Locked Doors

59

AS Sgt. Mullins came to his feet he said, “Mr. Kite, this is one big old spooky house ya’ll got here.”

Rufus smiled. “It’s haunted, you know.”

“That right?”

“There’s a ghost lives up on the third floor, gooses my wife every time she walks into our son’s old room.”

Sgt. Mullins grinned.

“I think I’d bolt that room shut, never go back in.”

“Nah, our ghosts are all right…just a little horny.”

“Mr. Kite, thanks for your time.”

As the old man stood, his eyes lit up.

“You know, come to think of it, there’s someone else you should talk to. Fellow named Scottie Myers. Works at Howard’s Pub. Used to be a friend of Luther’s. I told Ms. King about him, so he may have seen her after I did.”

“We’ll look him up.”

Rufus walked them toward the front door.

“Will you let me know when you find Ms. King?” the old man asked. “It’ll keep me up nights thinking about her.”

“Do you have a phone? We tried to call first, but couldn’t-”

“Sure don’t.”

“Well, if I remember, I’ll write you a note, let you know when we find her. Because we will find her.”

Rufus patted Max on the shoulder as he opened the door for them.

“Your wife will be in my prayers, young man.”

Sgt. Mullins and Max stepped outside and walked down the disintegrating steps into the waving beach grass. When Max heard the door close behind them he said, “Barry, you have to search that house. I have a bad-”

“Wait till we’re in the car.”

The black Crown Victoria was parked between the two live oaks in the front yard. Its windshield glinted and then went dark as the sun slipped behind the house.

The men climbed into the car and closed the doors.

“Something isn’t right in there,” Max said. “Get a search warrant, whatever you have to do, turn that place upside down. That old man…I don’t know.”

Sgt. Mullins put the key into the ignition but didn’t start the engine.

He stared through the windshield at the great stone House of Kite, ensconced on the banks of the sound.

“Well, I do know,” he said finally. “Been doing this quite awhile. You learn how to read people, how to know if they’re hiding something. If they’re nervous. Body language says a lot. Fidgeting. If the eye contact is too intense or nonexistent.”

“Barry, look-”

Sgt. Mullins held up a finger.

“That old man,” he said, “doesn’t have a thing in this world to hide.”

“It’s your suspect’s father for-”

“Means nothing. I looked into his soul, Max. He’s telling the truth.”

Sgt. Mullins clicked in his seatbelt and cranked the engine.

“Let’s go find Mr. Scottie Myers,” he said, shifting the car into reverse.

Max scowled.

Sgt. Mullins grinned.

“Trust me, Max. I’m right. It’s a gift.”

Sgt. Mullins turned the car around and they headed back along the dirt road that wound through the thicket of live oaks. Reaching down, he turned on the radio, found an oldies station, drumming his hands now on the steering wheel.

As Max reached to buckle his seatbelt he happened to glance in the side mirror.

“Stop the car, Barry!”

“What?”

“Look!”

Sgt. Mullins stepped on the brake and both men looked back through the window.

Beyond the tunnel of live oaks, they could see the stoop of the stone house, the front door flung wide open, a woman in torn yellow lingerie falling down the steps, picking herself up again, and running after them, the blood on her left leg visible even from fifty yards away.

Sgt. Mullins said, “Holy God.”

He turned back to shift the car into park.

The windshield shattered.

His right arm exploded.

Sgt. Mullins stomped the gas and as the car accelerated, the man with the shotgun stepped out of the way and fired pointblank through the window at Sgt. Mullins’s head.

The detective collapsed into Max’s lap, his foot slipped off the gas pedal, and the Crown Victoria rolled a ways down the dirt road before veering into the thicket. After ten feet, its front bumper collided gently with the trunk of a live oak and the car was at rest, idling quietly.

Max’s left shoulder had caught three pellets of buckshot but he felt nothing as he strained to lift the big detective off his legs.

He heaved Sgt. Mullins back into the driver seat and glanced through the rear passenger window. A man with long black hair was thirty yards away and closing, moving deliberately through the thicket toward the car. He saw Max looking, smiled, and pumped his shotgun.

They killed Vi.

He swept Sgt. Mullins’s coat back as the footsteps of the assailant waxed audible over the purr of the engine.

Unbuttoning the latchet, he pulled the Glock from its cowhide holster.

Vi had begged him several times to come shoot with her at the range. He never had and knew nothing of how to use a firearm except for what he’d seen in movies and on television.

After searching for a safety that wasn’t there, Max finally aimed through the rear passenger window as the pale-faced man closed in.

He squeezed the trigger and the glass exploded as the. 45 bucked in his hand.

The man continued toward him, unscathed.

Max opened the door and scrambled out of the car as the shotgun boomed, glass raining down on him. He crawled to the back of the car, poked his head above the trunk in time to see the shotgun jerk and fire come roaring out the barrel.

Max ducked down, sitting with his back against the tire. Sweat sheeted down his forehead into his eyes but it smelled rusty, and when he wiped it away the back of his hand was bloodsmeared. He touched his head, felt where the pellets of buckshot had scalped three marble-size trenches down to the bone, the steel November afternoon like ice on his skull.

He looked under the car, unable to see the legs of the man who was trying to kill him.

Max peered over the trunk again.

No one there.

He stood.

Glock quivering in his hand.

Three bloodstreaks down his face like warpaint.

Blinked, and there was the barrel of the shotgun, peeking over the other side of the trunk and Max felt the ground beneath him and he was staring through the twisted limbs of those haunted trees at flinders of a fading sky the color of his wife’s name and he tried to say it, tried to call out to her.

A black moon appeared and descended toward him, filling his violet sky with the reek of scorched metal and death.