Shotgun Opera Page 13

  He topped the ridge, headed down. There was a scar in the ground where the chopper had crash-landed. A second later he saw it smacked up against the thick trunk of an oak. The tail was bent, rotor blades snapped off.

  Some instinct kicked in. Mike brought the pistol up, approached slowly, trying to walk quietly. He listened for movement, scanned the area. From this angle, he couldn’t tell if the pilot was still in the cockpit or out in the open waiting to jump him. He noticed the US Army markings on the side of the helicopter.

  He circled wide, saw the pilot slumped forward. It was a woman. He took this in merely as information. He was fully prepared to kill man or woman alike. He opened the door on the passenger side, reached across, and pushed her back in the seat. A shallow gash on her forehead bled into her left eye.

  Mike checked the cockpit, found a purse and a cell phone. He took them. He also found a photo of his nephew. There could be no doubt now that this woman had come to erase Andrew from the face of the earth.

  The woman groaned. Her eyes flickered open. She pawed at her eye, wiped the blood away.

  Mike checked the purse. Military ID. Also a Kansas driver’s license. Meredith Cornwall-Jenkins.

  “Hey,” said Meredith Cornwall-Jenkins. Groggy. “Hey. I need some I need some help.” She rubbed the back of her neck. “Ambulance.”

  Mike held up the picture of his nephew. “Why does the US Army want to kill Andrew Foley?”

  “Dammit, I’m hurt here.” Her head was clearing now. She took stock of her injuries. “Get a doctor.”

  Mike leaned into the cockpit, raised the pistol, and shot her kneecap. Blood sprayed over the instruments and windshield. Meredith screamed horror, surprise, and pain all mixed together. She clamped both hands over the wound, blood squirting between her fingers. “Jesus!”

  Mike looked down at his pistol. It was the .32. He remembered carrying it from the old days, but he hadn’t remembered what a corny little pop it made.

  “You old f-fucker.” Sweat on her face. She grew pale, then tilted forward abruptly and vomited. The smell rose and mingled with the blood and smoke and fuel leaking from the chopper’s engine.

  Mike thumbed the hammer back on the revolver, pointed it at Meredith’s face. “I asked you a question.”

  “N-not the army, you idiot.” She blew vomit residue from her lips, spit. A line of drool flopped over her chin.

  “Then who?”

  “Goddammit! Pull me out of here before that fuel leak catches.”

  Mike dropped his aim and blasted a hole in her heel.

  She shrieked again, squeezed her eyes shut. Tears. “Oh bastard.”

  Mike thumbed the hammer back again, but didn’t feel confident. This wasn’t working. Tough lady. He had to think of something else. He remembered he was still holding the purse, opened it, pulled out Meredith’s wallet.

  She coughed, spit again. “What are you doing?” She seemed to be fighting to stay conscious.

  He opened the wallet, flipped past credit cards and found a picture. He held it up for Meredith to see. “Who’s this? Mr. Hired Killer?”

  “It’s nobody,” she said quickly.

  Mike examined the picture. A man in his middle thirties, Robert Redford good looks. “Maybe I should go see this guy. Maybe we should have a talk.”

  “Pull me out of here, and I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

  Mike kept flipping through the wallet. “Your address is on your license. And here are some phone numbers. One says John at work. Is that his name? John?”

  “You do a thing to him, and I’ll hurt you like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “I can believe it,” Mike said. “You’d be surprised. I think somebody in your line of work knows all the imaginative things that can be done with piano wire. Or even a simple pair of pliers.”

  “Don’t hurt him.” A hint of a plea in her voice.

  “Who ordered the hit on Andrew Foley?”

  “Get me out and I’ll tell you.”

  Mike shook the wallet at her. “I’ll kill him! I’ll cut out his eyes and his tongue and his liver, then I’ll fucking kill him.”

  “Don’t!”

  “Who ordered the hit?”

  “My sister!” She sobbed, gasped for air. “It was my sister.”

  Mike blinked. Her sister? “What are you talking about?”

  In his peripheral vision, Mike caught a flicker of orange. Something had sparked, more smoke from the engine. Flames.

  Mike clutched Meredith’s purse and cell phone and backed away from the chopper.

  “Wait!” Panic in her eyes. “Pull me out!”

  A sharp hiss from the engine, a pop, then a belch of fire from the back of the chopper. Heat washed over Mike, blew him back. He scrambled to his feet and ran from the chopper.

  Meredith screamed.

  Another small pop, then an explosion. Fiery debris flew in all directions. Mike hit the ground, covered his head with his arms. A chunk of charred metal the size of a doormat landed two feet from him. When he looked back, fire had completely engulfed the chopper.

