Valediction Part 14

"Shouldn't we call the police?"

"Yes."

I stared at the cars beside mine. Looking through the rain-splattered windows of the van.

"But we're not going to," Linda said.

"Not yet," I said.

"What are we going to do?"

"We'll wait awhile," I said. "See what they do."

Linda tugged her cape tighter around her, the hood over her head, and pressed against the van. "I'm scared," she said. "I'm so scared I can barely stand up."

"I'm sorry," I said. "But I want to keep you with me."

"Because why?" she whispered.

I shook my head. I remembered another rainy day. In Los Angeles. When I had blundered through an oil field. Looking for Candy Sloan.

Linda's voice became more insistent, and her whisper was louder. "Because why?" she said.

"I'm not going to lose you too," I said.

"My Jesus Christ," Linda whispered. "They don't want me."

I looked at her in the semidark with her cape clutched to her and the hood tightened around her small face. She was shaking.

"Yes," I said. "They're not after you." The car on the outside of mine was a light blue Buick sedan with four doors. As we watched, it slipped into gear and moved away from my car and down the aisle toward the theater.

"He's impatient," I said. "He's going to look."

The Buick went down the aisle, turned at the end, and moved slowly up the next aisle. The other car stayed where it was beside mine. It had a maroon vinyl roof and looked like a Mercury or a Ford.

"Okay," I said. "In a minute I'm going for the car. As soon as I do, you head for the mall. Get in there and mingle. These guys don't want you and don't even know what you look like. Once you're away from me you'll be safe."

"Will you come back for me?"

"Yes, I'll meet you in the bar in the mall, Dapper Dan's it's called. If I'm not there by closing, call the cops. Boston Homicide, ask for Sergeant Belson or Lieutenant Quirk. Talk to either of them and explain what happened. If neither is there, talk to whoever you get."

She nodded. "Sergeant Belson, or Lieutenant Quirk, okay?"

She nodded again.

The Buick was at the near end of the next lane. It turned and headed back down the next one. Crouching as low as I could, my gun in my right hand, the car keys in my teeth, I sprinted across the open road toward my car. I yanked the door open and I was in. And the key was in the ignition. I turned the key and tromped on the accelerator. It started. The window of the inside car started down. I fired at it, shattering my own window on the pa.s.senger side. I floored the Subaru and screeched, wheels spinning on the wet pavement, out of the slot and toward the street. A bullet punched through the side window and out through the windshield, sending spiderweb cracks out in a flared radius.

I stuck the gun into my pocket and using both hands headed along the edge of the parked cars, staying close to them for cover, and rammed a right turn and floored it for Mystic Avenue. Behind me the Buick and the other car roared after me. It looked like a Ford.

There was a red light at Mystic Avenue and a Chevy wagon stopped at it. I swung inside it and ran the light, turning right onto Mystic Avenue with the rain driving straight at me. The chase cars behind me parted, one went outside, one went inside the Chevy as they, too, ran the light. There were two more red lights at the complicated intersections of Routes 28 and 93 and Mystic Avenue. I ducked past an oncoming Volvo and heard brakes scream behind me as the two chase cars avoided it. It gave me a fifty-foot longer lead. I U-turned under the sign that said not to under Route 93 and headed back in toward Charlestown. At Somerville Lumber I went up the ramp onto 93 with the Subaru going as fast as it would in every gear. Four cylinders were not many. The car fishtailed on the slippery pavement, but I held its nose in and never let up on the gas. I turned my headlights on. There was maybe a mile of straightaway and the two chase cars were closing the gap with their big engines. Not good. I swung off at the Sullivan Square exit and plunged down into Charlestown. The Buick was hard behind me, coming on my right. The ramp was potholed and the Subaru bounced like an eccentric pony as we careened down the ramp by the Hood milk plant. On the straightaway that ran toward Bunker Hill College the Buick was right up on my tail on the inside and the Ford, if it was a Ford, was only a yard or two back on my left. As we came up on the college I veered left and into the tunnel that led toward City Square. The Buick couldn't make it and screeched past on the surface above me. The Ford went into the tunnel with me at about seventy and when we came back up thirty yards farther on, the Buick was running the light on the surface road but farther back. Ahead was City Square. Ahead also was a traffic jam that backed up from the Charlestown Bridge and the light at the Boston end. I swung up onto the margin of the road; my speed dropped to fifty. I yanked the four-wheel-drive lever up and the car trembled as it went in. To the right was a rotted chain link fence, ahead I knew there was a gate, and a driveway that led into the sand and gravel business located under the elevated structure of Route 93. The fields around it were head-high with weeds, and sc.r.a.p, and abandoned munic.i.p.al maintenance buildings. I was gaining on the chase cars. They were skidding and spinning their big wheels in the muddy roadside, lurching half sideways as they came on. I got to the gate. It was open. I wrenched the Subaru into a skidding turn and rammed on into the mud driveway and across it and in among the weeds that were higher than the car. Among the weeds was a pile of steel girders left over from the demolition of the elevated railroad that used to run into City Square. The Subaru hit them with the left headlight and b.u.mper and fender and tore them loose and canted up on one side as the four-wheel drive kept shoving. The car stalled with one wheel two feet off the ground and the whole left front quarter shredded.

