarette, hoping to get a quick look through Mitchell's case notes.

Now, he took the opportunity and picked up the detective’s cell phone.

"Yeah?"

"Detective Mitchell?"

Soergel smiled.

"Yeah, this is Mitchell, go ahead."

"This is Paula at dispatch.  I already put this out, but Chief Lenzen wanted me to call you directly with any important information on the Ferkovich case."

Soergel waited.

"I just got a call from Sarah Ross down at the marina."

The woman paused and Soergel rolled his eyes.

"And she called because...?"

"She said she thinks she saw a suspicious man on one of the boats."

Soergel felt his heart start thumping.

"She said the name of the boat was the
Teacher's Pet
.  Before I called you, I got on the computer and tracked down the owner of the boat.  It's Mary Ferkovich.  She's Joe's sister."

Soergel’s mind raced while the woman continued.

Ferkovich's sister must have been lying to Ray and he was too stupid to realize it.  Cops were staking out her house but they were looking in the wrong place.

She had a fucking boat!

"Well, Chief Lenzen said I was supposed to call you if anything came up on Ferkovich," the woman said, obviously expecting more of a response from the man on the other end of the phone whom she believed to be Ray Mitchell.

Soergel picked up on it.  He responded with enthusiasm.

"Good work, Paula."  Thank God he was good with names.  "Tell you what I'm going to do, I'm here with Chief Lenzen, and the two of us will check it out real quiet like, okay?"

"10-4," the woman said, confident now that the information was in the right hands.

Soergel hit the disconnect button on the phone.

He leaned back in the seat and casually glanced at Mitchell and Lenzen, still deep in discussion. 

Soergel shifted his gaze and spied the Channel 6 news van parked at the other end of the hospital's door.  He'd seen Nancy come back out after trying to get an interview with the actor.

He called her from his own cell phone.

"Hey."

"I've got some news."

Soergel waited, savoring the moment.

"I know where Ferkovich is."

Sixty-Eight

The pain throbbed, like a siren coming closer, pulsating with the precision of a razor blade through Mike Sharpe's forehead, threatening to crack his skull in two.

He slowly opened his eyes, and as the room came into focus the pain intensified.

"Michael?" a voice said gently to his left.

Mike began to turn his head, but the pain made the room spin, so he stopped.  Just then, Laurie's face came into view overhead and the pain lessened enough for him to smile.  But just barely.

"You're okay?" he said, his voice a whisper.

"I'm fine, how do you feel?" she said, her eyes, above the dark circles, were watering with tears.  She reached across the bed and took his hand in hers.

He groaned in response.

"Shh.  Don't try to talk."

"Tell me what happened to you," Mike said slowly.

Laurie took a deep breath and wiped away the tears from here eyes. 

"When I came to, that...that man, was looking at me..." she shivered.

"Then he ran off into the woods. I was sick, didn't know where you were, then he came back out and drove off.  I thought he might have killed you."

Mike looked away from her and stared at the ceiling. 

"But then the cops arrived, and the detective from Milwaukee drove off, then the ambulance came."

She absentmindedly touched the bandage on her forehead.

"They looked me over, and then we waited.  Finally, the call came that they'd found you, and to send an ambulance."

A single tear escaped from her eye, and trickled down her cheek.

"I was in the ambulance when we picked you up.  They looked you over and then we came here.  They said the man who did this to you thought that you were the killer, that Ferkovich."

"What about before that?" Mike asked.

"You mean when he ran us off the road?"

Mike closed his eyes and opened them again, indicating a nod in the affirmative.

"I just remember waking up briefly and you looking back at me from the front seat, and then it was lights out."

Mike paused, gathering strength.

"At first, I tried to outrun him-"

She cut him off.

"You don't have to tell me now-"

"No, I need to explain." His eyes implored her and she became quiet, listening.  He licked his lips, trying to moisten them.

"At first, I tried to outrun him, but then I thought that was a stupid idea.  Because I realized that this guy saw me at the gas station, and that
Nation’s Most Wanted
had just aired.  So I figured he had me pegged as Ferkovich.  So then I thought I would just try to explain I was an actor.”

Mike kept his eyes on the ceiling as he spoke.

"But when I got out of the car, he shot me.  So I managed to get out of the car and into the woods, since I figured he thought you were a victim, he wasn't after you, and I didn't want you to get shot by accident."

She gripped his hand more tightly.

"And you know the rest."

Laurie put her other hand along Mike's forehead and stroked his hair.

"Who would have thought?" he said.  "Three years in L.A. without so much as a scratch, and then I get shot twice here."

Their eyes met, and they both laughed, Mike grimacing immediately afterward.  But he felt better.

Suddenly, his stomach went cold.

Where was the ring?

He looked around the room but didn't see his clothes anywhere.

"What do you need, Mike?" Laurie asked, seeing his searching eyes.

"Do you know where my clothes are?"

"I think they threw your shirt away, but the nurse said she put the rest of your stuff in those drawers over there."

He looked at her closely, but it didn't seem like she knew about the ring.  Mike felt his heart start beating faster.  This wasn't the most romantic place he could think of to propose, but considering what had happened, he couldn't think of a better time.

Mike was just about to ask Laurie to bring him his pants, when they both heard voices outside the door.

"Now what?" Laurie asked.

