Mallets Aforethought (31 page)

I could guess how the gun got there, though. I could see it in my mind’s eye. Eva’s right hand, the one that almost certainly held the gun, would’ve jerked reflexively in the moment of her death. The little gun flew across the table, hit the old floor, and fell through one of the openings in the heating grate to the duct below, where it landed with the note.

Sheesh. Chester Harlequin had been framed, all right, just as Ellie insisted, by someone he trusted. Just like George.

But I didn’t have time to dwell on the ironic parallels. Instead I took a page from Sam’s book and pulled a thick splinter out of an antique floorboard. This I jammed as firmly as I could into the hole where the doorknob stem should have been.

There: not quite a doorknob. But wrapping Eva’s note around it made it thick enough to grasp, to try turning . . .

Damn. The wood broke off in the hole. Now I was worse off than before, unless . . . Okay, I told myself, fighting panic once more. So maybe it was a two-step process.

But it had better be a fast one because now my flashlight was failing; just finding a bent nail in the gloom was a project and wiggling it back and forth until it came out of the floor was worse. Then I had to bang the nail’s sharp end into the wood in the doorknob hole, using the heating grate’s edge for a hammer.

Careful, careful . . . Mindful that this was my absolute last chance, I grasped the head end of the bent nail, its pointed end firmly lodged—or so I very much hoped—in the wood jamming the doorknob hole. Then gently, gently I pushed down on it, using the nail as a latch-handle.

If the nail turned in the wood I was doomed. But if the wood turned the latch mechanism inside the door, there was a chance—just the barest chance—that the door might open.

Holding my breath, I felt the latch-set’s inner mechanisms turn gratingly. The door moved a fraction . . .
outward
. There hadn’t been room enough in the little chamber for it to open
in
.

That was why Eva had had to
pull
it shut . . . and now Will’s lath-and-plaster job was blocking it.

Which was when I went a little crazy. I grabbed up the grate and began demolishing the old door shred by shred. By the time I smelled fresh plaster, my throat was raw from screaming; every time I slammed the grate’s pointed corner into the door, it cut another wound into my hands.

Finally came the moment of truth. With the door apart at last I stood sweaty and exhausted, gasping and weeping. Staring at the fresh plaster seeping through the lath strips and already half-hardened, I knew there was barely a chance in hell I could ever break through.

But Wade was on the other side, and Sam was too. Fresh air, and Ellie and the baby. My dad was outside; likewise that damned district attorney who was trying to put Jemmy away.

All there. Even Victor.

And Will Bonnet.

Thinking about them all, I backed as far away in the little room as I could get. Physics, I thought. Time and gravity and the unchanging properties of substances.

Things. And . . . pressure. Never mind if I got hurt.

Soon I’d be hurting a lot worse, unless . . .

. . . now,
I thought.
Now or never.

Whereupon I
charged
the wall, slammed into it with my whole body, much harder than I’d ever hit anything before in my life. On impact the lath bit hard into my flesh, bowed out, and . . .

Splintering with a fast, sharp series of
cracks!
it suddenly gave way, slicing me in a dozen places as I burst through.

On the other side I staggered wildly to keep my balance and failed. When I fell, my head hit the floor so hard I saw stars for a minute, bright fluorescent explosions I tried blinking away. But I couldn’t do that, either. They had to fade on their own.

Lying there gasping, I tried to think of where Will would be right now. Or rather, where he
wouldn’t
be; it was crucial to know this since I was certain I wouldn’t survive another encounter with him. I was bleeding, still half-drugged, and if there was a part of me that didn’t hurt like the hounds of hell were using me for a chew toy, I couldn’t find it.

But as Wade said once when he drove himself to the ER with a boat hook stuck through his arm, pain is for when you have time. And this wasn’t only about saving George from a murder conviction anymore. It was about saving his life.

I staggered outside. The fresh air was sweet. But I couldn’t pause to glory in it.

I needed something sweeter.

Somehow I needed to stop that son of a bitch.

The new phone officer at the jail was no more helpful than the old one had been, but he had better manners.

“Your friend’s arraignment has been postponed due to his injury,” he told me. “He remains in the infirmary but his physician has requested that he be allowed no visitors.”

