Lou Mason Mystery - 01 - Motion to Kill (27 page)

“That’s it? Just point and shoot?” Mason asked, reaching for the gun. “This is starting to sound fun.”

“Not exactly, Wyatt Earp. Don’t point it at anybody or anything that you don’t intend to shoot.”

“Sounds reasonable. Let me have it.” Mason hefted the shotgun, raising it to his shoulder and then lowering it to his waist, aiming at the hay bales from his hip.

“What about the safety?”

“If you’re hunting quail, keep it on until you’re ready to shoot. If a man’s hunting you, keep it off. You forget to release it and you’re dead. You take too long to release it and you’re dead. It hangs up and you’re dead.”

Blues made him practice loading and unloading the gun, sighting, and firing without ammunition for an hour before letting Mason fire a live round. He paced off firing lines at ten-foot intervals from the hay bales, telling Mason to begin at the closest mark, fire three rounds, and back up to the next station.

The shot patterns on the bales vividly demonstrated the spread from each shell. As he backed up, the spread grew into an ever-widening killing field. A blue-gray cloud of acrid smoke hung in the air. Mason had learned how to load, pump, point, and shoot. He just hoped the bad guys were as cooperative as the hay bales.

Afterward they sat on the front steps of the cabin sipping cold beer they’d bought on the drive back. The sun was on the backside of the cabin, leaving the front in comfortable shade. The quiet of the woods had returned and it was hard to believe that they’d just finished their war games.

“So—what are you going to do?” Blues asked.

“Circle the wagons, make ‘em pay for every inch of ground—what am I supposed to say?”

“No, man. When this is over, what are you going to do?”

“I’ll treat the question as a vote of confidence. To tell you the truth, I haven’t really thought about it. I guess I’ll have to find a job or take up piano again.”

“You’d be better off joining the foreign legion. Why do you want to keep practicing law anyway?”

“I’m not certain. I had the right motives when I went to law school. Fight the good fight. Protect the individual. But I lost the fire somewhere along the way.”

“But you turned out to be pretty good at it.”

“Sometimes. I lost my last case. It was one of those I couldn’t afford to lose. Maybe I lost my nerve.”

“Fall off the horse, you’re supposed to get right back on. Maybe you should go back to the kind of practice you started with.”

“And maybe I should start doing what I should have done in the first place.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Listen to my aunt Claire. How about you? Are you going to spend the rest of your life as an itinerant Piano Man?”

“Nah. I’ve been making my changes all along.”

“Somehow musician and scuffling PI doesn’t sound like a grand strategy for fulfillment.”

Blues laughed and agreed. “You’re right about that, brother. I’m tired of bouncing from gig to gig. I’m buying my own place.”

“Get out! What kind of place?”

“Used to be a restaurant on Broadway. I’m gonna call it ‘Blues on Broadway.’ It’ll be a first-rate piano joint. I’ll play when I feel like it, and if I don’t feel like it, I’ll get somebody to sit in.” He said it with the satisfaction of a man who’d figured it all out.

“Have you closed the deal yet?”

“Supposed to close in three weeks. That’s why I wanted to have dinner with you last night. My place is across the street from the restaurant and I was going to ask you to look over the paperwork for me.”

“How big is it?”

“The club is a couple of thousand square feet. But I’m buying the whole building. There’s an office upstairs that I need to rent out. Make a nice place for some mouthpiece to hang his shingle. I’ll make you a good deal.”

Mason looked at Blues as he smiled and pulled on a long stem of grass he’d been chewing. Before Mason could answer, Blues said he was going for a walk. Mason watched him disappear into the woods, carrying a shotgun. He looked around for his, checked its load, and climbed back into the love seat on the porch to consider Blues’s offer.

Practicing law was the only way Mason knew how to make a living. He’d chosen the profession because he believed in the law—in its central role in society—in its capacity to heal and make whole. At first, representing injured people gave shape to those values. But the practice of law introduced a different human dimension to living those values. Partners he couldn’t trust; clients whose cases he couldn’t win and who had nowhere else to turn. He had abandoned those values just to keep practicing when he joined Sullivan & Christenson. Some safe harbor. A desk above Blues’s bar might be the right place to start over.

