Free Never Let Them See You Cry by Edna Buchanan Page A

sixteen-year-old daughter, Wendy. She heard her father take a telephone call in his room with the door closed. Then Jerry Russell went out. His TV was left on. So was the garden hose, which would run all night, flooding the lush green lawn he prized so highly. “Not like a precise pilot accustomed to checklists,” his bewildered father would say later.
    By 11:20 P.M . Lance and his passenger were almost home. A ranch-style wooden fence stretches 166 feet across the front of the property. Lance spotted something unusual out of the corner of his eye as they passed. A blue bicycle leaned against the east end of the fence. Lance stopped the Mercedes on the roadway and backed up at an angle, lighting up the bicycle and his front lawn.
    â€œThat’s when we saw the guy in the yard,” Armstrong said. Someone was lying in the shadows, next to a large bush. Something silvery and box-shaped lay next to him. “Maybe it’s a bicyclist who’s just going to sleep there for the night,” Armstrong suggested.
    Lance reached into the backseat for the derringer. He knew his wife was home. Perhaps he feared something had happened to her. Lance drove through the gate, into the driveway, onto the lawn, “and angled around the bush where the guy should have been lying. But he wasn’t there,” Armstrong said.
    â€œLance put it in park and we were about ready to get out to look for him, when he came walking around the bush.”
    The man wore a burgundy-colored jogging suit and a ski mask. “His left hand was on the mask. I think he just pulled it down,” Armstrong said. The eye holes had been enlarged. “He was holding a blue steel revolver in his right hand.”
    Three feet from the car the gunman opened fire. A bullet shattered a bone in Lance’s upper left arm.
    â€œOh, dear God!” Lance said, and shot back. They were his last words. The gunman kept coming.
    He was about a foot from the side window when he shot Lance twice in the face. Armstrong saw part of Lance’s jaw disintegrate. Another bullet struck Lance under the eye, snapping his head back.
    Then the gunman, “who never uttered a word, swung the gun in my direction,” Armstrong said. A bullet grazed Armstrong’s shoulder.
    He bailed out. “I knew Lance was dead. I wasn’t thinking about anything at the moment but saving my own skin.”
    Three more shots thudded into the ground behind him as he scaled a fence and scrambled into the room where he had been staying. Panting, he pawed in his suitcase for his own gun, then sat, terrified in the dark, waiting. The motor of Lance’s car had been racing. He heard someone switch it off. No footsteps approached on the gravel, so he sprinted out the door, hurdling three fences in headlong flight. Spattered with Lance’s blood, stained by his own, his clothing and flesh torn from the fences he’d leaped, he pounded on a neighbor’s door for help, still clutching his own gun.
    The frightened family refused to open the door, but called the police.
    The gunshots had routed neighbor John Kates from his bed. He heard sirens and saw police cars skidding into his neighbor’s drive. He and his wife hurried to the Anderson home.
    Lance sat dead at the wheel of his Mercedes, the tiny two-shot derringer still clutched in his right hand. The bullet fired into his face at close range had left powder burns on his forehead. Kathi never stepped outside to see what had happened. She was not alone. Her daughter was asleep, and fifteen minutes before the ambush, another of Lance’s business associates, Thomas Sloat, had arrived at the house from the boat show.
    Sloat heard the shots, found the body, turned off the engine, and told Kathi to call police.
    They found the murder weapon, Lance’s missing Arminius Titan revolver, near the fence. The silvery box-shaped object also lay in the yard: a homemade silencer, fashioned from a section of