You Can’t Stop Me Read online

  Harrow lifted his eyebrows. “I appreciate that desire, Mr. Gershon. Public service was bad enough, but now I’m really in the fishbowl. You mind if I call you ‘Archie’?”

  The breeze riffled the long wispy silver hair. “Not if I can call you ‘J.C.’ Where was it you sheriffed? Idaho? Ohio?”

  “Iowa. Story County. Just north of Des Moines. Good farmland there. Good people too.”

  “Not sure there is such an animal.”

  “What?”

  “As ‘good people.’”

  Harrow shook his head. “Not all people are bad. You said yourself, you like how my show puts bad guys away. That suggests good people getting help.”

  His host thought about that momentarily. “I’m going to smoke. You want one?”

  “Sure.”

  Gershon leaned the rifle against the stoop, fished a pack of smokes and a lighter from a pants pocket, and lit up. Then he passed the lighter and cigarettes to Harrow, who joined in.

  “Sheriff Tomasa, for example,” Harrow said. “He’s one of the good people. The good guys. Don’t you think, Archie?”

  “Better than most.”

  “I like him too. What about your neighbor—George Reid? Was he good people?”

  “That’s why you’re here, of course—the killings.”

  “You know it is. Reid a good neighbor?”

  Gershon grinned. “Why, you suppose if you asked him that he’d’ve said I was? No, we weren’t really neighborly. He was just the stranger who lived over there…” He pointed west. “…and did me the favor of minding his own business.”

  Harrow looked toward where the sun was lowering, about to drop behind the hills for the night. “He had kids, Archie.”

  “Yes, he did. They were never any trouble to me either.”

  “Whoever did this killed Reid’s kids.”

  “I know. World’s a shithole, and it can suck a kid down fastest of all.”

  For a shithole, the world looked beautiful right now, dusk settling in on the recluse’s perch with gentle tones of blue and gray.

  “Archie, you see anything that night? Hear anything?”

  “If I had, don’t you think I’d’ve told Roberto?”

  “No.”

  “Why, because I’m a nasty old hermit? A misanthrope who’s given up on the world and everything in it?”

  “No. You love that old hound dog, for instance. And he’s part of the world.”

  “You think you got a bead on me, J.C.?”

  “I think you’re hiding in plain sight, Archie. I think you’re waiting to see which catches up with you, first—people who come around to kill you, or just the darkness that eventually swallows us all.”

  He stared a long time at Harrow, who could see the shadows of approaching night washing over the old man, and they just stood there smoking.

  Finally, Archibald Gershon said, “Why don’t you come in for a beer?”

  “Thought you’d never ask.”

  The living room was large and knotty pine, lined with built-in shelves holding volumes of as many varieties as a well-stocked college bookstore—novels, both popular and literary from many decades, non-fiction works on politics and world history, philosophy, poetry, engineering.

  Where there weren’t book shelves in the living room, gun racks displayed a collection of firearms a crazy cult might envy. A very comfortable-looking, well-worn brown leather lounger on a braided rug on the bare wood floor faced a big flat-screen television, fifty-something inch easy, as if it were an altar. A table by the chair had beer cans and a fat satellite TV guide, a nine millimeter Browning, and a John D. MacDonald novel cracked open face down.

  With the exception of the beer cans, however, the place was tidy, and the kitchen—which opened onto the big library/TV area—had a Formica table dating to I Love Lucy days, where they sat and had Schlitz from the can, very cold. The hound curled up under the table at its master’s feet—when Harrow came in, it hadn’t even growled, sensing Gershon’s approval of their guest.

  “Breeze was out of the west that night,” Gershon said, after a particularly deep swig of Schlitz, “and carried the shots over here—it was like they were in my own yard.”

  “No question it was gunshots—not a vehicle backfiring, kids playing with fireworks…?”

  Gershon gave him a look. “I’ve heard plenty of guns in my lifetime, J.C.”

  “Enough to identify them by sound?”

  “This was a handgun. Loud. I’d say a .357.”

  “You do know your guns.”

