Comeback (Gun Pedersen Book 1) (16 page)

27

Gun awoke feeling dirt-dried from sleeping in his
clothes. He was lying on top of the dark wool quilt
that was his bedspread, with a bolt of ripe yellow sun
batting him in the face. He opened his eyes and sought the clock without turning his head. Six forty-five. He’d had two hours sleep after the drive up from Minneap
olis, It would have to be enough.

Sitting up, Gun felt his collarbone begin to beat like
a bass drum where the bat had connected, and he
reached for the wall to steady himself. His left hand
was stiff as a plaster cast. When the throbbing eased
off he stood slowly and stripped to his shorts. The
shoulder looked bad, with a black bruise starting at the base of his neck and swelling in a proud arc to
where the arm attached. Gun faced the mirror and forced the arm to move. It hurt, but he didn’t feel the
screaming pain or internal scraping that meant a
broken bone. He made the arm rotate, a small circle, then a large one, and diagnosed a crack. The hand he
paid less attention to. It was his glove hand, still tough
from two decades of catching hard-hit and hard-
thrown baseballs. Nothing had ever hurt his hand for
long. He closed it into a fist, and the pain shot his
memory back a few hours.

Rudy had dropped him off, and he’d approached
Rutherford’s house with caution, his only idea being
to reach the truck and head north before anyone
decided to pay Rutherford a visit. It was dark but a
bright amber streetlight showed him the house, undis
turbed, the front door hanging aslant. Apparently no
one had gotten suspicious. It seemed strange, a
planned murder and four more spontaneous ones,
carried out in the middle of a simple, mundane
neighborhood. People all around, Gun thought, and
not one of them aware of five dead bodies hardening
in a living room right here in a house they’d all walked
past a thousand times.

It was getting late. Gun got in his truck, put the key
in the ignition. He looked again at the house with its
green peeling paint. A big brown doormat he hadn’t
noticed before said
welcome, friends
in script big enough to read from across the street. Gun opened the
glove box and took out a pair of fuzzy yellow work
gloves. Not skin-tight white latex, but they’d do.

The room was ripe and the floor sticky under his
Pony runners as Gun made his way through
Rutherford’s living room. He remembered tenth
grade, reading
The Red Badge of Courage,
when the
young soldier looked into the eyes of his first corpse
and went witless, tearing through the woods. He
avoided the gaze of the scowling dead and headed for
Rutherford’s kitchen.

Freddy Cheeseman seemed to have the whole
Hedman scheme figured out, or most of it. He knew
Rutherford had been used to set up Tig Larson, knew
Rutherford was headed for Niagara in a breadbox
because of it. But he didn’t know it all. “Don’t know who the runner was,” he’d told Gun. Gun had the
runner figured to be Reverend Barr, the thin Friar, but
he wanted to be sure.

He was sure after a ten-minute search of Ruther
ford’s ample kitchen. Even with a near-useless left
hand he was able to sort rapidly through a stack of
mail on the counter, bills and letters and postcards,
nothing with the Stony postmark. He found what he sought in a drawer beneath the telephone: a thin red address book. Samuel Barr was penciled in between
The Back Forty and Broken Rock resort. Gun slipped
the book in his pants pocket and stepped with care to the front door. No one said anything. He propped the
screen into a more likely position on his way out.

With bacon thawing and coffee ticking on the stove,
Gun broke routine and walked in his underwear down
to the lake. No hitting practice this morning. A
cracked collarbone deserved a day of rest. He walked
to the end of the dock and dove without breaking
stride, parting the water with his hands, welcoming
the anesthetizing chill of Stony Lake. He did a slow
sidestroke, resting the sore half of his collarbone. He
floated home on his back. When he reached the shore
he ducked once under, then rose dripping into the
sunshine. A thin pinkness had begun beneath the
bruise on his shoulder. His left hand felt stiff but
capable. He glanced at the roofless stone boathouse. Later, it would provide therapy.

Breakfast was Wheaties, crushed in the bowl to hasten sogginess, a dull but functional Breakfast of
Champions. Gun ate quickly, then dressed in jeans
and a wide red sweatshirt. He looked at the phone,
thought of Carol’s black bangs and green eyes, and
went out to the F-150.

It was time for confrontation, Gun thought as he

drove to the Hedman estate. Past time, overdue, and
calling in the loan. Carol had asked him earlier why he
didn’t put the questions straight to Hedman’s face,
the questions about Mazy and Larson and Ruther
ford. Evidence, he’d answered her then, he needed
evidence. Well, he had evidence now. Larry Slacker
had been shaken loose, and Rutherford had been
shelled apart. And there was the new topography of Gun’s shoulder, rising up like a tender knoll, big as a
slab of sod. That ought to merit a piece of Lyle’s busy morning.