  Mike stood, brushed himself off. At this distance, he still felt the heat of the flaming helicopter and backed away a half-dozen steps. He watched the fire and regretted that he’d left the woman inside to burn to death.

  He’d planned to shoot her in the head.

  * * *

  When he returned to the vineyard, simmering rage, the immediate need for blood had subsided. He now felt the aches. Each step was agony in his knees. He tried to remember if he still had any Bengay in the medicine cabinet. His shirt was soaked with sweat.

  Although his bloodlust had subsided, his mind-set was the same. Mike’s make-believe life had been swept away by fire. The vineyard had only been the window dressing of his pretense. The real charade had been in his heart and soul, in the belief that he was anything other than a killer. Dan had tried to tell him. It had taken Mike forty years to see that his brother was right.

  So if he was a killer, then he would kill. He would stalk and find the ones who deserved it.

  Linda and Andrew were waiting for him. They’d wrapped Keone’s body in a dull green blanket. Linda’s eyes were red, cheeks wet. He looked beyond them to the cabin. Now it too was burning.

  “It must have been the gas line or something,” Andrew said. “It just started two minutes ago.”

  Mike shook his head, said nothing. He looked at his truck. The windows had been blown out. The entire side of the truck facing the cabin had been scorched black.

  Linda stepped close to Mike, put a hand on his arm. “You okay?”

  Mike nodded.

  “What happened out there?”

  “I took care of it.” Mike noticed that the Cadillac hadn’t been damaged. He felt in his pockets, found the keys.

  “Come back up to my place,” Linda said. “I sure as hell don’t want to be the one to do it, but someone needs to call Keone’s folks.”

  “I don’t know the number,” Mike said.

  “What? How can you not know?”

  “I said I don’t know it.”

  “That’s impossible.” She crossed her arms, frowned. “He’s only twelve. You’re telling me his parents let him work here all summer and didn’t leave a number? That’s ridiculous. You must have some kind of—”

  “Linda!”

  She started, took a step back.

  “I don’t know, okay? He showed up for work, and I paid him. His folks live in a trailer. I’ve never been there. I don’t even know if they have a phone.”

  She burst into tears again, sobbed quietly. The three of them stood around the body, not talking. A stiff breeze blew smoke past them. The crackle of fire.

  Finally, Mike said, “Linda, can Andrew stay with you a few days? I have to take care of something.”

  “What? Where are you going?”

  “Can he stay with you or not?”

  She hesitated only a second. “Yes.”

  Mike went to the Caddy, climbed in behind the wheel, stuck the key into the ignition.

  Andrew ran to the driver’s side, put his hands on the door.
“Whoa. Wait a minute. You’re just taking off?”

  “I have to,” Mike said. “They’ll keep sending killers until the job is done. I have to go finish this now. I have to take the initiative, or we don’t have any advantage at all.”

  “I’ll come with you. I can help.”

  “This isn’t for people like you,” Mike said. “It’s for men like me. Stay with Linda.” He cranked the Caddy.

  Andrew stepped away from the car. He looked like he was in shock. He looked lost.

  Mike drove away, didn’t look back. Blood had started this, and there would be more blood to finish it.

  23

  Nikki Enders hung up the phone and bit her thumbnail. Middle Sister wasn’t answering her phone. She sat with one leg dangling over an arm of the big overstuffed chair beneath the ever-watchful eye of her father’s portrait in the library. When Mother finally passed on to that great knitting circle in the sky, Nikki fully intended to remove the portrait and hide it in the farthest reaches of some dark closet. Daddy’s portrait had an Edgar Allan Poe quality about it. Sometimes he seemed to grimace in disapproval. Other times he seemed to sport a slight Mona Lisa smile as if he kept some smug secret.

  “I’m worried about Middle Sister, Daddy,” Nikki said to the portrait. “I used her. Just like you used to do. I used her to finish a job I was too chickenshit to finish myself.” She drank the rest of her coffee. It was her seventh cup.

  Nikki no longer bought into the fiction of her injury. Yes, her wrist had been banged up pretty badly, but she’d completed more difficult assignments with worse injuries.

  Now Middle Sister. Why didn’t she answer her phone?

  The library was dim and quiet, only a small reading lamp casting a dirty yellow glow. A light rain beat a slow rhythm against the windows. The weather service had predicted it would get worse. A tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico would soak New Orleans with a few days of heavy thunderstorms. Nikki let her thoughts drift, bit her nails, listened to the wind and rain and the gentle creak of the large old house.

