Serious Crimes (A Willows and Parker Mystery) (22 page)

Chapter 24

Garret hadn’t bothered to fasten his seatbelt, and neither had Billy. There was no time to react. Like synchronized would-be suicides, their helpless bodies tried to take a header through the fractured windshield and into the wreck of the store. But the Cadillac was equipped with all the options, including the latest in protective devices, the airbag. The windshield rushed at Billy and then the bag blossomed in front of him like a great big pillow, swallowed him up and saved his life. The bag was charged by a pressure cartridge. It had been designed to expand in only a few thousandths of a second, and then begin to collapse almost immediately, allowing the occupants of the car to escape.

The airbags functioned perfectly, but something was wrong with Garret; he wasn’t moving. Billy yelled at him again, and then saw that a shotgun blast had ripped a chunk out of the top of the bench seat, messed up Garret’s left shoulder pretty bad.

Billy wriggled and squirmed, struggled to escape the soft, pillow-like clutches of the bag. He managed to get his door open, fell out of the car. The Colt lay on the asphalt. He snatched at it. His ears were ringing. Somebody in a uniform ran towards him. He snapped off three or four shots — under such trying circumstances, it was impossible to keep an accurate count.

The uniform went down, cut a groove through the slush and lay still.

Billy got his feet under him. The Caddy had knocked a pretty fair-sized hole in the wall of the 7-Eleven. There was room enough to walk inside. The interior of the store was a shambles. The big floor-to-ceiling glass display cases of milk and fruit juices and soft drinks had tumbled. Must be a million cans of Coke in there, and he was as thirsty as he’d ever been. He squeezed off another shot, not aiming at anything in particular. The bullet hit a gas pump. An old man who’d been tanking up his car was startled into dropping the hose. Premium gasoline splattered across the car’s exhaust pipe, burst into flames. Billy stepped gingerly over a concrete building block, reached past the crumpled fender of the Caddy and grabbed an ice-cold can of Diet Coke.

The burning car’s gas tank exploded. A jagged piece of shrapnel whizzed through the air and buried itself in the shaggy flank of a Collie tethered to a bike rack next to the front door of the 7-Eleven. The dog bared its fangs and started screaming. Billy had never heard such a nerve-racking sound. So
human
.

Enough was enough.

He started running.

Billy ran in a straight line, following his nose. He hurdled the sprawled-out body lying belly-up in a pool of blood in the middle of Maple Street, stumbled on the curb and bounced off the wall of the liquor store. The impact jolted him hard enough to start him thinking again. He glanced over his shoulder. The car and pumps in front of the 7-Eleven were on fire, bright flames shooting fifty feet into the air. The Caddy’s brake lights glowed red and the horn blared endlessly, like a warning that had come far too late. Garret’s slumped form was backlit in orange and red. He seemed to have lost interest in the situation, but Billy supposed that was fair enough, given his condition.

Billy sprinted up Maple to Tenth Avenue, turned right. He jogged past an armoury, neatly parked rows of military vehicles. Across the railway tracks. Traffic on Arbutus was thick, and moving fast. Billy kept going. He heard the shriek of brakes, another horn. He didn’t slow down.

The Pinto was right where he’d left it. He tossed the Python on the front seat and fumbled in his pockets for the keys, then remembered he’d hidden them under the seat.

He found the keys and started the car. The exhaust belched black smoke. Behind him, there was a lurid orange glow in the sky, a flickering light that jaundiced the low-hanging cloud. He could still hear the screaming of the wounded dog. No, sirens. A screaming that filled his head and made it impossible to think clearly. He put the Pinto in gear and floored it and drove straight into the rear end of a Ford pickup. The Pinto’s headlights shattered and died.

Driving blind, Billy headed for the big house on Point Grey Road.