When Gun drove up to the iron gate, the
jumpsuited guard stepped back a pace from the bars
and smiled. He wasn’t the same guard Gun had
spanked earlier.

“Hello, Mr. Pedersen,” said the guard. He was taller
than the last one, and muscled like a TV wrestler.

“I want to see Hedman,” said Gun.

The guard raised his arms in a sorry gesture. “Mr.
Hedman isn’t here,” he said. He was still smiling.

“You might as well open the gate,” Gun said. “The
easy way or the hard way, I’m going to see him.”

The guard hiked the .38 on his hip. “Pedersen,” he
said, “you used to be a hero of mine.”

“I’m glad.”

“Used to dread the Tigers’ road trips to Minnesota,
you swingin’ through Twins’ pitchers like a wrecking
ball. Gave me a thrill, though—I saw you hit three
homers off Perry and Kaat in a doubleheader at the Met once.”

Gun waited.

“Thing is, though, I don’t watch baseball now, and
you don’t play it. You don’t pay my salary either, and
Mr. Hedman does. So I wouldn’t let you in, even if he
was
here.” The guard shifted his shoulders once, as if
he were uncomfortable under the jumpsuit. “But like
I said, he’s gone. Took the family. Took the dog, even.

Caravan of Jaguars, the old man’s, the kid’s, the
wife’s. Damn.”

Something about the guard made Gun believe he
was telling the truth. The part about the Jaguars. He
said, “Where did they go?”

“Come on, Pedersen. I’m a security boy, not a
vacation counselor. They don’t tell me where they go.
They just tell me to watch this gate”—he reached out
and slapped an iron bar— “and make sure that
people on the other side of it stay there.” The guard
showed Gun a sudden grin. “Another thing,” he said.
“When Hedman
is
here, I don’t deliver notes.”

“You’re a smart boy,” said Gun. He got into the
Ford and rode out on Kenya Drive, aiming south
when he hit the highway.

Driving with his bruised hand out the window, Gun
tried mapping his limited options. Time was spinning
ahead too fast. He’d delayed confronting Hedman
until he had some ammunition, and now that he had
it, Hedman was gone. With his wife and his kid and
his ill-gotten daughter-in-law. The polls would open at eight
a.m.
Tuesday, and it was Saturday already with the sun heaving up toward noon. Gun goosed the Ford
south on County Road 2. If the Hedmans were anticipating him, the Reverend Barr probably was
too. But it wouldn’t hurt to look.

Barr lived in an off-white house of European stucco with craggy slopes and ivy crawling a fieldstone chim
ney. Like Hedman’s place, it was invisible from the
road. Gun nearly overlooked the black rural mailbox
imprinted with domino-sized capitals: S. BARR. The
thin gravel drive took him through a tall lilac hedge
and into a meadowlike yard. He pulled the Ford up in
front of the broad brown front door and left the
engine running.

The door had a window and a fat bronze knocker.
Gun used the window first. He beheld a small, wallpa
pered entry with hanging coats showing from a dark
closet door. A snaggle of wire hangers had been tossed
onto a high-backed Shaker chair, and a yellow plastic
dog-food dish was upside down on the hardwood strip
floor.

The knocker made a sound like a locker being slammed. Gun gave it three sharp beats and waited. No one was home. He gave it three more, and the
bronze horseshoe came off in his hand. Gun walked to
the back of the house. There was a long narrow yard, framed at the edges by yellow-blossomed caraganas.
Across the yard opposite the house was a cubelike
building of matching pale-faced stucco, with square-
paned windows. It looked like the servants’ quarters
in a TV miniseries about nineteenth-century England.
Gun squinted through one of the windows. The place
was a garage, and it was empty. An oil drip pan sat in
the right stall. The floor was swept. Gun could see the
swoop and straight lines of a ten-speed bicycle under a sheet of thrown canvas. A strip of twisted gold fly tape
hung from the ceiling, bugless.

The sun said it was noon. Gun left the bronze
knocker in the reverend’s mailbox on the way out.

“They took off,” said Gun, “every damn one of
them.” Jack Be Nimble’s was cool and smelled of
fresh frying grease. Gun had just finished bringing
Jack up to date on the Rutherford killing, the
Cheeseman connection, and Lyle’s quick exit.

Jack chuckled, rubbing his thick fingers over the
black crew cut. “Seems you mentioned that
Cheeseman guy one time. Didn’t know you ran in
those circles, Gun.”

