One Fool At Least (23 page)

No bullet sound tore through the air, and I lowered my hands to see Kirk aiming his weapon at both of us alternately. “Get next to him,” he ordered. “You want to die together, it’s fine with me.”

“It’s not up to you when we die,” I said. I felt an unexpected rage filling me. Who was this man, this crazy man, who had ruined my honeymoon, who was trying to ruin my life? To
take
my life, even. I felt the anger burning upward, into my head, and I craved action. I heard Jack say “Maddy, no!” and then I started marching toward David Kirk, with the vague intention of killing him with my bare hands.

“Stop it. Get away,” he said. “I’ll shoot.” His gun teetered in my direction and stayed there, pointed at me. I was still relatively far from him; Jack was perhaps thirty feet away from Kirk on the other side.

“Madeline!” Jack yelled, anguished. He started moving, a peripheral figure among the trees, a dreamlike figure, and then an explosion ripped through the air. My trembling hands flew to my ears, pointlessly, since the sound had stopped; at the same time both David Kirk and Jack fell to the ground.

“Jack!” I screamed. I wondered hazily if there had been some sort of bomb. Kirk’s gun had flown out of his hand; I barely glanced at it or him as I made my way to the prone Jack. When I got there Jack’s hand snaked out and yanked me down, not gently.

“Jack,” I said gratefully, feeling him for bullet wounds.

“Would you get DOWN, you crazy woman,” he said, but I could hear the relief in his voice. “We don’t know who’s shooting!”

This made sense, and I lay down next to Jack, feeling with a certain gratitude the cool ground under my skin, the pine needles that pressed into my cheek. At the same time I was trying to get a sense of what our enemies were doing. Kirk still lay prone; he was moaning and clutching his arm. I became aware, too, of approaching footsteps crunching and snapping across the forest floor.

“Everyone okay?” asked a voice that I thought I knew.

“NO, I’m not okay!” yelled Kirk through clenched teeth. Ardmore walked up to him, holding a shotgun loosely in his right hand; he prodded Kirk’s wounded arm with a booted foot. I grabbed Jack’s neck, as though somehow this would stabilize us both, perhaps make things seem sensible.

“I wasn’t talking to you, asshole,” he said. He turned toward Jack and me and seemed to be assessing our condition.

“We’re fine,” Jack said. “You have impeccable timing.”

“Yeah,” Ardmore said, sounding a bit surprised himself. He scratched at the bandage on his arm, the remnant of his own bullet wound.

“Maddy, let go of my throat,” Jack said gently.

I did it. I stared at Jack and then Ardmore without really seeing them well. I wondered when my heart would stop hammering in my chest, when the blood would stop rushing in my ears like a mighty river.

Suddenly we heard another gunshot. I stared at Jack in disbelief. “Who?—”

I asked, and then we heard a voice.

“That was a warning shot!” boomed another familiar voice. “This is Chief Roy Hendricks. Identify yourself, shooter.”

Ardmore grinned, then turned toward the sound of Hendricks’ voice. “I’m Ardmore Wilde, and I have David Kirk lying on the ground here. He’s been disarmed. I’d be obliged if you’d come and get him, Chief.”

“Is the Shea girl with you?”

“She is, Chief, along with her hubby,” Ardmore said.

I wondered how long they were going to carry on this conversation; then Hendricks appeared, gun drawn, and he too put a foot on Kirk while he read him his rights. Pat and Slider suddenly loomed up next to us. “Are you hurt?” Pat asked, kneeling next to his brother. “Maddy, we just got your message a minute ago. All you said was ‘Oh, God,’ and then we tried to call you and you were gone. We were mighty nervous.” Pat still sounded nervous; he was talking rapidly and his eyes darted everywhere while he talked. The poor man had been through some major stress this week. “Are you hurt?” he asked again.

“No,” Jack said. “Just finding I don’t have enough muscle power to get up right now. Never had a gun pointed at me before,” he said. “Not to mention that seeing Maddy pop up behind Kirk took about twenty years off my life.”

He looked at me, and I saw that there were tears in his eyes. “Maddy, I said stay put.”

“And I figured that I wouldn’t be much of a wife if I let you face a criminal unarmed, which is what you did. If I did that, you’d be furious.”

“You have done that,” Jack said, looking away again, staring at the sky.

Slider and Pat slid away, murmuring something about getting my crutches for me.