Victor’s doing: trying to make sure no one came in from the outside to clobber George again.
Good try,
I thought at Victor.
Way to be paranoid when it’s actually appropriate, for once.

But it wasn’t going to help. “All right, now, please listen to me,” I told the officer. “There’s an inmate named Ronny, he’d have been brought in a little while ago. He was picked up in Eastport this morning and I know this sounds crazy, but—”

“Yes, ma’am,” the officer said. “Ron Ronaldson.”

When they start calling you
ma’am
in that humor-the-civilian tone, the conversation is over. But I tried a last time anyway.

“The thing is, Ronny’s going to try to kill George. Believe me, I know he is going to, and—”

“And you know this because . . . ?”

“Because his accomplice told me, the guy whose orders Ronny is taking, he had me in a room all drugged up and he meant to—”

“When did you take the drugs, ma’am?”

“I didn’t
take
them, he
gave
me—”

A radio sputtered in the background. “Ma’am, I can’t stay on the phone with you unless you need assistance. If you do I can send an officer or an ambulance to your location.”

My location was that I was roaring down Route 190 toward Route 1 in George’s old truck, and the only assistance I needed at the moment was a pair of jet engines. Or maybe just a regular one that didn’t threaten to conk out on me any minute.

“No. Sorry,” I mumbled, “to have troubled you.” I pressed the off button of the cell phone that George had installed at Ellie’s insistence in the cab of the truck.

Like the reflector strips on his boat, the cell phone was a safety feature. Staggering home from Harlequin House, I had found the truck in my yard with George’s lobster traps stacked in the bed. Probably Tommy had stopped off while bringing the truck over to George’s, so Sam could come along and give him a ride back.

But now both boys had gone off somewhere else in Sam’s car. Wade wasn’t around, or my father. Nobody home, house locked up because Wade’s gun shop was full of weapons, and me with no keys; they were down the heating duct at Harlequin House.

For a stupefied moment I’d just stood there wondering what to do. I couldn’t call Ellie because I didn’t want to risk Will being at her house, figuring out it was me on the phone, and knowing I’d escaped. And I couldn’t stumble around town looking for help, for the same reason; he might
not
be at Ellie’s and if he realized I was free, who knew what he might do?

Worst case, he could get a message to Ronny somehow, tell him to hurry up. And then good-bye George. What Will would do about me I wasn’t so sure but I didn’t think I’d like that, either.

Bottom line, I had to get to the jail in Machias. The truck key as always had been under the visor and for once the old heap had actually started on the first try; Tommy’s doing, probably. Now, slamming the phone back into its holder, I turned the truck onto Route 1; pressing on the accelerator I got the old rattletrap up to sixty and then to sixty-five.

It wouldn’t go faster, coughing when I tried to make it, but the engine noise didn’t change from its low, amiable hum. It gave me confidence, that sound like the buzz of an aging bumblebee. Passing first one hitchhiker and then another—around here the thumb was a common method of transportation, but I couldn’t risk stopping—I even began to think I might reach the jail without further disaster.

But my optimism was premature. Nearly thirty miles of forest and fields, divided occasionally by glittering saltwater inlets, went by without a cough, lurch, or shudder from the truck. As I approached the long hill on the outskirts of Machias, however, the engine gave a shuddery gasp. The battery light came on as I got the vehicle over to the side of the road. The starter motor ground valiantly but to no effect as I turned the key.

But as luck would have it, I’d pulled in right alongside another thumb-jockey. My luck, not his, as he saw immediately. He’d be better off walking than trying to promote a ride in this junk heap.

“Need any help?” he asked, approaching the truck. He was a good old boy from the backwoods, his boots muddy, beard scraggly, and blue eyes bright with the messianic light that comes to men who’ve been hunkered down in their cabins for too long, brewing up crackpot theories.

But he was all I had. “Yeah. Get behind the wheel?”

The look on his face as he scrutinized me told me how I must appear to him: bruised and bloody, lips raw from the tape I’d torn off them, eyes like a pair of peeled grapes.

In fact, in the possible crackpot contest I took the prize. “Please,” I added humbly.

The guy nodded. That’s one thing about hermits out of the backwoods. With them, your personal grooming isn’t an issue.

