Shay O'Hanlon Caper 04 - Chip Off the Ice Block Murder (24 page)

Greg let out a sound that was a cross between a laugh and grunt.

It was coming back to me. I remembered underground whispers surrounding a student named Sophie Brady. She was our school’s urban legend. There was always debate as to whether or not she actually existed or if the older kids had created a convoluted ghost story to scare the underclassmen. It seemed like it ramped up right around Halloween—stupid teens trying to outscare each other. I always figured that if she were indeed real, she’d run away or dropped out years before I showed up on the scene.

Who knows, maybe she got herself knocked up and moved somewhere no one knew her.

Greg took another step forward. He was almost within striking range.

Coop’s elbow tightened on mine and I squeezed his in response.

“Oh, yes,” Greg said, doing that weird singsong chant again. “She ran away, yes she did. But I found her.”

One more step, two at the most, and we’d have a slim chance to mow down Crazy Boy if he didn’t start firing his hand cannon first.
Come on, man … come just a little farther.

Hoping to draw him closer, I said, “Where did you find her?”

“I saved her.” Greg’s tone shifted. He sounded almost dreamy, like he’d mentally checked out of this terrifying tunnel and into his memories. “I found her and I saved her.”

He took another step. The sound of his foot impacting something was muffled by his pained yelp. “Dangerous down here,” he said after a second’s silence. “If you aren’t careful, you could get yourself killed. Your father wasn’t careful enough, Shay.”

Bastard! I hissed in a breath and Coop’s grip tightened on me. I opened my mouth, but before I could retort, Greg mumbled, “Sophie wasn’t careful either. She got herself killed.”

“How’d she get herself killed, Greg?” Coop’s voice was gentle, coaxing. He was always better in finesse-necessary situations than I was. I was more like a wrecking ball.

“I found her. With those drug-dealing dirtballs. I took her. I saved her.”

From the sound of Greg’s voice, he was finally close enough. From the sudden tension of Coop’s arm against mine, I knew he realized it too.

“I loved her. It wasn’t my fault I loved her to death.”

What the hell? Did Greg just confess to murder? Maybe Sophie Brady wasn’t fictional after all.

“I loved her, but she wouldn’t stop screaming.” Greg’s cultured voice became ragged. I imagined his eyes spinning around their sockets in a demonic frenzy. “I tried so hard to shut her up. Then she stopped fighting me. Oh, it was good. So good.”

We needed to take him down before he decided to pull the trigger, but his fractured tale was morbidly mesmerizing. I couldn’t help myself. “What was good?”

Greg ignored my question. “If your worthless, drunken, idiot father would have sold the bar, none of this would be happening.” With no warning, Greg went from lost in the past to high-pitched, present-moment fury. “Schuler was supposed to fix the problem! But your dad woke up before he froze to death. And you. Couldn’t keep your nose
out of it, you dyke bitch. We had it all set up and you ruined
every-
thing!”

“GO!” I shouted. Coop and I surged blindly forward. We had one chance. I prayed our aim was more accurate than Greg’s might be.

A brilliant flash lit the tunnel for the briefest instant, followed immediately by a thunderous explosion that battered my eardrums. I couldn’t tell if either Coop or I was hit. With the adrenaline spike,
I probably wouldn’t notice anything unless the shot took me out then and there.

By some miracle our raised elbows slammed smack dab into human flesh. The impact was so hard I thought the arm I’d entwined with Coop’s was going to pop right out of its socket. The bedpan in my free hand went flying.

For a moment, Greg was motionless, hung up between us. He gurgled as he tried to breathe. We’d nailed the weasel right in the larynx.

Coop and I unlinked our arms. Greg dropped to the ground. I went with him, groping blindly for his gun hand. Through the violent ringing in my ears, I heard a familiar voice shout, “Police! Don’t move!”

Thirty seconds later, after speed-cuffing Greg and securing his gun, JT had her arms wrapped around me so tight I could hardly breathe. Her entire body was quaking. She whispered fiercely in my ear, “You are going to be the death of me. Jesus Christ.”

Coop, his voice snarky and shaky at the same time, said, “Shay kind of has that effect on people.” He stood off to one side, hanging onto a disheveled Greg Larson. I wondered what potential constituents would think seeing Greg half-crazed and handcuffed.