Hendricks and Ardmore hauled David Kirk to his feet and marched him away. He was complaining all the while, saying he intended to sue for maltreatment. Ardmore threatened to kick him. “I’m not on the police force,” he said. “I’m just a guy who wants to kill you. How does that feel?”

“Watch it, Wilde,” I heard Hendricks say, and then they were gone.

I touched Jack’s arm. “No one knows what to do under stress. You didn’t, and I didn’t. We both followed our hearts. Yours was with protecting your family—and so was mine.”

Jack sighed. “Okay. Okay. But Maddy, what in the world were you planning to do? Just walking toward him like that? It was like you were daring him to shoot you.”

I blushed. “Uh—that’s the part I can’t quite explain. I just got mad.”

“You’d better hope I don’t tell your brothers about this.”

“Oh,” I said.

We stared at each other. “There’s something else bothering you,” I said.

“No.”

“Yes. We almost died, which means you must be honest with me.” I sat up and felt slightly dizzy doing so. The trees, and the glimpses of mountain, were still disorienting to me.

Jack sat up, in yoga position, and rubbed his face. I put my hands on his knees. “Well, he rescued you again, didn’t he?” Jack said. “I mean, the guy is like this legendary hero, big and manly, and you obviously dig him, and this is the second time he’s come to the rescue.”

I stared at him for a minute, not even sure at first what he was talking about. Then I realized, with delayed logic, that he meant Ardmore. I started laughing at the thought, and then my laughter became hysterical; my fear of death, never reliable, had finally kicked in, late as usual. I laughed until tears rolled down my face, and Jack looked at me with a concerned expression.

“Oh, God,” I said, holding my stomach. “Oh, Jack. Don’t you see how ridiculous that is? The man has a giant gun and he shot Kirk from the shelter of the trees. He was never even seen. You, on the other hand, marched out there unarmed, ready to take on anything for the sake of those kids. You are my hero, Jack. You’ve been my hero over and over, this whole trip, my whole life.”

He was silent for a minute, looking at me and then looking at our joined hands in his lap. “I want to be that,” he said.

“You are.” We sat in silence until I squeezed Jack’s hand a little harder. “Hey, here’s a thought. What was Ardmore doing in Pat’s woods with a loaded gun?”

*

Inside Pat’s place it was a bit chaotic. Kirk had been bundled into the back of Hendricks’ car; backup had arrived, and Hendricks was talking importantly in Pat’s driveway to other guys in uniform. They all strutted around with their hands on the sides of their belts, and their body language grew more pompous when a news crew arrived.

I turned away from the window to see that Libby hadn’t quite managed to calm Colleen Kirk, who had been horrified anew by her husband’s actions, and had screamed “bloody murder,” according to Libby, when she saw him marched past the door.

“Why did he come here?” she asked tearfully now as Libby stroked her arm. “How did he even know I was here?”

“He was in the trunk of your car,” I offered.

The three teenagers sat together on the couch, staring at all of the adults as though they were performing an opera. Ardmore stood in one corner; apparently he’d been called in by Pat Shea to explain a thing or two.

Colleen Kirk stared at me in disbelief. “In the trunk of—how could he—oh my God,” she said. “I didn’t even know he was in there.” A spurt of anger appeared in her face. “He could have gotten me arrested! Here I was making an appointment with Pat and Libby, who feared me so much they needed police protection—and that sonofabitch was hiding in my trunk!” Her tears dried, but her face took on a manic look. “That sonofabitch,” she said. “I’m so sorry to you all. And to my poor brother. Oh, Finn,” she said. She looked suddenly old.

A few minutes later her brother Aidan appeared at the door; he had been summoned by Libby, and he looked a bit shell-shocked himself. Still, he handled things well when he saw his sister. He knelt beside her and put his arm around her, letting her cry on his shoulder. And then he said, “Come on, Coll. We’ll go talk about this at my place. The restaurant is closed.”

Colleen nodded. She looked exhausted, and as soon as I saw that lack of energy I felt its corresponding weight in myself. I collapsed into a chair in Pat’s living room and decided that I would stay there for the rest of my vacation. I watched Colleen go, after a private talk in one corner with Pat and Libby, who accompanied her to the door and gave her hugs before they sent her off with her brother.

“The only one she has left now,” Libby said, empathetic tears in her eyes.

