No Second Chance

“All right!” Lydia shouted. “I’m surrendering!”

Then she jumped up with the semiautomatic already going. She pulled the trigger as fast as she could. Bullets flew, the sound ringing in her ears. She didn’t know if the shots were being returned or not. She didn’t think so. There was no hesitation, though. The gate was open. She darted through it.

Lydia ran hard. A hundred yards away, Heshy was waiting in a neighbor’s yard. They met up. Keeping low, they followed a trail of recently pruned shrubs. Heshy was good. He always tried to prepare for the worst. His car was hidden in a cul-de-sac two blocks down.

When they were safely on their way, Heshy asked, “You okay?”

“Fine, Pooh Bear.” She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and settled back. “Just fine.”

It wasn’t until they were near the highway that Lydia wondered what had happened to Pavel’s cell phone.

My first reaction, naturally enough, was panic.

I opened the car door to give chase, but my brain finally kicked in and made me pull up. It was one thing to be brave or even foolhardy. It was another to be suicidal. I did not have a gun. Both Rachel and her assailant did. Rushing to her aid unarmed would be, at best, fruitless.

But I couldn’t just stay here.

I closed the car door. Once again, my foot stamped down on the accelerator. The car bolted forward. I spun the wheel and veered across my front lawn. The shots had come from the back of the house. I aimed the car there. I tore through the flower beds and shrubs. They had been here so long that I almost cared.

My headlights danced through the dark. I started toward the right, hoping that I could work around the big elm. No go. The tree was too close to the house. The car wouldn’t fit. I floored it in reverse. The tires ripped into dewy lawn, taking a second or two to catch. I headed toward the Christies’ property line. I took out their new gazebo. Bill Christie would be pissed.

I was in the backyard now. The headlights slipped along the Grossmans’ stockade fence. I swung the steering wheel toward the right. And then I saw her. I hit the brake. Rachel stood by the pile of firewood. The wood had been there when we bought the house. We hadn’t used any. It was probably rotten and bug infested. The Grossmans had complained that it was so close to their fence that the bugs would start eating into it. I had promised to get rid of it, but I hadn’t yet gotten around to it.

Rachel had her gun drawn and pointing down. The man in the flannel was lying at her feet like yesterday’s refuse. I didn’t have to roll down a window. The windshield was gone from the earlier gunshots. I heard nothing. Rachel lifted her hand. She waved to me, signaling that it was okay. I hurried out of the car.

“You shot him?” I asked, almost rhetorically.

“No,” she said.

The man was dead. You didn’t have to be a doctor to see that. The back of his skull had been blown off. Brain matter, congealed and pink-white, clung to the firewood. I am not on expert on ballistics but the damage was severe. It was either a very large bullet or from very close range.

“Someone was with him,” Rachel said. “They shot him and escaped through that gate.”

I stared down at him. The rage boiled up again. “Who is he?”

“I checked his pockets. He has a wad of bills but no ID.”

I wanted to kick him. I wanted to shake him and ask what he had done with my daughter. I looked at his face, damaged yet handsome, and wondered what had led him here, why our life paths had crossed. And that was when I noticed something odd.

I tilted my head to the side.

“Marc?”

I dropped to my knees. Brain matter did not bother me. Bone splinters and bloody tissue did not faze me in the least. I had seen worse trauma. I examined his nose. It was practically putty. I remembered that from last time. A boxer, I’d thought. Either that or he’d lived some rough years. His head lolled back at a funny angle. His mouth was open. That was what had drawn my eye.

I put my fingers on his jaw and palate and pulled his mouth farther open.

“What the hell are you doing?” Rachel asked.

“Do you have a flashlight?”

“No.”

Didn’t matter. I lifted his head up and aimed his mouth toward the car. The headlights did the trick. I could see clearly now.

“Marc?”

“It always bothered me that he let me see his face.” I lowered my head toward his mouth, trying to do so without casting too much of a shadow. “They were so careful about everything else. The altered voice, the stolen van sign, the welding together of license plates. Yet he lets me see his face.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I thought maybe he’d worn an elaborate disguise the first time I’d seen him. That would make sense. But now we know that’s not the case. So why would he let me see him?”

She seemed taken aback that I was asserting myself, but that didn’t last long. She joined in. “Because he had no record.”

“Maybe. Or . . .”

“Or what? Marc, we don’t have time for this.”

“His dental work.”

“What about it?”

“Look at his crowns. They’re tin cans.”

“They’re what?”

I lifted my head. “On his upper right molar and upper left cuspid. See, our crowns used to be made of gold, though most are now porcelain. Your dentist makes a mold so you can get an exact fitting. But this is just an aluminum, ready-made cap. You put it over the teeth and squeeze it on with pliers. I did two oral rotations overseas, mostly dealing with reconstruction, but I saw lots of mouths with these things in them. They call them tin cans. And they don’t do it here in the USA, except maybe as a temporary.”

She took a knee next to me. “He’s foreign?”

I nodded. “I’d bet he’s from the old Soviet bloc, something like that. The Balkans, maybe.”

“That would make sense,” she said. “Whatever prints they’d find they’d send down to NCIC. Same with any sort of face ID. Our files and computers wouldn’t pick him up. Hell, it’ll take the police forever to ID him unless someone comes forward.”

“Which probably won’t happen.”

“My God, that’s why they killed him. They know that we won’t be able to trace him back.”

The sirens sounded. Our eyes locked.

“You got a choice to make here, Marc. We stay, we’re going to jail. They’ll think he was part of our plot and we killed him. My guess is, the kidnappers knew that. Your neighbors will claim it was quiet until we drove up. Suddenly there’s shrieking tires and gunfire. I’m not saying that we won’t be able to explain it eventually.”