A Catskill Eagle (16 page)

CHAPTER 37

THE ROAD WAS SMOOTH ENOUGH, IF YOU WERE riding on a springy upholstered car seat. If you were lying on your stomach on the metal roof of a van on top of steel rack ridges, you tended to wish for smoother. The van drove east through the uninterrupted night, following the tunnel of its headlights. We jolted along atop it, holding on to the roof rack, keeping our faces turned away from the rush of air that boiled up over the hood and windshield of the van. There was no other sound. We could hear nothing from the van beneath us.

“Susan wasn’t there we could start shooting down through the roof,” Hawk said. “Ain’t but a thin piece of sheet metal.”

He had his mouth close to my ear.

I answered him the same way. “Don’t want to hit the driver, either,” I said. “Having him roll this thing over would not be in our long-term interests.”

“They got to stop sometime,” Hawk said.

“And there’s six bodyguards, plus Costigan,” I said.

“Good idea,” Hawk said. “Getting up here. We no better off than we was if we tried to take them back there.”

“But it gives me time to think,” I said.

“Oh good,” Hawk said.

Now and then a car would come the other way, heading west in the dark, and its headlights would sweep over us. But if they saw two guys riding on top of a van they were by before they could react. And what was there to do in the way of reaction?

“How fast you think we’re going,” I said to Hawk.

“Hard to tell. Nothing to compare it to.”

“Probably fifty-five,” I said.

“No reason to go faster. No one’s chasing them. No point getting nabbed for speeding and all the aggravation that might ensue,” I said.

“Ensue,” Hawk said. “We riding on top of a fucking speeding truck with six armed guys in it in the fucking dark and you talking about ensue.”

“I’m going to shoot out a tire,” I said.

“They’ll think the gunshot is just the tire blowing.”

“I hope so,” I said. “And I figure the guy’s a good driver or they wouldn’t have him driving Russell.”

“So he won’t panic and roll the van,” Hawk said. The conversation was slow as we took turns talking into each other’s ear.

“And when he slows down we jump off and get out of sight, and when they all get out to change the tire we make our move.”

“Which is what,” Hawk said.

“We’ll see,” I said. “Hang on to me.”

Hawk held the rack bar with one hand. With his other he took hold of my belt. I twisted out over the edge of the moving van and looked down at the black road rippling by below me. With my left hand I clutched the roof rack, with my right I edged my gun out. I arched myself farther out away from the van, halfway off the roof, held by my grip on the rack and Hawk’s grip on my belt. I struggled to be steady, the muscles in my lower back were cramping. The position was nearly impossible. I tightened up my stomach and strained all the muscles in my body to hold steady and aimed and shot out the rear tire on the driver’s side. Almost at once the van began to swerve, the decompressed tire thumped loudly and the van heeled over toward the driver’s side as it lost its level. Brakes squealed. I was concentrating all I had at not dropping my gun. I could feel myself slide a little farther out as the van swerved again and then the brakes caught and it slowed, still swerving, and bumped off the road onto the shoulder. Hawk let go of my belt and I fell headfirst off the van and hit the ground and held on to the gun and rolled twenty feet down the road shoulder, into the ditch that ran beside it. Hawk landed silently and in two steps was beside me. We scuttled along the ditch, on all fours as the van careened to a halt, on the shoulder. There were weeds in the ditch.

We were ten feet down the ditch from them in the dark when the driver’s door opened and the driver got out. He walked back and looked at the blown tire, then he walked back to the door.

“It’s blown, Russell. The jack and the spare are in the back under the luggage.”

Someone in the van said something we couldn’t hear. Then the side door of the van opened and Russell got out. He went back and looked at the tire.

“Only flat on one side,” he said. He walked back to the open door. “Okay,” he said, “everybody out. Got to jack up the truck and change a tire.”

Susan leaned out, took Russell’s hand, and stepped onto the highway.

“Leave the guns in the van,” Russell said. “Don’t want some state cop to come by to help us and see six guys with machine guns.”

The bodyguards piled out of the van and stood along the highway looking at the van.

The driver went back to the rear door and opened it.

“Somebody gonna help me?” he said.

“Curley,” Russell said, “you help him. Rest of us will check out the heavens.”

