Cold Fire, page 27
Tess had no idea how long they’d been fighting, but it appeared again that Po’s knife wasn’t as ineffective as Pinky had made it sound, because Harper was bleeding from several wounds on his shoulders and upper chest. His gun was still in hand, but he wasn’t trying to shoot Po, he used it to hammer backwards at Po’s face, trying to knock her man loose. Po gritted his bloody lips and held on tightly, stabbing down again with his knife into the giant’s flesh.
Harper went down, skidding in the blood-flecked snow, but it saved him a final stab to the neck. Po spilled loose and rolled in the snow. Harper scrambled, grasping at the edge of a raised flowerbed for stability. He used it to haul forward on his knees, until momentum helped him find his feet once more. Po too had gotten his feet under him and twisted around to confront the brute. Harper aimed a kick at him with a tombstone-sized boot. It found Po’s midriff. Po gasped, clutched at his belly, and in that moment Harper raised the gun and this time did point it at her fiancé’s head. During the other ambush, he’d aimed similarly at Po with a revolver, not a Glock, and the hammer had fallen on an empty shell casing; this time there’d be no mistake, considering he must’ve been saving a bullet for such an opportunity.
Back in the barn, when Harper was likewise on the verge of maiming or killing Po, she’d been unsteady and weak, and her shots had flown astray. Her hand was steady this time, and she didn’t flinch from killing the man about to kill Po. She fired the gun, hearing an echo as Pinky also unloaded on the giant. Neither of them missed.
But the damned giant stayed upright.
The bullets striking him had done more immediate damage mentally than to his flesh. Po capitalized on the moment while the giant stood in shocked silence. He grabbed Harper’s pistol with one hand, yanking it aside, even as he plunged in with his blade. It slid through the soft skin under Harper’s chin and, once in deep enough, Po wrenched with a bent elbow and opened his windpipe. Blood gouted from Harper’s throat. He let go of the pistol, now firmly gripped by its barrel by Po, and stumbled backwards. Both his hands cupped his wound, but couldn’t contain the volume of blood pouring from him. He turned, shocked that he was not as indestructible as his exploits had fooled him into thinking, and stared wide-eyed at where Tess and Pinky stood with their pistols raised still.
He mouthed something, but there was no way of hearing what he said as Tess again fired a volley of bullets, this time dead center to his exposed heart. Harper sat down abruptly. His hands fell from his throat. This time she was confident he was dead.
AFTER …
Months passed before Po fully recovered from his battles with Bruce Harper. The third time was often the charm, and it had proven true again that it was during their third physical confrontation that he’d finally beaten his nemesis, but it had come at a price paid in broken bones, contusions and smashed teeth. After Harper’s ambush outside the decommissioned quarry, Po hadn’t confessed to how hurt he was from the shrapnel and bullet wounds, so he’d gone into that final battle at only about sixty per cent his norm. He’d fought tooth and nail, and it was perhaps a blessing that Harper’s madness had convinced him he could kill Po without resorting to shooting him as he had the police and Joanne. He’d kept one bullet in reserve, but Tess and Pinky had thwarted him from executing Po at the end. After taking a hellacious beating to his head with the gun barrel, and a kick to the gut he was certain had burst something important inside, Po had opened Harper’s throat, admittedly a horrible deed, but one he didn’t regret. After Tess finally slew the brute with the heart shots, Po had sunk down into the dirty snow and lain there gasping like a landed trout until an ambulance arrived to whisk him to hospital. He didn’t recall what had happened in the hours afterwards, but he’d wakened the following day and discovered he’d undergone surgery to fix a broken arm and several other wounds, but thankfully his spleen hadn’t been ruptured as initially feared. He’d peed blood for a couple of days afterwards. His lips were split, and five of his teeth broken, two of them unable to be saved. The wound to his side had severed a tendon and made walking without limping nigh on impossible for a while, but he’d gotten over it and walked with his usual languid gait after many weeks.
As he’d gotten more mobile, Tess had grown rounder and less nimble. She was glad. Her wounded hand required minor surgery, but it was nowhere near as bad as the injury that had ended her career with the sheriff’s office, and healed without any complications within a few weeks. Siobhan had come close to murdering her child in her womb, but failed. Her final trimester had passed without any major hitch, the baby growing and getting stronger day by day, and in the end was eager to meet her parents. Their baby girl was born three days earlier than originally expected, and she’d the pale skin and white blonde hair of her mother, but her dad’s expressive turquoise eye colouring.
Alex Grey survived the gunshot wound to his side. He got married to Emma Clancy, Tess’s sometimes boss, and now, sister-in-law, and they would become a wonderful uncle and aunt to Felicity Ellie-Jo Villere.