Sixty-Nine

As Chief Lenzen walked toward the front doors of the hospital, Ray looked back toward his car, expecting to see Soergel arrogantly leaning against the door, smoking a cigarette, plotting his next move.

But to Ray's surprise, Soergel was gone.

Mitchell scanned the parking lot, but he didn't see the Lieutenant, and he also noted that the Channel 6 news van was gone, too.

He shrugged off the coincidence, and watched Chief Lenzen disappear inside the hospital's doors.

Ray walked over to his car, opened the passenger door and reached for his briefcase, then froze.

His cell phone was resting in the right pocket of his briefcase, where he always put it, but it was turned the wrong way.  Ray always put the phone in with the screen facing him.

Was he imagining things, or had Soergel used his cell phone? He looked at his call history, but it had been cleared.

Ray looked off into the distance, wondering what Soergel was up to.

Whatever it was, Ray knew he wouldn't like it.

Seventy

There was a knock, and Mike looked up to see the local police chief standing in his doorway.

“How you doing?” the cop asked.

"I'm fine, considering I got beaten up by Sasquatch," Mike Sharpe said, the effort of speaking draining his face of the faint color his energy had mustered.

"What took you guys so long?" Laurie asked, not bothering to hide the venom she felt.

"We got there as fast as we could, ma'am," said Lenzen.

"Where's the beast now?" Mike asked.

"He's in jail, where he should be."

Laurie laughed at the Chief's answer.  The ensuing silence forced Lenzen to continue. 

"Look, you guys are tired, so I'm just going to let you try to get some sleep, and we'll talk in the morning, how's that?"

Just then the doctor came in.

He had a folder with some notes attached.

"And how's our famous patient doing?" he asked.

"You tell me, you're the doctor." Mike said.

"Good point.  Well, good news, the two gunshot wounds were superficial, they did no serious damage.  Your jaw, however, has sustained a hairline fracture, and, of course, your nose was broken.  At this point, though, we're going to let time work its magic.  Your ribs were badly bruised, but also not broken."

The doctor flipped through his notes.

"You probably suffered a concussion, but everything looks normal now.  I'll give you some medicine for the pain, and we'll keep you here for the night, but in the morning, if everything still looks good, we'll let you go."

"Well, that's good news," Lenzen offered, a comment met by cold stares from the patients.

The doctor put his hand on Lenzen's shoulder.

"Let's leave these two be until morning, Chief. "

With a nod, the doctor and Lenzen left, and Mike Sharpe promptly drifted off to sleep.

Seventy-One

It was the same dream he’d had many times over.

He was a kid again, down at the mill pond, staring at the water, occasionally trying to catch a frog.  It was sort of a secret spot for him, somewhere he could slip out of the house, escape the violent chaos that always arrived when his Dad came home from work.  Joe would ride his bike a few blocks on back streets, cut through an abandoned lot and lean his bike against an abandoned shed at the south end of the mill pond.

When the pond froze over in the winter, it was used as a hockey rink.  But during the summer, it was pretty much useless.  There were too many weeds to swim, no fish, and the water was murky and dirty.

So there was really no reason to come here.

Unless you just wanted to get…
away
.

The water was always dead calm, even when there was a breeze.  A fish jumped close by and it startled Joe, because he didn’t think there were any fish in the pond.  And then another one, a big one, jumped right in front of him.

Joe leapt to his feet. 

And then he heard laughter behind him.

“What a pussy!” one of the boys shouted out, and the older teenagers appeared behind Joe, who cursed himself for not keeping an eye out.  There were three of them, and although it was a relatively small town, Joe hadn’t seen any of them before.  One of them, the one in the middle, was much bigger than the other two.  In his hand was a rock, which he threw over Joe’s head and laughed when it splashed in the water

“More like dumb ass,” one of the other said.

Joe looked over at his bike. 

He might be able to get to it if he ran–

As if reading his mind, the boy on Joe’s left fanned out and blocked his path toward the bike.

The others walked right up to Joe, and then big one poked him in the chest.

“What’s your name, pussy?” he said.

“Joe,” Joe mumbled.

“What the hell are you doing down here,  Joe?” the big one said.  “No one comes down here by themselves except queers.  You a queer?”

Joe shook his head.

The other two came closer to Joe and he stood frozen.

“What’s that?” the big one said.  He turned to his buddies.  “He nodded!  Hell, he’s a queer!”

The other two started laughing and Joe made his break.  He lunged between the big guy and the one on his left, toward his bike, but someone tackled him and the next thing he knew, the big one was sitting on his chest.

“Hold him down, boys,” he said.

Joe watched with horror as the boy sitting on his chest unzipped his pants.

“Now, listen Joe.  I’m going to put something into your mouth and if you bite down, I’m going to beat you until you’re out, then throw you in the pond where no one will ever find you, got that?”

Joe was shaking and couldn’t answer.  He watched as the boy pulled out his thing and brought it toward Joe’s face.

Joe closed his eyes.

But he didn’t bite down.

He jerked awake in his sleep, sweat pouring down his face and his hands shaking.

Joe rolled off the bed and stood, listening closely.  He head heard something, maybe a car door.

And even though he was practically trembling, it was because rage was now consuming his body and he prayed with everything he had, that someone was going to approach the boat.