“Sorry, babe,” I said. “It’s not like I mean for these things to happen. How the hell did you find us?”

“Long story,” JT mumbled into my neck.

Eddy was a human light post, with a flashlight in each hand and another in her armpit. She said, “Let’s skedaddle. That father of yours is an ornery old cuss. Told us to find you two and Trigger-Finger over there. Lisa’s with Pete now, doing some fancy first-aid stuff. She called the police and an ambulance while your white knight and I did our thing.”

“Lisa? Lisa’s here?” That little weasel! I pulled back away from JT in alarm.

“Come on.” JT grabbed Greg by the scruff. “We can explain and walk.”

On the return trip, Eddy and JT gave us the down and dirty of what had transpired since Coop and I descended into Hell.

Greg must have tagged along when we drove up to Princeton. He’d somehow managed to get the drop on Eddy and JT. The bastard cracked JT over the head with something, knocked her senseless. After JT hit the snow, Eddy went after Greg with her Whacker, but he slammed her up against the wall. Once Greg crawled into building, he jammed a chunk of wood in the window frame to block it.

After that, he most likely followed the sound of our voices, and the rest was history.

I led the charge into the room where we’d left my father and skidded to a halt. My dad was seated on the couch, hunched over, his bruised face ashen. Lisa kneeled next to him, pressing something against his back.

My father looked up, relief cascading over his strained features. “Shay,” he wheezed. “You okay?”

I nodded. My throat constricted painfully. I’d never seen him like this.

“What … ” wheeze, “about the … ” wheeze, “vegetable muncher?”

Coop stepped up beside me. “I’m fine, Mr. O.”

JT dragged Greg around us and shoved him into a chair so hard he almost flipped over backward. “Please move, and make my day,” she told him and then glanced at my dad. “You’ll be happy to know your assailant is in custody.”

Greg glared at my father. “Too bad. My aim was a little off.”

“You asshole.” My composure crumbled. I belted him square in the kisser. God that felt good, even if my knuckles smarted like hell.

“What the thuck!” Greg tried to lob a loogie at me. Blood and saliva dripped off his chin. “Polith brutality!”

JT said, “She’s not a cop.”

Lisa looked like a skittish raccoon in the headlights. “Help’s on the way, should be here any second. Shay, can you hold this against your dad’s back if I go let the police in?”

“Yeah, sure.” I hustled to my father’s side.

Lisa showed me where she was putting pressure on my father’s wound. He grunted softly as my hand replaced hers, and I nearly passed out at the amount of red that had soaked into the bunched cloth.

Eddy went with Lisa in search of the front door. I wondered how they were going to open it. If they couldn’t, the cops would be able to.

Greg sat slumped, scowling blankly. Blood continued to dribble from his lip. I wondered if he was having a mental break. Well, more of a break than he’d already had.

Every second that went by felt like an hour. In reality, less than ten minutes later we were outside Hell, surrounded by a sea of various emergency vehicles flashing red, white, and blue lights.

After the Princeton cops were briefed on what had gone down, Greg had been stuffed into the back of a squad.

An ambulance crew stabilized my dad and whisked him to the Cambridge Medical Center, a hospital about twenty miles away. One of the medics patiently explained to me that if Cambridge couldn’t handle the gunshot wound, he’d be transferred to Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis.

I briefly gave my version of events to a pimply faced Princeton police officer, and then sat on a gurney next to JT in an ambulance in front of the Asylum of Horror.

A paramedic busied himself checking out a good-sized gash on the back of my woman’s head while she tried to justify to another cop standing outside the rear doors why we broke into abandoned state property in the first place.

JT gave a condensed recitation of what brought us up here. The cop jotted occasional notes, pausing now and again for clarification.

“Tell me again what happened outside the window,” the man asked, his pen poised above the paper.

JT said, “Eddy and I were waiting outside the window when
wham
! The lights pretty much went—ow!” she yelped, wincing as prodding fingers continued their examination.

The paramedic doing the poking said, “You should probably come in and get this checked out. I don’t think it needs stitches, but it’s a mess.”

“No, I’ll be fine. Just patch me up. I’ll have Shay bring me in if I need to.” JT listened about as well as I did to medical advice.

