Макс Коллинз - You Can’t Stop Me

“By the police?” Jenny asked.

“No. Have Chris Anderson do it — tell him to lay on the Southern charm. Brown should be told we want to interview him for the show — as an outstanding citizen of Lebanon. Tell Chris to get him in front of a camera crew and just stall his ass with local color questions.”

“Cool,” she said.

Harrow came down out of the trailer like his hair was on fire, and Laurene and Choi fell in with him.

“Where we going?” Laurene asked.

“To see the sheriff.”

“What for?” Choi asked.

“To ask him about a land deal.”

The trio moved down the middle of a street crowded now with bystanders, reporters, state cops, and God only knew who else. The Killer TV teammates were heading toward the house where Harrow had lately confronted a serial killer of record proportions.

Gibbons was holding court in the front yard of the Shelton house, his deputies around him in a semicircle, the stocky sniper Colby Wilson immediately to Gibbons’s right.

Carlos Moreno and the two camera crews were off to one side, taking a brief break, until they saw Harrow coming. Then they all jumped to their feet at once, and the red lights came on, little demon eyes burning in the night.

As he approached the conclave of uniforms, Harrow received a thin-lipped smile from Gibbons, who said, “There’s the man of the hour.”

With Laurene and Choi behind him, Harrow positioned himself a few feet from Gibbons, facing the semicircle of local law enforcement. The camera eyes and microphones moved in, keeping their distance, but — like snipers — with their targets well in view.

“We haven’t really had a chance to talk, Sheriff,” Harrow said pleasantly. “There’ll be some follow-up, of course. My firearm killed a man. You’ll want to take my statement.”

“Of course,” Gibbons said, good-naturedly. “But that can wait till tomorrow, J.C.”

“Sure. There’ll be a lot of do tomorrow. For example, we’ll need to dig into this whole Kahverengi International matter.”

Gibbons flinched at the foreign word, then squinted as if he hadn’t understood. “Afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, J.C. This is Kansas. We don’t deal with international anything, except maybe Harvester.”

His deputies chuckled.

“You’re being modest, Herm. You have a distinguished local citizen, ex-sheriff Daniel Brown, who does considerable international business, and land development all over the map... including right here in Lebanon.”

“I suppose that’s so. But it doesn’t have anything to do with this tragedy tonight.”

“Well, Gabriel Shelton thought it did. Just the mad ravings of a serial killer, though, right? If we were to take his lunacy seriously, then we’d have to believe Sheriff Brown and his deputies, ten years or so ago... you were one, weren’t you, Herm, a deputy of Brown’s? You’d have to believe a crazy story like deputies strong-arming local people into selling out when they didn’t want to, all because the sheriff thought a new highway was coming through, and that land would become valuable... Ridiculous. Crazy on the face of it.”

Gibbons and Wilson, and several other of the deputies, were getting fidgety, glancing at the cameras and boom mikes that were picking this up.

“J.C.,” Gibbons said tightly, “this needs to wait for another day. It’s not the kind of thing to air in public, now, is it? I mean, a person could get in trouble with libel or slander or that kind of thing, with fool talk like this.”

“Oh, but Gabe Shelton’s way past getting sued. Your crack shot, Deputy Wilson, almost killed him, and the attempt put me in a position where I had to. So you’ll understand why his words kind of... haunt me. I don’t take them seriously, of course, but we learned by studying his ‘messages’ that there was a method to his madness, as the saying goes.”

“You need to put a lid on this, Harrow. You are on very shaky ground...”

“Way I see it, Sheriff? Shelton was a monster, all right, but it took some greedy, violent bastards to turn him into one. Shelton’s family, mine, twenty-some families, all torn to pieces just so some solid citizens could own some land, and maybe make some money, for themselves and their own families.”

Gibbons turned away from Harrow and pushed the air with his hands. “Gonna have to ask you folks from the media to move back now — this is a crime scene.”

“It’s a crime scene, all right,” Harrow said. “If Shelton’s to be believed, his wife and children were murdered by three men in black ski masks driving a vehicle that belonged to the local sheriff’s department. He thought deputies had come into his house to threaten his family — maybe things got out of hand, and murder wasn’t the intention. But murder was born that night — murder on a grand scale, because Gabe Shelton... who must have had his problems all along... had something inside him break, and something else inside him trigger. A serial killer was made that night, formed out of other men’s greed and brutality. A damaged soul went out and did terrible things, including murdering my wife and family... committing the crime done to him, again and again, screaming for attention and justice through his twisted deeds.”

Gibbons swivelled and pointed a finger at Harrow, obviously wishing it could be a gun. “Now this talk is going to stop — right now . It’s inappropriate, and you are embarrassing yourself, Harrow. You need to pull it together and—”

“You don’t understand, Sheriff. I’m a TV personality. I just want to interview the lead investigator into the deaths of Cathy and Mark Shelton — and that’s you , right? And my first question is — why didn’t you mention that pertinent fact to us, Herm? Why did I have to find out for myself?”

Gibbons came up very close to Harrow. “You need to go, Harrow. Now. Or I will take you into custody for disturbing the peace.”

“Like you did Gabe Shelton?” Harrow whispered; this was for Gibbons, not the microphones or cameras. “That unmarked car he saw was real. The men in the masks were real. I wonder if you were one of them?”

The sheriff’s eyes popped; his mouth twitched, and he backed away. Then he said to his deputies, “Let’s cordon off this crime scene and get these media types out of here! We have work to do!”

The deputies flew into their jobs, and the sheriff came back over to Harrow.

“J.C., you are wrong about this. You are embarrassing yourself. This ended tonight. You killed the man responsible for taking your family away from you. You need to be grateful.”

Harrow, calmly, coldly, said, “I wonder if I’m looking at the man responsible for taking my family away? Certainly one of them.”

Gibbons swallowed, and turned his back to Harrow and went about loudly supervising his deputies as they worked the yellow crime scene tape and batted the media back.

Suddenly Harrow sensed someone at his side: Jenny Blake. She handed him a slip of paper. He read it.

Then Harrow made an announcement in a voice loud enough to freeze the deputies in their motion, and to bring the various cameras and microphones his way again.

“ Excuse me! I have important information related to the aftermath of this case!”

Pin-drop silence.

“Former Lebanon sheriff Daniel Brown has left the country. His passport was okayed by Homeland Security tonight. He’s flying to South America.”

Across the yard, the sheriff turned toward Harrow with the look of a wet hound. “That son of a bitch ...”

“Looks like he left you holding the bag, Herm,” Harrow said genially. “Who knows? Maybe you can get immunity.”