I rolled out with my gun in my right hand and headed through the weeds toward the new Charles River Dam.

The two chase cars churned into the drive through the gate and skidded to a halt behind the now lifeless Subaru, their headlights sweeping the tops of the weeds as they stopped.

I lay flat in the weeds, facing back toward the pursuit, soaked from the parking lot and now the drenched weeds and the mud.

Sat.u.r.day night is the loneliest night of the week.

CHAPTER 31.

The headlights went off, except the one remaining on my car. It slanted up like a searchlight. I heard car doors open and close. Then my headlight went out and it was nearly dark. There was no attempt at stealth. They knew I knew they were there. How many? Four at least, two in each car. Maybe more. There were traffic sounds all around. Behind me to the right, City Square; about me, Route 93; behind me and to my left, the Charlestown Bridge.

I heard the pump slide back on a shotgun as someone jacked a sh.e.l.l up into the chamber. I knew what it was. It doesn't sound like anything else. Linda was in the shopping mall by now, out of the rain, walking among the shoppers, scared but safe. I wouldn't lose her. They wouldn't kill her on me.

The matter at hand was to see if I could keep them from killing me. I was snuggled into the mud among the weed roots, smelling the harsh weedy smell. I was soaked through, trench coat and all. Still lying in the mud, I shrugged out of the trench coat. It was doing me no good and it slowed me down. Lightcolored as it was, it also improved my visibility. The cowboy hat had long since gone. I didn't remember it falling off. They didn't make them like they used to. Tom Mix never lost his.

Around among the weeds were a number of piles of steel girders, of the kind that had done in the Subaru. I worked backward on my belly toward the pile nearest me, and edged behind it and rose to a crouch. I could see the pursuit moving the weeds as they came on. Mostly I couldn't see them, just the wave of the high vegetation. They seemed to have fanned out and were coming in four, or whatever, abreast.

Behind me maybe ten yards was a dirt road that looped sloppily around along the water to my left, and led eventually past where the bad guys were moving, to the sand and gravel yard five hundred yards beyond. It was hedged with the weeds and I could see only a brief patch of it. I thumbed back the hammer on my gun. It was short.38, not good for much range. I rested my forearm on the top of the steel pile and aimed at the movement on the farthest right, and watched. With my left hand I had to wipe the rain from my eyes. Without losing sight of my target I was trying to keep a peripheral sense of where the others were. They didn't know where I was, so they moved very slowly. But it would not be pleasant if I was staring at the right side of the pursuit and someone from the left side came up and shot me in the head.

I could hear no conversation among the pursuit. There was enough traffic sound to m.u.f.fle it, but they didn't need to talk. They knew what they were doing, and how it should be done. We were at the verge of the harbor, where the Charles emptied into the Atlantic through a series of locks built into a just-finished dam across the mouth of the river. The wet air was strong with the smell of the salt sea, and the faint echo-y sense of moving water. The movement through the weeds paused, wavered, began again, and for a moment I saw a man with a beard. I fired, aiming just below the beard, squeezing the shot off carefully so as not to jerk the gun. I was running for the road when I heard a grunt from the direction of the bearded man and some movement in the weeds. The ba.s.s thump of the shotgun coincided with the clatter of shot off the steel pile I had just left. I was on the dirt road running, now straight up, hidden by the weeds, sprinting along the curve that would take me in behind the bad guys. Someone honked his horn above me on Route 93. Then a considerable number of horns began honking. A nation of sheep.