The medic dabbed at the wound with a piece of gauze. “All you cops types are alike.” He leveled a pointed look at me. “Watch her for changes in alertness, confusion, a headache worse than the one she’s got now. Confusion.” The hint of a grin softened his otherwise stern countenance. “Oh, did I say that?” He shifted his eyes back to JT’s scalp. “Seriously, any vomiting, seizures … unlikely, but you never know.”

I gave my own pointed look at JT, who rolled her eyes at me. “I’ll drag her in kicking and screaming if need be.”

The cop cleared his throat none too quietly, and JT resumed her recitation. “Anyway, between Lisa Vecoli shaking the snot out of me and Eddy trying to turn me into a snowman, I came around pretty fast.” She nodded at Lisa, who was milling with Coop and Eddy a few steps from the ambulance.

“You two,” the cop called to Lisa and Eddy, “can you please come over here?”

Coop remained where he was, happy, I was sure, to have some distance between himself and the po-po.

Eddy and Lisa shuffled toward the bumper of the ambulance. It took a few minutes for both of them to run down their vitals and contact information.

I waited for Lisa to identify herself as a St. Paul police officer, but she didn’t. Now would be the perfect time to bring up the fact I knew she was a lying sack of horse hockey. I said, “Lisa, don’t you think you should tell him your little secret?”

Lisa frowned. “What secret?”

“Come on,” I said. “You don’t need to hide it any more. You might as well come out and say it.”

“Say what? I came out in high school.” She did a great job of looking perplexed.

The cop stared at Lisa. “I don’t give a crock about anyone’s sexual orientation. Just tell me what happened.”

Before I could needle her any further, Lisa said, “Earlier today I was about to swing by the Rabbit Hole—the café Shay owns—to find out if Shay’s dad had come back. I’ve been trying to give him something my mother wanted him to have. Anyway, I saw that her car was parked close to the front door of the Rabbit Hole. She, or whoever
was driving, pulled out as I pulled into a space on the other side of the street. A huge, gray, four-door Chevy truck two spots behind her came out almost at the same time. It nearly sideswiped a bus. For a second I thought it was a coincidence until the truck swerved into the opposite lane of traffic to pass the bus and three other cars before cutting back in behind Shay.” Lisa shrugged. “I guess I’m suspicious by nature. So I flipped a U-turn and followed them both. I never expected to wind up here.”

If you ask me, that didn’t sound exactly suspicious. What did make sense was that the little liar had been watching us herself, and the fact that she lucked out and someone was indeed tailing me gave her a great excuse now.

Lisa said, “I tracked Greg—at a distance—through the field and into the woods, where I lost sight of him. Luckily there were plenty of tracks in the snow.

“I found Eddy trying to revive JT. Between the two of us we got her back on her feet. Then we kicked out the plank blocking the window. Eddy refused to be left behind, so we helped her inside and she came with.”

I wondered how many bruises Eddy was going to have after that.

JT said, “We didn’t know what we were going to find once we got in, but we followed the same path you did, Shay. We found your dad, got him up on the couch. Lisa called for backup and an ambulance, and your dad ordered Eddy and me to find the two of you.” She glanced at the cop, who had his head down and was writing furiously on a palm-sized notepad.

“And,” Eddy said, “all we had to do was listen to Greg sing his way through the corridors. The Pied Piper of the Princeton Mental Institution led us right to them.” She paused. “Ah, you might not want to include that in your notes.”

“Got you covered,” the cop said without looking up. “Go on.”

JT said, “We stopped, listened to Greg ramble about a gal named Sophie Brady until we heard Coop and Shay trounce him and a gunshot. Then I moved in and threw the cuffs on.”

A grudging part of me was thankful Lisa came along when she had to help JT and Eddy. Even if she was still staunchly playing the, “I simply want to find Pete to carry out my mother’s last wishes” gambit.

After what Greg had said down in the bowels of Hell, Lisa’d be hard pressed to continue to question my father’s participation in Schuler’s demise. I wondered if the body in the cellar of the Leprechaun could be Sophie Brady. That concept gave me a kind of potential, bittersweet relief. Regardless, there were still so many unanswered questions. The one thing I felt I could rest easy about was that my father had no hand in creating any corpses.