  Gershon twitched a smile. “You’ve already gathered you aren’t the only one retired from public service.”

  Harrow had already suspected that it wasn’t company that Gershon feared so much as The Company. As in CIA.

  “When I heard those shots,” he was saying, “I already knew it was too late to do any good. I’m not heartless, J.C.—I knew there were kids over there. But there was no saving anybody.”

  Harrow nodded.

  “Still, I grabbed up the Remington and got outside.”

  “Could you see the perp leaving? Did you take a shot at him?”

  The old boy shook his head, the silver locks swinging. “I meddled in other people’s affairs a long time ago—I try not to do it anymore.”

  Harrow said nothing.

  “Come on, J.C. Think it through. He’d killed who he’d come to kill, by the time I heard those shots. If I’d gone over there, they’d be dead anyway. If I shot the guy, who knows who he is or he’s working for? No. I have enough on my plate just keeping my own ass alive.”

  “Why do you bother, Archie? Keeping your ass alive, if the world is such a shithole?”

  “Why, J.C.—if I was dead? Something terrible would happen.”

  “What?”

  He grinned. “I’d miss your show.”

  Harrow grinned back at him. “Okay, Archie. You didn’t take a shot. But what did you see through that scope of yours?”

  He swigged more beer. “You’re right—I did watch as the guy drove off.”

  “What direction?”

  “East.”

  “So, then…he drove right by here.”

  Gershon swigged again.

  “What did you see, Archie?”

  “Late model Ford F-150.”

  Harrow tried not to show any reaction. “Color?”

  “Blue—light blue.”

  Another hit.

  Still, Harrow remained impassive. “See the driver?”

  “Not really. Probably a man. That’s about all I got.”

  “What makes you say it’s a man, then?

  Gershon shrugged. “Just didn’t feel like a woman. Loud gun like that mag, truck like that…. No, I think it was a man, all right.”

  “What else did you get, Archie?”

  Gershon took another gulp of beer.

  “Come on, Archie—what is it you’ve been trying to decide whether or not to share?”

  “…You want the license number?”

  Harrow just looked at him.

  “Oklahoma plates,” he said, and gave the number to Harrow, who wrote it down in his mini-notebook.

  Harrow shook his head. “You memorized the number?”

  “Sometimes having a good memory comes in handy. Other times you’d trade it for being able to forget.”

  “And sometimes,” Harrow said, “memory is all you have.”

  “Truth in that,” the old man said.

  Harrow finished his beer, then stood. “Look, Archie—I’ve got to go run this plate. You got anything else for me?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  But Harrow couldn’t quite let go. “Why didn’t you tell anyone? Just call your friend Roberto?”

  “No phone.”

  “It’s just…Archie, goddamn it—somebody might have caught this bastard, if you’d just notified the police.”

  “If that’s all, J.C., I got shows to watch, and books to read.”

  Harrow shook his
head. “None of this means anything to you?”

  “You lost your family, didn’t you?”

  “…Yeah.”

  “Ever want to cash it in after that?”

  Harrow sighed. “I could use another smoke.”

  The old man provided one, and the two went back outside where dusk had deepened to purple evening.

  “I might want to cash it in,” Harrow said, “but I can’t think that way. I have to stop this son of a bitch before he does this sick thing again, and again.”

  “See, that’s why I like you on TV, J.C. Why other people like you on TV.”

  “Huh?”

  “You don’t give a shit about being a star or having your fifteen minutes of whatever-the-hell. You’re the only person on television with an unselfish motive for being there.”

  “Oh, I have a selfish motive, Archie. I want justice for my family.”

  “Not revenge?”

  “Semantics.”

  Gershon chuckled dryly, letting smoke swirl out. “People think I’m crazier than a shithouse rat, living out here. I survived things I never should have, and that survival’s so ingrained in me, I couldn’t ever punch my own ticket. So, here I sit on this goddamned hill just waiting to die.”

  “Or for someone to come kill you?”

  “That’s just one way of dying.” He looked out into the gathering darkness. “What those ‘good’ people do out there to each other, that doesn’t mean squat to me anymore. Yet I’m still here. Waiting.”

