Gun Church (37 page)

His hand went right to his holster. “There’s only the two of them, right?”

“Just Jim and Renee, that’s right,” I said.

“Okay, you and Amy get down low and stay here while I get Tony Dee up. Don’t move. You got me?”

“Clear as a bell.” Amy nodded in agreement.

As soon as McDonald tapped on the bedroom door and stuck his head inside to wake his partner, Amy and I took off. We had a little trouble with the front lock and that gave McDonald time to figure out what was going on. He screamed for us to stop and as we finally got outside, I heard his footsteps coming up behind us. The door closed in his face and that gave us the time we needed to get down the stairs and into Isaac’s car ahead of him. We were pulling away just as he reached us. I took a peek in the side view mirror. McDonald looked pretty pissed off.

I waited until we were nearly back to the highway before speaking. “Listen, Amy, Jim’s dangerous and he will do the things he says he will. He killed Haskell Brown.”

“Oh, my god!”

“None of this is about you, really. You and Peter are involved only because you are connected to me and Peter to you. Saving Renee is only part of why I’m going. Jim is my personal nightmare. I have to go. You don’t. I can go by myself. Maybe I can talk Jim down. He does have this worship and adoration thing about me and maybe—”

“Will he kill Peter if I don’t go?” she asked, her voice sharp as a razor. “The truth.”

“Maybe, but he might kill him anyway.”

“I’m coming.”

“Are you sure? All you need do is say the word and I’ll drop you off. You’ll be safe.”

“Of course I’m not sure. Who would be? But I’m coming just the same.”

The rain had let up and the traffic had thinned. I pulled onto the Whitestone Expressway and moved easily into the flow of traffic. It was probably the last easy thing I would ever do.

It was around noon when I pulled off the main road and onto the thin strip of crumbled blacktop leading to the abandoned bungalow colony. Overgrown hedges, their leafless and twisted branches like tangles of natural barbed wire, scraped against both sides of the car. The approach was eerily similar to that of the old berry farm down in Brixton. I had a sense that whatever was about to happen would produce more damage than a concussion and wounded pride. Writers have a knack for the endgame. That’s how many of us begin our books, knowing the end. Then we write to it. There was no scenario I could envision that left any of us—Amy, Renee, Moreland, or me—alive, let alone unscathed. Jim had painted all of us into a corner, himself most of all.

Up to that point, we had done exactly as we’d been told. As we approached Stewart Airport—like Hardentine, an old Air Force base—Amy called her husband’s cell. It was Jim who answered, and Amy got hysterical when he refused to let her talk to Moreland. She had been okay during most of the ride, her fury directed at me keeping the bleakness of the situation at bay.

“Did you hurt Peter? Please don’t hurt him. Please! I’ll do anything,” she was screaming when I pulled to the shoulder and took the BlackBerry out of her hand.

“Jim, we’re not driving another inch until you tell me whether or not you killed Moreland.”

Amy gasped at the bluntness of my ultimatum. I could almost hear Jim thinking through the phone. I knew he hated to be bossed around, but we had leverage. He needed us and he had gone through too much trouble to ruin it now.

“I blew off two of his fingers. What a pussy. He cried like a baby. I had Renee wrap up the wound.” He then gave me directions to get onto Old Route 17 leading into the Catskill Mountains and another landmark from which to call. “After you get there and I give you that second set of instructions, toss your cell phones. You show up here and I hear a ring or a buzz, Moreland will lose more than a few fingers. And Kip,” he said, “no more threats.” Then there was a gunshot, more screams. I clicked off, hoping Amy hadn’t heard that last part.

I handed the BlackBerry back to her and told her that Peter was alive, but scared. I neglected to mention the gunshot and the screams. She was already wound so tight, I didn’t want to risk her completely unraveling. If there was any chance at all of us coming out the other end of this, we needed to hold it together as long as we could.

