Purgatory Chasm: A Mystery (36 page)

We played chicken, neither wanting to say it.

The game lasted 2.3 miles. I lost. “You fucked him,” I said.

Nothing.

“Deny it,” I said. “I’m begging you.”

Patty Marx said nothing.

My heart hurt.

“Please deny it.”

She folded her arms.

“You slept with Tander Phigg,” I said. “
Then
you told him he was your father.”

“I didn’t kill him,” she said so quickly I barely made it out.

“You must have helped.”

“No no no! Josh knocked him out, then lifted him by himself. He’s ridiculously strong.”

I thought back to the first day I saw Josh. He’d carried a tire and wheel under each arm like they were spare pillows.

“The cops never said anything about Phigg being knocked out.” But I knew they weren’t looking for anything like that, were content with their path-of-least-resistance suicide theory.

“Josh knew how to half fill kids’ balloons with sand,” Patty said, “and tunk people on the head, knock them out with minimal damage. He bragged about it.”

“A sap,” I said, nodding. “Old school.” It fit. It worked. But then I thought of something. “Did he hit
me
in the head, that day at Motorenwerk?” I fingered the lump. “Because that was no dainty minimal-damage shot. Busted me open.”

“It was him,” she said, “and that one wasn’t
supposed
to be dainty. He thought he could scare you off.”

We rolled north in silence.

After maybe ten minutes Patty said, “I won’t cop to that. Not in public. I’ll dime out Josh all day long, but if you mention … what you just said about Tander and me, I’ll deny it. And I’ll sell the denial very, very well.”

I said nothing. Everything felt so heavy.

“What do you say to that?” Patty said.

“You won’t have to dime out Josh.”

I felt her looking at me. “You are a very serious man,” she finally said.

“I assume Josh and Fred met in Brattleboro?”

She nodded. “That’s what Josh said. After his granny died in Utica—after he killed her, as we now suppose—he took his shitty little inheritance and bummed around a few years. Wound up broke in Vermont.”

“So? What was the connection?”

“When I told Josh that Tander was meeting one Conway Sax for breakfast, Josh looked like he’d won the lottery. He said he had a lever for you.”

“How’d he make the connection between my father and me?” I said. “I hadn’t seen Fred but once in fifteen years.”

“Apparently you were all he talked about with the homeless set,” she said. “His son, the big-deal NASCAR driver.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“He talked that way about me?” I said.

“I guess he did.”

We were quiet awhile.

“What was the pitch?” I said. “What did Josh promise Fred?”

“The usual, I would guess,” she said, rubbing thumb to fingers.

But that wasn’t it. I didn’t bother to tell her. I thought about watching a light turn green, about driving away from Fast Freddy Sax with a blank IOU in my hand.

Handing me to Josh on a silver platter must have meant more to Fred than any payday. It hurt my insides to think about it, but there it was.

*   *   *

You try to tamp down your hopes. You prep yourself for disappointment.

Hope fights through anyway. Hope that Josh’s crappy old Audi would croak on the way here. Hope that a heads-up cop had pulled him over. Hope that he couldn’t swing loose the false floor by himself, that I’d catch him tangled in rope, vulnerable.

We eased down Jut Road and saw right away the hidey-hole had been opened. It dangled amid a mess of climbing rope.

“Hell,” I said. Climbed from my truck, looked down at tire tracks made by an all-wheel-drive car—Josh’s Audi.

He was long gone.

But hope fights through. I walked to the edge of the slope, looked over the half-assed sling he’d rigged. Slipped down the steep muck barely under control, got one work boot wet. Looked up.

Gone gone gone. The money and Josh both.

“Well?” Patty said.

“Gone.” I had my hands in my back pockets, was looking at the river.

“What do you think he’ll do?” she said, shouting. “Make a border run?”

“Safer to stay in the States. Ditch his car, make it to a bus station, he can be invisible in eighteen hours.”

“Still,” she said, shouting again over the Souhegan’s rush, “I bet it’s tempting to head for Canada when you’re this far north.”

If she hadn’t kept hollering like that, babbling in a way that was unusual for her, he would have pulled it off. The river noise and woods thrum was plenty of cover.

But half a beat after the second time Patty shouted, I realized she was making noise to cover for Josh. I spun, threw myself against the steep bank, and looked up. As I did I heard a sound like two one-by-twos slapping together, then a flat
plint
as a bullet hit water.

There was Josh Whipple, Ollie’s P35 in his hand, surprised he hadn’t just killed me. I could understand the surprise: He was braced on one knee and had fired from eight feet away with a nice downward angle.

The moment of the adrenaline spurt is a lot like what happens in racing: Even though your world, your life, hinges on the next three seconds, an additional branch of perception opens up and you take in more data than people think possible. After a race at Thompson Speedway in Connecticut, one driver commented that on the third lap, a squirrel had tried to cross the track in turn three. I told him that was no squirrel, that was a chipmunk, and it was the
fourth
lap. Another driver overheard and asked if we were both blind, it was a
family
of chipmunks, and two of them made it, but he squished the papa with his left front tire.

So: The work boots dig in, splayed out duck style, chopping through muck for traction. Josh is above me and to my left, but instead of charging straight at him I crab to my right. This forces Josh to swing the P35 to his left, across his body, making for a tougher shot. I remember the gun’s been modified to fire heavier-than-stock .40 S&W loads, which give it hellacious stopping power but make it hard to fire accurately.