SIXTEEN

Two days later, I
sat perched on the edge of my dad’s hospital bed, and Coop was parked in one of those vinyl recliners that looked comfortable until you actually used it.

My dad had certainly been through a few rough days. He wound up with bruised ribs, a broken nose, and a bullet that passed through his lower right side, missing the most vital of organs. The doc said he didn’t need his appendix anyway, and after two hours of surgery to repair the damage, we were told he should be almost as good as new once he healed.

The cops had been in three times to question my father since I’d come up at nine that morning. It was closing in on two thirty, and I wondered how many more visits from law enforcement he was going to get before this neverending Thursday would be done. My dad had firmly denied knowledge of either Chuck Schuler’s demise or how Jane Doe wound up beneath the cement in his basement.

The police were checking into my dad’s story, looking into who owned the cabin my dad “claimed” (their quotes, not mine) he had found himself in, and trying to nail down a timeline of what exactly had transpired since last Friday night. The good news was that there was physical evidence that my dad had been beaten. The bad news was that my father’s memory of the time between the poker game Friday night and waking up bruised and battered Monday was still nonexistent.

Not a lot of information had come from any of the cops regarding Greg Larson’s status except that he was being held while the investigation continued. I was dying to know—and that was certainly a bad choice of words—if Greg really had something to do with Jane Doe. Was the body in the Leprechaun Sophie Brady?

The door creaked open, and a hand holding a brightly colored bouquet of flowers in a glass vase preceded JT into the room. She’d made a run down to Pam’s Pawhouse, retrieved Bogey and Dawg, and dropped both of them off at the Rabbit Hole before driving back up to Cambridge. At this point most of our vacation time was pretty well shot, and we’d be going home tonight instead of heading to Duluth after all. Sooner or later we’d find another chance to get away.

“Hey guys,” JT said and set the vase on the windowsill. “Though these might cheer you up, Pete.”

Coop gave her a thumbs up. “Nice.”

She came over to stand next to me and assessed my father. “You’re looking a little more lively. How you feeling?”

“Hard to feel too bad with the stuff they’re pumping into me.” My dad motioned at the IV stand and the various tubes that carried various drugs into his arm. “Thanks for the pick-me-up.”

JT leaned her hip against my thigh. “No problem. Any more visitors?”

“Nope,” I said. “Not yet anyway. Did you see Eddy at the Hole?”

A conspiratorial grin brightened JT’s features. “I did. She rode here with me and will be up in a couple of minutes.”

I knew that look, and whatever Eddy was cooking up was going to be interesting.

Coop asked JT, “You get in hot water for what happened?”

“No. I had some explaining to do, but as long as I keep cooperating with the investigation, I should be okay. Busting into a locked, abandoned building with the intent to save a life was a worthy reason for breaking the law.”

The door opened again, this time admitting Eddy, whose smooth brown face was split by one of the largest I’ve-done-it-this-time smiles I’d seen from her in a long time. In her hands she clutched a weirdly shaped object beneath a hand towel.

“What’ve you got under there, Eddy?” my father asked cautiously.

“You’ll have to take the towel off and see.” With barely restrained glee, she plunked the thing down with a metallic thump on the hospital tray table that hovered over my dad’s lap.

Gingerly he reached a hand out and took hold of the edge of the towel. “It’s not going to blow up or smoke or do anything like that, is it?”

“No, it’s not going to bite. Go ahead.”

With a flick of his wrist, the towel went flying. Underneath was an old, metallic-silver bedpan, like the one I’d grabbed from the tunnel floor in the Lizardspit section of Hell. The bowl was filled with chocolate Tootsie Roll midgees.

My dad said, “Where did you get that shit pot? You clean it before you put that crap in there? And yes, I know what a pun is, and yes, I meant to say it.”

Eddy’s dark eyes sparkled. “I swiped it after we took down that rascal in the crazy house. Figured it would be a souvenir.”

“That’s some souvenir.” JT reached over and grabbed a handful of Tootsie Rolls. “You did wash it out, right?

“What do you take me for?” Eddy said. “Of course. I disinfected it and ran it through the dishwasher at the Hole.”

I wasn’t sure if I was okay with that or not. But in the end, the poop-catcher was clean, so what the hell. I grabbed a few midgees too.