Those she was named after had all kept in touch with Tess, the two elderly sisters acting as if they might be ideal fairy godmothers, and if ever she required a nanny then Joanne Mason would be her go to. Joanne had survived being shot by Harper, the anti-ballistic quality of the vest given to her by Alex doing its job. She’d been winded, and shocked, and overwhelmed by the ambush she had fainted, but had fully recovered in the days following. Her sister Karen Ratcliffe’s injuries required medical attention, but she hadn’t left Joanne’s side until she was safely in the protection of the FBI. Joanne’s testimony had gone on to help prove Carl Blackhorse was the architect of Bruce Harper’s murder spree. His alibi of betting at an Atlantic City casino while his wife and her children were murdered didn’t save him. Under interrogation, Blackhorse had admitted that his greed was exponentially greater than his love for Lacey and his stepchildren. Learning of Lacey’s plans to divorce him, and take half of everything he owned, he’d promised Harper and others in his employment rich reward should one of them do away with his problem for him. It came with the caveat that they would probably have to flee the country afterwards, but that wasn’t a deterrent to people like Harper, Monk, Lyman or Carson – all of whom he named as person’s intent on claiming the prize he’d subsequently placed on Joanne Mason’s head – but oddly enough he hadn’t named Siobhan Doyle in that category of scum. He said she was a lowly driver that Harper had pressed into his service and most likely against her will. Hearing this about Siobhan did change Tess’s feelings towards the woman who’d almost murdered her child, but only by a tiny degree.
Joanne was totally exonerated, the hateful Angel of Death tag finally struck from her name.
So too was her sister, Ratcliffe, who first faced charges for harboring and assisting a felon. Those accusations couldn’t stand after Joanne was named a victim and star witness in the trial that sent hedge fund billionaire Carl Blackhorse to jail for the remainder of his life, and also earned Lyman and Carson jail sentences for their part in the conspiracy to murder, and in their part in the failed ambush on the convoy in Portland. John Corbett Monk and Siobhan Doyle were posthumously named as conspirators. Harper was named the undeniable killer, and footage discovered on a computer hard drive snatched from a gas station in northern Maine also identified him as the murderer of an innocent war veteran and his son: unbeknown to all, Siobhan had not gotten rid of the evidence as instructed by Harper and had left it in her SUV when abandoning it at the quarry in the hope it would be found and Harper punished. Had she known this Tess might have forgiven the woman one more iota.
Perhaps Harper suspected that Siobhan intended fingering him for the crime, and it could go some way to explaining why he’d treated her so awfully in the last moments of her life. Locking her inside the burning vehicle was unnecessarily cruel but by then it was assumed that the maniac was drunk on murder and violence and enjoyed the creativity of it after stealing the car from the arsonists he’d beaten to death. Somewhere along the line, somebody let slip that Harper prided himself on functioning on logic, but there was absolutely no logic in his subsequent assault on the police station. He intended forcing Joanne outside, and his plan worked, putting her in his sights but how could he ever logically believe that he could defeat the numbers of cops and civilians prepared to defend her. He must not only have been drunk on murder, he had to have been plastered.
Jake Wolsey was jailed for his part in the arson attacks on Tess and Po’s property. He was the youngest of the trio of brothers, and had been given the tasks of getaway driver or watcher by the older siblings. He had not lit any fire and despite discharging a weapon at Pinky Leclerc had caused no actual harm: he got off lightly compared to what his brothers suffered at Harper’s hands and feet. Both Jake and his mother Carol had been shown leniency, given allowance to attend the funerals of Aaron and James – both brothers’ remains were cremated during a private ceremony – before they were returned to prison, in Carol’s case to the prison infirmary where further skin grafts were scheduled. Despite the severity of her burns her surgeons had saved her hands from amputation.
After months bunking in with Tess and Po at the ranch, Pinky moved to a loft conversion above a warehouse on the waterfront overlooking the Fore River. His closest neighbors were chain hotels and the Casco Bay ferry terminal. Tess’s old apartment on Cumberland Avenue had been comfortable but admittedly his new place enjoyed better views. He had only left the ranch because Tess wanted the spare room ready for their baby girl and who was he to deny her. Anne Ridgeway finally retired: she intimated to Tess that she only kept the curios shop as it was never too busy and allowed her plenty of reading time. She decided she could actually read her novels anywhere she wished to.
Bar-Lesque had been badly singed, but was up and running again in no time, under management of Jazz Reed and Chris Mitchell as before. As for Charley’s, Po invested in a new purpose-built autoshop and of course named the old man head mechanic. He was able to re-employ all his former workers, plus specialists able to restore vintage and classic model vehicles to their former glory and beyond. Po drove the Kia Telluride, but it wasn’t to say he didn’t love a muscle car, and despite what he’d said to Pinky and Tess about the Mustang being unsuitable as a family car, he soon purchased and initiated restoration of a gold and black 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle SS L56, with cash from the insurance pay out. Tess couldn’t begrudge her man this small pleasure; she’d domesticated him as far as she would and secretly hated the idea of him growing settled, bored and boring. A lasting change she did press him into was getting rid of the knife in his boot.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
To add verisimilitude to the adventures of Tess Grey and Nicolas ‘Po’ Villere, I have given them a real world setting. I’ve tried to stay true to Portland, Maine and other localities featured in their adventures, but always in the understanding that the stories and the locations are completely fictitious or used fictitiously. At times I’ve played loose and free with the law enforcement departments and characters featured in the books, but it is always with full respect and admiration of the tough job that these public servants do. Any mistakes are mine, sometimes accidentally but also occasionally made deliberately to assist the flow of the narrative, and mostly because I’m a storyteller who makes things up for a living. Thank you for reading; I hope it was time well spent.
Matt Hilton
Matt Hilton, Cold Fire
