“Nobody gets my gun,” I said, trying not to let my voice shake. “You’re going to kill me anyway, so I may as well take you down with me.”
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Now his hand shook a little, and he took a step backward. “I’ve got the drop on you, pig. You’re not taking me anywhere. I’m telling you for the last time, drop your gun!”
“You have the drop on me with a small-caliber weapon. You can shoot it and kill me. But I’ll still be able to pull out this very large-caliber revolver and put three or four hollow points into your sorry ass.” It was bravado I didn’t even believe, but I was committed now. No turning back. If my heart had beat any faster, it would have exploded.
He said, “Why the fuck are you here, Mapstone? I thought we were rid of you.”
“You never should have brought me into this in the first place.”
“That was her.” He indicated Julie. “She can be quite clever when she’s lucid.”
“And what about you? Back from the dead?”
He smiled. “It worked. As far as that prick Bobby knows, I’m dead and his money is long gone.”
“That’s not showing much gratitude for a man who seems to have set you up pretty damned well,” I said.
“Entrepreneurship is the American dream,” Townsend said. “I was tired of working for someone else. And when you work for Bobby, the run is great, but it always ends. I knew it was coming to an end. I handled the high-end shipments, the big money, and the risks were just too great. Bobby would have given me up to DEA and written it off as a tax deduction. But with a million dollars in seed money and the right clients, I’d turn old Bobby over to the feds and take his business.”
“So who died in your place?”
He looked annoyed. “Some drifter Julie picked up down in town. We had a few drinks, found out he had no one to miss him, and in general, he did have my body type.” Townsend laughed. “Julie told him we wanted him to join a threesome.”
“You took a chance that the cops would assume it was you.”
“Cops get busy like everybody else,” he said. “I wanted to make this easy for them. After I had the money stashed away, I set up our drifter to look like me. I knew the cops had intelligence linking me to Bobby Hamid, so they’d assume it was a drug execution. Then I had this place, secluded, but I could watch the comings and goings down below. First the cops. Then Bobby’s people, twice. It was like ‘hide in plain sight.’ They never knew I was here.”
“It almost worked,” I said. “But when you start murdering people, it’s hard to make things go right.”
He looked at me.
“Phaedra. She had someone who would miss her and find out what happened. And that was me.”
“Very commendable, Professor Mapstone,” Townsend said. “And you are going to get the chance to join her, if you believe in the oppressive bullshit doctrines of Christianity and Western civilization.”
“Well then, we’ll both head that way.” I put my hand on the Python’s grip.
“I didn’t hurt her,” said Julie, who sat back on the floor between us, rocking back and forth, running her fingers through her hair. “I just needed the money.”
“Shut up, Julie,” he said sharply, watching her and then me.
“You shut up!” she screamed. “You told me this morning you loved me and that we’d finally get married.”
“Bitch,” he said.
I said, “I guess I should have known from the start that she was yours.”
“Oh, and how’s that?”
“She had bad taste in men,” I said. “And it didn’t add up that you and Phaedra got together through the personals. That would be a risk for someone in your, uh, profession. You met Phaedra because you were already involved with her big sister. That must have been complicated.”
“You can’t stop, can you?” Townsend said, gripping the gun tighter. “You just have to know what happened.”
“And why.”
“Is that the historian in you, or the cop?” he sneered. “A famous man said, ‘History is mostly bunk.’”