  Harrow stubbed out the cigarette under his heel, but before he turned to go, he asked, “Were you in Dallas in 1963, Archie?”

  “…Don’t believe everything you hear.”

  “I don’t,” Harrow said. “But I do pay attention.”

  Bestowing his guest a tight smile, Gershon said, “I will tell you one thing—I was in the Dominican Republic in 1961.”

  “Trujillo?”

  “You know your history. If a man knows his history, he might keep from repeating it…not that anybody in charge of this country for the last twenty years ever got that.” The breeze blew at his hair again, and the old man shivered, possibly with the cold.

  Harrow sighed. “Been a lot of blood spilled in a lot of places.”

  “I said you knew your history.”

  “Whoever spilled that blood next door, Archie, has got to be stopped.”

  “Don’t disagree. But it’s your job, not mine.”

  “It is at that…and I should get to doing it.”

  “You should,” Gershon said. “But if you ever want to stop back and shoot the shit again, chances are I won’t shoot at you. And if I do, I won’t likely hit you.”

  Harrow gave up a lopsided grin. “Thanks for that much. And thanks for the license plate number. That should put you in solid with your pal Roberto. And I’ll get my network to pay for the damage to his vehicle.”

  “And they say TV stars are just a bunch of phonies.”

  Then, laughing at his own joke, the old man turned around and went into the house and joined his hound, his TV, his lounger, his books, and his guns.

  Chapter Eighteen

  For tonight’s show, Carmen Garcia—chicly businesslike in black slacks and a gray silk blouse, her dark hair pulled up in a tight bun—was about to do the live segment intro. This would be followed by a long walking shot sans teleprompter—she’d memorized a full page of script—and Carmen could not remember ever feeling more nervous. She prayed it didn’t show, or else her meteoric rise might be quickly followed by the same kind of fall….

  As the assistant director counted down to the second, Carmen sent herself a mixed signal: Stay calm…and energy up!

  “I’m Carmen Garcia. Welcome to Killer TV on the road with Crime Seen!”

  Hathaway, on Steadicam this time, followed Carmen down the institutional hallway, as did Nancy Hughes with her boom.

  “We’re on our way to a conference room at the Rolla, North Dakota, sheriff’s office, where our team’s set up shop. We are investigating the two-year-old murders of Nola and Katie Hanson—wife and daughter of then–county comptroller Burl Hanson, who later took his own life, becoming the killer’s third victim.”

  Hathaway followed her in as she moved along and around the big table dominating the room. Behind her, easels held bulletin boards arrayed with crime scene photos from the Hanson house (the most explicit had come down for the broadcast).

  Cameraman Phil Dingle was already in the room, capturing tighter one- and two-shots of the others at the table—Laurene Chase poring over more crime scene photos, Jenny Blake hunkered over her laptop, Billy Choi sitting before a computer as well. Both Hathaway and Dingle’s shots were being uploaded by the satellite truck for director Stu Phillips back in LA to work his (and his staff’s) magic.

  Carmen stopped next to Choi. “Bullets from the Ferguson home in Placida, Florida, match bullets from the Hanson murders here in Rolla. Firearms and tool mark examiner Billy Choi has been working on this evidence…. Billy?”

  The firearms expert with the perfect hair wore the now-familiar Crime Seen! lab coat over an open-collar blue shirt and navy slacks.

  “Carmen, using NIBIN…” A pop-up defined NIBIN for new viewers. “…we’d already matched the bullets from the two crime scenes. But look at the slides of the two—the striations are a perfect match. These bullets were fired from a vintage Browning nine-millimeter automatic.”

  “You can be certain of the make of the weapon?”

  “Oh yes—the striations are made by the rifling in the barrel. Glocks, Sig Sauers, and the like have barrels struck on a mandrel, with no rifling. The Browning’s rifling gives us a way to identify it. The killer may have picked up the shell casings…but we can still get a match through the bullets themselves.”

  “But this is a different gun than the one used in the murders at the Harrow home?”