*

Nancy wanted to go to a movie, but Tyler wasn’t in the mood. She cleaned up the kitchen and dining room while he read the evening paper, then shrugged into her coat and drove the BMW up to Broadway and rented a video — a French detective film called
Chou
Pantin
. She hung her coat in the hall closet and paid a quick visit to the wine cellar in the basement, chose a dusty bottle of Napa Brothers Beaujolais. Maybe a little red wine would start the blood moving through her husband’s veins.

When she came back upstairs, Tyler was reading the sports section. He had no interest in baseball or hockey or football, but felt it necessary to stay abreast of the sporting news in order to function in casual office conversation.

Nancy used a gas-powered opener to pop the Napa Brothers cork. She took two glasses from the shelf above the refrigerator and placed the bottle and glasses and two soft-pink cloth napkins on a mahogany tray, carried the tray into the living room on her way to the stairs.

Tyler neatly folded the sports section and tossed it on the coffee table.

“What’s going on, Nance?”

“I rented a movie. I’m going to watch it upstairs.”

Tyler nodded. “Two glasses, huh. Thirsty?”

“I thought you might care to join me.”

“What’s the movie?”

Nancy told him. He frowned. “Is it… sexy?”

“It’s a thriller.”

“A sexy thriller?”

“Not that I know of, Tyler.”

“Subtitles, or dubbed?”

Nancy gave him a look. She hated dubbed films, and Tyler knew it. It was one of the things they’d had in common, before they were married and Tyler got rich and she started feeling middle-aged and neglected.

Tyler said, “Be up in a minute.” He scratched his stomach. Nancy, climbing the thickly carpeted stairs, wondered why it was that as men got older, their pants got baggier and their shirts got tighter.

She went into the master bedroom, put the tray down on the nightstand on her side of the bed, walked across the room and slipped the video into the VCR. A tiny red light glowed brightly. The universal remote control was on top of the television. Tyler went into a rage if he had to go searching for it. In his life, there was a place for everything and he strongly believed everything should be kept in its place. Including his wife.

Nancy picked up the rectangle of black plastic and punched several buttons, careful of her fingernails. The Sony flicked into life and then the VCR made a nasty whining sound. She fast-forwarded to the FBI copyright warning and stabbed delicately at the PAUSE button. The screen held steady.

She poured herself a third of a glass of wine and drank it down and poured herself another.

The hall light went out and Tyler walked into the bedroom. He glanced at the screen and then at Nancy and then back at the screen. He said, “I’m going to take a quick shower.”

Nancy said, “Okay,” in a neutral tone of voice.

Tyler tilted his head and raised his eyebrows. He gave her a ridiculous, leering wink. “Care to join me?”

“I’ll have to think about it.”

Tyler grinned and said, “I’ll soap you in all those special places you like so much but can’t quite reach.”

Nancy said, “Now I’ve
really
got some thinking to do.”

Unbuttoning his shirt, Tyler went into the ensuite and shut the door softly behind him.

*

Billy couldn’t stop thinking about Garret, if he was dead, and what
that
was like. At the time, scrambling to get free of the car, the shoulder wound had been a blur, a red smear. But now, in retrospect, he saw the wound with vivid clarity.

It was just amazing, how much time the two of them had spent joking and bitching and freezing their asses off in that parking lot, waiting. And then it was just amazing how fast it was all over.

Billy knew it was impossible, but he wanted a chance to do it over again, and get it right this time. Take charge, and not be manipulated. As he drove his Pinto due west towards the house on Point Grey Road, he replayed the botched holdup over and over again.

It never took more than a few seconds, and it always came out the same.

Billy had kept Garret on a short leash since the day they’d met, fucking
years
ago. But it was Garret who was first out of the Caddy. And it was Garret who goddamn
ran
at those uniforms, Garret who pulled the Remington’s trigger and blew a man away and then swivelled his hips as he worked the pump and fired again. Explosions that rocked Billy’s world.

They’d sat around in his living room, drinking beer and practising the techniques of murder, drawing down on talk-show hosts. Talking about
firepower
. What a gun could do to a man.

Billy had never had the faintest idea.

