Murder Games Read online

  But this wasn’t about the Dealer. This was about me. Maybe my father, too.

  “She knows,” I said.

  “Who? The detective?”

  “Yeah—Elizabeth. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t have to.”

  I expected any number of reactions. Anger was one. Doubt was another. I could almost hear him calling out my arrogance, reminding me that having a doctorate in psychology didn’t mean that I could read people’s minds.

  Instead I got the reaction I least expected. Ambivalence. “Okay, so maybe she knows,” he said. “So what?”

  “So everything,” I said. “That would mean—”

  “Yeah, that Deacon told her.” My father shrugged. “He’s not exactly the mayor of Podunk, and he’s a billionaire to boot. Besides, you were surely the first suspect, right? A guy like Deacon would take his vetting of you very seriously.”

  “By vetting, do you mean hacking?”

  “It’s possible. It’s not like a State Department official would ever have a private e-mail server in her closet or anything,” he said. “Point is, classified just ain’t what it used to be.”

  “What do you suggest I do?”

  “What you do with any leak,” he said. “Seal it.”

  My father suddenly stopped, motioning at Diamond, who had gone birdy. The dog was rigid as a rock, having picked up a scent.

  Sure enough, there it was, twenty yards ahead of us. Bonasa umbellus. The ruffed grouse.

  A fat one, too. They don’t spook as easily. The young, lean grouses tend to flush at the sound of a leaf falling, not to mention the snap of a twig. The bird was perched on a low branch of one of the few sugar maples that were mixed in with all the aspens. Dinner, here we come.

  On my father’s nod I raised my rifle, lining up the shot. It was mostly clean, only the hang of another small branch in the way. Quickly I looped my index finger around the trigger.

  When I was a boy and my father first taught me how to shoot, he repeated the same words over and over. “Ready and steady, son…ready and steady.”

  I could hear him now in my head. I could see him, too, out of the corner of my eye.

  Then I watched in horror as he fell to the ground.

  Chapter 46

  THE SHOT wasn’t mine.

  It came from the other side of the sugar maple, the laughter that followed it removing any doubt. Laughter?

  I was sure that’s what it was as I dropped my rifle, running over to my father. He’d rolled onto his side next to a low stretch of bramble and was reaching for his left leg, directly above the knee. Blood was oozing from two small holes in his briar pants—holes caused by pellet spray from a 3.5-inch magnum shell, if I had to guess. That’s as large as they come for a 12-gauge. Too large if you value skill.

  Hunters hunt. Others simply fill the air with lead.

  Whipping off my belt, I tied it around my father’s thigh above the wound. “Are you—”

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” he said.

  “Well, hell, that’s good news,” came a voice from behind me.

  “Shit, yeah,” said another.

  I turned to look at the two guys, probably in their late twenties. One was big, the other even bigger. Together, it was as if John Steinbeck had replaced George with another Lennie in Of Mice and Men.

  The only difference? Steinbeck’s Lennie seemed to be a hell of a lot smarter than these two.

  You just shot someone, you idiots. You might want to put the beers down…

  Idiot number 1 shook his head and laughed, the same laugh I’d first heard. Only now it was the most annoying sound on the planet. “You picked one hell of a place to be standing, old man,” he said.

  Is that supposed to be an apology?

  I really didn’t know where to begin. My father did, though.

  “You picked an even worse place to be shooting from,” he said.

  “This is private property,” I added, although I immediately regretted it. It made me sound like a city boy, not the tone I was going for. Not with these two. Idiot number 1 was actually wearing overalls.

  “Private, huh? Do you two own it?” asked Idiot number 2, convinced that we didn’t.

  That got the first one laughing again, his large gut sloshing around underneath those overalls. He clearly hadn’t missed a meal in his life. “Yeah,” he said. “Show us some paperwork.”

  “They can’t because they ain’t got any. They’re not even from around here. You can tell.”

  “Yeah. Where you from, old man?”

  Go ahead, call him old man one more time…

  My father was a lot of things. Conversationalist wasn’t one of them. “You two are poaching, and you know it,” he said calmly. Then the switch flipped. “Now stop fucking around.”

  The way he punched each word, raising his voice, immediately set off Diamond. There’s no breed more loyal than a vizsla.

  Diamond began barking more loudly than I’d ever heard him before, showing his teeth while edging toward the two idiots. Things were beginning to spiral out of control.

  “If you don’t shut that dog up, I’ll shut it up for you,” said Idiot number 1.

  I called to Diamond, but he kept barking. He answered to my father, not me, and my father wasn’t about to call him off. He’d been shot, and he was pissed. He was also something else. Ready.

  It was as if he knew what was about to happen next. An asshole with a beer in one hand and a pump-action shotgun in the other was about to make the sort of mistake he’d been building toward his entire misbegotten life.

  The second that can of beer dropped from his hand, I knew it, too.

  His gun was raised. He was aiming at Diamond.

  Chapter 47

  MY FATHER immediately sat up, lunging for the old-school Winchester 101 lying by his side. He pulled it toward him so fast it could’ve been on a string. Every muscle in his neck went taut. His voiced dropped, and the terms couldn’t have been clearer.

