Everyone Dies (33 page)

A state police cruiser came toward him on the Interstate. It slowed, drove onto the left shoulder, cut across the median and oncoming traffic through a break in the northbound flow, and stopped next to him. Russell Thorpe got out.

“Got problems, Sergeant Istee?” Thorpe asked jokingly, gazing at the steam billowing from the engine compartment.

“The water pump went out,” Clayton said, returning Thorpe’s smile, “and you don’t have to be so formal.”

Russell’s smiled broadened. “Good deal. Santa Fe dispatch passed on a request from Chief Kerney. He’d like you to stop by his house.”

“Did the baby come?” Clayton asked.

“Last night,” Russell replied, “and mother and son are fine.”

“Great,” Clayton said.

“I’ll give you a ride there after the tow truck arrives. ETA is ten minutes.”

“I’d like to get briefed on what’s been happening up here first,” Clayton said.

“I can do that while we wait,” Russell said, opening the passenger door to his cruiser.

Clayton nodded and climbed into Thorpe’s unit.

Samuel Green left the diner with a plan in mind. He gassed up his car at a self-serve station, then checked the yellow page listings for florists at a pay phone. After writing down the addresses of several that weren’t in busy retail, shopping mall, or downtown locations, he cruised by the businesses. He decided to use a florist that shared a stand-alone building with a shoe store on Cerrillos Road, where the only vehicle outside either establishment was the flower delivery van.

He drove around the building before parking and found four cars in reserved employee spaces near the back doors to the shops. Inside the flower shop he saw no surveillance cameras. A middle-aged woman and a kid in his early twenties worked at a table behind the customer counter unpacking fresh cut flowers from boxes and placing them in a glass refrigerated display case that stood against a wall.

Green approached them with a smile. “I need to send some flowers.”

“What’s the occasion?” the woman asked, wiping her hands on an apron. She had a soft, placid face and chubby arms.

“A birth,” Green replied. “Put something nice together.”

The woman smiled cheerily. “I’d suggest stargazer lilies, some roses, and spikes of liatrus, set off with ferns and some delicate baby’s breath.”

“That sounds perfect,” Green said. Except for the roses and ferns, he didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about. “Can you deliver?”

“Certainly,” the woman replied. “What color roses would you like?”

“Red will do,” Green replied.

She asked him to select a card from the rack on the counter and turned away to begin putting the arrangement together. The kid moved the boxes of cut flowers to a work table and continued unpacking them.

Using a fingernail to hold the card in place, he scrawled congratulations, added an exclamation mark, scribbled an indecipherable name, and left it on the counter. He watched as the woman stuck a stem with a whole bunch of purple flowers into a vase. It only took her a couple of minutes to complete the job. She tied a ribbon around the vase and carried it to the counter.

“That’s so lovely,” she said, as she admired her handiwork.

Green nodded in agreement. “How soon can it be delivered?”

“Is it going to the hospital?”

Green shook his head and gave her Kerney’s address.

“We’ll get it out right away,” she said as she wrote the address on a delivery slip, put the card in an envelope, and attached it to the vase.

“Thanks a lot,” Green said as he paid the bill.

“Thank you,” the woman replied. “We love doing birth bouquets. It’s such a special event to celebrate.”

Green smiled. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

While Sara and Patrick slept, Kerney dozed on the living room couch until the ringing doorbell brought him to his feet. A quick check out the window revealed another delivery truck and a kid standing on the porch holding a vase of flowers.

Kerney opened up wondering if the house would be filled with bouquets by day’s end. It was the third delivery since they’d arrived home.

He tipped the kid, put the vase on the coffee table, and read the card, trying to make out who’d sent it. He couldn’t decipher the name, and the handwriting was unfamiliar. Maybe Sara would know. He’d ask when she woke up.

Minutes later the doorbell rang again. This time Kerney glimpsed a state police cruiser in the driveway and Clayton, who was dressed in civvies, standing at the door.

“Where’s your vehicle?” Kerney asked when he opened the door.

“Getting a new water pump installed,” Clayton replied with a wave to Russell Thorpe, who drove away.