He stood beside Susan. “Like those stars, baby? Romantic, huh?”

Susan didn’t say anything. She stood quietly beside him. The four bodyguards stood near them at the front of the van, while Curley and the driver unloaded the luggage.

I touched Hawk’s arm and pointed toward the two unloaders. He nodded and moved back down the ditch soundlessly. I edged in the other direction so that I was ahead of the van. When they finished with the luggage, the driver deployed the jack and the spare, while Curley squatted with the lug wrench and loosened the flat. The driver jacked up the van and then squatted beside Curley while both of them removed the bad tire. As they were in the midst of this Hawk came silently out of the ditch. He hit Curley across the base of the skull with the barrel of his gun and kicked the driver in the face. Curley’s shout of pain turned everyone toward him and I scrambled out of the ditch behind the others and put my forearm under Russell’s chin and my gun hard into his ear. From the back of the van Hawk, in a half crouch, aimed his gun at the remaining guards.

“Susan,” I said, “step away from the group.”

“My God,” Susan said.

I said it harder. “Step away.” She did.

“You four,” I said. “Facedown, on the ground, hands locked behind your head.”

The four bodyguards looked at me without moving, Hawk shot the one closest to Russell. The bullet hit him and spun him half around and he bumped into the van and slid to the ground leaving a smear of blood on the side of the van.

“On the goddamned ground,” I said and the three guards still standing dropped to the ground, facedown, and put their hands behind their heads.

“Spenser,” Russell said. It wasn’t a question.

“You finish the tire,” I said to the driver.

“I’m hurt,” he said. He was sitting on the ground with his face in his hands.

“Change it,” Hawk said softly and the driver squirmed around and got to his knees and started on the tire. Curley was on his face with his hands pressed over his ears as if he had a headache that any sound would pierce. He rocked slightly as he lay there.

No one spoke while the driver changed the tire. I could feel Russell’s breathing, steady as we pressed together. And the pulse in his neck was fast against my forearm.

The driver finished.

I said to Hawk, “Check the lugs.”

Holding the lug wrench in one hand, and keeping the gun leveled with the other, Hawk squatted on his haunches and tested each of the lugs.

“They tight,” he said.

“Okay,” I said to Russell, “down, hands behind the head. Like the guards.”

“No,” he said. “I won’t lie down for you.”

He was wearing a gun tucked back of his right hipbone. I could feel it as I pressed against him. I moved my left arm from under his chin and reached around and unsnapped the holster and took the gun. It was a .32 Smith & Wesson Chiefs Special. With my gun still screwed in his ear, I pitched the .32 backhand into the darkness behind me.

“Susan, get in the van.”

She didn’t move.

“Suze,” I said.

She went to the van. And got in.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to drive, and Hawk’s going to lean out the side door and stare at you with one of the Uzis and if you move while we’re in sight he’ll kill you.”

I stepped away from Russell. And got into the driver’s seat of the van. Russell stared at me and I looked back and our eyes locked. And held. It was a look of hatred and knowledge and it held unwavering while Hawk got in the backseat and picked up an Uzi. He held it level out the door while I put the van in drive by feel, still with my eyes locked on Russell, and took the emergency brake off and the van began to roll. And then I tromped on the accelerator and the van surged back up onto the pavement and we were gone.

The silence as we drove east on Route 44 was as strange as I can remember. Hawk and Susan were in back and I drove. Hawk seemed to be resting, his head back, his eyes closed, his arms folded over his chest. Susan sat erect, her hands in her lap, looking straight ahead.

At Avon I turned north on Route 202 toward Springfield and at the intersection of Route 309 in a town called Simsbury I pulled over to the side. It was three fifteen in the morning. Routes 202 and 309 are the kind that are marked with very thin lines on the road map. Simsbury was rural Connecticut, close enough to Hartford for commuters, but far enough out for horses if you wished.

I glanced back at Susan. She was leaning forward with her face in her hands. She rocked very slightly. I looked back at the road and then adjusted the rearview mirror so I could see her. In the mirror I saw Hawk lean forward and put his hands on each of Susan’s shoulders and pull her up and over toward him.

“You all right,” he said. “You be all right in a while.”