  “It is,” Choi admitted. “The Harrow murders and, we now know, at least one other set of murders were committed with a .357 revolver.”

  “And what’s next?”

  “Because of Jenny’s discovery, I’ll be looking for matches among several other gun attacks across the United States.”

  “Thank you, Billy.”

  Carmen turned to Jenny and asked, “What was the discovery you made?”

  Her name and area of expertise superimposed at the bottom of the screen, Jenny wore not her usual T-shirt and jeans, but dress slacks and a silky blouse, her blonde hair tied back in a loose ponytail. In real life, she rarely wore makeup, but this was television and she was mildly glamorized, still looking painfully shy…but steady.

  By punching some keys on her computer, Jenny brought up a map of the United States with red stars scattered around. “These mark different towns where attacks may be related to those we’ve been investigating.”

  Dingle got in close on the map, showing the audience the twenty-two different towns where attacks on the families of civil servants had occurred over the last nine years.

  Jenny and Carmen went on explaining the theory, as scripted, while halfway across the country, in the office of Sheriff Roberto Tomasa, the rest of the team—Harrow, Pall, and Anderson—sat before a monitor studying the map as they waited for Carmen to throw the show to them.

  Till now, these attacks had been a list of names, addresses, and dates on a page. Now, displayed on a map, they started to carry weight, graphically indicating the possible extent of the killer’s carnage, and his travels. Texas, Nevada, California, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Michigan, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, Ohio—the red stars seemed to be everywhere. All this, plus the Iowa, Florida, North Dakota, and New Mexico murders.

  Chris Anderson could only shake his head in frustration that these statistics made feeling the true weight of the tragedy so elusive.

  At twenty-seven, the blond, boy-band handsome chemist had himself pegged as the youngest member of the team, with the possible exception of computer cutie Jenny Blake, and perhaps segment host Car
men Garcia (although she wasn’t, technically, a member of the team).

  Turning to Pall, Anderson asked, “We could use a print-out of that map, don’tcha think, Michael?”

  “I do,” the short, muscular Pall said.

  “Sheriff?” Anderson said, turning to Sheriff Tomasa, who stood off to one side, waiting for Harrow to interview him during the upcoming segment.

  “Yes, son?”

  “Can you get someone to get me a fold-out map of the United States?”

  Tomasa glanced at Harrow, to see if he had time to honor this request, and the host nodded. Then the sheriff made a quick cell phone call to one of his deputies.

  Harrow called over to Anderson: “What is it, Chris?”

  “I don’t know yet, sir, not for sure,” Anderson said, voice lazy, eyes alert. “There’s somethin’ about all those towns, but I can’t quite put it together….”

  Sound man Ingram was counting down, and they all turned their attention to the show at hand.

  Harrow introduced a short segment that included, from the bottom of the gravel drive, pieces of his encounter with Archie Gershon. The audio from Hathaway’s camera hadn’t picked up anything worth using, so Harrow had prerecorded a voiceover explanation, saying that the recluse had given them a significant lead—the license number of the perp’s vehicle.

  Back on camera, Harrow said, “Meet Michael Pall, one of the premier scientists in law enforcement.”

  Pall’s thick black comma of hair hung Superman-style, his black glasses giving him the right professorial look, a white shirt and dark tie peaking from beneath his Crime Seen! lab coat. The sleeves of the white jacket seemed stretched to the limit by the compact man’s muscles.

  Pall was, Anderson knew, a zealot about his workouts. Even with their hours mostly spent on the bus, in the semi-situated lab or in a motel, Pall always seemed to find a place and the time to lift weights. The guy was a good twenty years older than Anderson, but had more energy than a crate of Red Bull and no apparent need for sleep.

  “So, Dr. Pall,” Harrow was saying, “what can you tell us about the license number Mr. Gershon gave us?”

  Looking at Harrow and not the camera—as he’d been taught in the crash course in TV technique the network had provided—Pall said, “Oklahoma plate registered to a Honda Accord owned by a seventy-year-old woman in a little town called Clinton.”