The second he’d bolted up the stairs, I knew what I had to do. I set my sights on the coffee table. My body was still convulsing and shaking violently, but I knew I had only one chance left. If he came down those stairs before I reached my goal, I was dead.
Gritting my teeth, I reached out and clawed at the floor, pulling myself only a few inches as I listened to him stomping around upstairs. Focusing with all my might, I tried again, and this time I was able to pull myself several feet. My heart hammered in my chest when I heard furniture being toppled, and I reached again and again, frantic now to get to the beech-wood box resting peacefully on top of the table.
I heard footfalls on the landing and knew Velkune was about to descend the stairs. I clawed again and got to the table. His footsteps started to descend, and I reached up and pulled at the box. It toppled down on top of me, striking me in the cheek, but I barely winced. The latch flipped up and the box cracked open. Garrett was midway down the stairs.
My hand was now shaking so hard, I could barely wedge it into the opening. “You think you’re so smart,” he was saying as he reached the last few steps. “Sending me on a wild-goose chase upstairs, huh?”
I curled myself around the box, willing my fingers to clutch the grip of the gun and pull it free. “You ever wonder what it’s like to be electrocuted, Abby?” he asked as he reached the landing and began to make his way back over to me with that cattle prod held out in front of him sending little blue currents between the two prongs of the fork.
I tore my eyes away from it and focused on the gun.
“If you get hit with one of these at the base of your neck, they say that you can hear the blood in your brain boil before you die.”
I clenched my jaw so tight it hurt and rolled to the side just as he raised the prod to jam it into my neck. The rod went into the floor and three bullets went into Garrett Velkune.
He dropped to his knees and stared at me as if he couldn’t believe I’d actually shot him. Then he fell over backward and was still.
I managed to squirm over to the sofa and prop myself up against it so I could lay the gun on my belly, still pointing it feebly at Velkune’s body, worried that someone that evil might actually thwart death and get up to attack me again. The sound of sirens finally came to my ears, and just then Dutch burst into the room, gun drawn and looking as shaken as I’ve ever seen him. His eyes darted about the room, spotting first Velkune, then me, then going back to Velkune.
“What the hell happened?” he shouted, his face pale and frightened as he looked again at me.
I managed to wave the gun a little in Garrett’s direction. “He brought a cattle prod to a gun fight,” I said, and then I actually laughed. It wasn’t a good healthy laugh, more like a “I can’t believe I just survived that” laugh. It still felt good, either way.
Dutch holstered his weapon and came forward, and just as he got to me I heard someone else’s voice coming up the steps. “Dutch? Your car’s parked all caca in the driveway. I could barely get my Mercedes to fit and I didn’t want to leave it in the street. Those sirens sound like they might be coming this way. I wonder what all the fuss is about?”
And then my sister’s face appeared in the door, and she dropped her wedding binder the moment she took in the scene. It made a loud thud, but not as loud as the shriek that erupted out of her when she saw us. Guess that’ll be the last time she drops by unexpectedly.
Meanwhile Dutch bent down and picked me up into his arms. “Sweet Jesus!” he whispered as he cradled me close. “Candice called me and said you were being attacked. I heard the gunshots from down the street and I thought…” He didn’t finish his sentence; he just held me close.
When he finally let me go a little, I wiped the moisture from his cheeks and managed a weak smile. “Thanks for the wedding present, cowboy,” I told him. “On our anniversary, could you maybe get me a holster?”
I was sent to the hospital along with Garrett Velkune, who, miraculously, had survived the three bullets I’d pumped into him. If there was any justice at all to be found that day, it was in the fact that one of those bullets had permanently paralyzed him from the waist down.
The police began to put together the pieces of the Moreno and King cases, and they took a lot of the confession Garrett had given to me to lead them through the discovery of evidence, because Velkune wasn’t talking.
His ever-faithful wife had hired the best defense lawyer money could buy, but I doubted it would get him anything other than maybe a life sentence instead of the chair. That was better in my book. I wanted him to suffer for as long as possible.
