David Handler - The Hot Pink Farmhouse

“Do you know where he keeps it?”

“What difference does that make? We have got to get out of here before he kills us both!”

“My truck’s down at the gate. So is my cell phone, I’m afraid. Your phone is out.”

“I know-he cut the outside wires. And stole my cell phone out of my shoulder bag.”

“Does he keep his will in that wall safe in the living room?”

“I think so,” she replied, as they inched their way down the staircase, step by step. “But I don’t know the combination. No one does, except for Father.”

“Okay, that’s not a problem.”

“Are you saying he told you the combination?”

“He didn’t have to-I know how his mind works.”

“I’ve known that awful man my whole life and not once have I known him. How can you even say that?”

Because he was certain, that was how. In fact, Mitch had never been as certain of anything in his whole life.

They reached the passageway at the bottom of the staircase now, standing there in the blackness as Mitch tried to regain his bearings. “I don’t suppose you can find your way back to the living room from here, can you?”

“With my eyes closed,” she replied. “We used to play down here when we were kids.”

Now she was the one leading Mitch. Slowly and surely, she led him back through the darkness of the catacombs toward the rickety wooden staircase. Up they climbed, back toward that secret doorway next to the fireplace, back into the living room. They stood there hand in hand, blinking from the lights. Listening for Hangtown. Hearing only silence. Takai suddenly becoming aware of how revealing her torn blouse was. She folded her arms primly in front of her exposed, taut left nipple, her bare shoulders scratched and bleeding, one cheek scraped raw. Her bare foot still oozed blood.

Mitch started toward the big rolltop desk over by the windows and pushed the button under the center drawer, triggering the panel of bookcases that hid the wall safe. “The combination will be taped underneath one of the other drawers,” he told her.

“How do you know that?” Takai demanded, sticking close to him.

“Because that’s where it is in every old movie I’ve ever seen-more important, he’s ever seen.”

“Make it fast,” she said urgently. “We’ve got to get out of here before he finds us.”

Quickly, Mitch knelt before the desk and started yanking out its drawers, dumping their contents out onto the floor and flipping them over, one after another after another… until, sure enough, there it was, on the underside of the bottom left-hand drawer, scrawled in pencil on a piece of masking tape: R16-L18-R26-L08.

Mitch tore it off and headed for the wall safe with it, Takai gaping at him in amazement. After spinning the dial a couple of times he carefully entered the correct combination, paused and yanked the safe open.

The first thing he found inside was cash. Lots of cash. Stacks and stacks of hundred-dollar bills wrapped in rubber bands.

“My God,” Takai gasped, piling them onto the desk. “That crazy old man must have a hundred thousand bucks in there.”

“You didn’t know about it?”

“Are you kidding me? If I had, I would have told him to put it in the damned bank.”

Deeper inside the safe, Mitch found a metal strongbox. It was unlocked. He found a fistful of stock certificates and legal papers inside. But it was the folded legal brief right on top that was of greatest interest, the one proclaiming itself “The Last Will and Testament of Wendell Frye.”

It was not an old document. It was on crisp new paper that still smelled of fresh ink. In fact, it was dated only three days ago, Mitch noticed. “He must have changed his will,” he mused aloud. “Sure, that must be what he meant.”

“Here, let me see that…” Takai snatched it away from him, her eyes scanning it quickly. And growing narrower and narrower as she began to comprehend the details. “Oh, that bastard!” she hissed. “He will never get away with this!”

“Oh, yes, I will, princess,” a heavy voice spoke up from the front hallway.

It was Hangtown, standing there in the doorway with the huge. 50-caliber Barrett propped against his shoulder. It looked something Rambo might have used to shoot a chopper out of the sky. As for the aged artist, he seemed exhausted and disheveled, but calm.

Eerily calm.

“I took you out of my will and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it,” he said, his voice low and menacing. Now he propped the Barrett on a table, the weight of its long barrel steadied by its own built-in stand, and pointed it directly at his younger daughter. “Care to know why I did it, Big Mitch?”

“Whatever you say, Hangtown,” Mitch replied, his eyes never leaving that big gun.

“He’ll kill us both, Mitch!” Takai cried. “He’s out of his mind.”

“I’ve never been more sane in my life,” Hangtown said. “That evil woman’s trying to trick you, Mitch. It wasn’t me who shot Moose. It was she. She killed Colin’s secretary. And she killed that cop at the gate, too. She wanted you to think I did it so you’d come running to her rescue. She was hoping you’d shoot me down like a rabid dog.”

“I could never do that to you,” Mitch insisted. “Not in a million years.”

“Then she would have done it herself,” Hangtown told him. “With you serving as her sympathetic witness. But I stopped her. And now it’s all over.”

“Put down that gun, Father,” Takai pleaded, her voice quavering. “You’re sick. You need help.”

Hangtown ignored her, staring down at the gun in his hands. “When I gave you that tour of my wine cellar the other night,” he told Mitch, “I discovered that somebody had been using my secret hooch cupboard. Hiding something in there. Something wrapped up in a rug or a blanket.”

“I noticed the outline in the dust,” Mitch recalled. “I remember that you seemed bothered.”

“Damned straight I was. Because there were only three other people on the face of the earth who knew that cupboard existed-Takai, Moose and Big Jim. And because I had no idea what was going on. None. Not until it was too late. Too damned-” He broke off, his voice choking, before he turned his penetrating blue-eyed gaze on his daughter.

Takai had begun to back slowly up against the fireplace, her own eyes wide with fear. She was trapped and she knew it.

“After you murdered your own sister with this thing,” Hangtown said to her, “you stashed it back in the hooch cupboard, knowing the police would never find it there. But I found it in there. That’s when I knew you’d done it, you evil bitch. But I kept quiet-I didn’t want the law to have you. I wanted to take care of you myself, just as soon as the two of us were alone. I wanted the satisfaction of telling you that you were too late. I wanted to see the look on your lovely, twisted face when you realized that you killed Moose for nothing.” He stood there grinning at her crookedly. “It may not be much, but it’s the only satisfaction this old soul has left. That and seeing you die before I do.”

“You bastard,” she snarled at him, the skin stretching tight across the bones of her face. “You mean, sick bastard.”

“Go on and tell him, princess,” Hangtown thundered at her. “Tell Mitch how you killed your own sister.”

“Screw you!”

He fired the Barrett, a colossal, deafening boom that took out a fist-sized hole over the mantel less than a foot from her head.

She shrank back against the fireplace, her teeth chattering.

Mitch stood there frozen, his ears ringing, realizing that there was only one way this could possibly turn out. Takai was going to die-right here, right now. There was no way he could stop it. The only question that remained unanswered was whether he himself was about to die, too.