A hundred yards down the road I ducked off it back into the weeds, cut across to an abandoned storage building, crouched beside it and waited, breathing with my mouth open as quietly as I could. There were four bullets left in the .38. I didn't have extras. Usually I did, but Sat.u.r.day afternoon at a PG movie I had figured five rounds were enough. No such thing as too much money or too many bullets. Live and learn. I hope.

The loading door to the warehouse was open, four feet off the ground, sagging badly on its hinges, and a bunch of what appeared to be old munic.i.p.al ledgers was scattered and rainsoaked outside the door. Inside was dim and suggestive of packing cases. I thought about going in. No way out. Once in there and confronted, I was trapped. Better to stay out here. Hit and run, sting like a wasp, run like a rabbit, or something.

It had gotten too dark now for me to see far. I couldn't spot any movement in the weeds. They'd have to get closer before I could see them. Or maybe they'd come along the road. Maybe I'd left tracks. These were city dudes. They wouldn't come loping along single file in the road, reading signs as they came. The tracks they knew horses ran on. But they'd come. And I was patient. I settled in a little tighter against the shed. It was corrugated metal and had once been painted white, but very little paint was left. There were remnants of milk cartons and wine bottles and beer cans and Devil Dog wrappers and other hints of civilized life having pa.s.sed on. The whole area was an oasis of weeds and refuse in the middle of the city--cars, boats, people, lights, buildings, gestations, and high school kids were all around us, but in here, in the dark ten-acre wasteland-we could have been in a Sumatran rain forest. Hunting. It was getting colder and this close to the harbor the wind had picked up. I shivered a little. If the weather were better, it might have been more fun. Cops and robbers. Capture the flag. There was death involved, but that just made it serious; it didn't spoil the fun. Especially if death had very little sting left. And for me, it had barely any.

CHAPTER 32.

They came out of the weeds, four abreast, s.p.a.ced, looking carefully right and left, One of them, a tall fat man wearing a red warm-up jacket, carried the shotgun at port arms. The other three had handguns. The guy next to the shotgun carried a big silver flashlight. The kind that takes five D batteries. He was wearing a baseball cap and a brown plaid raincoat. Spiffy. He raised his hand and the four of them stopped. The guy with the flashlight talked with the guy carrying the shotgun. The other two gathered around them. Stupid. Easy to pick them all off, together like that. Except I had a gun that wasn't accurate that far, and only four bullets.

The group split up. Flashlight and Shotgun stayed put. The other two swung in a wide circle around the storage shack. I flattened on the ground. n.o.body saw me, the circle they made was too big, trying, probably, to stay out of sight and range of the shack while the guy with the shotgun covered the front. I lost sight of the two circlers. I didn't like that. Then one of them whistled from behind the shack. The two guys in front began to move toward the open door. The big one had the shotgun leveled, his buddy turned on the flashlight and beamed it straight into the shack. I stayed flat. At the door they stopped. I couldn't see them either now. Then I heard someone clamber up into the building. One was in, one was out. No better time.

I came up into a crouch and slid around the corner of the building. Plaid Raincoat was standing on the ground, shining his big flashlight into the shack. Shotgun had gone in. I don't think he heard me. I had on jogging shoes and I was quiet. He must have sensed me coming and turned, bringing his right hand out of the doorway and turning the big automatic he held toward me. I shot him in the face and he went over and I was past him heading back into the weeds. As soon as I was in the weeds I hit the ground and as I did pellets whisked through the wet weeds above me, and the shotgun boomed. As it boomed I was back up and moving, heading to my right toward the river and the dam. I had to slow down. It was dark now and if I ran into a pile of girders or something, it would be a short misery before someone put me out of it. I began to feel my way along. The sound of them crashing through the weeds behind me had softened to a rustle. They must be doing the same thing. As I moved I stepped in something squishy. It was too dark to see what it was. I was glad. I could see headlights and taillights gleaming wetly from the Charles River Bridge. Misted by the rain and enhanced by the wet reflection they were elegant against the darkness. Not bad for a taillight. There was movement in front of me. I dropped to my knees. One of the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds had gone around by the dirt road. The other two were still behind me. Or were there two in front? No, one would circle, two would chase. The movement continued while I strained into the dark to see him. Then he was there, a vague shape, a faint glint of light from the bridge touched the gun in his hand. Must have been stainless. Blued was better for this work. He was turned a little away from me. I fired at the middle of his body, he grunted and turned toward me. I fired again and he fired, his gun beginning to tilt up as he fell.

