Obstruction of Justice Read online

  Nina realized he meant it. Collier was thinking this over. "All right," she said. "Collier and I will wait outside. The door’s thin. I could hear everything in the hall when I was over there. We’ll listen. But don’t trick him, Paul. Be fair."

  Collier went into the bedroom and came out dressed, carrying a standard-issue .45. "In case he tries to run," he said. "Are you armed, Paul?"

  "Always," Paul said, patting his shoulder holster.

  "He would never try to hurt one of us," Nina protested, but they paid no attention to her. The three of them went back out and got into the van, Nina in the middle.

  On the way to Kenny’s apartment, Paul said, "A flash of green. Kim saw it on the driver. Just the color. She put it in her painting."

  "His green sunglasses," Collier said. The way he said it, in an ugly voice that didn’t sound like him, was spooky. Nina turned to look at him. His eyes were blind.

  "Hold on." Paul swerved into the driveway of the funky apartment building, clicked off the ignition, and doused the lights.

  "Nina, you’ve got your cell phone?"

  She stopped to check her pocket. "Right here."

  "Get a move on," Collier commanded, striding urgently ahead into the building. Quietly, Collier and Nina took up positions out of sight in the hallway, around the corner from the apartment.

  Paul rapped on the door.

  The pungent odor of marijuana wafted from under the door, and a heavy bass vibrated the deck through the hall. Kenny opened the door a few inches so Paul could see the chain.

  "What do you want?" Kenny’s eye peered up at Paul.

  "I need to see Jason."

  "He’s not here."

  "C’mon, Kenny. I just have to talk to him before he leaves."

  "Did the lawyer send you?"

  "No. His mother. This is personal."

  "Jason!"

  Jason came to the door.

  "Your mother was afraid you needed money," Paul said. He patted his wallet pocket. "She sent me over."

  A pause. "Hand it through."

  "No way. I hand it to you personally along with a message from your mother."

  "How much is it?"

  "That would be telling." Paul heard a commotion, then the door swung open, and Paul entered Kenny’s living room, reminding himself about what it was like to be nineteen and too naive to know the oldest come-on in the book when it walked up and slapped you silly.

  Only the lava lamp was lit, the waxen red droplets dribbling and re-forming endlessly in the hot solution. Molly stood behind Kenny, who leaned over to the stereo and lowered the music. Suitcases stood against the bedroom door, which was slightly ajar. Molly looked stoned and frightened.

  "Hi, Molly. Hi, Kenny," said Paul.

  "Hi," said Molly. Kenny sat her down on the couch.

  Nobody spoke for a minute. Paul was feeling out the atmosphere, choosing his approach.

  "There’s no check, is there?" Jason said. He looked as if he were on his last legs. "What did my mom tell you?"

  Paul sat down at the counter where he’d eaten his pastrami sandwiches with Kenny, making himself comfortable. "So you’re leaving," he said. "Is that going to help your mother and sister? I thought you were a brave kid. Boy, was I wrong. The minute you get your chance, you run again."

  "It’s not like that."

  Molly said, "Our mom’ll be all right. She’s got Leo. We have to get away from all this. We can’t stay."

  "I told you, Moll, you can’t come," Jason said.

  Paul said, "Nina cares about what happens to you, Jason. And what about your mother? She loves you. If your sister goes along, I don’t think your mother will be all right at all."

  "I’m telling you for the last time, Moll, we have to split up," Jason said. "We have to, Moll!"

  "I won’t!" Molly said. "Not in this town full of death! I don’t care if we have to go to Timbuktu! I don’t want to live without you!"

  "You promised, Moll, never to try that again!"

  "Why not just stay and pay the price, Jason?" Paul said mildly. "Going into exile can be a worse torture than jail. It’s so very lonely out there. And you’d always be afraid."

  "Because I can’t. It’s worse than Nina knows. She can’t do anything. No one can. I have to go away."

  "Because you’re a murderer after all, right, Jason?"

  Molly inhaled sharply. Kenny said, "Uh-oh."

  "You did very well. You almost got away with it."

  "You’re bright to figure it out," said Kenny. "We’re all bright."

  "Why did you do it?" Paul asked, keeping his eyes on Jason. "You’re going away, you might as well tell me. You have to tell somebody, sometime."

