For Whom the Minivan Rolls: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,93

die?”

Joel shook his head. If he’d known I’d engage him in an emotional debate, he might have prepared more diligently. “Just shut up!” he shouted. “Shut up and leave me alone!”

“Madlyn wasn’t going to come home this time, was she, Joel? She was going to stay away, and blackmail the others into letting her do it. Am I right?” He stayed silent, but didn’t actually raise the gun to kill me, so I figured I was ahead. Delay is all. “And when she tried to pressure Martin and Rachel, they got scared. Something like this hits the fan, it’s gonna be hard to get elected mayor.” I circled the whole time, trying to get closer to the closet door, but Joel was keeping his back to the closet, and blocking my way.

Joel actually seemed interested in our discussion, like he hadn’t heard it put exactly this way before, and was seeing things from a fresh perspective. “So they decided Madlyn had to go, and when Rachel couldn’t talk Martin into getting rid of her, they tried Gary,” I said. “But Gary, unlike everybody else in this bizarre little story, actually loved Madlyn, and refused to discuss it. How am I doing so far?”

“I wasn’t there for all of it,” he responded, quite reasonably, but he didn’t seem to consider this whole thing to be all that serious. It was like we were just talking about a little dust-up at school. The worst he was looking at was a couple of days suspension, and he could watch TV and eat pizza at home. How bad was that?

I finally managed to get near the closet door, but when I reached, Joel raised his gun. “What are you doing?” he asked.

I dropped my hand and ignored the question. “I’m betting that when they came to talk to Gary, you were upstairs, and you heard them, just like you heard me talk to Gary today. And you volunteered, didn’t you? You hated Madlyn enough to actually volunteer.”

At this, Joel became quite animated, and shook his head vigorously. “No, no,” he said. “I didn’t ask to do it. They came to me. After my father left the house, Rachel came back.”

“Your birth mother.”

“Yeah, and she said she knew Madlyn had been bad to me. She said Madlyn was being bad to them, too, and somebody had to do something about it. I finally said I would.”

I circled away from the closet, and he followed me, lowering the gun but still watching my every move. “Did Rachel get you the gun?”

“Nah. My dad had it around the house. He didn’t tell Madlyn about it because he knew she was scared of guns.” Joel was proud of himself now. He’d been smart enough to find a gun without help. “But Rachel and Martin gave me a ride down to Atlantic City in a rental car, so if anybody saw the car, they wouldn’t think it was us.”

“And you went up to the room and shot her.”

“Jesus, man, you should have seen her. Waiting for her precious Martin to show up, all dressed in dirty underwear. I couldn’t look. I just pointed the gun and pulled the trigger without looking. Then I went home.”

It was perfect. Rachel and Martin got what they wanted, Gary would protect Joel out of parental guilt, and Joel, little budding sociopath that he was, didn’t even see the wrong in what he’d done.

“You killed her, Joel. You ended her life. She can never have her life back again. Is that fair?” Maybe I could get him to feel something.

“She got in the way, and she deserved it. Just like you deserve it.” Then again, maybe I couldn’t.

“I don’t think you want to kill me, Joel.” Joel shrugged and raised his left eyebrow. I could almost read his thoughts: “What the hell? Kill one person, kill another. What’s the difference?”

“You’re a problem. You need to be solved.”

“Where’d you get this gun?” Keep him talking.

“From Rachel and. . . oh, no,” Joel said. “Not this time.” And he raised the gun to fire.

I moved quickly to my left as Joel shot. The sound of a gun going off in a small room is truly jarring, not like it sounds in the movies. Stunned, I stopped and stared at Joel. The bullet missed its intended target—me—by several yards and blew out the woofer on my left stereo speaker, four feet over my head and way to my left. If all this took two seconds, it was