Right behind me there was the rush of running in the weeds and I snapped my last shot off toward it. Otherwise they'd be on me. The rush stopped, and I ran for the dam. Around the dam there was a landscaped area and atop the dam a building-in fact, two buildings that housed pumping equipment and offices and the harbor police. A rusty chain link fence maybe six feet high ran along the perimeter of the dam property and I had to go up and over it to get in. I put my gun back into its holster, grabbed hold of the top crossbar, and pulled myself up. I got a leg over, swung the other one up, and dropped on the dam side. The fence ought to be a real problem for the fat guy with the shotgun. He'd have to go around.

The wind was up now and I was on the run toward the locks. There were two locks, spanned by pedestrian walkways that swung open when a boat went through. They weren't big locks. There was no commercial traffic on the Charles. The locks were for pleasure boats. The dam was to keep the ocean from flowing upstream at high tide and leaving a layer of heavy salt water at the bottom of the river to kill all the bottom life.

There were streetlights on the dam property, lining the driveway entrance from City Square. I moved as fast as I could, staying low, trying not to silhouette against the streetlights. The wind was cold and I was soaked and shivering. I crossed a set of railroad tracks that breached the fence and ran across the dam compound and came to an end just short of the base of the Charlestown Bridge. If the fat guy with the shotgun knew about them, he wouldn't have to go around. If he knew about them and came out that way, I'd be a sitting duck in the lighted area with the choice of standing my ground with no gun or running for it across the two sets of locks on the narrow iron footpaths under the are lights. In either case the guy with the shotgun could cut me in two while juggling two pickled eggs.

I stopped and moved back along the fence and crouched flat against it, next to the railroad tracks, beside the opening. The two gates were swung all the way back against the fence. A chain dangled from one of the gates, and a broken padlock was hooked through it. So much for security. I looked closer at the chain. It was merely looped through the fence link, the padlock still attached. Someone had cut it with a bolt cutter. G.o.d knows why. But vandalism marches to the beat of its own drummer. I took the chain out of the fence. Doubled, with the padlock end swinging free, it made a decent weapon. Not, on the whole, as decent as a shotgun, but better than an empty .38 with a two-inch barrel. The weeds grew right up to the outside of the fence, overgrowing the railroad tracks. On my side it was lawn and I felt the center of attention in the bare lawn with the streetlights shining twenty feet away, but they wouldn't see me until they got through the fence. If they came around, I could duck back through the gate into the weeds again. If they came one from each direction, I was probably going to be shot often.

They came on the railroad tracks. I saw the weed movement and then they were through the opening. First through was Shotgun, nearest me, and half a step behind Shotgun's left was a guy wearing aviator gla.s.ses and carrying a long-barreled revolver. I swung the chain down on the wrist that held the shotgun. The fat guy made a gasp, the shotgun fired upward and to the left and fell from his hand. I was shielded from the guy with the gla.s.ses by the fat man, who dropped to his knees, pressing his right hand against his chest and groping for the shotgun with his left. As the fat man dropped I hit his buddy across the face with my chain flail. His gla.s.ses broke and some of the gla.s.s got in his eyes. Blood appeared and he dropped the handgun and put both hands to his face. I shook the chain in a short circle to keep it out and away from him and then drove it down against the back of the fat man's neck. He had gotten the shotgun but was having trouble pumping a round up with his right hand numb and maybe broken. The second time the chain hit him he pitched forward and lay still on top of the gun, the barrel sticking out past his shoulder. His partner ran. With one hand still pressed against his right eye, he sprinted for the pedestrian walkway across the locks. I worried the shotgun out from under the fat man, pumped a round up. Shot the fat man as he lay, and went after his partner, working the pump lever as I ran. The partner was hurt and it slowed him. Pain will do that, even if it's pain elsewhere. The iron walkway zigzags across the locks. Over each lock it is actually on the dam doors that open and shut to let boats through and a sign says that the locks are subject to opening without warning.