Coop’s face was a mask of horror. “That’s disgusting on so many levels. The fact that you’re eating nothing but a bunch of chemicals is bad enough, but eating them out of a bed pan?”

I unwrapped a roll and stuck it in my mouth, chewed for a while, and swallowed. “Tastes okay to me.”

Coop tossed the magazine he’d been reading at me. With a delighted howl, I fired off the Tootsie Rolls that were in my hand, catching him center mass.

“Oh, you’re in trouble now.” Coop snagged the Kleenex box from the side table by the bed and flung it Frisbee-style at my head. The door swung open just as I ducked. The box narrowly missed the doorjamb, and bounced off the shoulder of a man dressed neatly in a suit and tie.

My laughter choked in my throat when I realized the victim of the flyaway box of tissues was Roy Larson, Greg’s dad.

“That’s some welcome.” The surprised look on his face smoothly morphed into concern. Roy stepped into the room and the door swung shut behind him. “Pete. I wanted to stop by and see how you’re doing.”

Coop said somberly, “Sorry about the Kleenex attack.”

“Hey. If you can’t have a good time in a hospital … ” Roy trailed off with a shrug and refocused on my dad. “Really, Pete, how are you?”

“Doc says I’ll mend.” I could tell from my dad’s tentative tone he was wondering how to handle Roy.

What was appropriate to say to the father of a probable murderer?

“Oh. Good. That’s good. Wanted to stop by, apologize. For my son. He’s been under stress. A lot of stress. Lately.”

Like
stress
was a reason to shoot my father?

My dad waved off the words. “Politics are a dirty business. Pressure. Strain. Not a good combination.”

“No, it’s not,” Roy agreed. “There’s a lot of dirty business. Too much dirty business.” His shoulders drooped, and it was like he deflated, folded into himself. “Dirty, dirty business.”

I glanced at JT, and she was watching Roy with a look of concern. She said, “You okay, Mr. Larson?”

Roy’s gaze slid off my dad and his eyes landed somewhere between the mattress and the floor. “Oh, yes. I’m fine. Just fine. Couldn’t be finer. No.”

Eddy cocked her head as she studied Roy. “You having a stroke or something?”

“No, ma’am. Not yet, anyway.” Roy pushed his hands into his pants pockets.

“Roy,” my dad said, “I told you, it’s okay. I’m okay.”

“Okay,” Roy said, his voice sounding weak. “Not okay. It’s not okay.” Suddenly his head snapped back up. “It’s not at all okay, Pete.”

“I know it’s got to be hard to deal with—with your son in the clink, and … ” My father trailed off, leaving the obvious unspoken.

“It’s not okay, Pete.” Roy was stuck on repeat. Maybe he
was
having a stroke. I glanced around the bed for the nurse call button.

Roy’s face flushed a deep maroon. His ears turned red and his neck became suffused with blood. He muttered, “Nothing is ever going to be okay again. If nothing is going to be okay for me, it’s not going to be okay for you either.”

“What—” my dad said, but Roy cut him off.

“No, nothing will be okay.”

Roy pivoted to face me. In one motion, he pulled his hand out of his pocket and raised it to chest level. My chest level. It took me a second to realize there was something in his hand. And it was pointed at me.

That something was a black, palm-sized handgun.

My arms flew up. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Just wait a second.”

“Roy,” my father barked. “What in the sam hell are you doing?”

JT stiffened, eased away from me.

“You took my son away from me, Pete. So I’m going to take away something you care about.”

Roy’s gun hand was remarkably steady. “You,” he said to me, “over there, by your father.”

I didn’t argue. I shifted to stand next to the head of the bed.

“You two.” Roy looked at Coop and Eddy. “Over there.” He motioned with his gunless hand at the space next to the window. “You too, police girl.”

Eddy and Coop shuffled over to the window. JT slowly backed up, her hands at shoulder level. “Take it easy, Roy.”

Roy glared at JT. “You know I’m the king of kitty litter, right?”

JT frowned, but she nodded with gusto. “I sure do.” I could imagine her saying that whatever the madman wants, the madman gets. Maybe psychotic breaks run in the family.

Roy said, “Do you think I wanted to be the king of kitty litter?”

JT said, “I don’t think I can answer that.”