  On the wall near the library door a red light blinked, accompanied by a gentle, inoffensive buzz. Nikki came to attention, sprang from the chair, and went to a panel set in the wall under the light. She slid the panel back, revealing a floor plan of the mansion. A tiny green light indicated a secure door or window. A flashing red light indicated a security breach.

  An upstairs window blinked red, a bedroom at the other end of the hall from Mother’s. Some unwitting burglar was about to get the surprise of his life. Nikki would need to make her way to the gun locker in the special anteroom just off the kitchen. At one time there had been a pistol secreted someplace in every room in the house, but with Mother in her current condition it wasn’t safe, and all the firearms had been gathered into two locations, one locker downstairs and another one upstairs.

  Nikki would grab a small automatic from the downstairs locker, then teach this burglar a thing or two about—

  Another red light blinked to life. A window in a downstairs hall. It cut her off from the gun locker. Shit. A third blinking light. Upstairs bathroom. This wasn’t a burglary.

  It was a hit.

  Her eyes spun around the library, searching. She saw the cavalry saber under Daddy’s portrait, grabbed it, drew the blade, and tossed the scabbard aside. She swung it side to side, getting a feel for the weight and balance. Her mother’s tutoring sessions flooded back. She reminded herself this wasn’t tournament fencing. She’d be going for kill strikes.

  Nikki kicked off her house shoes, peeled off her socks. She jogged down the dark hall toward the gun locker, her bare feet silent on the hardwood floor, eyes scanning the shadows for the intruders. She heard the door from the kitchen creak open, and she shrank into the darkness between a potted palm and a china cabinet. Movement, two figures from the doorway into the hall, their wide forms barely visible in the nearly complete darkness. The lead figure held something out in front of him. A gun.

  They tried to move quietly, heavy boots, rainwater dripping from soaked clothing.

  Nikki waited for the first intruder to pass her hiding place, then leapt up between them. She kicked the knee of the second man as she thrust the sword into the first. The blade slid deep, and the man grunted, gurgling blood and pitching forward. She spun back on the second man, jammed the heel of her palm into his nose. Cartilage snapped, and warm blood sprayed on her hand. Nikki finished him off by bringing the hilt of the sword down hard on the top of his head.

  She felt along the floor for the first man’s dropped gun, couldn’t find it in the dark. Nikki couldn’t spare any more time searching. She forgot the gun, sprinted up the stairs, sword in front of her.

  At the landing at the top of the stairs, she found three more. The light was better here, streetlamps leaking in through the big, rain-streaked windows. Wide-bodied toughs, jeans, dark T-shirts. Nikki swung at the first one as they turned to face her, lopping off his gun hand at the wrist. The clenched fist rolled down the stairs, still clutching the revolver. He screamed, stumbled back, holding his arm, blood pulsing out.

  She didn’t have time to admire the carnage. The other two were already lifting their pistols.

  She swept the sword back, and the blade bit deep between neck and shoulder. He dropped his gun and went down, but the blade lodged fast in bone. Nikki had to let go of the sword. She stepped in close to the final thug, so his shot went past her. She locked on to his wrist, twisted, and he dropped his gun too. She punched him in the gut, then the face. He backed up, pulled a knife, and came at her, thrusting wildly. She dropped to the floor and swept his legs. He landed hard on his back, the air whuffing out of him. She bent over him, grabbed his head and chin, jerked sharply, and was rewarded with a sharp crack.

  The attacker with the severed hand darted past her. Nikki went to one knee, pried the knife from the hand of the man whose neck she’d broken. She stood, threw the knife. It flipped end over end, burying itself in the back of the fleeing intruder. He yelled, went stiff for a moment, then tumbled forward and bounced down the stairs before finally landing in a heap at the bottom.

  Nikki rushed to her mother’s room, flung the door open. “Mother? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” Her mother searched through the top drawer of her dresser. “I need another pair of knitting needles. My other ones are soiled.”

  Nikki looked in the corner of the room. A dead man on his back, a knitting needle driven into each eye, all the way back through the brain. Nikki winced. “Stay here, Mother. I need to check the rest of the house.”

  Halfway down the stairs, she picked up the severed hand and relieved it of the revolver. She checked the load and methodically searched the rest of the mansion. No more intruders.

  She went back to her mother’s room, found the eerily calm woman in a rocking chair, a new clean pair of needles clicking away at her scarf.

  Althea appeared at the door. She wore a heavy yellow robe, bedroom slippers. “Miss Nikki, there’s a big mess of dead bodies out here. You want me to call the police or shall I fire up the big basement furnace?”