Gun looked at the empty bar in front of him. He said, “Aren’t those things done yet?”

“Should be.” Jack rolled away to the kitchen. When
he returned he had two long plates with a shingle-
shaped burger on each. The buns, full-size kaiser rolls,
perched on the meat like decorative cherries. Gun’s plate held buttermilk in a beer glass.

“Before,” Gun said, “I might have been able to just
blow in there and get her out. But I waited too long,
and now everybody’s gone.”

They finished eating with no more talk. Gun tucked
a five under his plate and got to his feet. “Wherever
they went,” he said, “I’m going to find out.”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” said Jack. “My day off.”

28

By nine-thirty that evening a rack of washboard
clouds had slid over the sky, curtaining the bright new
moon and promising a black night. Gun, stiff but
strengthened from an afternoon roofing the boat-
house, used the last of the light readying the old
Alumacraft. He removed any item that might rattle or
clank: a pair of loose-jawed pliers under the bench
seat, a long teardrop-shaped landing net, a tackle box.
He untied the anchor from its rope and tossed it on
the grass, then coiled the line and tucked it in the bow,
leaving one end secured to the eyebolt in front. He
reached into the new boathouse rafters and drew out
two long bleached oars, oiled the locks until they
swung lightly, and laid them in place. At last he
pushed the boat into the water, floated her next to the dock, and rocked her with his feet until the gunwales scooped water. There was no noise but the slap of the
waves he’d created.
The straight-line route from Gun’s to the Hedman
shore was roughly four miles, or about eight minutes
in one of the low-slung, high-chaired bass boats that
were increasingly populating the lake. In Gun’s bat
tered rig, pushed through the dark by a dutiful fifteen-
horse Evinrude, it took much longer. At ten-fifteen he
was carefully edging past the rocky point that stood
out from Hambone Island. Ten minutes later some of the gaslight lamps that lit the Hedman drive were
winking through the shoreline trees. Gun idled down and cut the motor. A chill wet breeze made cat’s paws on the water. Gun reached into a pocket of his canvas
hunting jacket and brought out a black wool watch
cap.

The Woman River exited Stony Lake at the southern edge of the Hedman property. Moving parallel to
the lakeshore, Gun rowed silently until he could make
out the two ghost banks of rushes that marked the
outlet. Then he pointed the boat between them and floated in driftwood-quiet on the current.

He waited to land until there was a small thinning
in the wall of cattails, then dug one oar into soft river
bottom and nosed into the weeds. Through scrub-
willow branches Gun could see flaring African lamps,
lit for extra security in the absence of the Big Bwana.
The wet breeze blew him the sound of the gas hiss.
Gun poled through the rushes until the boat thumped
the mossy bank, then replaced the oar and stepped
aground. He tied the free end of the anchor rope to a
reaching hook of willow root, put his toe to the prow of the Alumacraft and shoved. The boat disappeared
like a spirit in the sway of weeds.

The main lodge sat on the crest of a hill, perhaps
seventy yards distant and fifty feet in elevation from
where Gun crouched in the willows. He was wearing
the watch cap over his white hair. He also wore the
brown canvas jacket, black woolen pants with dark
green flecks, and ankle-high leather boots soft with
mink oil. He felt like an ad for L.L. Bean, but at least
he wouldn’t attract any eyes.

It took a murky half hour to reach a small, grass-thatched hut some twenty yards from the lodge. He
hadn’t yet seen a sentry, though he suspected the night guard would be heavy. He sat down in the black shade
of the hut and watched for movements in the gaslit
yard. Thank God Lyle traveled with his dog, Gun
thought. Last thing he needed tonight was Reuben.

He heard macadam footfalls before he saw the
guard. On his stomach in the wide black shadow,
Gun’s eyes gradually pulled the man into vision. Like the others, this guard wore a light green sleeveless
jumpsuit. A three-quarter-sleeve baseball jersey cov
ered his arms against the night. The standard .38 was
a proud lump at his side, and a nightstick jumped on a chain at his thigh. The man walked between the lamps
on Kenya Drive, headed for the lodge. Gun pulled
back behind the hut. He heard the tread of boots on wooden steps, and the
chuck
of keys as the guard let
himself in. When he peered forth again, the guard was
returning to the porch. A six-pack of silver cans
glowed in his grip.

“Hey, Horseley, you big hog!” The sudden voice
was as high and thin as a nerve in the air. It was also
close. Gun tensed his body, strained his eyes.

“Bondy? Where the hell are you?” The first guard,
standing on the porch, bent his neck forward, probing.
Yeah, Gun thought, where?