  "You really want to know?" Kenny said.

  "Kenny, don’t!" Molly cried.

  "Because of Ray," Kenny said. "He was killing them inch by inch. Molly, Jason, and Sarah. And me. He was going to put me away in some funnyhouse, just for sticking my ugly face into his life. He was going to kill Sarah. Everything came together at once and Jason knew it was the only chance."

  "I still don’t get it."

  "Don’t let Kenny say anything else, please, Jason," Molly said, but Jason didn’t move. He had the abstracted look Paul had seen him wear in court, as if he were listening to a voice inside himself, an accusing, hateful voice. Molly got up and went to him, put her hand on his arm tenderly.

  "Good, Kenny, good," Paul said. "Go on."

  "That’s enough!" Molly said. "Look what he’s doing! We can’t talk to him. Let’s just go, Jason!"

  "No," Jason said, pushing her away. "I pay. Not you. Not Kenny."

  "How did it go down, Jason?" Paul said, his voice steady.

  "Oh, Jason," Molly said tearfully. "Please don’t say anything!"

  "No one can hate me worse than I hate myself," Jason said slowly. "I hate myself, you know. I can’t stand myself.’’

  "Say it!" Paul demanded. "Say it!"

  "I can’t say it!" Jason said. "I’m too ashamed. I’m so sorry. I know I did what nobody could ever forgive." He hung his head. The lamp cast his shadow against the wall, the head bowed as if awaiting a guillotine.

  Molly said in a tiny voice, "You did it to save us." There was another pause. Then Jason went to the two suitcases and picked them up. "Wait," Paul said. "You haven’t told me about your grandfather."

  "He followed me to the cemetery. We argued. He clutched his head and he said, ’Jason, I have the most awful headache.’ Then he fell. I ran over to him, but he was unconscious. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t call anyone. So I put him in the back seat...."

  "And Ray in the trunk."

  "I thought, the cabin. I had to think. But when I got there, he was dead."

  "The shovel with the blood, though, that puzzles me."

  "It was right next to the rock. Like Nina said. He fell on it. I moved it away from him...." Jason was reliving the moment.

  Molly took one of the suitcases and said desperately, "Come on, I’m ready."

  "I’m going now," Jason said, looking down. "Tell my mother—"

  "Just one more thing. Don’t worry, I won’t stop you from opening that door," Paul said. "The thing that would bring all this together for me. Just this: Why did you dig up your father’s body?"

  Jason said, "Tell my mother I’m sorry. Tell Nina thank you. She tried to help. Kenny—"

  "Good-bye," Kenny said softly, "bro." He edged over and gave Jason a shy hug, little Mutt hugging tall Jeff.

  "Good-bye, Moll." But Molly wouldn’t let him hold her.

  "No! No!"

  "Please, Molly," Kenny said. "Stay. I need you."

  "What’s that noise?" Jason said, pointing at the door.

  "I didn’t hear anything," Paul said. "Don’t go, son. We’ll try to help you."

  "There’s someone outside!" Kenny said.

  Collier burst in, pushing Nina ahead of him. His gun was drawn and he was breathing in short gasps. "Get out of the way," he said to the air, and then h
e raised the gun and aimed it at Jason, who was standing not two feet from Nina.

  "No!" Nina yelled, and threw herself in front of Jason. Paul had his own gun drawn now. "Put it down, buddy," he told Collier. "You’re not going to shoot Nina, are you?"

  Jason’s arm shot out, knocking over the lava lamp, which whacked the vinyl floor, bounced once on its base, and cracked into smithereens, leaving them in complete, windowless darkness. Someone whimpered. Paul grabbed Nina, holding her still, and froze, praying that Collier wouldn’t fire off a shot in the dark.

  The apartment door swung open. Jason and Molly ran out into the hall. Paul’s hand found Collier, but Collier whirled away from him and ran out too.

  The outside deck held the only real light, all of forty watts beaming muddily down from above the doorway. Paul checked the gun in his hand. An eerie green glow surrounded it from the Tritium night-sights. Two figures fled like deer through the dimness, disappearing almost instantly, Collier already falling behind.

