Parting Shot

Fifty Cal

If I’d known we were going to end up at the movies, I’d have gone back into the beach house for my cell. It was a long time to be without a phone.

After heading into Sandwich for some ice cream, Jeremy continued to complain about the cable not working at Madeline’s place. I grabbed a discarded newspaper on a nearby table and found an ad for a Cape Cod movie complex. The seven o’clock shows were already under way, but we could hit one that started after nine. I handed the paper to Jeremy — he was working on a banana split with enough whipped cream to bury a Volkswagen — and asked him if any of the shows interested him.

He pointed. “That one.”

It was some superhero thing. When I was a kid, the only costumed crime-fighters on my radar were Batman, Superman and Spider-Man. I knew there were more, but they were the only ones I cared about. These days, though, there were so many, it was a wonder there was enough evil in the world to keep them all occupied.

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

“What if someone recognizes me?” he asked. “Like at the hotel?”

When we got back to the car, I gave him the Blue Jays baseball cap he’d worn in the grocery store and told him to keep it pulled down hard until we found our seats and they killed the lights. That seemed to do the trick. No one gave us a second look.

On the way to the theater, Jeremy said, “I could probably come up with a list.”

“Huh?”

“Of people at the party. People you could talk to.”

“Okay,” I said.

“But I don’t know what the point is.”

“Let me worry about that.”

“I mean, it’s not really your job, anyway.”

“I’m an investigator. I investigate.”

“It’s not what you were hired to do. Don’t expect my mom or Bob or anyone to pay you for doing something extra. Especially Bob. He’s all business. Everything done by the book. They’ll say you’re trying to pad the bill.”

“I’m not charging them anything extra,” I said.

“I’m giving you a heads-up. They’ll be pissed.”

Maybe he was right. Maybe this wasn’t my concern. I’d been hired to look after him, plain and simple. I hadn’t been hired by the defense.

But I couldn’t help but feel bad for the kid. Outside of his family and Bob, I thought I might be the only one on the planet who felt that way. His father sure didn’t seem to have much time for him.

“We’ll talk in the morning,” I said. “Maybe you can give me some names then.”

He shrugged.

We got our tickets, a bucket of popcorn big enough that it could have served as roofing insulation for a medium-sized house, and some Cokes. Jeremy and the rest of the audience were pretty taken with the movie, cheering at the end, especially when there was a teaser about the next instalment in the series. I knew I’d only be attending under threat of death. All these flicks were the same. Regular guy somehow gets super-powers. Comes up against villain with even greater super-powers. Big fight at the end where hero prevails, but not before the two of them have engaged in an epic, never-ending fight that pretty much levels a city. But it doesn’t matter if thousands of innocent people are killed in the crossfire, because the superhero’s girlfriend is okay.

It was nearly midnight when we got back to the beach house. I wished I’d left some lights on. I kept the headlights shining on the back door long enough for me to get the key in. As soon as I had it open, I flicked on the inside and outside lights and gave the high sign to Jeremy, still in the car, to kill the headlights.

There was a smell in the air I didn’t like. I thought it might be gas, or something chemical. I wondered if it was blowing in off the water, or coming from one of the nearby cottages. While the houses close to us didn’t appear occupied, they all had boats of varying sizes sitting on trailers in their yards. I wondered if someone had spilled some fuel getting a boat ready for an outing. Or, worse, someone had tried to steal some gas by siphoning it out of a tank.

Once in the house, Jeremy went straight to the fridge, looking for a snack. I’d had so much popcorn that not only did I not want anything else to eat, I was in need of some Pepto-Bismol. I’d brought none, so I settled for a few antacid chewables instead.

I hit the lights upstairs and found my phone on the bed. I fired it up. I’d missed a call, plus there was a voicemail. And an email. I checked the voicemail first. It was from Barry Duckworth, my friend on the Promise Falls Police. I listened closely, saved the message when it was finished.

Then I opened the email Duckworth had said he would send me. It was a photo of this Cory Calder he’d warned me about.

“Shit,” I said, looking at the shot of the guy who’d talked to us on the beach.

I looked out through the sliding glass doors to the blackness of the night and felt, suddenly, very vulnerable. I went over to the wall switch and flicked it down, killing the lights.

“Jeremy,” I said, just loud enough that he would hear me downstairs.

“Hmph?” He had a mouthful of something.

I went to the top of the circular metal staircase. Evenly and calmly, I said, “We’re leaving.”

“Hmm?”

“Pack. And turn off any lights downstairs. Now. Work the best you can in the dark. Get your stuff. Quick as you can.”

“What’s going on?” he asked, his mouth now clear of food.

“Do it.”

Three seconds later, the lights downstairs died. The staircase was only wide enough for one, so Jeremy waited at the bottom while I came down. His bedroom was up, mine below. We went into our respective rooms to throw our things together. I had my suitcase on the bed and my stuff dumped into it in under a minute. One thing I held onto was my gun.

I became aware that a light had come back on. Softly, I called upstairs to Jeremy. “I told you, lights out.”

“I didn’t do it,” he said. “I thought that was you.”

It was then I realized that the light wasn’t inside the house. It was coming in through the windows. I turned my head quickly to look through the pane of glass in the back door, thinking maybe someone was shining their headlights up against the house.

It wasn’t headlights. It was fire. And it wasn’t coming from just that side of the house, either. Within seconds I could see flames leaping up past the windows on all four sides.

Someone was torching the beach house.