“Sipping the old man’s imported reserves, hey, Horseley?” said Bondy, piercingly near.

“Damnit, Bondy, where are you?” yelled Horseley.
He set the six-pack on a rattan porch chair and used
both hands to shadow his eyes as though looking at
the sun.

Bondy laughed. “Horseley, you’re a blind man.
Right here. The shed.” Gun felt the vibrations of the

hut as Bondy slapped the other side of it, not fifteen
feet away. He rose to his knees and then to the balls of
his feet, as careful as if the earth had a ticklish skin.

“Jeez, Bondy.” Horseley sounded relieved. “You
blended in. Goddamn chameleon. Why don’t you get
your ass up here and share some of the wealth?”
Absolutely, Gun thought. Get it up there.

Bondy made stiff, musclebound noises getting up.
He must have been sitting there some time before
Gun ever pulled up behind the hut. Horseley picked
up the six-pack and sat down in the rattan chair.

“Here’s to sudden vacations,” said Bondy. He
unzipped a beer can and tilted it high.

“Here’s to expensive Hedman brew,” said
Horseley. “The man has taste.”

Gun leaned against the dark wall of the hut for the twenty-minute duration of the six-pack. He was in an
unfortunate location, since the hut was lit on three
sides by the gas lamps. He might shift back the way he’d come, but getting anyplace would take too long.
He wanted to get into the lodge, not away from it.

“Grock,”
said Horseley, belching mouth open, hip
po style.

“All gone,” observed Bondy, putting his eye to the
top of his can.

“More to come,” said Horseley. He stood, quite steadily, and let himself into the lodge.

Chilled from staying motionless in the misty night,
Gun set a limit. One more six-pack and he’d take
action. Forward or backward, but action. He blew a soft sigh and rubbed his palms. He craned for a look
when he heard the porch screen swing to. Horseley
was carrying two six-packs.

“Bless you, Marse Lyle,” said Bondy.

The second six-pack was only a fifteen-minute wait.
The guards were doing their best not to let it get warm.
While Horseley and Bondy giggled the empties into a

twelve-can pyramid on the porch, Gun reached for the
layered steel padlock on the door of the hut. Cautiously at first, he rattled the lock against the metal clasp. It
made a sound like a squirrel on a tin roof. Bondy and
Horseley drowned it out. They were having a belching
contest. Gun grabbed the lock as he had Barr’s
knocker and pounded it against the clasp. He had to do it four times before the sound sunk through the
laughter. Horseley put one hand on his gun and the
other on Bondy’s shoulder.

“Crap, man, did you hear that?”

Bondy grinned a strong imported grin. “Aw, get off
it.”

“No. Seriously. I thought I heard somebody sneak
ing around, out by the shed maybe.”

Gun knocked again.

“The shed,” said Horseley. “Shit. Someone’s in the shed, knocking around with the old man’s mowers.”

Bondy took a step toward the screen door and
stumbled over the beer pyramid. The tinkling scram
ble seemed to tighten their nerves.

“I’m going out there,” Horseley said in a beer-
amplified whisper.

“I’m right behind you,” said Bondy, whispering
too.

Gun flattened his back against the wall of the hut
and waited. They said nothing else, but Gun could
hear the unsnapping of holsters and feel their uneven steps as they approached. The wet breeze sharpened
against Gun’s face, and the long blue glow of a .38
barrel nosed blindly around the hut’s corner.

Gun didn’t wait for its owner. He seized the barrel in both hands and jerked Horseley into black shade, the pistol erupting and blowing an orange hole in the
air six inches from Gun’s left shoulder. The shot
startled Horseley into a scream, and for one frozen
frame Gun could see the horrified whites of the

guard’s eyes. He darkened them with a staccato punch
to the face and wheeled for Bondy.

Bondy wasn’t there. Gun panted quietly for less
than a minute before he heard the guard’s voice, bleak
and sodden.

“Horseley?”

Bondy was close, very close. Gun guessed he was
against the adjacent wall, on the corner, too scared to enter the shadow. His finger would be nervous on the
.38.

“Come on, Horseley, talk,” muttered Bondy. The
guard’s breath fluttered in his teeth like a moth. “Did
you get ‘em? Tell me you got ‘em, Horseley, this is a damn bad joke.”

Gun edged to the corner. He thought, I’m a monster
in the dark, boy. Then he curled one hand into a
searching claw and flung his arm around the corner. It
connected immediately with Bondy’s soft sweaty
neck, and Gun felt the .38 hit the earth. He pulled the
guard squeaking into the shade. He was careful, when
inducing sleep, not to hit too hard.