A Man Named Doll by Jonathan Ames (popular books to read TXT) 📗

and we went running across the patio and up the slope in the freezing cold, and it was covered with wild grass and rocks—it rose at about a thirty-degree angle—and we just had to get past the rim of the light, where it would be very hard to see us.

But I started to struggle: blood was pouring out of the incision in my side, and my legs weren’t really working, I couldn’t get up that hill, and Monica was way ahead of me, moving fast, and then she slipped into the darkness—there seemed to be an outcropping of some boulders up ahead—and then a shotgun blast fired right next to me, kicking up dirt, and I turned and fired—Ben was down on the patio—and I missed, and then somehow I got into the darkness, and Monica cried, “Over here,” and she was crouched behind the rocks, and Ben fired again, but I was with her, covered, and then another shot fired, followed by silence—he must have been reloading—and I peered around the rocks and Ben was starting to make his way up the hill, in the middle of the arc of light, and Madvig was on the patio, directly behind him, huffing, holding his rifle, and I fired at Ben and it punched Madvig down.

I had shot Madvig in the face and he went straight back, falling to the ground. Ben shrieked and ran back to Madvig, and I fired at him twice and missed both times, and he put his shotgun down and picked Madvig up and ran through the French doors, carrying Madvig in his arms like a child, and I shot at him two more times, missing him again, and then the clip was empty.

“Let’s go!” said Monica, and she went running down the hill, and I followed after her, holding the empty gun, but I still couldn’t move fast. She ran around the side of the house and I followed.

We came around to the front and Monica was racing up the lawn alongside the driveway, and I was a good twenty yards behind, and then I heard a noise: it was Ben running out the front door after me.

But I couldn’t move at all now.

My legs were dead.

I had been drugged for hours and was bleeding profusely, and I threw the empty gun at him and he rammed into me, knocking me to the ground.

He straddled my chest and punched me in the face, and my poor wound erupted yet again, and then he began to choke me, those huge hands around my neck, and his eyes were enraged, I must have killed Madvig, and the port in the side of my neck was squirting blood, and Ben was getting very far away, he was killing me, and then Monica hurled herself at him, and he let go of my neck and swatted her away, and she went facedown into the grass, and I was able to rise up and his neck was exposed, and just like I had practiced in my mind, and just like I had with Carl Lusk, I drove my hand, like the blade of a knife, into his Adam’s apple, and I could feel it explode in his neck, it was a perfect strike, and he toppled off me and fell to his side, gurgling, his hands grasping at his throat, and his legs were kicking spastically in panic, and I stood up and Monica stood up, and she got a large flagstone from the side of the driveway, and she was going to bring it down on his head and put him out of his misery, and for a second his eye caught mine, we knew each other, and then his eye went dead, and his legs stopped kicking, and Monica dropped the rock; it was no longer needed.

Epilogue

In the end, I made out all right.

The lucky streak that began that night with throwing the poker just perfectly at Madvig’s son kept on coming, like a once-in-a-lifetime run in cards.

Looking for a landline in the main house to call the cops, we found a phone in Madvig’s office, but we also found his safes—there were two of them—and we changed our plan.

Both safes were about five feet high and deep, and on a whim, I tried both handles—I had learned a long time ago, when I was a cop, that people are often lazy and don’t lock their safes. They just close them without going through the necessary steps, and sure enough the second safe had been left open.

We cleared out nearly $500,000 in cash, took the Land Rover, and stashed the money at Monica’s house, using her key under the mat to get in.

After that she took me to Good Samaritan Hospital downtown and it was then that we called the police, and, overall, I did pretty well with the law. Thode and Mullen were happy to see me, if you could call it that, and I got charged with a number of things that didn’t stick, though I did lose my PI license.

But on the upside, the LA Times and the local news affiliates credited me and Monica, not the LAPD, with exposing what Madvig had been up to, and the story went national.

At first the internet went the most wild when it was revealed that it was the old actor with the big nose who had bought my kidney—he had been found alive in the back house, up in Malibu—but then the bigger story twenty-four hours later was the police digging up twenty-five bodies on Madvig’s property: the twenty-three donors, who had been murdered, plus the two sons who had gotten killed on Belden Drive. Which was one part of my story I left out: throwing Paul Madvig off the balcony.

Of the money we grabbed, I gave $200K to Lou’s daughter for the diamond, and the rest went to Monica, which she accepted and has begun to slowly launder with Rafi at the pawnshop.

After we got