Tough Customer

CHAPTER 15

WHAT WERE THE CHANCES?

That was the question Oren had been asking himself for most of his life. Whenever Fate pulled a nasty practical joke on him, which was with unfair frequency, he had asked himself what were the odds of that happening, whatever that was in any given situation.

Obviously the odds of shit happening to Oren Starks were very good because the bad luck just kept coming.

Friday night had been a fiasco. The "lake house incident," as it was being referred to by the media, had been a disastrous personal failure, but to an outside observer, its absurd outcome must appear almost laughable. It had been like a bad farce, with the villain making his exit by falling down the stairs no less.

Given its comic elements, the shooting of Ben Lofland possibly could have been written off as a squabble among former co-workers. No one had died. Lofland's condition wasn't even all that serious. There would have been some unpleasant legal ramifications to plow through, but after all was said and done, the incident would soon have been forgotten.

But now,

now, Oren Starks was wanted for the fatal shooting of a sixteen-year-old boy. Which was another kettle of fish altogether.

What were the chances?

Sneaking into a room in a disreputable motel had seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, there was a one-in-eight chance that room number eight would remain vacant. There had been seven others to choose from, for crying out loud!

But no, that particular room had been given to Davis Coldare and his female companion.

What were the chances that the Coldare kid would turn out to be an honor student, an all-star baseball player, a beloved son, friend, and student? If someone had to walk through that motel room door, why couldn't it have been a drug addict, a thief, a pedophile? Had that been the case, Oren Starks might have been hailed a hero for ridding the community of a menace.

Instead, the citizenry and every law enforcement officer in the state were on the lookout for the heartless killer of a golden boy.

What were the chances that the unnamed young woman who'd witnessed the shooting would remain levelheaded enough to later identify the shooter? It had been reported that she had picked out--unequivocally--Oren Starks's photo from a group. To add insult to injury, it had been that damn Delray Marketing employee photo that he'd always hated! The photograph on his driver's license was more flattering than that one. In it his forehead looked too high, his eyes too closely set, his chin undefined and weak.

What were the chances that he would be forced to deal with a disaster that had been totally unforeseen and for which he had no contingency plan?

The odds of all that happening were as slim as the odds for Mike Reader's neck to snap when Oren pushed him off the merry-go-round. The summer Oren turned nine years old had been a hot one in Beaumont, Texas. The wilting, record-breaking temperatures were keeping most kids indoors during midday. That's why Oren and Mike Reader were alone at the playground that fateful afternoon.

When Oren parked his bike, he approached the other boy with caution and awe. Mike was a bully who outweighed Oren by thirty pounds and was a head taller. But for all his wariness, Oren welcomed this chance encounter, seeing it as an opportunity to make a good impression on a popular classmate. If Mike and Oren forged a friendship during the summer break, then in the fall, when school reconvened, Oren would be accepted into Mike's wide group of friends.

But Mike was happy to see Oren there in the park only because he then had someone to torment. He invited Oren to join him on the merry-go-round. Oren cheerfully climbed on. But immediately Mike hopped off, gripped one of the metal bars, and, running full-out in the beaten-down track of the circumference, pushed the merry-go-round to go faster and faster until the landscape was a blur to Oren, who was holding on for dear life and whimpering in terror.

Mike jumped back on and began mocking him. He made fun of him for not having a daddy, and when Oren yelled to him that his daddy had died, the boy laughed and jeered and said he was a mama's boy. He called him a queer, a weirdo, a wimp, a sissy who probably peed like a girl, like his mother, sitting down. Oren blubbered denials, but Mike Reader persisted and began chanting the taunt. He made a little song of it.

The crude ditty was silenced when Oren mustered all his strength and, letting go of the bar he'd been clinging to, gave Mike Reader's chest a mighty push with both palms. Mike, caught off guard by Oren's courageous defiance, toppled backward off the spinning merry-go-round and landed in the hard-packed dirt. Oren heard the sound, like that of a stick being broken over someone's knee.

Catching intermittent glimpses of Mike Reader, Oren stayed on the merry-go-round as it spun round and round until it came to a full stop. Only then did he get off and walk over to the boy lying lifeless on the ground. His bladder and bowel had emptied the instant he died, which Oren saw as poetic justice, considering the nature of his recent jeers.

Oren wanted to linger over the boy's still body and gloat, but he quickly removed his shirt and used it to rub off any fingerprints his hands might have left on the merry-go-round. He brushed it over the imprints that the soles of his sneakers had made in the dirt. Satisfied that he'd eliminated all evidence of his having been there, he got on his bicycle and pedaled home as fast as he could before anyone saw him, keeping to the pavement so as not to leave tread tracks.

To this day it was believed that Mike Reader's death had been a tragic childhood accident.

Ever since that summer afternoon, Oren had wanted to kill all the other people in his life who treated him cruelly. He'd longed to give anyone who persecuted him the just deserts that Mike Reader had got. But he'd always talked himself out of it because most offenders weren't worth the risk of getting caught.

But Berry Malone's treachery was in a league of its own. Therefore his reprisal must be.

He had vowed to see her dead, and he would. But his original plan had gone awry, and, now, if he wasn't very clever, he'd be arrested for shooting that Coldare kid and Berry would go on living with impunity. Which was untenable and unacceptable.

There was one fortunate aspect to this catastrophe: Oren Starks was accustomed to coping with bad luck because he'd had so much practice at it. For instance, he knew to avoid panic. Hand-wringing over something gone wrong was a surefire way to expose one's guilt.

The day Mike Reader died, Oren had returned home, watched TV, ate his dinner of fish sticks and mac-and-cheese, had his bath, behaved normally, and no one, not even his own mother, had ever guessed that he'd been the cause of the tragedy that had taken place only two blocks from his house. When he'd heard the sirens of a police car and an ambulance screaming through his neighborhood, his only reaction had been to adjust the volume on the TV.

The Coldare kid was dead, and he would remain dead. Oren had no choice but to accept it and handle it. He must remain calm. He must not act rashly. Problem solving was his forte. The more complicated a puzzle was, the better he liked it. It took patience and ingenuity to work oneself out of an intricate maze.

There was a way out of this muddle. He simply had to find it.

Of course, if the worst-case scenario came about, he had a fail-safe escape hatch already in place. But for the present, he was facing an unexpected wall. His only recourse was to backtrack. Bitterly, he accepted that, to ensure success, sacrifices must be made.

To that end, it wasn't absolutely necessary that Ben Lofland die.

The man had had the bejesus scared out of him and had been made to look like a fool for being caught with his pants down, literally. While this wasn't the severe punishment Lofland deserved, Oren resolved that it was satisfaction enough.

Berry, however, must die. There was no other option. He'd be satisfied with nothing less than death for her.

But how to bring it about? Everyone near her was on high alert. Oren's name and face had been widely broadcast. Any man even remotely resembling him would be arrested on sight if not shot outright by a trigger-happy vigilante. In which case, hiding was an acceptable course of action.

But hiding was unproductive and, frankly, boring. And the worst effect of hiding and taking no action whatsoever was that Berry remained alive. On the other hand, if he was seen--

And with that thought, the solution came to him suddenly.

Create confusion. Yes, yes! He would confound them. With cleverness, good timing, and a little luck--and wasn't he due some?--Berry and those protecting her would soon be scratching their heads, trying to make sense of the impossible.

The prospect of that filled Oren with glee.