  “You shoot that dog, and I shoot you,” he announced. Just like that, neither idiot was laughing anymore.

  But they weren’t backing down, either.

  “You ain’t gonna shoot me,” said Idiot number 1. “Not a chance.”

  My father whistled. “Down, Diamond!” he said.

  Diamond immediately stopped barking, backing off. Now there was no reason for anyone to shoot anyone. Simple as that.

  If only.

  “I don’t fuckin’ like nobody pointing a gun at me, old man,” said Idiot number 1.

  The second he pivoted, his double-barrel lined right up with my father’s chest, was the second I was doing the math. Two of us, two of them. Except my gun was ten yards away from me. As dumb as these two guys were, they still knew that two is greater than one.

  “Easy there,” said Idiot number 2, raising his gun as I glanced over at mine. Somewhere in between he tossed his beer to free up his trigger finger.

  All I could do was stare at my father. Now what?

  In return, all he could do was stare back at me. And laugh?

  His was louder than that of either of the two idiots. Hell, it was louder than the two of them put together. A real deep, guttural laugh that echoed throughout the entire woods.

  Josiah Maxwell Reinhart had gone batshit crazy.

  Or so it seemed to the two idiots now looking at one another. Make that three idiots, because I couldn’t figure out what the hell my father was doing…until he finally stopped and asked me a question.

  “So you’re telling me she knows, huh?”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “The detective back in New York,” said my father. “Are you sure she knows?”

  Seriously? You’re bringing that up now?

  Yes, it was exactly what he was doing, as sure as he’d incited Diamond to start barking in the first place. He never intended to defuse the situation. Instead he was expediting it.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sure she knows.”

  “In that c
ase, why don’t you let these guys know, too?” he said. “For the both of us.”

  Chapter 48

  I STOOD up from my father’s side, my palms raised. “Guys,” I began, “I don’t how this got out of hand so quickly. On behalf of my dad here, I apologize. He’s been shot. It was clearly an accident, but you can understand his being a little bent out of shape. There’s no need to make a bad situation worse, though.”

  I turned to my father, motioning for him to hand over his gun.

  “Hell, no,” he said.

  “C’mon, Dad. Enough is enough. Clean out those barrels and hand me the gun.”

  My father’s tortured expression made it clear that surrendering his gun was the very last thing in the world he wanted to do. Finally, though, he nodded and cycled out the rounds, one shell after another. For good measure, he let me know exactly how he felt about having to do it.

  “You pussy,” he said.

  And just like that, both idiots were laughing again. Perfect.

  I took my father’s Winchester, its walnut stock etched with an American eagle, and held it out in front of me as if it were on a platter. Walking toward the two, I watched as their arms went slack. They could still do the math, and it was even more in their favor. Instead of two against one it was two against none. My father and I were unarmed.

  They were standing around six feet apart, and the closer I got to them the bigger they looked. Of course, the bigger they are…

  “Fallaces sunt rerum species,” I said, breaking out the Latin. The appearances of things are deceptive.

  “What?” they both asked in unison. They had no idea what I was saying.

  They had no idea, period.

  Faster than a New York minute, I closed my fist around both barrels of the Winchester, whipping my hips around with my arm straight and locked for maximum torque. Exactly as I’d been trained.

  The weight of the stock, solid black walnut, did all the work from there as it traveled head-high toward Idiot number 2. Ear-high, to be exact. If you really want to incapacitate a guy, don’t hit him in the face. Hit him in the ear—right smack against the auditory meatus, otherwise known as the ear canal. He won’t just feel the pain as he crashes to the ground, he’ll also hear it for the rest of his life.

  One down, one to go.

  My back was turned to Idiot number 1. I could feel the breeze of him coming at me, though. He was armed, but self-preservation is a primal instinct and tends to negate everything except the purest form of combat. Simply put, he wanted to kill me with his bare hands.

  Instead what he got was Newton’s second law of motion, courtesy of my spinning back around with the butt of the Winchester leading the way. I lodged it into his massive gut, knocking the wind clear out of him. His knees buckled but didn’t give as he loaded up to swing at me with everything he had. The one thing he didn’t have, though, was balance.

  Grabbing the straps of his overalls, I dropped and barrel-rolled him over my head, slamming him hard to the ground using all his momentum. To make sure he stayed there, I swung my forearm down on his Adam’s apple, a maneuver that, when done properly, can make a guy wish he’d been hit in the ear instead.

  Two down, none to go. Done and dusted. All within six seconds.

  “You’ve lost a step,” said my father.

  “You wish,” I said.

  He smiled and pulled out Diamond’s long leash from his vest, cutting it into two strands with his hunting knife and tossing them to me.

  As I tied up the idiots I glanced over at my father as he was reaching into one of the other pockets on his vest.

  “You’re kidding me,” I said the second I saw what he was taking out. So much for the no-cell-phone rule. “All these years?”

  “Just in case,” he said.

  He called the police, giving them our coordinates, courtesy of Google Maps. He then reached back into the same pocket after announcing that dinner might be a while, if we were going to have any at all. “Here,” he said, tossing his other contraband to me.