He got in and popped the hood in a way that made me think he’d done this sort of thing before. I filled the same Big Gulp cup I’d used the last time from the gas can George kept in the truck bed, hoisted myself up onto the front fender, and peered into the engine compartment.

Now, which hole had I poured that gasoline into? Not the oil dipstick, not the radiator . . . Gingerly, I found and unscrewed the fuel line from the carburetor. Which luckily this truck had; no fuel injection, bless the old beast, just an old-fashioned carburetor, fuel pump, fuel line, and spark plugs.

Very carefully—if I messed this up, a big ball of flame was going to be the result—I began dribbling gas from the soda cup into the carburetor. “Okay, turn the key.”

The hermit guy obeyed. The engine turned over a couple of times but then coughed irritably and stalled again.

More gas, just a teensy stream. “Turn it again. Please.”

Cough, cough. But then—bingo. Gas began spurting out from the disconnected fuel line; with trembling hands, I screwed it back on. Truck exhaust spewed in a fragrant plume from the back of the vehicle, and the engine noise smoothed out.

I slid off the fender, slammed the hood, and swung into the cab again as he slid over. “Where you going?”

“Bangor.”

In the side mirror, a line of cars approached from behind us. I let them pass, waiting for my chance. And then I saw it.

Not my chance. Something else. “You don’t want to ride with me,” I said.

The guy looked over, not sure he’d heard correctly.

“I mean it. You really don’t want to ride with me, trust me on this. Get out.”

His eyes met mine, his brow furrowed with the injustice of my pronouncement, and I saw him thinking about whether or not to protest vehemently. After all, he had helped me, so didn’t I owe him a ride? But then, to my relief, he gave me the benefit of the doubt and hopped out. Meanwhile I kept waiting for my chance to get back into the traffic lane, at the same time watching a vehicle making its way up the hill behind me . . .

I hit the gas hard, spinning gravel as the truck shot out onto the pavement. Probably it wasn’t a good way to treat an ailing engine. Or the backwoods guy either.

But coming up behind me, passing everything in its way, was a collection of mismatched fenders and out-of-square chassis with the big front grille of an old Buick Roadmaster and a windshield held on by a row of C-clamps on either side.

It was big, it was fast, and it was without a doubt the same car that had been following Ellie and me the day we’d visited the Condons and Ginger Tolliver.

Wildly the vehicle swung out and shot past two more cars, just missing a log-rig loaded with a pile of thirty-foot tree trunks, speeding uphill. We hadn’t hit the steepest part of the grade yet and George’s truck was already slowing, laboring in third gear.

Will was even more thorough a bad guy than I had thought. He must have gone back to Harlequin House to check on me, found me gone and George’s truck nowhere around, and drawn the correct conclusion.

There was a blare of horn and a harsh squeal of tires as my pursuer narrowly missed hitting an oncoming vehicle head-on. I tromped the gas. The truck lurched and backfired, barely avoiding a stall.

And then with a sudden hard gleam of his ferocious-looking front grille in my rearview, there he was.

Right behind me, bumping me.

Hard. Behind the big car’s wheel I glimpsed Weasel Bodine’s unattractive face, his two big front teeth hanging out as he gripped the steering wheel one-handed and grimaced with the effort of rubbing his few brain cells together.

He hit me again. The lobster traps piled in the truck bed lurched alarmingly, and the steering wheel tried to jump right out of my hands. With the next impact—or maybe the one after, which was not to my mind a particularly better option—he would force me right off the road or into the path of another car.

Bang!
The lobster traps jostled again, the entire pile of them sliding backwards a foot. Too bad, I thought grimly, that the truck bed wasn’t filled with iron spikes. They’d be at about the level of Weasel’s head, and . . .

Wham.
The truck’s tailgate flopped open, its spit-and-baling-wire repair job not quite up to a game of highway bumpercars.

And neither was I, as I desperately wrestled the truck back into its own lane. What Mister Overbite meant to do once he caught me I wasn’t sure, but I had a feeling Will’s instructions had been X-rated for violence. Will needed me silenced, and after all, the promise of a big payday had worked on Perry Daigle. Why wouldn’t it also banish the fear of prison from Eastport’s very own homegrown version of Bucky Beaver?