“Until she turned up pregnant.”
“She called me at home, late. Asked me to meet her at the turnout. All very hush-hush and melodramatic.”
“She was being careful, Max, protecting you. If Milano found out, he’d can you in a New York second.”
“She shouldn’t have told me at all! I wouldn’t have known. It was all just a soap opera to her.”
“Maybe she thought you deserved to know.”
“To know what? That with my whole life falling apart, one small miracle happens and she was going to brush it off like a breadcrumb?”
“What did you expect her to do, Max? In her situation—”
“What about my situation! My wife is dying, I’m a quarter mil in the hole for medical bills, we’re losing the house—”
He looked away, swallowing hard, his jaw working. But the gun never wavered. He was on a tightrope, stretched taut across the abyss, only a word away from killing me. Or himself.
Or both of us.
“Just tell me what happened, Max. I need to know.”
“She said she was getting rid of it,” he said, looking away a moment. “She didn’t ask what I thought, or what I wanted to do. Everything is falling apart and — I snapped, I guess. Lashed out. I’ve never laid hands on a woman in my life.”
“You didn’t lay hands on her, Max,” I said, straining to keep my voice even. “You smashed her larynx with a kill strike.”
“Reflex from the army. A heartbeat later I would have cut my arm off to take it back. But I couldn’t. I can’t. There’s no going back now.”
“Or for me, Max. People know I’m here.”
“Actually, I’m counting on that,” he said, his eyes locking on mine.
“There’s no way out for me, I get that. But I can’t just quit, either. None of this is Margo’s fault, but if I go to jail, she’ll lose everything. She’ll die in some charity ward.”
I swallowed a surge of bile in the back of my throat. I knew where this was going. It was in his eyes.
“Somebody has to pay the tab for Sherry,” he continued. “That’s on me. But somebody has to see to Margo too. And I only know one way to do that.”
“To hell with you, Max! I won’t help you. It won’t work anyway.”
“Then we’ll both die for nothin’. I’ve already made my choice, Dylan. I thought it would be hard but it’s almost a relief. I’m already in the wind, almost gone. If I have to take you with me, I will.”
He fired a round. Point blank. The bullet ripped past my ear like a thunderbolt! I flinched, but managed to stand my ground. Max’s eyes were glittering with battle madness. He fired again! And then once more! Punching a hole through the wall, exploding a window behind me. And somehow I stood there. Didn’t move.
That’s three, I thought. He doesn’t want to kill me and he only has three rounds left—
But he was way ahead of me. Flipping the revolver’s cylinder open, he spun it hard and snapped it closed. Then he aimed straight at my head and pulled the trigger.
Click! The hammer fell on an empty chamber. My knees turned to water.
“Damn it, Dylan, you’ve the devil’s own luck!” he cackled. “Your odds—”
Pure reflex: I drew my weapon and fired two shots, a double tap to the torso, dead center. The impact sent Max stumbling backward into the tool bench, then he dropped to his knees.
I was so enraged I almost fired again. Probably should have. His gun was still in his fist. But he didn’t seem aware of it anymore.
Blood was bubbling from his mouth. He thrust his face upward, keening for a few final breaths. His eyes met mine and I could read his desperation.
Kneeling beside him, I took the gun out of his hand, grasping his shoulder to keep him from falling. He sighed, and I realized his eyes had lost focus, as though he were staring off into some immeasurable distance. Perhaps he was.
In the space of a single breath, he was gone.
I eased him gently to the concrete floor. A part of me hoped he choked all the way to hell. But he’d been a brave man once, a man who ran into shellfire to get a picture. With his world crashing around him, he’d lashed out in a moment of fury. And in that split second...?
God.
Whatever mistakes Sherry and Max had made, they’d paid a terrible price for them. And the worst of it was, it was for nothing.
Sherry died trying to save the career she wanted so desperately, and Max died trying to provide money for his wife’s care. It wouldn’t happen.
The syndrome is called suicide by cop. A desperate man provokes a shootout with police, hoping to go out in a blaze of glory. But insurance companies recognize it for what it is. And they don’t pay off for suicide. Period.
Max’s wife wouldn’t see a nickel. And Sherry would be dismissed as another ditzy blonde with a messy love life. Unless...
I rose slowly to my feet, looking around me, evaluating the garage as a crime scene. I could hear sirens in the distance. Valhalla isn’t Detroit. Gunfire in a quiet neighborhood triggers 911 calls. I had a few moments, not much more.
A minute later the first prowl car came howling down the street with lights and sirens. It screeched to a halt in the driveway. Two Valhalla patrolmen came boiling out with weapons drawn. I knew them both, but I stepped out of the garage very slowly anyway. Holding my badge in plain view, I placed my weapon on the ground. And then things started happening very quickly.
The shooting occurred inside Valhalla’s city limits, but with a local officer involved, the state police took over jurisdiction. I spent the rest of the day in a Hauser Center interrogation room with a tag team of detectives from downstate, Bendix and Coughlin.
I knew Dan Bendix from the winter hockey leagues. He played forward, liked to body check along the boards. Big and burly, with scars on his knuckles, he’s a genuinely tough guy. His questions were sharp, but fair. He had nothing to prove.
Coughlin was the opposite. A runty Irishman from Lansing, he had freckles, red hair, and an attitude to match. He’d gotten his gold shield a few months earlier and felt compelled to play bad cop. He tried too hard, shouting questions at me like I was some mutt off the street, sneering at my answers. He called me a liar. Twice. I let it pass.
He was right, actually. But his punk-ass attitude made lying to his face a lot easier.
I hated Max for what he had done, but none of it was his wife’s fault. He threw his life away to get the money for Margo’s care, and I made certain that she got it.
To do that, I had to eliminate any suspicion that his death had been a “suicide by cop.” And I did. By making him the villain of the piece.
With a vengeance.
A good man driven to crime is an old, familiar story, from Robin Hood to Breaking Bad. It wasn’t hard to sell.
Desperate for money, Max had gone into the drug trade. The brick of crystal meth the Staties found hidden in his garage was the proof. Working on a story about meth labs, Sherry discovered his involvement. She confronted him at the turnout, hoping he would give himself up.
Instead, he killed her. He admitted it all to me before dying in a desperate shootout. Resisting arrest isn’t suicide. If the two Staties had any doubts, they vanished when I showed them the map of the meth labs I’d recovered from Max’s body.
The story was a total crock, but it was plausible, and seamless. And they bought it.
The raids on the crank labs began at dawn the next day and continued through the week. The state police and DEA rolled up eight labs and a dozen cookers. It made national news. Which was the second point of the exercise.