“They’ll be okay, I think,” Pat said. “Colleen is young. She can bounce back from this.”

Jack walked up to Ardmore. “Thanks for being my back-up,” he said. “I didn’t have much of a plan.”

Ardmore took a swig of some whiskey Pat had slipped into his hand. “Well, you’ve got balls,” he commented.

“And yet I wonder what you were doing out there, gun in hand,” Jack said, smiling. Pat handed him a whiskey, too. Pat ought to get some sort of award for diplomacy, I thought suddenly.

Ardmore took another large sip and swished the liquid around in his mouth for a minute. Then he bent his big frame into a chair next to Slider, who still sat on the couch, his mouth hanging open. “I was trying to look out for my honorary brother here. I figured, when someone took a shot at me, that this was something linked to Finn’s kin, and then I heard about Slider’s incident with Kirk the other day. I started driving by here several times a day, just to keep my eye on things.”

Jack and I exchanged a glance. I wished Pat would hand me a whiskey. And then he did, and I felt a rush of love for him. I took a sip, coughed and sputtered, and then let the warmth calm me in its wonderful, sinful way. Libby was kneeling in front of me, examining my cast. She shook her head at me, still shaken by Jack’s and my ordeal and, I found out later, the revelation her son had made to her just before the craziness—that he had renewed feeling in his legs.

“It looks okay,” she said.

“It is okay, Libby. Everything’s okay.”

I touched her shoulder, then looked back at Ardmore, who was taking his sweet time with the story. “Today I drove past and saw Hendricks’ car. I worried that something had happened, so I drove up the driveway a ways, then got out and walked. And that’s when I saw her—” he pointed accusingly at me—“trying to go hell bent for leather on those chopsticks. It would have been comical, but I happen to know that girl means trouble, especially when she has that look on her face.”

“Oh yeah,
I’m
a trouble maker,” I said drily.

“So I went back to the car, got my gun, and went in the direction I’d seen her go. That’s about it. I saw Kirk there waving a weapon around, and I figured it would be permissible to shoot it out of his hand. Especially because the bastard killed my brother; he’s lucky I didn’t miss his hand and shoot him between the eyes.” There was nothing lighthearted about Ardmore’s expression now, and the hardness of it made me realize he had some of the renegade qualities of his own father—his father, who had ordered me kidnapped.

And Ardmore planned to be a lawyer.

It was a funny old world.

Finn’s will ultimately
wasn’t that problematic. Slider learned that he had been named, along with Ardmore, as a key beneficiary. However, a portion of Finn’s savings—which were surprisingly substantial—had been allotted to Aidan and Colleen, and Pat’s lawyer friend said that it was likely Colleen would still inherit her share, although she would obviously not get what her husband had wanted for the two of them.

Finn had confided the contents of his will to David, since he wanted some financial advice as well, and Kirk had been horrified to learn of Finn’s intentions, and what he considered the false loyalty of Colleen’s adopted brother. It had rankled with him; Colleen confessed that David “hadn’t been himself” in months; I wondered if David Kirk had ever been quite right.

It was over money, of course, that he and Finn had been arguing the night Finn died—the night Kirk shot him. According to Colleen, who had spoken only briefly with her husband at the jail, David had not intended to kill Finn; then again, he’d gone to see him with a loaded gun in his pocket. He insisted that his intention was to make Finn change his will first, but the will wasn’t in the office, and Finn wouldn’t provide its location. His lawyer had provided it, of course, after his death.

Kirk had threatened Flanagan with death to him and all of his “new family,” which Finn took to mean Slider, Ardmore and all of their friends. That of course included Molly, which was why Finn had whispered the warning to Slider as he, Finn, died.

Slider took all of this news surprisingly well; there were tears in his eyes when he heard the story, but he simply nodded and held Molly’s hand and said he was glad he’d had time to meet and know his brother, and glad of the new friend he had in Ardmore, his link to Finn Flanagan.

*

Before we left Montana I went back to the doctor, who said my foot looked better, and fitted me with a walking cast. I returned the crutches joyfully, and gave my husband a big hug. “Think how much has happened since we came here,” I said, nibbling his earlobe.

“What in the world are you going to tell your mother?” Jack asked, knowing that my mother has senses beyond human comprehension.

“Nothing. We just tell her I broke my ankle, that’s all,” I said. “Let’s go.”