“It’s good to see you.”

“I understand I now have a brother,” Clayton said as he stepped inside and shook Kerney’s hand.

“Yes, you do,” Kerney said, surprised that Clayton hadn’t stressed a half-blood relationship to Patrick. He looked for an unspoken coolness in Clayton’s expression and saw nothing but genuine pleasure. “Six pounds, ten ounces. Fortunately, he looks like his mother.”

Clayton smiled. “That’s good. Let’s hope he’s not as troublesome to deal with as I’ve been.”

“You’ve been confusing to deal with, not troublesome,” Kerney said with a laugh.

Clayton chuckled in agreement and looked around the room. “So where is he?”

“Sleeping. So is Sara. Come into the kitchen. We can talk there without disturbing them. You did good work down in Socorro.”

“Not good enough,” Clayton replied as he followed Kerney through the living room. “We still haven’t caught him.”

“I’ve got some ideas why,” Kerney said. “Are you up to speed on what happened last night?”

“Yeah, the bald-headed man,” Clayton said as he sat at the kitchen table. “Thorpe filled me in.”

“Good,” Kerney said. He filled two coffee mugs and brought them to the table. “But first, how are Grace and the children?” he asked.

“Doing better,” Clayton answered. He sat back in his chair and talked about how he’d hated to leave them while they were still so upset, how Wendell had gone a bit wild after the explosion, how Hannah had glued herself to her mother, how Grace probably felt abandoned by his decision to go to Socorro.

“Didn’t Grace understand that it was something you had to do?” Kerney asked.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t make it any easier on her,” Clayton replied, launching in to all the things that needed to be done to get everything back to normal.

Kerney nodded sympathetically and listened, thinking maybe something good had come out of all the adversity and chaos of the past week. For the very first time in their relationship, Clayton was really talking to him.

Down the street from the flower shop Samuel Green waited impatiently for the kid in the delivery truck to return. What happened next would all depend on what the kid had to tell him.

Even though there was heavy traffic on Cerrillos Road, nobody had entered the shop since Green left, and only one customer had made a quick stop at the business next door. If the trend held, there shouldn’t be any problem putting the second phase of his plan into action.

After ten more minutes, the kid arrived. Green left his car, circled behind the building to avoid any curious eyes inside the shoe store, and walked into the shop. The bell on the door tinkled and the kid and the woman looked up from the counter and smiled at him.

“Back so soon?” the woman asked.

“Yeah, I need to send some flowers to another friend,” Green said sheepishly as he stepped toward them, looking at the kid. “Were you able to make that delivery?”

The kid nodded. He had a big ugly-looking pimple on his neck. “Yeah, I just finished the run.”

“That’s great,” Green said. “Were there any police officers there?”

The kid gave him a funny look. “Just the one that took the flowers. He wore a badge and a gun on his belt.”

“But it was the father, right?” Green said, describing Kerney to the kid.

“Yeah, it was him,” the kid said, “as far as I could tell.”

“Super,” Green replied, as he pulled the pistol from the waistband at the small of his back. He shot the woman first and then the kid, the silencer flattening the sounds into dull splats.

He stepped around the counter. Both were dead, the kid with a stunned look on his face, and the woman still wearing her frozen, customer-friendly smile. He took the truck keys out of the kid’s pants pocket and concealed the bodies behind the counter.

Moving quickly, he put on a pair of latex gloves, found more keys in the woman’s purse under a small desk, locked the deadbolt to the back door, and turned on the telephone answering machine. He got a wad of paper towels in the small restroom, wiped off the counter to destroy any fingerprints, and put the pen he’d used to write the note in his shirt pocket.

He pulled a piece of plain paper from the tray of the fax machine, and wrote out a message in block letters with a felt-tipped marker. Then he grabbed a fancy floral display from the refrigerated case and taped the message to the inside of the shop’s door.

Green glanced around before locking up. No one was in sight. He wiped his prints from the handle of the door, put the flowers in the delivery van, and drove away unable to resist the laugh that bubbled out of him as he thought about the sign he’d put up. It read:

CLOSED DUE TO A DEATH IN THE FAMILY

That sure as hell was true, and would soon apply to Kerney and his family, too, if all went well.

