Клер Донелли - The Big Kitty

“Gordie!” Sunny yelled. “Hey! Gordie!”

He took one look at her and ran around the corner. Sunny dashed after him, digging out her cell phone, wishing she’d put Will on speed dial.

Behind her, she heard the roar of an engine, then wild horn-honking.

Sunny turned to see a huge blue SUV barreling through traffic—coming straight at her. The fight-or-flight response kicked in. If Sunny had been running before, she almost flew now, reaching the far sidewalk. But the big vehicle kept coming, climbing the curb.

Oh my God! Sunny thought, hurling herself to the left. The envelope she was carrying slipped from under her arm, and her phone flew from her hand as she skidded along the sidewalk. The truck flashed by, going way too fast … then hit the brick wall of the tavern.

They built things pretty solid back in the day. The wall may have shaken a little, but the front fender of the SUV crumpled. Sunny heard the bang! of an airbag going off, and a sort of rattling roar that built up to a huge crashing noise.

She pushed herself up onto her knees as the door of the truck opened. The driver wobbled out, but he had no interest in Sunny. His hair flew wildly around his head, and he held a hand over his nose and lower face. Bright red blood dribbled between his fingers.

A nondescript Toyota pulled up in the street. “Come on!” a voice yelled to the injured driver, who stumbled into the car as it fishtailed away. By the time Sunny got into the street, it was too far away for her to make out the license.

Sunny lurched back to the sidewalk, managing to retrieve her phone and her envelope as people poured out of the tavern, staring at the abandoned SUV.

Then a scream came from around the corner. Sunny forced her shaky legs into another run, skirting the rear of the SUV and swinging around.

Bad idea.

A young woman rammed into her, running blindly, still screaming at the top of her lungs. Sunny tried to step back, but the crowd from the tavern had surged after her, blocking any hope of retreat.

Now Sunny knew what had made that rattle-crash sound right after the truck had hit. Like many buildings from the old days, the Redbrick Tavern had a slate roof. The shock of the crash had dislodged a bunch of the thin slabs of rock and they had cascaded down onto a passing pedestrian.

Somebody in a paint-stained gray hoodie that was rapidly turning red.

15

The screaming womanfinally quieted down just as screaming sirens announced the arrival of the Kittery Harbor Police. The first responding officer was Constable Ben Semple. He looked a lot more authoritative today as he ordered the crowd back, called for backup and an ambulance, and then asked if anyone had witnessed what happened.

Sunny raised her hand, and he turned to her, his eyes going wide in recognition. “Ms. Coolidge!”

She mustn’t have looked her best, because the next thing Semple said was, “Are you all right?”

“You’ve got to call Will Price,” Sunny said, trying to keep her voice low and steady. She’d tried to get him herself, but her fingers were shaking so much, she kept hitting the wrong buttons on her cell phone. “I don’t know if you recognized him, but that’s Gordie Spruance under there.”

More officers arrived, helping to herd the onlookers out of the way while Semple made a phone call and then knelt for a real examination of the bloody form on the sidewalk. The constable glanced at Sunny, giving her a brief, negative headshake. Rising back to his feet, he craned his neck to look at the roof.

“Was Spruance trying to avoid the SUV when it crashed?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “Gordie was trying to avoid me . I was trying to avoid the SUV.”

As she told her story, the constable began to get that glazed look she’d seen on his face before. “I don’t know what the sheriff’s going to make of this.”

“That makes two of us,” Sunny muttered.

Will arrived, using his badge to get past the police line. He looked bleary-eyed, as if Semple’s call had hauled him from a deep sleep.

He’s on the swing shift, Sunny thought. That’s exactly what that call did.

He also appeared to be a bit grouchy at being woken up. “Weren’t you supposed to call about wherever you were going?” Will demanded.

“I had to deliver—” Sunny broke off, looking at the envelope she’d been carrying. “Oh, God. I’ve got to get this to the Captain’s Table. Ollie Barnstable’s been chewing me out ever since I agreed to do that story for Ken Howell. This will give him an excuse to fire me.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but you can’t go,” Semple said. “You’re a witness to”—he gestured at the scene all around them—“whatever this is.”

“Looks to me like someone leaving the scene of a fatal accident—at the very least.” Will took the envelope from Sunny. “I’ll head over to the Captain’s Table and get this into Barnstable’s hands.”

“Also, tell him to call someone in to cover the office,” Sunny called after him. She turned to Semple. “Something tells me I’m not leaving here anytime soon, am I?”

*

Sunny’s suspicion turnedout to be all too correct.

After canvassing the crowd, Constable Semple wound up taking her and a couple other witnesses to the police station, where they were divided up into separate rooms and asked to give statements.

By the time she finished with that, Will had reappeared. “Barnstable was wining and dining some foreign guy,” he reported. “And you were right, he was not happy when I told him what had happened. He seemed to think you tried to get yourself killed just to inconvenience him.”

“I’d say it was a bigger inconvenience for poor Gordie.” Sunny shook her head. “How could this stuff be going on? This is Kittery Harbor, where nothing happens.”

Will’s initial grin faded into a serious frown. “So would you mind going over the sequence of events again for my benefit?”

She explained about getting the call from Ollie, bringing the package, seeing Gordie … and what had happened as a result.

As she did, Will kept looking at some papers in his hand. “The getaway car—you said it was a Toyota?”

She slowly nodded. “I saw the logo on the trunk. But I was still getting up. I never got a decent look at the license plate. I can’t even say if it was from Maine or New Hampshire.”

“And the car’s color?”

“It was one of those new bland metallic colors.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know what you’d call it. Cream? Sand?”

“Well, that falls in between the person who called it silver and the one that called it tan.” Will sighed.

“And the one that almost hit me was blue,” Sunny suddenly said.

“Yeah.” Will drew out the word a little. “Easy to check on, since it’s still stuck against the wall at the Redbrick. If you want to be precise, I believe it’s sport blue clearcoat metallic.”

“A Ford Explorer.”

Will gave her a bemused look. “That’s right. You must really fixate on logos if you noticed that bearing down on you while busily jumping out of the way.”

Sunny shook her head. “I saw it before. That day you gave me a lift, that—that monster truck was following me on my bike.” She began to shake again. “It would have been really easy to wait till we got out on an empty road and—”

Will grabbed her hands. “They didn’t then, and they didn’t now,” he broke in forcefully.

“But you can’t put this down to a Wile E. Coyote foul-up.” Sunny paused for a second, struck by a thought. “Or can you? Was Gordie there to lure me into position for that truck? Or was he just really unlucky—in the wrong place at the wrong time?”