John Verdon - Think of a Number

“Dickie-Dickie-Dickie Duck,” said the old woman in a rhythm quicker than the clicking of her shoes. Dermott’s mouth opened a fraction of an inch, but he said nothing.

“I did it because he looked like my father,” said Gurney with an angrily rising voice, “looked like my father looked the night he smashed a teapot on my mother’s head-a fucking stupid teapot with a fucking stupid clown face on it.”

“Your father wasn’t much of a father,” said Dermott coldly. “But then again, Detective, neither were you.”

The leering accusation removed any doubt in Gurney’s mind about the extent of Dermott’s knowledge. At that moment he seriously considered the option of absorbing a bullet to get his hands on Dermott’s throat.

The leer intensified. Perhaps Dermott sensed Gurney’s discomfort. “A good father should protect his four-year-old son, not let him get run over, not let the driver get away.”

“You piece of shit,” muttered Gurney.

Dermott giggled, seemingly crazed with delight. “Vulgar, vulgar, vulgar-and I thought you were a fellow poet. I hoped we could keep trading verses. I had a little ditty all ready for our next exchange. Tell me what you think of it. ‘A hit-and-run without a trace, / the star detective fell on his face. / What did the little boy’s mother say / when you came home alone that day?’”

An eerie animal sound rose from Gurney’s chest, a strangled eruption of rage. Dermott was transfixed.

Nardo had apparently been waiting for the moment of maximum distraction. His muscular right arm accelerated up and around in a mighty circular overhand motion, hurling the unopened Four Roses bottle with tremendous force at Dermott’s head. As Dermott sensed the movement and began to swivel the gun-in-the-goose toward Nardo, Gurney launched himself in a headlong diving leap at the bed, landing chest-first on the goose, just as the thick glass base of the full whiskey bottle smashed squarely into Dermott’s temple. The revolver discharged beneath Gurney, filling the air around him with an atomized explosion of down stuffing. The bullet passed under Gurney in the direction of the wall where he’d been sitting, shattering the table lamp that had provided the room’s sole illumination. In the darkness he could hear Nardo breathing hard through clenched teeth. The old woman started to make a faint wailing sound, a sound with a quavering pitch, a sound like a half-remembered lullaby. Then there was the sound of a terrific impact, and the heavy metal door of the room flew open, swung around, and hit the wall-followed immediately by the huge hurtling figure of a man and a smaller figure behind him.

“Freeze!” shouted the giant.

The cavalry had finally arrived-a little late, but that was a good thing. Considering Dermott’s history of precise marksmanship and his eagerness to pile up the crows, it was possible that not only the cavalry but Nardo and Gurney would have ended up with bullets in their throats. And then, when the gunshots brought the whole department swarming into the house and Dermott opened the valve, sending the pressurized chlorine and ammonia through the sprinkler system…

As it was, the only major casualty other than the lamp and the doorframe was Dermott himself. The bottle, propelled by all of Nardo’s combative rage, had struck him with sufficient force to produce what looked like a possible coma. In a related minor injury, a curved shard of glass had splintered from the bottle on impact, embedding itself in Gurney’s head at the hairline.

“We heard a shot. What the fuck’s going on here?” snarled the hulking man, peering around the mostly dark room.

“Everything’s under control, Tommy,” said Nardo, his jagged voice suggesting he wasn’t yet part of the everything. In the dim light coming in from the other part of the basement, Gurney recognized the smaller officer who’d rushed in on Big Tommy’s heels as the crew-cut Pat with the acetylene-blue eyes. Holding a heavy nine-millimeter pistol at the ready and keeping a close watch on the ugly scene in the bed, she edged around to the far corner of the room and switched on the lamp that stood next to the wing chair where the old woman had been sitting.

“You mind if I get up?” said Gurney, who was still lying across the goose on Dermott’s lap.

Big Tommy glanced at Nardo.

“Sure,” said Nardo, his teeth still partly clenched. “Let him get up.”

As he rose carefully from the bed, blood began flowing freely down his face-the sight of which was probably what restrained Nardo from immediately assaulting the man who had minutes earlier encouraged a demented serial killer to shoot him.

“Jesus,” said Big Tommy, staring at the blood.

An overload of adrenaline had kept Gurney unaware of the wound. He touched his face and found it surprisingly wet; then he examined his hand and found it surprisingly red.

Acetylene Pat looked at Gurney’s face without emotion. “You want an ambulance here?” she said to Nardo.

“Yeah. Sure. Make the call,” he said without conviction.

“For them, too?” she asked with a quick nod toward the odd couple in the bed. The red glass shoes caught her eye. She squinted as if trying to banish an optical illusion.

After a long pause, he muttered a disgusted, “Yeah.”

“You want the cars called in?” she asked, frowning at the shoes that seemed to be disconcertingly real after all.

“What?” he said after another pause. He was staring at the remains of the smashed lamp and the bullet hole in the drywall behind it.

“We’ve got cars on patrol and guys out there on door-to-door inquiries. You want them called in?”

The decision seemed harder for him than it should have been. Finally he said, “Yeah, call them in.”

“Right,” she said, and strode out of the room.

Big Tommy was observing with evident distaste the damage to Dermott’s temple. The Four Roses bottle had come to rest upside down on the pillow between Dermott and the old woman, whose curly blond wig had shifted in a way that made the top of her head look like it had been unscrewed a quarter of a turn.

As Gurney gazed at the bottle’s floral label, the answer came to him that had eluded him earlier. He remembered what Bruce Wellstone had said. He said that Dermott (aka Mr. Scylla) had claimed he’d seen four rose-breasted grosbeaks and that he had made a particular point of the number four . The “translation” of four rose-breasted grosbeaks struck Gurney almost as quickly as the words. Four Roses! Like signing the register “Mr. and Mrs. Scylla,” the message was just another little dance step advertising his cleverness-Gregory Dermott showing how easily he could toy with the dumb evil cops. Catch me if you can .

A minute later Pat returned, grimly efficient. “Ambulance on the way. Cars recalled. Door-to-doors canceled.” She regarded the bed coldly. The old woman was making sporadic sounds somewhere between keening and humming. Dermott was morbidly still and pale. “You sure he’s alive?” she asked without evident concern.

“I have no idea,” said Nardo. “Maybe you ought to check.”

She pursed her lips as she walked over and probed for a neck pulse.

“Uh-huh, he’s alive. What’s the matter with her?”

“That’s Jimmy Spinks’s wife. You ever hear about Jimmy Spinks?”

She shook her head. “Who’s Jimmy Spinks?”

He considered this for a while. “Forget it.”

She shrugged-as if forgetting things like that were a normal part of the job.

Nardo took a few slow, deep breaths. “I need you and Tommy upstairs to keep the place secured. Now that we know this is the little fucker who killed everyone, the forensics team will have to come back and run the house through a sieve.”