Color of Blood(123)

Hunched over the phone, with Marty directly behind him, Dennis twisted reflexively from the cold barrel of the handgun against his temple.

The sound of the detonation inches away from his ear arrived at the same time as the bullet. Dennis remembered a roar and an all-encompassing white flash that seemed to invade every molecule of his body.

That was followed by a vivid sensation of effortless floating.

His vision slowly returned, and he found himself staring into a gauzy sea of dark gray. He was lying on his stomach on the ugly, gray living-room carpet. His eyes were two feet away from someone’s shoes. The owner of the shoes was talking, maybe on a phone. It was Marty, and he was angry.

“He’s not dead. He turned at the last goddamn second . . . Don’t give me that shit . . . there’s no such thing as a double-tap suicide. Now it’ll have to be a robbery. Goddamnit.”

Dennis was amused at how clever Marty had been: the offer to take him to the ER, the staged phone call, the inaudible conversation so that Dennis would cover his open ear and not hear Marty get in position behind.

Then the voice, loud and purposeful, came from the hallway. At first he thought it might be God talking.

But it was only Judy.

“Put the gun down,” she said. Dennis could tell she was quite angry.

“Who the hell are you?” he heard Marty say.

“I said put the bloody gun down,” Judy said again, this time enunciating her words slowly in the commanding tone of voice that every law-enforcement professional has at her disposal.

“Are you a friend of Dennis’s?” Marty said. “Oh, wait. You’re the Australian chick. Cunningham’s little Aussie bitch.”

Dennis heard another loud detonation and for a moment could not tell where it came from. Almost instantly, Marty’s shoes disappeared from in front of his eyes as if by magic, and in another feat of apparent trickery, Marty fell like Tom Thumb from far above, landing on his back about three feet away from Dennis’s face. Marty rocked back and forth on the carpet next to Dennis, grimacing.

“You stupid woman,” Marty yelled.

Judy’s face appeared several inches from Dennis’s. “Good God,” she said, touching his face. “Dennis,” she said, “how do I call for emergency help? Do I call 911? Is that what I do?”

It took an enormous amount of energy for him to respond. “Arggghhh,” is all that he could say.

She stood up, and instead of going right to the phone, he saw her beige, high-heeled dress shoes pass close over his face. He could see Judy’s shoes standing next to Marty’s rocking head, and then he saw Judy kick Marty above his left ear with so much force that it sounded like someone had dropped a ripe cantaloupe onto the kitchen linoleum.





Chapter 45


“I can’t believe I missed the gun switch,” he said, holding Judy’s hand. They were in the emergency room at Arlington County Hospital.

“Don’t worry about that now,” she said. “Just relax.”

“When Marty went through my house before I returned from Australia, he switched guns,” Dennis said. “He took my gun and left me a duplicate Glock. Then he was going to take it back afterward. What a clever guy.”

“Stop talking,” Judy said.

“Then after shooting me, he planned to simply clean my gun and put it in my hand. No one would bother looking for powder burns on my hands.”

“Hush, Dennis, please.”

“You heard the doc,” he said. “I’m going to be fine. The round just skimmed me.”

“He said you have a skull fracture and you need to remain calm,” she said. “There’s always a chance of a blood clot.”

“I’m going to be fine,” he said.

“Of course you are. But I don’t understand why they’re going to move you to another hospital.”

“Oh, that’s just to get me away from civilians,” Dennis said. “They’re moving me to Walter Reed National Medical Center. It’s military. More control over the situation. Where’s Marty?”

“I’ve already told you twice before, they moved him a while ago,” she said.

“Oh yeah,” Dennis said. “I remember.”

“Is he OK?”

“You mean his shoulder or his legal problems?”

“His shoulder.”

“His shoulder is fine, and why do you care? The man almost ended your life. God, Dennis, you have a funny sense of loyalty.”

“Just feel bad for him, that’s all. People do strange things for money.”

“And you think Marty knew nothing about the rare earth metals?”

“Don’t think so,” Dennis said, adjusting a strip of gauze that was pressing his eyebrow. “Idiot was doing odd jobs for Massey for years to get some extra cash. Little surprised he’d go this far, though. You know, Marty warned me several times to let this thing go. He begged me to give it up. I see why.”

“Oh, so that exonerates him from trying to kill you? Dennis, can we stop talking about that man?”

Judy slumped in the chair next to his bed and listened to the chirping of medical monitors. The adrenaline had finally worn off, and she was physically and emotionally spent. She had been interviewed four times already: twice by Arlington County Police and twice by the US government investigators that hardly identified themselves. She repeated the story each time about what happened when she arrived at Dennis’s house.