The sun had broken through the clouds by the time we made the second call and the temperature had to be around forty degrees. It was then, after Jim had given us the new set of directions, that I had a decision to make. I knew I still couldn’t risk calling the cops. They might get to where we were going before we could and that meant I would be sacrificing both Renee and Moreland. There was no doubt Jim would murder them before the cops got within a hundred yards. And if they killed Jim in the process, I was fucked. There was the issue of Haskell Brown’s murder. I could no longer pretend that Jim was blowing smoke about having the Beretta he had used stashed away. My fingerprints were all over that gun. I’d fired it so many times, gotten my skin caught in its slide, that it probably had my DNA on it as well. The gun, the toll record, no alibi, and my publishing contract made me look like suspect number one. I didn’t even want to think about what he’d done with Stan’s body.

On the other hand, how could I just stroll Amy and me into Jim’s game without letting someone else know? To do that would allow Jim to make sacrificial lambs of us all. With us dead, he would just walk away from it, if only temporarily. At the very least, I wanted someone to find our bodies, but I was so stressed and worried about Amy, Renee, and what lay ahead of us that I couldn’t think straight. In the end, I was Prufrock and did not dare to eat the peach. I did nothing and threw the cell phones away as instructed.

About a quarter mile up the crumbling, single-lane road, we came upon the area where the bungalows had once been situated. They had long ago collapsed from neglect or been bulldozed. All that remained of them were the cracked concrete footings on which they once had rested. The slabs were overgrown with blankets of moss and weeds shooting through fissures in the cement. Aligned in rows as they were, they looked like toppled headstones in a long-forgotten graveyard. At least Jim had developed a sense of irony along the way. This was the spot where we were supposed to get out of the car and walk down the hill toward the maintenance shed.

“Last chance, Amy,” I said. “You can take the car and go for help. But if you walk down there with me, he’s not going to let you turn around and walk away. Once you’re in, you’re in.”

She closed her eyes, swallowed hard, paused. “But if you walk down there alone, he’ll kill you and Peter.”

“Probably.”

“Let’s go,” she said. “I can’t have all that blood on my hands.”

During the drive here, I had tried to explain to Amy the series of events that had led us to this place. I hadn’t gotten very far. She was too frightened, too distracted, and it all seemed so absurd. Eventually our conversation was reduced to me giving her false assurances, ones she seemed too eager to believe. Now all of that was done with and there would be no turning around.

The sun had disappeared back behind the clouds and a nasty wind had come out of nowhere. Old leaves and dirt blew into our faces as we walked through a stand of trees. The big pines, oaks, and maples leading down the hill felt oddly familiar. Then, hearing the low rumble and rush of moving water as we came through the trees to a clearing, I saw a small waterfall in the distance. It was no accident that this place felt familiar. It was not so different than the spot in the woods where we used to shoot outside Brixton. Jim had apparently scouted it out—which meant he knew the lay of the land, and that scared the shit out of me.

A mess of flaking paint and rotting planks, the maintenance shed was on a flat spot in a small clearing fifty yards above the falls. It was surrounded by the woods on three sides. Only the spot the shed was on and the broad downhill path to the river had been cleared of trees. A small access road, just wide enough to accommodate a tractor, led out from the shed into the woods. Jim stood with his back to the shed, Renee at his side. He held a Colt Python, the one he’d given me, in his right hand, a Glock in his left. The familiar butt handles of the Smith & Wesson .38 and the Browning .45 stuck up from the waist of his jeans. Peter Moreland, his clothes soaked in blood, both hands swathed in gauze mittens, was kneeling in front of Jim. Jim pressed the nose of the Glock to the back of Moreland’s head. Amy made to run to him, but I grabbed her arm.

“Don’t!” I whispered. “He’s an expert shot with every one of those weapons. Don’t give him any excuse to use them.”

As if to prove my point, Jim fired a round into the dirt a few inches from my feet, and we were still a good ten yards away from the shed. The round kicked dirt up onto my pants and running shoes. Amy dropped down and covered her head with her arms. Then, looking up, noticing that I hadn’t even flinched, she stared at me with a mix of awe and horror.

“That’s close enough, Kip. Throw me your car keys.” I did as he asked. “Amy,” he said, waving the big Colt at her, “you come over here by me and see to your husband.”

I helped lift her to her feet, but held on to her arm, and stepped directly in front of her. “She’s not going anywhere, not yet, Jim.” Renee shook her head no at me, but I was determined. “You let Peter, Amy, and Renee walk back to my car and then you can do whatever it is you have planned for me.”

