Rob Cornell - Ridley Brone 02 - The Hustle (16 page)

—
so still. Why isn’t he moving?

You know why he isn’t moving.

Eddie knelt beside the body. The side he had struck with the hammer was opposite the illuminated side, hiding the exact damage Eddie had caused. But the red pool rolling out from under the head spoke of the damage to the back of the skull from hitting the floor.

He’s not going to move. He’s never going to move.

Tears streamed down Eddie’s face. He tried bargaining with God.
Please make this just a dream. Please, this can’t be real. Wake me up, God. Wake me
up
!

God did not answer. In all the time Eddie had believed in God, he had never asked for anything, content to know peace awaited him in the afterlife. But God failed him when he needed him most. Eddie could feel his faith drain out of him as he stared into the dead eyes of his cousin.

Why, Hunter? What were you doing here?

Chapter 16

I needed a drink. Which reminded me that I was supposed to be at the bar by now. The mere thought of listening to karaoke turned my already turned stomach.

Eddie stared at me expectantly, waiting for my reaction. I could feel his eyes trying to read my face. To me, my face felt numb, expressionless. But Eddie must have seen something else.

“You don’t believe me?” he asked.

Hell, I didn’t know what to believe. Before he started his story, hadn’t I seen a glimmer of a killer in his eyes? He had let his milquetoast mask slip a little to show some of the green lizard skin of the monster underneath. “You thought it was Warren.”

“Who else would it have been?” He pressed the heels of his hands against either side of his head. “There was no reason for Hunter to do that. I told you he was crazy. We never figured out what was going through his mind.”

Ping
went my PI sonar. “We?”

Eddie dropped his hands and looked up at the ceiling. “I panicked. I’d just…just killed my cousin, for God’s sake. I didn’t know what to do. So I left. I ran.”

Finally one thread tied to the next. “You went to Amanda’s.”

He nodded and swiped at one wet eye with his knuckle. “I didn’t know where else to go. I thought for sure I was going to jail. I wanted to see her one last time. I hadn’t planned on telling her anything. I barely remember telling her everyone was going to explode. But that’s what they would do when they found Hunter in the basement.” He sniffed. “I shouldn’t have said anything to her about it. But I couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened.”

I tried to put myself into Eddie’s shoes that night. I would have liked to know for sure I would never hurt someone I loved. I would never rape her, that was for damn sure. But Eddie’s frame of mind that night was unreachable by my imagination. I heard enough. I could guess the rest. Eddie wasn’t done, though.

“I wanted to be with her so badly. I couldn’t explain that I’d never see her again, couldn’t tell her why we
had
to make love.” He coughed out a series of sobs, shoulders hitching, his hands curled out in front of him as if looking for something to hold onto so he didn’t blow away in the hurricane wind only he could feel.

I heard his anguish—could
feel
it emanating from him like heat from an open stove—and wanted to forgive his actions. But it wasn’t my place to forgive. That right belonged to Amanda, and she had somehow managed it by only suspecting something terrible had happened to Eddie before he came to see her. What would she have thought if she knew? She might have had a harder time forgiving a rapist and a killer.

Taking Eddie’s story at face value—which I wasn’t about to do—it sounded as if he’d made an honest, if not grievous, mistake. The worst kind of mistake a human could ever make in a lifetime. But still…would I have acted any differently if someone had invaded my home, cut the power, and stalked me into the basement?

Hell, no.

In terms of my corner-peeling metaphor, Eddie had torn away a serious chunk. But there was still some yet to reveal. “It sounds to me like a pretty clear cut case of self-defense,” I said. “But something like that would have made the news, Eddie.”

He nodded, crossed his arms so hard he looked as though he meant to squeeze the life out of himself. “My parents…” He took a close-mouthed gulp, his white face giving him the look of a man about to hurl in his own lap. “I went back home after…Amanda. I had no place left to go. When I got there, my parents were sitting on the couch, waiting for me. They didn’t look shocked or angry, just tense.”

He’d peeled up enough corners for me to make out the rest. “They covered it up?”

His pained face was answer enough.

“How?” I asked.

“Dad told me they took him home. They somehow made it look like he’d fallen there. They must have done a pretty good job, because no one thought it was anything but an accident. Just crazy Hunter acting stupid and falling on his head.”

I checked my watch. Our conversation had taken us past dusk and well into night. A fresh cliff of snow had collected on the window sill, signifying the snowfall hidden from view in the dark. Paul would grumble about my absence at the bar. Holly, to busy running the stage, probably wouldn’t notice until a little later. The ones I worried about were the wait staff. They were afraid of Paul, his gruff act keeping them at a distance just as he liked it. Holly didn’t know spit about the bar operations—not her turf. So they depended on me to give them direction. They would just have to learn to fly on their own tonight.

“Well?” Eddie asked.

Well, indeed. “There’s a few issues. First of all, the way you have it set, this whole story could be a fabrication. There is no one else alive that can corroborate this.”

“Look at me.” He pointed at his face. His finger trembled. “Do I look like I made this up? This has festered inside of me for two decades. A week after I accidentally killed my cousin, my family is wiped out. Four people dead in the space of a week, one of them my fault, my dad blamed for the others. I have enough pain in my life. Why would I make this up?”

It did seem a pretty elaborate excuse for what he had done to Amanda. Only it didn’t excuse him. And the way he told it, he wasn’t looking to be excused. He just wanted to explain. I supposed I could temporarily believe his story while cautiously waiting for the next lie.