There’s that second round, fired as I make the top of the slope. As I hoped, Josh has swung the P35 too far—this one whangs past my right shoulder as I turn to charge him. Next to his leg puddles a white trash bag, kitchen-size, its plastic drawstring tied in a nice bow. That’s the seventy-five grand: I watched Trey bag it up, watched him tie the bow. Next to the bag stands Patty Marx, and I would swear in a court of law she is ignoring the semiautomatic pistol three feet from her ear, the two men trying their hardest to kill each other. She only has eyes for the sack of money.

I scrabble at Josh’s shins, low low low, mostly because I slip as I charge, but it’s a good move because his third shot whangs over my left shoulder. I hear it, and the
zzzzz
sound squirts more adrenaline, and I feel clever—
very clever,
the phrase of the day—for staying so low, and I take one last chopping step and angle upward, meaning to hit Josh with what football players call a form tackle, squared up, wrapping my arms around his torso.

And Josh, stepping back, off balance, panicking for the first time I’ve seen, flinches and grimaces and shoots me in the stomach.

*   *   *

Before I hit the water, arms locked around Josh as planned, I had time to feel like a jackass. Why hadn’t I checked the shack before scrambling down to the river? Had Patty somehow warned him we were coming? Or had he decided on his own to stash his car and take me out right then? Any way you sliced it, I’d been stupid to not glance in the shack.

Then we slid into the river and the cold stole my wind. Josh ended up on top of me. My head settled into the muck. I stared through clear water at the sky.

Josh kneed me in the balls. When I coiled up out of instinct, he stood, hesitated. I wondered if he was getting set to shoot me, then figured he couldn’t find the gun. I took a weak kick at his legs. Nothing. He jumped in the air and landed on me with both feet.

That was when the gunshot shock wore off and my right side, maybe two inches above my pants pocket, began to hurt worse than anything I’d ever felt. A warm trickle front and back told me the bullet had gone through and through.

The warm trickle.

The icy water.

The stomped balls.

I almost gave up.

Almost.

Instead: Josh bent over, reaching for my throat with both hands. I waited until he was fully committed, saw the hard smile in his eyes, kicked
him
in the balls. He twitched at the last instant or I would’ve had him. As it was, he fell next to me and rested on hands and knees.

I didn’t know what to do, but I needed to get the hell away from there. I half stood, facing the shore, and as Josh rose with a good-size rock in his right hand, I used what was left of my leg strength to flop away into the Souhegan.

He dove after me, wrapped his arms. I grabbed a lungful of air as Josh dragged me under, my belly facing the sky. I reached for the pier that ought to be behind me. My fingertips brushed it, slipped away, grabbed, missed. Josh was bear-hugging us both to the bottom. He hadn’t been shot, and he was young, and he was going to hold his breath until I passed out.

There—fingertips on the pier again. I got my hands around it and began to climb, climb. I felt Josh loosen his arms to adjust his crushing grip. Before he could, I wrapped my legs around his torso, scissors style. He tried to move his arms, couldn’t, thrashed and panicked.

And then my face was above water, my arms clamped around the pier. I breathed, breathed, had never known air to have an actual
taste
like this.

And all pain, all wounds, all bleeding, all cold were pushed from my mind as I squeezed Josh Whipple underwater with my legs, using every muscle, holding him under the Souhegan a full five minutes after I knew he was dead.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Exactly three weeks later, on a Saturday morning, I stood in front of a roll-up door on Mechanic Street, put two fingers in my mouth, cranked off a whistle. The pit bull sounded off. The Mexican looked through a small window, stared for ten seconds, vanished. In another ten seconds he stepped from the shop’s front door, kicking at the pit bull to keep it inside.

“The fuck you want?”

“You remember me?”

“Who’s gonna forget you? You all over the news.”

“I need to do some work in there,” I said, jerking a thumb at Motorenwerk. “Cops ever roll by these days?”

“Hardly ever. Things pretty much back to normal.”

“Anybody swings past, I could use a heads-up.”

“I got work of my own.”

“Pay you a grand to sit out here in your favorite chair and call me if a cruiser comes by.”

“You got shot, uh?”

I nodded.

“Save your grand,” he said, sitting and waving a hand. “This could be entertaining.”

We pulled our cells. I set mine so he had a unique ring tone: If a cop came by, the Mexican would speed-dial me and I wouldn’t even have to pick up.

*   *   *

They said McCord found me on the riverbank with Josh’s dead body still between my thighs. I’d either been unwilling to let go of him or, more likely they said, unable—muscles spasmed, locked up. It made for a hell of a picture: me dog-paddling in from the pier, using my arms only, with a leg-lock on Josh Whipple.

I nearly bled to death and I nearly froze to death. When the New Hampshire State Police tried to shuffle me into some podunk hospital, Charlene and a half dozen lawyers she could afford laid a near-death experience on
them,
and so I wound up in Mass. General getting the best care in the world.

I’d suffered the easiest wound you can get north of your ass, my surgeon told me proudly: low on my right side, through and through, no vital organs pierced, an abductor muscle “molested” (the surgeon’s word).

Easy wound or not, that molested muscle hurt like hell as I crossed Mechanic Street, scoping out Motorenwerk. The shop had that
Twilight Zone
look that businesses get after they go out of business but before their guts are auctioned off.

The same squadron of lawyers that terrorized the New Hampshire Staties made sure I never spent so much as an hour in a cop shop, even when I was healthy enough. By then, Josh Whipple’s thirteen-year murder spree was the biggest story in the country. People wanted me to write a book. People wanted me to do a reality show. Network news shows sent fruit baskets.

I had the fruit baskets forwarded to Diana Patience Roper. She’d changed her name again: Patty Marx was dead, long live Diana. The Massachusetts Staties grabbed her three hours after she took the trash bag full of money and stole my truck. When it was time for her phone call, she buzzed a producer she knew at a tabloid TV show and sketched out her story.