Kelly pulled into the clearing around five o’clock. Mason was inside trying to scrape more clues from the printouts on O’Malley. She came in carrying sacks of groceries for the night and no signs of baggage from their conversation in her office. Mason wasn’t going anywhere, and so far, she wasn’t throwing him out.

“Any luck?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

“Where’s Sandra?”

“She’s staying with Riley until they find something.”

The sacks contained K.C. strip steaks, corn on the cob, charcoal, watermelon, and more cold beer. Mason was back in the barbecue business. He built a fire and put the steaks on when the coals turned white on the outside while still glowing red on the inside. Kelly joined him and they watched the flames lick the steaks until Mason decided to test the waters.

“Any news on Vic Jr.?” he began.

“McNamara called again. He’s really pushing me to bring you in.”

“Bring me into what? He makes it sound like I’m a criminal.”

“He isn’t satisfied with the information I gave him. Says he has to talk to you personally. I told him I’d let you know.”

“Great. What else?”

She hesitated to answer. When she did, Mason understood why. Amateurs aren’t supposed to be right.

“Vic Jr. attended the University of Chicago. His senior year, he was charged with drug trafficking and interstate transportation of a minor. Since he crossed state lines it became a federal case. And then it all went away.”

“Daddy buy him out of it?”

“I don’t know. But it puts him in the right place at the right time. Carlo D’lessandro runs the skin trade and the dope in and out of Chicago. He might have hooked up with someone in D’lessandro’s organization and the contact followed him home to Kansas City.”

“So now what?”

“I’m going to Chicago in the morning.”

“Why? The money laundering isn’t part of your case. Leave that to the feds. I thought you wanted to find Sullivan’s killer.”

“We both know they’re tied together. I want to get a look at Junior’s file.”

“That’s it?”

“No. I’ve still got sources in Chicago. I may be able to find out if D’lessandro is running this operation. If he is, I might come up with some way to pressure him to back off.”

“How are you going to do that? Go see him and ask him nicely not to let Camaya kill the poor schmuck who wandered into this mess?”

“Lou, sometimes you make it hard to care about you.”

“Well, that’s just part of my charm.”

“Really? If that’s as good as it gets, I may bring him back here to meet you in person.”

The grill was going up in flames and the steaks were sizzling on the edge of incineration. Mason rescued their dinner just in time. Later, she joined him in the love seat and surprised him by leaning her head against his shoulder. He put his arm around her, and she didn’t resist when he pulled her closer. Blues came outside and wisely announced he was going for another walk.

“My dad and I built this cabin,” she said, nestling against him. They were a natural fit. “It was just before he died. He could build anything—do anything. I helped him trim the trees and notch the logs so they’d fit together. Making it together made it really special.”

“It is special.”

“It’s always been my hideout. I come here to heal my wounds.”

The air was clear, the sky a starlit panorama. The love seat rocked them gently as he pulled her face to his. Finally, she breathed his name.

“Do you want to see my trapdoor?”

“I always knew you were a hopeless romantic.”

He fumbled with her belt. She held his hands in check.

“No, you dope. I really do have a trapdoor. I made my dad build it in the cabin. I thought it would be fun to have a secret way out.”

“Oh. Sure, I’d love to see it.” Mason said, slumping against the love seat. “Where is it?”

“In the bedroom.”

She giggled and spun out of his grasp, clinging to his fingertips. They made it to the bedroom, but Mason never saw the trapdoor. They began to undress each other as the moonlight cast their shadows against the wall. The bed was soft and they rolled to the center, entangled, consumed by the exquisite sense of discovery when two people make love for the first time. Part shyness, part adventure.

Mason traced the freckles on her chest with his fingertips, an abstract pattern caressing her breasts. She stroked the side of his face in a soft gesture that slid past his chest and ended with a grasp both firm and delicate. They paused for a moment, eavesdropping on the night sounds rolling through the woods, catching the sounds that didn’t belong.

