Shallow Graves (27 page)

“You got that gun.”

“I’ll leave it in the car. Drive out toward the highway to the forest preserve. I’ll be right behind you. Don’t try to get away. I’ll be aiming for the tires but I might hit your gas tank.”

“You asshole,” the boy muttered as he got into the car. The big Pontiac engine exploded to life and Nick pumped the accelerator.

They pulled out of downtown, the camper right behind the GT.

It turned out even better than Pellam’d thought it would be. They’d gotten two miles out of town, to the stoplight, when Nick did just what Pellam knew he was going to do: Looked for cross traffic, slipped the clutch and shot through the red light, running up through the gears with his fancy shifter, sounding like a buzz saw.

The boy was probably in fourth when the state trooper Pellam had seen on his way into town, hidden in the bushes, a speed trap, started to pull out.

Nick came within two or three inches of taking the front end of the trooper’s Chevy with him.

Pellam drove slowly past the scene of the arrest. Then past the sign that said
Welcome to Cleary
and continued into the blackness.

Good night, officer.

Good night, sir. . . .

PELLAM TURNED THE
camper off Barlow Mountain Road, and eased along an overgrown side road up the hill that he supposed was Barlow Mountain. He nosed the Winnebago forward into a clump of hemlocks
then killed the engine. He pulled the Colt out from under the seat and slipped it into his waistband then stepped outside. His boots made gritting taps as he walked along the asphalt toward the warm yellow house lights that glowed in the fog, a quarter mile away.

A hundred yards from the house he made his way off the road into brush and sparse woods. He smelled wet pine and ripe leaves. A hit of skunk. He saw the glistening lights reflecting on a lake to his right. A late, lone cicada made its deceptively cheerful sound and somewhere a dog barked. He moved slowly toward the house, stepping around branches.

The house was a rambling old monster, easily two hundred years old. A drab, ugly brown, Plymouth Rock chic. He heard water lapping and saw the lake clearly; it came right to the edge of the property. The dog barked again, the sound rolling across the lake. There was no other noise or motion, not even wind. The house was still and the lights were dim; Pellam wondered if they’d been left on while the residents were out to discourage the potential intruders that Pellam now understood Ambler would have good reason to worry about—the state police, for instance.

He thought of the drugs that had been planted on Marty—and on him—and the odd heroin Sam had taken. He recalled that Meg or someone told him about other overdoses and murders in the area. Ambler was responsible for it all . . . and desperate to make sure a movie wasn’t made here, drawing all sorts of unwanted attention to Cleary.

He knelt in the grass and felt the cold dew through his denim. After five minutes, during which he saw no
motion, he ran in a crouch to the separate garage, a two-story saltbox, and looked in the window. Only one car inside, a Cadillac. And there was an oil stain on the concrete, about ten feet to the left of the Caddie, which told him that Ambler had two cars.

A family out to dinner on Sunday night? Probably. But even when he walked to the house Pellam stayed in the shadows and edged up to the first-floor windows slowly. He bobbed his head up and looked in one quickly, seeing small rooms, decorated with rough, painted furniture, wreaths of dried flowers, primitive Colonial paintings of spooky children and black-clad wives—everything stiff and spindly and uncomfortable.

He saw no movement at all.

The windows, he noticed, were mostly unlocked.

The third room was the one he wanted.

It was dark paneled and inside were two large gun cabinets, glass faced, set against the wall. Several trophies were mounted near the low ceiling—a couple of antelope and a good-pointed buck. But they were on one wall only, as if the hunter had gotten tired of taking lives. Or at least of displaying his kills. Pellam, squinting, saw a number of rifles in the cases. Several looked like they were .30 caliber and at least two of them had telescopic sights.

Pellam lifted his hands up to the window and tested it. Unlocked. He stood completely still for a moment, his face millimeters away from the rippled, old-fashioned glass. Then he eased up the window, which moved slowly. He opened it about two feet. A hard climb, though, he thought—considering his bruised thigh, his damaged joints.

It was then that he glanced inside and noticed something odd.

What’s wrong with this picture?

The second gun cabinet. The third space from the left.

Empty.