  The rest of them waited a long, silent instant, until they were sure he and his trigger finger had gotten safely away.

  Then Nina and Paul raced out into the parking lot, past the startled neighbors, Kenny hopping along behind them. They arrived in time to see the Jeep, followed by Collier’s car, skidding around the corner of the street at top speed, brakes screeching, the people driving behind the steamy windshields wearing looks of equal determination.

  They leapt into the van, Kenny jumping in back just in time, and chased the cars. At Highway 50, all three cars, one after the other, careened into a sharp left. Paul drove the van, and had no trouble in the light traffic keeping track of Collier in his little car trailing the Jeep in front. Nina was punching 911 for the third time that month. Paul pried the phone out of her clutching fingers and calmly described the Jeep, its license number, and the pursuing car, all the while driving at top speed up the street.

  But there didn’t seem to be any danger of the two cars ahead losing each other. Collier stuck to the car ahead of him. When he got close, he surged forward, slamming into the back of the Jeep. Jason skidded left, veering up onto the sidewalk, where he drove for what seemed like an eternity, narrowly avoiding posts, flattening some bushes, and causing two pedestrians to jump for their lives.

  "Why’s he trying to kill them?" Kenny said, hanging on to the back of Paul’s seat.

  "The probation officer Jason killed—she was his wife!" Nina called back, not turning her head away from the cars in front.

  "Anna Meade? He never did that!"

  "He just confessed, didn’t he!"

  "No! You’re all mixed up!"

  Down again onto the road in front of Collier, Jason jumped the curb with a thundering jolt, raising up a sheet of water from the half-flooded street. Nina could see Molly’s hair flying behind her as the Jeep skewed once more, almost completely out of control.

  Collier roared up behind Molly and Jason again. Again, he slammed them.

  "Oh, my God! He’s going to kill them both!" Nina cried, but they recovered somehow, returning to take the lead, their maniacal speed eating up the road before them. Her cell phone rang in vain somewhere near her feet.

  "They’re heading across the state line!" Kenny yelled, his hair brushing against Paul as he leaned over the seat. "It wasn’t him! Stop that guy!"

  "Damn it, Paul. Faster!" Nina shouted, and Paul gritted his teeth, pushing harder.

  Somehow they had crossed the miles between Kenny’s apartment and the casino district. Nina watched Paul, who must have had his foot glued near the floor already, edge forward, and listened for the sound that must come next, the sound of a crash. She closed her eyes, and almost instantly opened them, to the sight of Jason’s car whipping into a left turn that had to be the closest thing to a right angle possible in a car, directly into the Prize’s parking lot.

  Collier shot past, skidded into a U-turn in the middle of the highway, nearly hitting a car coming from the Nevada direction, and hurtled up the drive into the parking area just ahead Paul. He cruised the lot rapidly, and they could see him craning his neck to examine the cars. Then they saw the Jeep, empty, windshield wipers slapping time, doors open, in the middle of the drive. Collier screeched to a dead stop and tore out of his car, running straight through the puddles into the brightly lit casino entrance.

  "Oh, shit," Paul said. He grabbed his phone from the seat and barked out where he’d gone.

  The van skidded to a stop. They all jumped out.

  Brilliant and garish, full of busy people, the casino’s raucous atmosphere quickly absorbed anything out of the ordinary. Blinking in the bright lights, Nina stood in one place until she caught a glimpse of Collier in the elevator near the door, gun waving as the doors closed on him. A couple of security guards from the casino punched buttons on the next elevator. Two others ran for the stairs, their own guns drawn. Kenny had dropped behind them, lost in the crowd.

  Collier’s elevator, an express car, stopped only at the rooftop restaurant.

  "Police!" Paul yelled. The guards obligingly held the elevator door long enough for the two of them to run in, dripping and gasping. "All the way up!" Paul ordered. "Police are on the way. He’s trying to kill a young man with a girl who must be just ahead of him. His gun’s loaded."

  The doors opened. They found themselves in a red-carpeted hall, the anteroom to the penthouse restaurant. A maitre d’ had shrunk his body tight against the wall. When he saw the guards, he stepped out and pointed, saying, "That way! He has a gun!"

  "The roof!" one of the guards yelled. They ran after him to a small closed door, which led to a narrow flight of metal stairs.