Soft but certain footsteps, a discreet tap at the bedroom door, Blues’s cautious whisper as it opened a crack. “We’ve got company.”

“How many?” Kelly asked.

She dressed with an economy of movements, ignoring Blues’s presence. He kept his back to her, but Mason couldn’t. Watching her put her shirt back on was nearly as mesmerizing as taking it off. The sound of shells rattling into shotgun magazines finally got him moving.

“There’s a black Escalade blocking the road right where it comes into the clearing. Four guys got out, one short and heavy. He was giving orders to the other three. I figure we’ve got a couple of minutes, tops.”

Kelly snapped her service pistol around her waist. Blues dumped extra shells into three ammunition bags, slinging one over his shoulder, handing them the other two along with their shotguns as the woods came alive with animal sounds telegraphing news of the advancing party.

The air in the cabin thickened. Beads of sweat dripped from Blues’s neck. Kelly’s hair was matted along the edge of her cheeks. They were wired but under control. Mason’s stomach churned as he picked up his shotgun and ammo pouch.

Kelly slipped into the front room and peered out the edge of a window. The moonlight illuminated the clearing enough to make out shapes but not faces.

“That’s got to be Camaya standing next to the Escalade. I don’t recognize the others,” she whispered over her shoulder. “They’re at the edge of the clearing. There’s about a hundred feet of open space between them and the cabin.” She crouched below the window line and scooted back into the bedroom. “They’ll see us if we climb out the windows. We’ll go out the back way,” she said, opening the closet door. Blues started to roll his eyes until Mason explained.

“Trapdoor. Every high-class cabin has one.”

Kelly knelt and pressed down on a plank in the center of the closet floor with her right hand. The other end rose, revealing a steel ring that she grasped with her left and pulled up. A two-foot-square lid swung open on hidden hinges. She rested it against the wall of the closet. Holding her shotgun and ammo bag, she dropped into the crawl space below the cabin and disappeared. Blues went next, followed by Mason, who crouched and pulled the trapdoor closed over them.

Kelly was on all fours against the base of the rear wall, running her hands along the stones that formed the foundation for the cabin.

“Got it,” she said, pushing open a square section of rock that swung outward. She slipped through the opening and, an instant later, stuck her head back in and motioned them to follow.

Running close to the ground, Kelly led Blues and Mason across the open field behind the cabin, not stopping until the woods camouflaged them. They turned around in time to hear automatic fire ripping through the inside of the cabin.

“Bastards!” Kelly said.

“What now?” Mason asked.

“My Trans-Am and Kelly’s pickup are out front, so they know we’re here somewhere. Once they clear the cabin, they’ll come looking for us.”

Blues was calm, somehow satisfied with their predicament. His eyes shone as he shifted his weight lightly from right to left like a boxer keeping loose before the first bell, sweat trickling off his face. He was ready.

Kelly put a soothing hand around Blues’s arm as she drew both men near her, focused on the fight they were about to have.

“Lou and I will circle around to the north. Blues, you take the south side. They won’t find the trapdoor, so they’ve got to come out the front. If we can catch them in the open, we can take them. Don’t shoot unless they don’t give us a choice.”

Moving slowly to make as little noise as possible, Mason and Kelly threaded their way through the trees, watching the open space around the cabin for signs of company. There was no path to follow. The moonlight couldn’t penetrate the tangled vines and thorny bushes hidden in the dark that grabbed at their legs and feet. The few minutes it took to reach the front of the cabin could have been an hour.

Through the trees, Mason could see the yard in front of the cabin and imagined its oval shape to be a clock, the cabin at twelve o’clock. He and Kelly were hiding at three o’clock. The Escalade was parked in the mouth of the drive at the six-o’clock mark, engine still running.

Camaya leaned against the back, taillights lighting his face with a red glow. Blues’s Trans-Am and Kelly’s pickup were parallel parked at the edge of the grass, clockwise from the Escalade. Mason guessed Blues was somewhere between nine o’clock and midnight.