She put her face, still pressed into her hands, against Hawk’s chest and didn’t move. Hawk put his left arm around her and patted her shoulder with his left hand.

“Be all right,” he said. “Be all right.”

My hands on the wheel were wet with sweat.

CHAPTER 38

FOR SOMEONE WHO HADN’T SLEPT ALL NIGHT, Susan looked good. Her hair was tangled and she had no makeup on. But her eyes were clear and her skin looked smooth and healthy. She broke the end off her croissant and ate it.

“Whole wheat,” I said. “You can get them at the Bread and Circus in Cambridge.”

“I’ll bet you fit right in, shopping there.”

“Like a moose at a butterfly convention,” I said. “But the Shamrock Tavern in Southie doesn’t carry them.”

Susan nodded and broke off another small piece. “Not many people your size in Bread and Circus, I suppose.”

“Only one,” I said, “and she’s nowhere near as cute.”

I poured more coffee from the percolator into my cup and a little more into Susan’s. It was early and the light coming in the window was still tinged with the color of sunrise. Hawk was asleep. Susan and I sat at the table in the safe house in Charlestown feeling the strangeness and the uncertainty, wary of pain, slowly circling the conversation.

“You got my letter,” Susan said. She was holding the coffee cup with both hands and looking over the rim of it at me.

“About Hawk? Yes.”

“And you got him out of jail.”

“Un huh.”

“And you both came looking for me.”

“Un huh.”

“I knew that security intensified. Russ always traveled with bodyguards, but a little while after I wrote you, everything got much more serious. ”

“Where were you when it got serious, ” I said.

“At a lodge Russ has in Washington State.”

“Had,” I said.

“Had?”

“We burned it down.”

“My God,” Susan said. “We were there to fish for trout, but one day Russ said we had to go to Connecticut. He said we could fish the Farmington River instead.”

“They were setting an ambush for us.”

“Which didn’t work.”

“No.”

Susan drank her coffee, and kept looking at me over the rim.

“Start from the beginning,” she said. “And tell me everything that happened up to last night.”

My eyes felt scratchy and I was jittery with coffee and raw from sleeplessness. I finished my croissant and got up and put another one in the oven to warm. I took an orange from the bowl on the counter and began to peel it.

“I had a leg cast made with a gun in the foot. Then I got myself arrested in Mill River and when they put me in jail I produced the gun and Hawk and I left.”

The smell of the orange peel brightened the room. It was a domestic smell, a smell of Sunday morning mingling with the smell of coffee and warming bread.

“‘Death is the mother of Beauty,’” I said. Susan raised her eyebrows, like she did when something puzzled her.

“Poem by Wallace Stevens,” I said. “The possibility of loss is what makes things valuable.”

Susan smiled. “Tell me what happened,” she said over the rim of the cup.

I did, chronologically. I paused occasionally to eat a segment of orange and then, when it was heated, to eat a second croissant. Susan poured more coffee for me when the cup was empty.

“And here we are,” I said when I finished.

“What did you think of Dr. Hilliard,” Susan said.

“I didn’t spend enough time with her to think much,” I said. “She’s smart. She can decide things and act on what she’s decided. She seems to care about you.”

Susan nodded.

“Now you have me and you haven’t done anything about Jerry,” she said. “What about that.”

“We’ll still have to do something about Jerry,” I said. “We have a lot of things we can be arrested for and unless we get the feds to bury them, we’ll have to be on the dodge for the rest of our lives.”

“And you couldn’t be acquitted if you gave yourselves up and went to court?”

“Susan, we did the things we’re accused of. We’re guilty. Hawk did kill a guy. I did bust him out of jail. And all the rest.”

Susan had put her cup down. Most of the coffee was still in it. It had the little iridescent swirls on the surface that cold coffee gets.

“You have to kill Jerry Costigan or go to jail.”

“Yes.”

“What kind of a government is that? To give you that kind of choice?”

“The usual kind,” I said.

“They’ve required you to be simply a paid assassin.”

“They helped me find you,” I said.

She nodded. There was a small rounded end of croissant on her plate. She rolled it between her fingers, looking at it and not seeing it.

“And,” I said, “we have annoyed the daylights out of Jerry Costigan. We have burned down his lodge, trashed his factory, invaded his home, taken his son’s girl friend, killed some of his people.”

