Jerry Labriola - Murders at Hollings General

What the!

The other car's door opened slowly and the figure slid out. David verified it was Nick-outwardly unarmed. And he recognized the car as a white Buick Park Avenue.

"Stay down," David said, exiting. "Just in case." He raced to Nick's side and they both crouched between the cars. Nick pulled out a revolver from his waistband.

"You got the same call?" David asked.

"That I did," Nick said.

David raised up and peered over the top of each car. He returned to his crouch and said, "I don't think he's here at all. Looks like we've been snookered. The creep's toying with us. Whoever he is, he's toying with us." Nick nodded.

David wondered why Nick hadn't offered the same conclusion instead of a nod and then the proclamation, "Such are the wild chases in police work."

David didn't need that and, after searching Nick's face, responded, "Well, I'm hungry and I need a drink."

"Me, too," Nick said.

David drove off without saying good-bye or bothering to ask Nick how long he had been parked there. It was unusual behavior but he had a gut feeling Nick preferred it that way, too. Ordinarily, David would have censured himself for leaving an associate so brusquely, but he held that Nick Medicore was no ordinary associate and that the last week was no ordinary time.

On the way to Kathy's mother's house, he stewed in his Mercedes, ambivalent over feelings of being duped and of becoming quasi-competitive with Nick. Dismissing any dire consequences of a different outcome, he was disappointed he hadn't found a stranger there, an out-of-towner. Not a Spritz or a Foster, and certainly not a Medicore. What the episode did was reinforce what he had thought all along. It placed the killer closer to home, roaming the spots David knew. And it compelled him to wonder about Nick's nonchalance. Somehow, he had difficulty visualizing the Chief Detective taking the same precautions he had taken in approaching the Center. But no difficulty in imagining his driving straight to the spot where his car was parked.

And another thing. Why did he blink his lights? Did he think the killer was coming down that hill? Or yours truly?

Kathy greeted David at the door with, "You got held up?"

"Not exactly," he said, removing his scarf and gloves and tossing them on the hall. table. They embraced and kissed, longer than he expected.

Standing in the hall of plaster, wainscotting and high ceiling, he sketched what had transpired at the recycling center, leaving out his offense-as-a-defense maneuver.

Kathy listened and proffered her opinion: "I think both of you were nuts. Men!"

David made like he hadn't heard and said, "By the way-your boss?"

"Nick? What about him?"

"Did he come here well-recommended?"

"Very. They hated to give him up, I understand. His wife's from these parts, her parents aren't well and that kind of thing. I guess she worked on him pretty good. We had the opening, as you know, and he relocated. Why?" Kathy's eyes narrowed speculatively. "You're not insinuating …?"

"Who's insinuating?" He took Kathy's hand and led her into the living room.

"Then why the question?"

"Curious, that's all."

But David had been aroused by more than curiosity. Perhaps our Chief Detective truly relishes my taking a lead role in the investigation for his own selfish-or devilish-purposes: to dilute professional input, maybe to screw things up. It's lame reasoning, and I'll concede he's a lame suspect, but right about now, nothing and no one's written off. He's either the killer and wants an amateur on the case-or he's not and is investigating as hard as I am.

He refused dinner and stayed but ten minutes more, engaging in a round of unfocused converation with Mrs. Dupre before he left.

For most of the trip home, a pair of bright lights filled David's rearview mirror. Their shape reminded him of a frog's eyes.

The next day, Wednesday, David felt the sting of January winds in the hollow of Cannon Cemetery. Specks of snow floated and disappeared into the ground, belying the morning's sun and reflections off parking lot bumpers and antennas. He considered whether snow flurries and bright sun could combine for a rainbow, deduced not, but scanned the sky anyway. Bedecked in his double-breasted funereal suit, he strode from his car along a rigid path which curled among mounds of tombstones, flowers and flags, toward a yellow and white canopy set at path level and to the right. Within its shade, most of the folding chairs were unoccupied, and he recognized those seated-perhaps thirty-as the most seasoned doctors and nurses from crosstown Bowie Hospital. Alton and Nora Foster were the only others there to represent Hollings General.

Earlier, David thought it hypocritical even to consider attending the church service for Dr. Everett Coughlin, but irreverence aside, reasoned it was necessary to check out the graveside gathering. Would the killer dare come? A surveillance mission, that's all.

He queried how the nearby burial pit had been dug through hardened turf and noticed the front end of a hearse parked on its other side. A casket with blinding brass handles rested on a rig while a clergyman sat impassively on a front chair, flanked by four women, their sobs puncturing the silence. SOP, so far.

David took a position behind and slightly above, having calculated the best vantage point for his purpose, leaning against a tree, his foot on a neighboring stump. He perused the scene ahead, gaze askance-he had forgotten his sunglasses-avoiding the glare from the casket handles and trimmings. At first, he thought little of a linear flash of light registering in his periphery, coming at him from halfway up the mountainside on the left like mirror signals he had seen in cowboy movies. But, weighing its location in dense underbrush, he had to confront the glare head-on, and he saw that it had changed shape-to a smaller, sharper ball of fire. David pushed off the stump, dropped to the ground and rolled behind the tree. He ended up on his back, as if for a judo stomach throw-only this time, he waved a Minx semiautomatic. Jesus Christ Almighty! A rifle! The specter of a bloody bullet wound similar to the one on the body now being prepared for interment tore through his mind. He listened for a shot. There was none. He got up and peered around the tree. The reflection had vanished. That was a rifle, goddamn it! The intended victim disappeared. So it disappeared.

All ahead remained serene, as serene as David was alert for flight, not away but toward the mountainside. He backed up and, intending to twirl around, clutched his knee and hopped twice on his good leg. Reconsidering, he hobbled toward the parking lot, knowing that whoever yielded the weapon, reached his nest from a road on the other side of the mountain, the same one the hearse had traveled.

David slid into his car, lifting his sore left leg with his hands. He sped off and, reaching a clump of trees at the turn to the far road, heard the poorly muffled roar of a two-stroke engine. Two strokes? He rounded the curve in time to observe a red motorcycle appear out of a swale, two hundred yards ahead. Just before a Sunoco Station, it left the road and knifed into the woods, up a trail David had often walked in earlier times. For a moment, he thought of taking the dirt road beyond the station. It was a road which led to High Rock Mountain at least a mile up its side, but he knew the parallel trail veered off halfway up and guessed the cycle had already reached that point.

Instead, David stopped at the foot of the trail, got out of the car and looked over its roof into a narrow bend, empty but for thinning fumes. When he could no longer hear the cycle, he sat in the car and puzzled over what he had just beheld. Is that our man in the first place? On a motorcycle? It looked like a Honda or a Suzuki. Or even a Harley-Davidson. Who can tell at that distance? And another thought tumbled from the depths of his brain like a coin in a pay phone. When the cycle turned into the trail, the driver's face might have looked flat. Might have.