Page 27 of Go Home (Kate Valentine #1)
He poured himself another thimbleful of Wild Turkey and plopped an ice cube in, checking the time on the kitchen clock. Half past eleven exactly. If he was still awake at one a.m., he could have another glass, but that would have to be his last until tomorrow evening.
Palmer wasn’t going to let himself go, like some cops did.
He recalled his old colleague Dai Evans – going down to see him in the Welsh Harp, barely three months after he got the gold watch.
Shaking like a whelp. At lunchtime. The bartender keeping his glass permanently full.
Sip-sip. Dead by Christmas. Or sadder still, Andy Andreyeff.
Lieutenant Andreyeff took early retirement because of his back.
More accurately, Andy was taking so many Oxys for his back that he passed out while escorting the visiting Republican senator around the precinct.
Went from that to smoking H in his car to a final, fateful, fentanyl farewell.
How hard do you have to hit that stuff, to retire in July and be a goner by December?
And what was it about cops? When they went wrong, why did they have to go so spectacularly wrong?
Nothing could compare to the job, maybe.
The thrill of the chase. That serene, almost mystical moment when the pieces came together and you knew you’d got the guy.
The closeness with your partner, a telepathy that no wife, no husband, no sibling or offspring could hope to share in.
The fury, too, when the perp walked away, when the tree-hugging, thug-loving jury decided that the scumbag deserved a fifth, sixth, seventh second chance, or the smirking hotshot lawyer poked his finger in the loophole and tore your case apart.
Good and bad, high and low, the job was intense.
When you were in it, you were really living. But when you weren’t…
He shook his head and took his drink into the living room.
He just had to adapt. That’s all. He really hadn’t been retired for very long.
It wasn’t surprising that he was still having some sleepless nights six months in.
Well, all right, nine months in. His sister was right.
He had a lot to give. He needed to call that number, discuss volunteering opportunities in the community.
And he had a lot of stories to tell. What happened to that idea about writing his memoirs?
The time he booked Gotti for slapping his goombah.
That other case – what was the name of the victim now?
– how the top brass took all the glory, when the only breakthrough had been his.
He knew the guy they had in custody didn’t do it.
Cop’s instinct. People used to value that.
He focused on the TV for a moment. Nature documentary, that breathless British guy, Sir-David-something.
What a fraud. He’d been trying to explain to his niece last Thanksgiving.
The guy had a ton of footage where nothing happened: a raccoon on a log, a bird wading through a stream.
And he makes up a story to go with it. “He’s decided to go looking for a girlfriend…
” What a crock. “Along comes his enemy, Walter Wolf.” Nothing’s happening!
He grunted with annoyance, realizing that the curtains hadn’t been properly closed, and that a long, thin wedge of street-lighting was piercing the comfortable darkness of the room. He stood up, pulled the curtains apart. Glimpsed a flicker of movement by the gate outside. What was that?
He went over to the desk, where there was a second TV screen, split into six separate camera-feeds.
Clicked on the front door, and the frame enlarged; he saw a large cat washing itself by the gate.
It must have jumped when he went over to the window.
Satisfied, he clicked through the other five screens.
He had the house and garden covered, front and back.
Clay Tuttle had got the system up and running.
Retired like him. Offered him a sales job.
How could he take it? He’d outranked Tuttle in the PD. That wouldn’t work.
He heard a thump out in the hallway, but it didn’t trouble him. That would be the kids in the adjoining house. They had no bedtime, no kind of routine; the mom just let them run wild.
If it was anything he needed to worry about, the system would detect it.
Cost a bundle, even with Tuttle’s alleged discount.
But you couldn’t be too careful. Especially if you were an ex-cop.
Criminals had long memories. And a surprisingly rigid sense of right and wrong, when it came to their right and wrong, the cops’ right and wrong.
But too bad. So, what if the odd bit of evidence had to be placed somewhere, sometimes, or just as mysteriously misplaced ?
It wasn’t as if these were choirboys. They were bangers, bangers and hoods and two-bit scumbags, and the good guys had to come out on top.
Anyway, if anyone wanted to pay a midnight call on Palmer, well, Palmer would be ready to greet them with a fully loaded Ruger Redhawk.
He pulled the curtains together forcefully and returned to the sofa. Where was the remote? Dammit. It was on the table.
He got up with another grunt. When did that start?
The grunting every time he stood up or sat down or bent over.
He had his hand on the remote when he heard another noise.
It was in the back. He had motion sensors on the back fence behind the fire pit; twin lamps would bathe the whole garden in a gigawatt of stadium-grade LED security lighting.
The mom next door was always giving him grief about it – said it woke the kids up every time a possum took a piss.
Her words, not his. Maybe he was old-fashioned, but he didn’t like to hear women talking like that.
And never mind his lights, those brats were up half the night anyway.
No Daddy. No consistent male influence. A pair of crimes waiting to happen.
But why was the garden in darkness?
He switched the kitchen light off, peered into the inky blackness as he went into the top drawer for the flashlight. Stood by the sink and shone it out slowly, left to right, then back again a few feet higher. A full perimeter sweep.
Two eyes glinted back at him like a pair of silver dollars. He jumped a little.
Old fool.
It was just another neighborhood cat. Shaking his head, he switched the kitchen light back on. He’d have to look at those garden sensors in the morning. Not much point having state-of-the-art security if the bulbs were gone.
But hadn’t he replaced them all, on Fourth of July weekend?
He padded back into the living room, shutting the kitchen door tight behind him. His first thought: check the camera feeds on the laptop again, just to be sure.
His second thought: why was the laptop shut?
He felt a prickling on the back of his neck.
Some things you did automatically. Closing doors. Switching off lights. Flushing the toilet. No need to think about doing them, no need to wonder whether you did them. You did them. Auto-pilot, muscle memory.
He never closed the laptop. When he went to bed, he took it with him, dulled the screen so it didn’t keep him awake. Not that that mattered at the moment. But he hadn’t shut it. He hadn’t shut it. And yet it was shut.
Trembling slightly, he lifted the lid. Pressed the power-up button.
At that moment, everything else went black: the lamps on either side of the sofa, the TV screen.
The house was plunged into darkness. Only the laptop screen provided a little light, the half-dozen separate camera feeds giving him a view from the front door to the street, of the side-alley and the garage, the garden seen from the kitchen window, the kitchen and the whole back of the house from the garden.
He jumped. Almost dropped the laptop. There was a face on the screen. Right up close to the camera. Two eyes in the darkness of a balaclava, staring directly at him. No. Staring into him.
“You motherf-”
Palmer ran to the cabinet in the corner, fumbled in his pocket for the keys.
What was that smell?
He grabbed the gun, stubbed his toe as he groped his way out of the room, but barely felt it. Limped to the kitchen door and yanked it open.
It was as if all the air in the house was instantly sucked away.
Instead of his kitchen, Palmer found himself facing a wall of flame and smoke; choking fumes lashed his eyes.
He staggered away from the kitchen, made it down the hallway to the front door, his lungs burning, his eyes and nose streaming. He retched as he pulled at the door.
It was locked. Dead-bolted at the bottom.
Hadn’t he heard a noise out in the hallway?
Thought it was those kids, jumping the last few stairs like they always did.
Pathetically, he thumped at the panels of the door.
Steel-reinforced. For his own safety. A soft explosion sounded in the kitchen, something heavy sliding into the inferno, followed instantly by a further wave of toxic, throat-searing smoke.
He made it to the hallway up the stairs before he passed out.
And in the garden, his killer watched.