*

Garret pushed aside the partially deflated airbag. He crawled out of the Caddy and stumbled across Maple Street, back to the liquor store parking lot. The armoured car’s emergency siren was still screaming. He stared blankly down at the two guards with their faces shot off and nothing there but hamburger. He glanced up, looked all around, and yelled, “Billy!”

The manager of the liquor store waited until Garret’s back was turned and then crouched and scooped up a dead man’s .38.

Garret heard the scrape of metal on asphalt. He turned and fired. The load of buckshot struck the man in the chest. Garret was shooting with one arm and was in a considerable amount of pain. It was a lucky hit and he’d have gladly admitted it, had anyone asked.

Predictably, no one did.

Garret lowered the shotgun until the muzzle touched the asphalt, braced the weapon between his knees and shoved two fresh shells into the chamber and worked the slide. People were running in all directions, scattering like rabbits. A wealth of targets, but the sucker he really wanted to puncture was long gone.

He had a pretty good idea he knew where to find him, though.

*

Nancy sipped a little more wine and then began to take off her clothes. She wasn’t at all sure that she was in the mood, just yet.

But on the other hand, Tyler’s invitations were far too infrequent to ignore.

*

Traffic on Point Grey Road slowed and then came to an abrupt stop. Billy wondered if some fool had had an accident. Then he saw the black and white, and the cop with the flashlight. The car behind him was too close for him to back up. Not that he was much inclined to take a detour. He worked the Pinto’s gearshift, making sure the car was in low gear, and cradled the Python in his lap. There was only one cop. As he inched closer, he kept the nose of the Pinto up against the rear bumper of the car in front of him, so the cop couldn’t see the smashed headlights. He lit a cigarette, rolled down his window and cocked the Colt.

The cop glanced up, and then looked away. He waved his arm. The car in front of Billy moved forward. He hit the gas, and the Pinto bucked and lurched and all of a sudden he had his second rear-ender of the night.

The cop’s flashlight lanced towards him. Squinting, Billy fired into the blinding white eye of the beam. The light skidded sideways, and down. Billy raised his arm to protect his night vision and pulled the trigger again, shot through the Pinto’s windshield and right through the rear window of the car in front of him.

The car bolted down the street, tires screeching, and Billy gave chase. He was half a block away when he heard the wail of the siren. The lights of the black and white filled his mirror.

Billy shifted into second. Better. The car in front of him swerved sharply off the road, and rolled.

He heard a popping sound behind him, the dull
thwack
of a police wadcutter hitting metal. His faithful Pinto lurched as a tire blew out. There was an intersection just ahead. Waterloo Street. The name meant nothing to him. He yanked on the wheel. The Pinto drifted across the road and up on the boulevard. He pushed open the door and jumped, mowed snowy wet grass with his face, ended up on his hands and knees.

The crippled Pinto struggled up the boulevard. Billy scrambled to his feet. He jumped a fence and started running.

The cops would bring dogs to sniff him down. Pals of that goddamn Collie, probably. He needed something to spoil his scent. A sudden rainstorm, or a creek. Why was it that there was never a creek around when he needed one?

In the distance, someone shouted. A heartbeat later the night was splintered by a sound Billy had come to know all too well; the percussive thunder of a revolver fired at full speed.

Garret was dead. Bad enough, but now they’d got the Pinto, too.

*

Nancy waited until Tyler had finished showering and then turned the temperature up a little and let the water beat down on her. Tyler had made a few moves on her and hadn’t done too badly, all in all. But the truth was she had a hard time feeling sexy when he was wearing that goofy plastic shower cap.

She bent from the waist and ran a palm lightly up the calf of her leg. Her skin was soft and smooth. No need to use the razor. She counted to one hundred, as slowly as she knew how, then turned the water off and stepped out of the shower. She liked to keep Tyler waiting; it honed his appetite. But the timing had to be just right. If she left him too long, she’d come in and find him sound asleep. Dreaming of stocks and bonds, no doubt.