The Taking of Libbie, SD (Mac McKenzie #7)

“He picked his targets well, didn’t he?” I said.

Randisi kept his property like he was expecting company. He lived in a pristine white clapboard house on a low hill at the end of a groomed gravel driveway. A rich, manicured lawn surrounded the house, and green and purple fields of alfalfa bordered that. The outbuildings were recently painted, and what machinery I could see, although well used, looked like it had just come off the dealership lot. There was a turnaround at the top of the driveway. Large stones painted white bordered a small garden planted in the center of the turnaround. In the center of the garden was a flagpole. Old Glory flapped listlessly in the breeze.

I parked the Audi between the flagpole and the farmhouse. We hadn’t been in the car long enough for it to cool properly, yet it was still far more comfortable than the heat that greeted us when we left it. The sun was now high in the cloudless sky, and it glared down on us as if it were bad-tempered. The faint breeze that caused the flag to sway brought no relief. I saw large birds circling off to my left, and I wondered if they were buzzards—they felt like buzzards. Sweat trickled down my spine to my waist as I headed toward Randisi’s back door. Tracie trailed behind.

I knocked once, and the door flew open.

Randisi was standing on the other side of it.

He was pointing a rust-spotted, long-barreled .38 Colt at my head and smiling as if he had played an April Fool’s prank on me.

“What do you want?” he said.

I had been taking martial arts training on and off ever since the police academy. Some instructors were better than others, yet even the worst of them preached the same sermon—act without hesitation. Hesitation will get you killed.

Randisi was holding the gun in his right hand. I slid to my left even as I seized the wrist holding the gun and angled it away so I was out of the discharge line. I stepped in closer, took hold of the barrel of the gun with my other hand, and pushed it toward Randisi, rolling it against his thumb—the thumb is the weakest point of the hand. The gun was now pointing at his chest, but I kept twisting it until he let go of the butt. I released his wrist and shoved him hard backward into the kitchen. He lost his balance but didn’t fall. He grabbed his thumb with his left hand and said something that sounded like “Huh?” I released the spring-loaded latch on the left side of the gun, swung out the cylinder, tilted the gun upward, shook out all six cartridges onto the kitchen floor, slapped the cylinder back in place, and handed the Colt butt first to Randisi—all in the time it took to say it.

“Hi,” I said. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.” I tried to keep my voice light and cheerful. I doubt I succeeded. My mouth was dry, my heart was drumming, and I suddenly felt out of breath.

Randisi looked down at the gun that he now held with both hands and then back at me. He was a short, compact man with thick shoulders and a worldly face and eyes that looked as if they had seen things. It was easy to imagine him helping to pull a neighbor’s car out of a ditch in the rain.

“How did you do that?” he said.

“Practice,” I told him. “Do you always draw down on people who come to your door?”

Randisi slipped the gun into the waistband of his jeans. “It’s legal,” he said. “State says I can carry.”

“It doesn’t say you can shoot people.”

“What do you know about shooting people?”

“Far too much.”

“You a cop?”

“In my misspent youth.”

“What about this one?”

He gestured at Tracie. I had forgotten about her. She was standing six feet behind me, blinking in the hard sunlight, her face flushed. Heat—I assume it was heat—had covered her body with a mist of perspiration; her skin glistened, and her eyes held an almost giddy light.

“She’s a model,” I said.

“Model?” he repeated.

There’s something about that word that makes men silly. It transformed Randisi from a menacing recluse into a gleeful teenager. He quickly removed the Colt from his waistband, set it on the kitchen counter, and nudged it away. Almost simultaneously, he brushed past me, stepped outside of the farmhouse, paused, gave Tracie a slow, bold stare of appraisal, and extended his hand. “I’m Mike Randisi,” he said.

Tracie smiled, only I could see that her heart wasn’t in it. She shook Randisi’s hand as if it were something she’d rather not touch.

“Sorry about the gun,” he said. “I’ve been getting some threats lately, and a fellow can’t be too careful.”

“Threats?” I said.

Randisi gently set two fingers and a thumb on Tracie’s elbow and urged her toward the door. “You don’t want to be standing out here in this heat. Come inside now, where it’s cool.”