  On the roof, the rain-swept sky pressed down, heavy with unseen presences. Below, with its arc of gaudy light between lake and forest, the town looked as remote and frivolous as it had from the top of the mountain. Encrusted with brilliant neon signs, the walls of the neighboring casinos burned and hissed. Cylindrical shapes of ventilator casings and square concrete walls of unknown purpose broke the wet expanse of concrete, creating pools of complete darkness.

  They spread out, searching for Collier, Nina staying close to Paul. Half-crouched as she moved beside him, her clothes already sodden and heavy against her skin, she was as exposed as she had been in that other storm, but this time she felt no fear. This time she felt that rocklike resistance rising in her against the tide that propelled them irresistibly from event to event, quenching every attempt to outwit it.

  If only they hadn’t told Collier... and what was Kenny blabbering about in the car?

  Out of obstinate loyalty to Jason, Molly, too, was now in the line of fire. I won’t let that idiotic girl die! Nina thought. But what could she do? Collier had cracked, and she felt tragedy rocketing toward them like a crashing jet.

  Catching a movement out of the corner of her eye, she ran off to the left toward the edge of the building. "There they are, Paul," she shouted. He sprinted toward her, gun raised in his hand.

  Fleet and light as birds, the twins made an unforgettable sight. Multicolored in the glittering neon, they moved swiftly toward the low wall of the building. Jason got there first. He twisted his head back toward Molly. "Stay back," he said. Then he made his move, leaping into a dive over the side. Nina’s breath froze in her chest. In her mind, she watched the inevitable ending, Jason falling out of the sky, a man-bird whose wings have failed him.

  "There’s a ladder, Nina. There must be!" Paul said.

  Out of a pool of blackness, Collier appeared, his gun silhouetted in front of a darker Tallac. In the dimness he crept along the edge toward Molly. Casting a terrified glance back toward the man who came after her like a hunting animal, she looked once below, then leapt over the side, following her brother into the abyss.

  Collier ran after her, teetering along the building’s edge, seemingly oblivious of the danger and the rain streaming down his back.

  Nina waited for a blast, a shriek.

  No sound. No sound at all.
/>   Paul had followed Collier, and now, too late, Nina saw a new danger descending upon them, imminent and terrible. Paul would have to kill Collier to save Jason.

  "No!" she screamed at Paul, but her voice was drowned by the harsh static of electronics and the cacophony of voices behind her as the security people caught sight of them and came running toward them from the other side of the roof.

  Paul stood directly behind Collier, his gun pointed at Collier’s back. Nina’s eyes, sharpened by anxiety, saw his finger on the trigger.

  "Freeze!" Paul shouted. But Collier ignored him. She heard a hoarse cry from beyond the wall.

  And she lunged forward, seizing Paul’s taut forearm, the one holding the gun. They were so close to the edge, and her balance was bad—God, it was a long way down. They wrestled furiously, until Paul finally flung her away. She felt herself losing her balance, going over, but Paul pulled her back toward the solid ground of the roof.

  Gasping for breath, they looked toward the edge. Collier was gone.

  Racing to the place he had disappeared, leaning over and straining to see over the side through the rain, they glimpsed the escape route, a metal ladder. Stretching down a hundred feet along the building, it ended on a flat extension of the roof spanning barely six feet. Molly was hurrying down the ladder to her brother, within twenty feet of the ledge where Jason stood, looking up into the rain. Collier was only a few feet above her, moving clumsily, an easy target for Paul.

  A sound came, a tearing sound like a branch splitting off a tree. The ladder below Molly fell away, hurtling toward Jason, who raised his arms as a shield. "Omigod—" Paul had time to say, "Leo said—he planned to fix the fire ladders—"

  The long length of ladder smashed onto Jason’s ledge, still standing straight up. It stood momentarily on end, then tumbled off the ledge and fell again, pitching heavily into the power lines far below. Crackling and sparking, the metal section hung between the wires, glittering in the air like a stairway to hell.

  Then it crashed to the street, splitting into several pieces, narrowly missing several Douglas County police officers sheltering under their cars.

  Jason! Had the ladder hit him? Nina spotted him still crouched on the ledge, looking up, his mouth open.