“Yes,” Susan said.

“You think he’ll shrug and put another record on the Gramophone?”

“No,” she said. “He’ll hunt you down and have you killed.” Her voice was quiet and clear, but flat, the way it had been in the car last night.

“Or vice versa,” I said.

Susan stood and began to clear the table of the cups and plates. She rinsed them under the running water and put them on the drainboard. Without turning from the sink she said, “What about Russ?”

“My question exactly,” I said.

She rinsed the second cup and put it on the drainboard and shut off the faucet and turned toward me. She, leaned her hips against the sink. She shook her head. “I don’t know how…” she said. I waited.

She took a deep breath. She picked up a pink sponge from the sink and wet it and wrung it out and wiped off the table and put the sponge back. She walked into the living room and looked out the window. Then she walked over to the couch and sat on it and put her feet on the coffee table. I turned in my chair at the table and looked at her.

“First, you understand. I love you,” she said.

I nodded. She took her feet off the coffee table and stood and walked to the window again. There was a pencil on the window ledge. She picked it up and carried it back to the sofa and sat again and put her feet back on the coffee table. She turned the pencil between the thumb and forefinger of each hand.

“My relationship with Russ is a real relationship,” she said.

She turned the pencil between her hands.

“It didn’t start out that way. It started to be a gesture of freedom and maturity.”

She paused and looked at the pencil in her hands and tapped her left thumb with the pencil and sucked on her lower lip. I was quiet.

Susan nodded. “It’s hard,” she said. “The work with Dr. Hilliard.”

“I imagine,” I said. “I imagine it takes will and courage and intelligence.”

Susan nodded again. The pencil turned slowly in her hands.

“You have those things in great number,” I said.

Susan stood again and walked to the window. “Growing up…” She was looking out the win dow again as she spoke. “You don’t have any siblings, do you?”

“No.”

“I was the youngest,” she said.

She walked from the window to the kitchen and picked up the bowl of oranges and brought them into the living room and put them on the table. Then she sat on the sofa again.

“When you came back from California and asked more from me, needed me to help you recover from failure, needed the support of a whole person, there wasn’t enough of me for the job.”

I sat without moving in the imitation leather chair across from her.

She stood again and went to the kitchen and got a glass of water and drank a third of it and put the partly full glass on the counter. She came to the entry between the kitchen and the living room and leaned against the entry wall and folded her arms.

“You did help,” I said.

“No. I was the thing you used to help yourself. You projected your strength and love onto me and used it to feel better. In a sense I never knew if you loved me or merely loved the projection of yourself, an idealized…” She shrugged and shook her head.

“So you found someone who didn’t idealize you.”

She unfolded her arms and picked up the pencil again and began to turn it. Her throat moved as she swallowed. She put her feet up on the coffee table and crossed her ankles.

“You can’t have us both,” I said. “I’d be pleased to spend the rest of my life working on this relationship. That includes the damage your childhood did you, the damage I did you. But it doesn’t include Russell. He goes or I do.”

“You’ll leave me?” Susan said.

“Yes,” I said.

“If I don’t give up Russell?”

“Absolutely.”

“You could have killed him in Connecticut.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know as much as you know, about civilization and its discontents. But I know if you are going to be whole, you’ve got to resolve this with Russell, and if he dies before you do, you’ll be robbed of that chance.”

Susan leaned forward on the couch, her feet still on the coffee table, like someone doing a sit-up. She held the pencil still between her hands.

“You do love me,” she said.

“I do, I always have.”

She leaned back on the couch. She swallowed visibly again, and began to tap her chin with the eraser end of the pencil.

“I cannot imagine a life without you,” she said.

“Don’t fool yourself,” I said. “If Russell’s in your life I won’t be.”

“I know,” she said. “I can’t give him up either.”

“I can’t force you to,” I said. “But I can force you to give me up. And I will.”

Susan shifted on the couch.

She said, “I’ll have to give him up.”

“If’t‘were be done,’t’were well it be done quickly,” I said.

She shook her head and folded her arms and hugged herself, the pencil still in her right hand.

“What are you waiting for,” I said.

“The strength,” she said.