DNA on Kendra’s fetus came back positive to Velkune, and everyone from his wedding remembered him being late to the big event. Someone at Decker Lake also remembered seeing a guy in a ball cap pass by driving a silver Toyota Camry along the lake road, but then later seeing the same man jogging the other way on that road with no sign of the car. Investigators found a path through the woods behind Donna’s house that led to that part of the road, and they knew that was likely the route that Velkune had taken back to Seely’s after dumping the car.
If he killed Kendra before dumping the car or after was something I was left to wonder about. My guess was that he’d hauled her to Seely’s, probably hiding her in the garage, where he’d hog-tied and gagged her before heading out to dump her car in the lake. He’d then hurried back to finish her off. The reason I thought this was that he was a sick fecker, he enjoyed torturing women, and he’d mentioned to me that he’d gone back to retrieve his cattle prod from the garage, which was when Seely had seen him.
Donna King’s car was never found, but I suspected that if the area lake levels dropped low enough during a summer drought, it’d show up. The police didn’t really need it anyway. They had Velkune’s cattle prod, which perfectly matched the burn marks on her body.
There was also the testimony of three very pretty girls from small towns along the Texas rodeo circuit from several years back who’d been attacked in their homes by a man with a cattle prod. Their statements all described the same thing—a man in a ball cap had knocked on their doors, claimed that his truck had broken down, and he’d asked to use their phones. The moment their backs were turned, he’d zapped them with a cattle prod. He’d then taken them out to the woods, tied them up, and raped them. None of the poor girls had been murdered, thank God, but all of them remember their rapist as looking remarkably like Velkune. DNA from at least one of the rape kits was sure to be a match, I figured.
All in all the DA had a solid case, thanks to the team of Fusco and Cooper, but did they thank us? No. Some minds are just locked up tight, I guess.
Still, we did discover one ally—the newbie detective Dutch had befriended was fast discovering that I was a pretty good resource, and he made a point to send me flowers and a note of appreciation. I showed the card to Candice, who grinned and said, “I guess we found our reliable source at APD.”
I smiled too. “Yeah, but I’ll miss Purcell.”
Candice laughed. She was looking better and better since her bout with the bad shrimp salad.
Over the course of the next week, things really settled down, which I was very grateful for—except for one tiny thing that blew up quite unexpectedly the following Friday. I received a frantic call from my sister—which I actually took for a change—and at her urging flipped on the news. There on the screen lit up like a bonfire was the venue for our nuptials—completely ablaze. Cat was actually crying into the phone, and it took me about an hour to calm her down.
Dutch called me too, right after I hung up with Cat. “Did you hear?” he said.
“I’m watching it right now,” I told him.
“It was a grease fire in the kitchen,” he told me. “The old place went up like a dried-out Christmas tree. They were lucky no one was hurt.”
“So I guess we’re back on for an elopement?” I asked hopefully.
Dutch laughed. “I like how your brain works, Edgar.”
&n
bsp; My phone beeped and I looked at the display. “That’s Cat, cowboy; she’s pretty upset. Let me call you back.”
I hung up with Dutch and clicked over to Cat. “Great news!” she said, and the switch from distraught to happy was so fast in her that it took me a minute to catch up.
“What?” I asked. “What’s great news?”
“I found another venue!”
I blinked. “How? I only hung up with you ten minutes ago!”
“Money can make things happen fast, Abby,” Cat said. “Anyway, we’ll have to move the date up to October thirty-first—”
“Are you crazy?” I said to her. “I can’t get married on Halloween!”
“Oh, pish!” she scolded. “Abby, it’s just a date on a calendar. We don’t have to have a Halloween theme or anything.”
But Halloween had never been a good day for me. Bad things always seemed to happen to me at the end of October. “Cat—,” I tried, but her bulldozer was in high gear.
“I have to go,” she said. “I’ve got to call the caterer, the band, the flower shop, the photographer, etcetera, etcetera. Thank God those wedding invitations didn’t go out yet. I’ll have to change the date on those right away to get them out in today’s mail.”
“Cat—,” I tried again, but she’d already hung up.
Well, that confirmed it. I’d felt something very bad was going to happen at my wedding, and the venue burning down and the date being moved to Halloween pretty much counted as “very bad.”
The thing of it is, however, that on that morning in late October, I didn’t even know the half of it yet.
But that’s another story…
Victoria Laurie, Lethal Outlook
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