  It was the best Milky Way bar I’d ever had.

  Book Three

  Dealer’s Choice

  Chapter 49

  “MAY I have a volunteer?” I asked, kicking off the class from behind my lectern.

  I held back a smile as I watched a grand total of zero students raise their hands. I might as well have asked if someone were willing to strip naked and dance a polka in front of everybody.

  Finally a hand went up in the last row. “Thank you,” I said to the young man wearing a Yale hoodie. “Now, as they say on The Price Is Right…come on down!”

  The young man sidestepped out of the row, then made his way down to me. Since it was only the second class of the semester, I explained that I hadn’t committed everyone’s names and faces to memory yet.

  “It’s Edward,” he said. He awkwardly put out his hand to shake mine, which got a laugh from the entire class. That made my segue all the better.

  “Edward, I have a simple proposition for you,” I said. “I’ll give you an A for this course if within the next five seconds you punch me as hard as you can in my stomach.”

  The class laughed again. They thought I was joking. Right up until I turned to Edward and spread my arms wide as if to say, Take your best shot.

  Of course he did no such thing. As I began counting, “One one thousand, two one thousand…” Edward looked to be suffering from an acute case of rigor mortis. He froze. The question quickly switched from whether he would actually punch me to whether he was actually still breathing.

  “Relax,” I told Edward after reaching the count of five. I turned to the class. “Quick, someone give me a reason why he didn’t do it.”

  Almost every hand shot up now. I pointed at students around the room as though I were giving a press conference on speed.

  “He didn’t believe you,” said one.

  “He was afraid he’d get suspended,” said another.

  “He’s a pacifist,” said a third.

  “Good. Very good,” I said. “Now, what if the proposition were different? What if I told Edward that I would fail him if he didn’t punch me? Would that change anything?”

  A collective “Nooooo” echoed throughout the class. I resumed my pointing at students for reasons why.

  “He wouldn’t believe that, either,” said one.

  “He’d be afraid you’d get suspended,” said another.

  “Okay, fair enough,” I said. “But what if I change the proposition yet again? This time, I hand Edward a suitcase filled with a million dollars in cash. He gets to keep it if he hits me. What’s more, I have the president of the university on hand to tell him that there will be no risk of any disciplinary action from the school. What does Edward do now?”

  “Swing away!” someone yelled.

  “If he doesn’t, I will,” joked another.

  “Exactly,” I said. “So what does this tell us about human behavior? It’s context-driven. Meaning that changing the circumstances will often change the resulting behavior. Thou shalt not kill, right? Unless of course it’s in self-defense or during a war or, more controversially, an act of capital punishment. Put another way, we can be motivated to do almost anything depending on the circumstances. Normal behavior, therefore, is when we collectively believe that the circumstances justify the behavior. Likewise, abnormal behavior is when we don’t. But how much does behavior actually tell us about the circumstances? Can we ever really judge behavior simply by the behavior itself?”

  With that I promptly turned to face young Edward again in his Yale hoodie.

  I then punched him in the stomach as hard as I could.

  “Welcome to permission theory, class.”

  Chapter 50

  “HOW MUCH did they all freak out?” asked Tracy, pouring two glasses of our go-to red, an Artesa Cabernet. Hands down, it was our favorite vineyard during our trip to Napa years ago.

  We were hanging out in the kitchen after I got back from New Ha
ven. I’d already changed into the home uniform: jeans, bare feet, and my Stones T-shirt.

  “On a scale of one to ten, it was a solid eight and a half,” I said. “The collective gasps were louder than last year, although not quite as loud as the year before. That class was like Spinal Tap; it went to eleven.”

  “What about the kid?” asked Tracy. “Was he believable?”

  “Best one yet,” I said before raising my glass. “Cheers once again to the Yale School of Drama.”

  Every year the dean sends over one of his most promising male students, and every year the kid doubles over after I hit him. But he’s really just taking a bow. Always smiling, he pops right up and lifts the bottom of his hoodie to reveal a body protector, the kind boxers wear when sparring.

  Can we ever really judge behavior by the behavior itself?

  Lesson learned. Most often, we can’t.

  “You know what I love the most?” said Tracy. “You always swear the class to secrecy afterward so they don’t spoil it for future classes, and they always keep their promise.”

  “That’s one of those counterintuitive things about human nature,” I said. “One person with a secret is more likely to reveal it than a whole group.”

  “Did Freud say that?”

  “No. Reinhart did.”

  Tracy shook his head. “Never heard of him.”

  “Yeah. Me, either,” I said, reaching for our stack of take-out menus. “So what are we in the mood for? Pizza? Chinese? Sushi?”

  I should’ve known better. Tracy certainly did. He pulled out the drawer next to the dishwasher, grabbing the birthday gift he gave me after we first moved in together. Dinner a-go-go, he called it.

  From day one, we could never decide what we wanted for takeout, so Tracy took the spinner from an old Twister game he found at a flea market and wrote the names of all our favorite restaurants in the colored circles ringing the dial.