Green eased into the passing lane, making sure to use the turn signal even though no cops were in sight. Within the hour he’d be done with it, back in his car, and heading for the open road.

Over a second cup of coffee, Kerney explained why he believed the killer was the bald-headed man and not Olsen.

Clayton, who agreed with Kerney’s analysis, nodded. “So we’re back to having an unknown suspect.”

“Unless we can make an ID, this could drag on for some time,” Kerney said glumly. “But if we stay smart and ask the right questions, we’ll find him.”

“Well, until then we’ll just have to keep our guard up,” Clayton said as he got up and put his coffee mug in the sink.

“I’m sorry all this crap fell on you and your family.”

“It’s not your fault,” Clayton said as he returned to his chair. He leaned forward and gave Kerney a studied look. “Tell me something. Did you go into the delivery room with Sara?”

Kerney nodded, grinned, and his eyes lit up. “You bet I did.”

As Kerney described the experience with unabashed delight, Clayton felt the last of the pinprick anger he’d always felt about Kerney begin to wash away. The thought came to him that his boneheaded rejection of Kerney hadn’t been fair to the man. That it had been ground into him by his mother for as long as he could remember never to question who his father was, no matter how much he longed to know.

For the first time Clayton wondered if he’d been angry with the wrong person. Maybe it was time to stop trying to be the perfect, politically correct Apache man his mother always expected him to be and instead concentrate on being Kerney’s friend.

Clayton smiled as Kerney described his shaking hands and pounding heart when he’d looked at Patrick for the first time and cut the umbilical cord. “Isn’t that a kick?” he said.

“You’ve done it?” Kerney asked.

“Twice.”

The doorbell rang and Kerney got to his feet. “It’s probably more flowers,” he said.

He checked out the window to be sure and recognized the van, although the man waiting with flowers in hand wasn’t the same kid who’d delivered earlier. He took a couple of bills from his wallet and swung open the door.

Green smiled as he brought the pistol from behind the vase and pointed it at Kerney’s gut. “Hello, shithead,” he said. “Try to act natural or I’ll kill you where you stand.”

“Don’t do this,” Kerney replied.

“Where’s your bitch and her baby?” Green asked.

“In the bedroom sleeping,” Kerney said, raising his voice slightly.

“Good. Keep your hands at your side, step back slowly, and let me in. Be cool.”

“Whatever you want,” Kerney replied as he backed up.

Green waved the pistol. “Keep moving.”

Kerney stopped when his legs hit the edge of the coffee table.

Samuel Green closed the door with the heel of his shoe and put the flowers on the foyer table. “How do you want it?” he asked. “You first, or the bitch and the baby?”

“I thought you wanted me to watch them die,” Kerney said, raising his voice another notch.

“I’m flexible,” Green whispered. “Keep your voice down.”

“But not very bright,” Kerney said. “You didn’t do your homework with Olsen.”

“Fuck you,” Green said, his voice rising a bit.

“Where is Olsen?” Kerney asked, trying to keep the conversation going. He hoped that sooner rather than later, Clayton would come looking for him.

Green smirked. “Talking won’t keep you alive. But I’ll answer your question. He’s at the bottom of a very deep hole.”

“How imaginative,” Kerney said. “You made all these creative finesse moves, and where did it get you?”

“Don’t try to rile me, Kerney. You still don’t know who I am, do you?”

“I’m working on it.”

Green heard a flush of water running through the pipes beneath the floor. “Sounds like momma is up,” he said, waving the gun. “Take me to her.”

“Kill me now,” Kerney said.

“No way, cowboy.”

Kerney led the way past the open kitchen door. Clayton was nowhere to be seen. He turned the corner of the hallway just as the door to the guest bathroom behind him began to open.

“Hit the deck,” Kerney yelled as Green swung toward the sound and fired two quick rounds, chest high into the door. He reached for Green as the man pivoted back to face him. Two bullets shattered the bathroom door and hit Green in the back.