By the time we were across the first lock I had closed the gap between us. The walkway was wet with rain and he had on leather-soled shoes. Blood ran down his face, he was running with one eye closed and his hand pressed against the eye. I was five feet behind him when we reached the second lock.

"Freeze," I said, "or I will blow the top half of you off."

He could tell from my voice that I was right behind him. He stopped and put his left hand in the air. His right still pressed against his eye.

"My eye," he said. "There's something bad wrong with my eye."

"Turn around," I said.

He turned, his face was b.l.o.o.d.y. And the rain drenching down on it made the blood pink and somehow worse looking than if it had been just blood.

"I want you to go tell Mickey Paultz that you couldn't do it. That he sent five guys and it wasn't anywhere near enough. You hear me, sc.u.mbag? Tell him next time he better come himself."

"I'm going to lose my f.u.c.king eye," he said.

"I hope so," I said. "Now, be sure to tell Mickey what I said."

He stood silently, holding his eye, one hand looking silly sticking up in the air.

"Beat it," I said.

Still he stood, staring at me with one eye. I threw the shotgun in a soft spinning arc into the river. "Beat it," I said. "Or I will throw you in after it."

"My f.u.c.king eye," he said. And turned. And ran toward the Boston side.

I trailed after him at a more sedate pace, feeling the beginning fatigue of pa.s.sion expended and a slowing of the adrenaline pump.

"You didn't kill her on me this time," I said aloud. "Not this time."

Beyond the locks was a parking lot, and beyond that North Station. I went around to the front of North Station and caught a cab back to a.s.sembly Square. I looked like I'd been wrestling alligators and losing. The cabbie didn't appear to notice. A lot of North Station fares looked like that.

CHAPTER 33.

Linda stood against the wall outside the pub at the a.s.sembly Square Shopping Mall. She had dried out in the time she'd waited and her hair was curlier than usual where it had been rain-soaked. She stood motionless as I approached, and when she saw me her eyes widened but she made no other sign.

"How you doing, babe," I said. "You in town long?"

She stared at me and shook her head. "Come here often?" I said.

"What happened?" she said, her voice soft.

"I thwarted them," I said.

Her soft voice was insistent and there was some color on her cheeks. It wasn't the flush of health, it was two red spots, unnatural and hot looking. "What happened, G.o.dd.a.m.n you?"

"There were five of them, I think I killed four. One I sent back to his boss with a message."

"You just killed four people? Just now? And then you come here and joke with me? 'You in town long?' Jesus Christ."

"They were trying to kill me."

"What was that stuff about losing me too," she said.

I felt very tired, it was hard to concentrate. "I don't know," I said. "What stuff?"

"You said you didn't want to lose me too. Were you talking about Susan?"

I remembered. I remembered other things. Feelings I'd had. I remembered on the locks in the dark rain with the wind off the harbor pulling my words away, You didn't kill her on me this time. You didn't kill her on me this time.

"I was thinking of a woman in Los Angeles," I said. "I let her get killed."

"Well, I'm not she," Linda said.

"I know. I'll call a cab and get us out of here."

"And then what?" Linda said.

"Cook a couple of steaks," I said. "Drink a little wine? Your place or mine?"

Linda shook her head. "Not tonight. I . . . I can't tonight. I have never . . . I'm exhausted and I need to be alone and to think. I can't just eat and drink and . . . I can't do anything after something like this."

I nodded. "Okay," I said. "Let me get us home anyway."

I found a phone booth in the mall and called a cab, and Linda and I went and waited for it at the main mall entrance, inside, out of the rain. We didn't talk and Linda, normally the most touching of people, kept her hands buried in her pockets and stood a foot away.

The cab dropped us off at Linda's condo. I got out with her. She said, "I can go up all right alone. You better keep the cab."