And then a gunshot.
The heavy thud of a body falling.
“There’s your dismissal, you freak,” Tyler’s voice said.
Len was staring wide-eyed at the paper. “Hekilledme?”
Per told him, “His story was that you tried to escape, fleeing the scene of your crime, and he shot you before discovering what you’d done. Everybody believed him, too. Except me.”
My would-be murderer stared from me to Per, and back to me. “But you’re not dead. And I’m not dead.”
At which point Tyler walked into the room.
“Which makes this tougher for me. But not impossible.”
Tyler blocked the door, and I remembered again what a big guy he was. He wasn’t lean and hard like Per, but he was wide and meaty. And the gun he pointed straight at me made him a lot bigger.
The gun in my own hands had gotten pretty heavy by that time. I could feel the muscles in my forearms quivering. The muscles keeping my knees from buckling joined them.
I had been scared of the man who had come to kill me, but I was more scared of Tyler. He was urbane. Genteel. Respected and respectable. He had people – a lot of them. Law partners, parents,siblings, guys he went yachting with, guys he went big-game hunting with.
All of them would no doubt say he was the best guy ever born. Salt of the earth.
And me . . . who did I have? I had the Thorsday Night Writers, whose odd-lot appearance and diverse lifestyles would make their testimony a hard sell.
And for the moment, I had Per. He hadn’t yet disappeared, but was probably going to any second.
Small picture, there were three of us, and only one Tyler.
Big picture, Tyler knew how to use his gun. And had every other advantage, too.
And then Len, would-be hit man, pond scum, violent criminal, said, “You shot me in the back, you son of a bitch.” With his wrists still duct-taped in front of him, he lunged to his feet, yanked the gun out of my hands and charged Tyler with a speed and a fury that made me realize Len could have been on me and I would have been dead before my reflexes even had a chance.
I scooped up the baseball bat at my feet as Len’s animal leap launched him across my bed towards Tyler. Tyler swung his gun away from me to protect himself.
Len’s gun jammed, and Tyler shot him. He dropped like a bag of hammers and lay bleeding on my bedspread.
Per lunged at Tyler. I charged at the same time, baseball bat swinging in short, sharp arcs. I swung and kept swinging, and kept connecting, until Per dragged himself across the bed and pulled me away from what was left of the would-be John Grisham of fantasy.
Per introduced himself to the cops as Per Tordönsson, of Tordönsson Detective Agency, and told them I’d hired him to check out the man I was dating. He presented them with his card and a folder from his backpack that included copies of documents on which Tyler had forged my signature, giving him control of my estate, naming him as my next of kin for all my personal effects. He handed them what he said was a phone tap of Len getting the date and time of my murder from Tyler. He said it was clean, that the affidavit was in the folder.
The cops sent someone to the ER to talk to Len, who admittedthat Tyler had hired him to murder me. He also said that he hadn’t intended to do it.
No one believed him.
It was the end of a long, exhausting Friday. Per sat across the table from me in the hotel room we’d rented, his leg stitched and bandaged, working his way through room service steak and eggs, salad, roll and a dessert of questionable origin.
“What happens now?” I asked him.
“What do you want to happen?”
“I want to be with you forever. I just keep waiting for this beam of light to surround you and whisk you out of my life, and I want to know how much longer we have.”
And there it was. That smile again. The one that melted me on the inside and made me know from the first instant I saw it that this was a man I had to know.
“I’m staying,” he said.
“But your time. The research historians. Won’t someone be along to drag you back?”
