Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2) by Jack Lively (reading well TXT) 📕

The hinges creaked. It opened into a vestibule containing a simple wooden bench, hanging hooks for clothes, a neat pile of white towels, and a neat pile of white robes. It all looked clean and fresh and smelled like laundry detergent and heated wood.

From the vestibule, there were two ways to go. The sauna, and the bathroom. I toed the bathroom open. Empty and humid. The shower curtain was wet. I pushed the sauna door in. Empty and hot. There was a towel on the bench. I picked it up. Moist. The coals were being cooked by the electric coil below. A pail of water was beside it, the surface flat and unmoving. A wooden ladle lay over the top. The ladle was dry, which didn’t mean anything. It was a sauna. Everything was dry. Except the towel, which meant that it had recently contained something wet, like a person who had just showered.

But there was no longer a wet person wrapped in the towel.

I backed out of there and continued down the corridor. At the threshold of the games room I could see bodies, plural, two of them. One was the blonde bearded guy with the bandaged hand. The other was the guy whose nostril I had sliced with my fishing knife.

The sliced nostril guy was sprawled upright into a liquor cabinet. His head rested on a shelf where it shared space with Jack Daniels and Jim Beam. There was also Makers Mark and Wild Turkey. The shelf above had even more exalted characters, like Laphroaig, Yamazaki, and Lagavalin, among others. Beside the nostril cut, the guy had suffered a gunshot wound to his neck that was visible from the doorway. I moved closer and saw another one at the temple, in front of his left ear. That had been the shot which pushed him into the liquor cabinet. The neck shot had been the follow-up, pinning him there. It occurred to me that the neck shot had been a kind of joke. Like the nostril slice guy had been about to fall over and the neck shot had redressed the balance. A third bullet had gone in at the heart. There was not much blood from that one. The blood from the head shot was pooling on the glass shelf, running in and around the bottles, but not spilling over the slightly raised shelf lip.

The blond bearded guy had been playing pool. The shooter had got him first in the back of the head. That shot had killed him. But he had been standing upright and the head is a heavy thing. When the brain ceased to function, it had stopped firing out messages to the guy’s muscles. The head was no longer able to defy gravity and had tumbled forward and down. The rest of his body had followed. The head had smashed into the top of the side rail, leaving a nice mark in the polished wood. The body had then crumpled to the floor face-down, where it had stayed. The guy’s arm had unfolded beneath the table.

Beside the head wound I couldn’t see another entry wound. But given that the others had been shot three times, it was likely that this guy had been as well. Which is why I figured the entry wound was facing the floor, chest most likely. But there was no exit wound at the back. So I guesstimated right then and there that the gun had been a .22 caliber.

There were three drinks in the games room. Two beer bottles on a small table between comfortable lounge chairs. A whiskey glass on a counter near the liquor cabinet. Two dead guys, one dead woman. Four drinks in total if you included Abrams’ smashed whiskey glass.

I was thinking about the blonde girl and the wet towel in the sauna. I dipped a finger into the whiskey glass and tasted it. Diluted bourbon. The ice had melted.

But then I was thinking about myself, because I could hear police sirens in the distance. I was thinking that being in the house when the police arrived would be somewhere between bad and catastrophic. Not that I was guilty of anything, but good luck explaining that to a judge.

Eleven

But first there were things to do, things to know about. There were the bodies and the blood and the smashed glass. There were casings to check for, but no casings to be found. Which didn’t surprise me, as the killings had all the features of a professional hit. I figured I had five minutes, tops. Time enough for a rapid tour. The Beaver Falls Lodge had five bedrooms. Four of which had been occupied. One minute per room, one minute for miscellaneous movement and to get out of the house.

I didn’t see surveillance cameras. Part of what you get when you can afford luxury is privacy. There would be a camera at the gate, to scan and record vehicles.

I looked out the large picture windows. There were many of them, on all sides. All dark, throwing back reflections from inside the house. I wondered who would have been around to call the police. One answer was the shooter on a burner phone. A corollary to that was the idea that the shooter was watching me now, from the woods. I used up four minutes searching the house.

One minute to go. Sirens approaching fast.

I went out past Jane Abrams, still sightless, still dead. I slid the glass door closed. The wind had picked up and with it came fine droplets of rain moving through the air. I looked out at the woods. Dark and indifferent. Maybe there was someone out there, maybe not. On the other side, water glinted in the channel.

I let myself tumble over the banister. Grabbed hold of the post and shimmied down. At the bottom I crouched under the deck, up against the inside of the post. I saw the flashlights before I heard the people holding them. Two lights moving up