Jim fired a second shot. The round bit into the dirt no more than an inch from my left foot. I may have blinked, but that was about it. Renee shook her head even more insistently. Jim didn’t say a word. Instead, in one graceful motion, he moved the muzzle of the Glock away from Moreland’s head, lowered it, then fired into Peter’s left calf. Moreland convulsed in agony and screamed so that I thought someone
had
to hear it. Amy dropped to her knees and threw up.

“I told you, Kip, no more threats. Amy, come here now unless you want Peter to lose the use of his other leg.”

She didn’t need prompting and fairly ran to Moreland’s side. “You bastard. You fucking bastard!” she yelled at Jim.

He just smiled. “Tell your ex-husband to do as he’s told or your current one is bound to keep suffering.”

Renee removed her hooded sweatshirt and wrapped it around Moreland’s leg above the wound. She used a branch to torque the sweatshirt tight. Amy made a pillow of her coat, resting Moreland’s head on it as she stroked his hair.

“Was that really necessary, Jim?” I said.

“You tell me.”

“What now?” I asked.

“Hard choices.”

“Hard choices?”

“Who lives? Who dies? They don’t get much harder than that, do they, Kip?”

“This isn’t a game.”

“It is if I say it is.”

Amy interrupted. “He’s going into shock. Let me get him some help.”

“It’s not my fault,” Jim growled at her. “It’s him. If he hadn’t ruined things, we could have all been happy. Now, this is all that’s left. So shut up. All of you just shut up!”

Amy didn’t argue, but I could see she was seething underneath the surface. Good, I thought. There was that notorious rage. She wasn’t going to surrender.

“What’s the game, Jim?” I got him to focus on me again.

“Cutthroat meets Fox Hunt, New York–style,” he said, pulling the .45 from his waistband and tossing it at me. “Go ahead, pick it up.”

As I took slow, steady paces approaching the .45, a hundred things went through my head. Chief among them was that Jim was fucking with me, testing me. Why, of the four handguns he had, did he throw me the one I was least comfortable with? It wasn’t coincidence. I’d lately grown very skeptical of coincidence. No, there was a reason he’d thrown me that gun. I only wished the fuck I knew what it was.

“Go ahead and pick it up,” he called to me when I was standing directly in front of it. “Pick it up!”

I kept my eyes fixed on him as I knelt down and placed my palm around the gun’s grips. I rocked it in my hand to reacquaint myself with its heft. The design was a century old and it was a pretty heavy weapon. I just held it, pointing the muzzle at the ground. I had no intention of provoking him.

“So, it’s going to be me and you,” I said.

He didn’t answer directly. “Somebody’s going to walk out of here alive today. Who that is depends on what you do in the next few minutes.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Again, he didn’t answer. Instead, he bent at the knees and placed the Glock and the Colt on the ground to his left. He took the .38 out of his jeans and dropped it by the other handguns.

I didn’t move. I kept reminding myself that with Jim, nothing was as it seemed.

“What are you waiting for, Kip? Take off the safety. It’s loaded. See for yourself. Go ahead. Do it, Kip, but hurry up. Moreland’s lost a lot of blood and time’s wasting. Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock … ”

I undid the safety and racked the slide. A bullet ejected, spinning in mid-air and then, hitting a rock, tumbled harmlessly in the direction of the shed.

“If I go for any of these,” he said, gesturing at the guns at his feet, “you’d be able to blow a hole in me before I even got close.”

“Probably.”

He smiled. I really hated Jim’s smiles. “You were asking about how you determine who gets out of here alive,” he said. “This is how. You have the edge now and you better use it. You won’t have it again, Kip, not ever.”

“Shoot him for chrissakes!” Amy shouted, jumping to her feet. “Shoot the crazy motherfucker. Peter’s dying. What are you waiting for?”

I looked to Renee for a sign, for some indication of what I should do, but she kept mute and noncommittal and that scared me. Did she know something that she couldn’t say or wouldn’t say?

Just as I put my finger on the trigger, Jim grabbed Amy by the hair much the way Stan Petrovic had done to Renee that last night in the chapel. He twisted it so hard that Amy fell to her knees. She was clawing at him, flailing at his legs. When one of her wild punches landed too close to his groin, he tugged her hair harder, snapping her head back. She stopped flailing and screamed in pain.