Not that it mattered, because Eddie might have solved his own case without even realizing it. “It couldn’t have been easy on your parents to cover up a homicide.”

“Of course not. The only one who didn’t have a sack full of guilt to lug around was my little brother. He’d been with a babysitter that night. He had no idea what had happened.”

“That kind of guilt can change a person.”

“We’re back to that, huh?”

“You have to see some kind of connection. Your dad’s stability—”

“Why would he do that to my mom? To Scotty? Maybe I could see him committing suicide because of his guilt. I know it probably drove him crazy holding a secret like that in. And have me there every day to remind him of it.” He sliced the air with an open hand. “But he would never hurt Mom and Scotty. Never.”

I wasn’t going to get into a debate on abnormal psychology. But Eddie had made one good point. We were back where we had started. Soiled by the dirty back story, but nevertheless no closer to getting at this person harassing Eddie by claiming to be his parents’ killer.

I watched him for a handful of seconds. He looked back at me. Both of us held our thoughts in check like a pair of gunslingers waiting to draw at high noon.

I drew first. “I need to sleep on it. I’ve got some other problems I have to deal with. But I’ll do a little more digging when I get the chance. No promises though.”

“But you’ve already made up your mind, haven’t you? I can tell.”

I had no reason to lie. Besides, we’d dealt with enough lying to last a lifetime. “What you did to Amanda wasn’t rational. You cared for her, but because you were so distraught, you harmed her. Badly. The same could be said for your dad.”

“But what about the phone calls? Someone out there knows what really happened.”

“The only thing you have that didn’t make it to the papers is a ripped Guns N’ Roses sticker. There’s a reason the cops didn’t worry about that.”

“But how could he
know
?”

My back ached from sitting so long on a chair that felt made of bones. I stood. My knees cracked, my backed popped. Christ, I sounded like my grandpa used to when he got up to change his oxygen tank. “That’s why you hired me, remember?” It occurred to me that
hire
might be the wrong word, considering he wasn’t paying me. “To find the con man.”

His eyes narrowed. “You keep changing your story. What happened to someone targeting me and those I care about?”

The theory sounded ludicrous now. I was embarrassed I’d ever brought it up. “After the story you just told me,” I said, “I think it’s pretty obvious what’s going on.”

“What?”

“Your luck flat out sucks.”

Chapter 17

For the first time since I had the
High Note
rebuilt after the explosion, I played hooky and did not go to the bar after Eddie left. I went back into the music room, ripped the drape off the piano, and flung open the cover over the keys. The ivories grinned at me mockingly. I hadn’t touched a piano in a long time. I gave voice lessons to a friend of mine, but I used a guitar as accompaniment for those sessions.

Not that I had any intention of playing. But I wanted to stare this thing down. I knew it was responsible for drawing me into this room in the first place. It represented so much of what had fallen apart in my life. The music. The damn music that had hounded me from the day I could almost speak to this very moment, staring at a vile creature that anyone else in their right mind would either revere or think of as innocuous. When could a piano ever be sinister?

When it reminded you of your dead parents who you never had a chance to reconcile with. Parents who had died believing you had hated them, though what you had always hated was not them, but what they wanted to make out of you.

See that? A piano could be pretty fucking evil.

“What am I doing,” I muttered. I closed the piano and spread the drape roughly the way I found it. From there I went to the kitchen with my gun. I spent the next hour cleaning my gun and daydreaming. One of the things I kept visualizing was finding Hersch and shoving my gun barrel up one of his nostrils. I even spent time debating which nostril, and ended up deciding on his left for no better reason than I’m right handed, which would correspond with his left nostril when he faced me.

After that, I ran out of things to occupy me with any sense of accomplishment. The thought of going to be made me tired, but not tired enough to even think about sleeping. I had transformed magically into a hamster on his wheel, running hard and getting nowhere.

I hated that.

So I took stock. I couldn’t do much for Eddie. Didn’t really want to think about him at all. I’d maxed out my Eddie intake level for the day with some to carry over to the next. Besides, I had my own mystery stalker con man. He knew a lot about me, some things he couldn’t know if not for the help of Sheila. When a con man milked an unsuspecting friend or family member, they could appear positively psychic until you realize they got their info the same way any good investigator did.

I looked down at my gun as if it had been privy to my thoughts and just made a snide comment about stating the obvious.

“Screw you. You’re a gun. You wouldn’t have thought about it if I hadn’t first.”

The gun, thankfully, did not answer. I could put off my stay at the local psych ward’s luxury suite.

I kept talking, though, aware that the gun was my version of Tom Hanks’ Wilson in
Castaway
. “Friends and family members,” I said. “Sometimes they know things we don’t know they know.” I waggled my eyebrows at my genius.

My gun was not impressed.

The jolt I got from peeling up another one of those proverbial corners (and Eddie’s case must have come in an octagonal box with all the corners it had) made sure I would never sleep that night. My blood pulsed as if I’d slammed a double espresso chased with a handful of chocolate covered coffee beans. I wanted to jump back in right away, get a hold of Eddie, or do some more digging on the net. But I had to put it off. As much as I would have liked to pretend I didn’t have anything else on my plate—like, oh, a sociopathic con man out to find my daughter before I did—I couldn’t drop everything to focus on his case. I had more pressing matters as they said in stuffy old British movies.

First stop, the home of one Harold Fennimore Zelinski (a.k.a. Hal).