“No!” The volume of Roy’s voice caused a group jerk reaction. “I was supposed to be governor! But that didn’t work out so well, did it?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “No it didn’t. Everything fell apart when Greg … ”

“When Greg what?” I asked, keeping my hands by my ears.

“Boys will be boys, you know. Things get a little carried away. Happens all the time.” This was turning into a like son, like father fiasco.

I finally saw that the remote with the nurse call button had slid down between the side rails.

Suddenly Roy growled, “You look at me, Shay.”

I snapped my head up and met his eyes. They were eerily similar to his son’s in a loony bin sort of way.

He said, “You have no idea what it’s like to have to protect your offspring. The lengths you’ll go, even if it means sacrificing everything. Everything you’ve worked your entire life for.”

Roy shifted to better see my father and me. The hand holding the gun was now trembling. A lot.

“If only,” Roy’s tone was wistful, “if only Greg hadn’t started seeing that girl, none of this would ever have happened. I wouldn’t have had to take care of her. I wouldn’t have had to jackhammer concrete in the middle of the night and hope no one noticed. I wouldn’t have had to lay new cement. We would’ve been home free. And we were, until the goddamn sewer line broke.”

Oh my god.

Roy’s voice hardened. He glared at my father. “If only you’d sold the Leprechaun when Schuler came knocking, we wouldn’t be here.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Eddy reach toward the bedpan and then jerk her hand back. How could she be hungry at a time like this?

“When you refused to sell, Pete, I had to take matters into my own hands. Again. I had to make this pesky little problem go away. Again.”

The Protector starting revving up and my core vibrated.

Hoarsely my father parroted, “Pesky little problem?”

“It was the perfect setup, you know. Your gun was so easy to take. And that damn Hanssen. He actually came though. Found someone to dispatch Schuler. Do you know how to freeze a body in a block of ice? A chest freezer works amazingly well. We even remembered to drop your gun in there with him. Oh yes.” He laughed harshly. “Do you have any idea how heavy a block of ice that size is? We actually had to cut the freezer away from it in pieces! Took Greg and I forever. After that it was easy. Pushed that monstrosity right out of the back end of Greg’s truck and dumped it next to the other ice blocks in Rice Park. It was rather artistic, if I do say so myself.”

The man was certifiable. Shouldn’t the nurse be coming in any time? I couldn’t remember how long it had been since she was in last.

“We smeared his blood all over you. Your clothes. Inside your car. Even had someone mess you up. All the proof was there.”

Roy took two quick steps forward and pressed the barrel of the gun against my dad’s head. “You’re stubborn, Pete. Too stubborn for your own good. You were supposed to die. Everyone knows you’re a drunk. On the wagon, off the wagon, no one would have questioned anything. No heat, the cold. You were catatonic when we left. You were supposed to be unconscious long enough that you’d die of hypothermia. That’s what the man said. The stuff was strong, he said. A couple drops would take care of it. If only I’d put a few more into your scotch, Pete. It wouldn’t have hurt. Freezing to death.” His eyes were wide now, the whites showing. “Why won’t that bitch fucking leave me alone?” Spittle flew from his mouth and his lips trembled.

Talk about a cluster of a confession. Holy shit on a shingle. If we lived through this, my dad was home free.

My father said, “You’ve had my back all these years, Roy. We were there for each other. How could you do this?”

“You betrayed me. You were supposed to die. Greg was so close! So close to my dream. I did everything I could to make his career happen. I made his mistakes disappear. Do you know how much that’s cost me? Do you? And now it’s all washed down the goddamn sewer.”

It felt like the hot end of the betrayal poker had been shoved down my own throat. Everything I had understood about Roy’s role in my past was being reframed. Right here, right now. And I didn’t like it one bit.

While Roy’s attention was on my father and me, JT had slowly shifted, trying to ease around the end of the bed. I glanced furtively, trying to gauge her progress without being obvious. Her face was weirdly scrunched up, and her chest jerked once and then again.

Oh shit. She was trying not to sneeze. I held my breath.
Come on babe, hold it back.

She explosively lost the battle.

Roy whipped around, his gun stopping directly in front of JT’s drippy nose. “Don’t even think about it, lady cop. You move again and I’ll do it. I’ll shoot her.” He jerked his head at me.