Thinking: If a man was as organized as Ambler seemed to be and he
didn’t
have enough guns to fill a cabinet, he’d probably keep the ones he did have centered in the rack. Which meant—

“Don’t move,” the man said.

The jump was involuntary, though the cold touch of the shotgun barrel at his head brought the movement under control real fast.

The voice was that of a middle-aged man. He asked, “You have a gun?”

“Yes.”

“Hand it to me.”

If he was impressed with the Colt, the man didn’t say so. He slipped it into his pocket and, leaving the Remington over-under at Pellam’s neck like a nesting kitten, said, “Let’s go inside.”

PELLAM MOVED BACK
and forth slowly in the bentwood rocker he’d been invited toward by the blunt 12-gauge trap gun. (Pellam hated shotguns. Shotguns were really loud.)

The man—he
was
Wex Ambler, according to his muttered introduction—studied Pellam carefully. Pellam gazed back. It was an odd contrast—hateful dark eyes and an L.L. Bean Sunday gardener’s outfit, complete with bright green Izod shirt.

“What were you doing?” Ambler asked.

“Thinking of shooting a movie here. I was—”

“You know I could shoot you now. Blow your head clean off and all the sheriff’d do is tell me how sorry he was I lost a window and bloodied my floor.”

Pellam saw the stillness in Ambler’s eyes and knew this was a man who could easily kill.

He said, “I wanted to see if you were really the man who was trying to send me to Attica for ten years.”

Ambler said, “I didn’t want you to go to prison. I wanted you to leave town. Get the hell out and not come back. You chose not to play by the rules.”

“You could’ve asked.”

“You
were
asked. Several times.”

Goodbye
 . . .

Ambler’s eyes flashed. “You people . . . We have a decent town and you think you can come here from Hollywood, and make your movies, but you’re laughing at us. Behind our backs you’re laughing. I hate you people.”

Pellam
was
laughing. “Bullshit. I came to town to rent a few houses and stores for a couple of weeks. That’s all we wanted. My friend gets killed and I get beat up and somebody plants drugs on me. . . .”

Ambler shook his head, whipping Pellam’s words off like they were gnats.

Pellam’s eyes measured distances, noticing that the shotgun’s safety was on, that Ambler’s finger was outside the trigger guard, that the muzzle was aimed sixty or seventy degrees away from him. Noticing a carving set on the counter, antler handled, a burnished, well-honed blade on the knife. Even the serving fork looked vicious.

“Sin city,” Ambler said.

Pellam rocked forward. His legs tensed, thinking he could probably make it. He wondered what it was like to stab someone. “It’s just a business,” Pellam said.

Ambler didn’t hear him. “People here go to church, they have children, they teach them Christian values, they work hard, they—”

Pellam thought:
Make millions selling smack.

“—don’t need your kind of influence.”

Outside influence.
So it was a script. Moorhouse and Ambler and the sheriff all had the same script and the lines were terrible. They’d all be in on it, of course. This man with a million-dollar house was probably the ringleader. He’d arranged to bring the
drugs in from someplace out of the country. Then he’d distribute them in small towns like this. An untapped market. Moorhouse, Tom the sheriff and the pastel-sunglassed deputies were his enforcers.

Ambler was lecturing. Sin, providence, promises unkept.

The words didn’t quite harmonize with the fact the man had killed Marty. Or was seeding God-fearing Dutchess County with exotic drugs. (But Pellam recalled a former acquaintance—E Block, West Wing, San Quentin, California—who went to church every day.)

Ambler kept talking like a crazy person on the street, furious. Flecks of spittle in the corner of his mouth. The muzzle of the gun rose and fell like surf.

But Pellam wasn’t paying much attention to Ambler’s mania or the moral purity of Dutchess County.

He was thinking about the carving knife.

His feet rested themselves under the sensually curved chair.

Pressing the balls of his feet against the tile. The knife, the knife, the knife.

He felt the tension, like blued spring steel, building in his calves.

The knife . . .

He kept his eyes calm, staring right into Ambler’s. That was the giveaway in a fight. You could always tell when a man was about to swing or go for a weapon—his eyes. He’d learned that from another acquaintance (D Block, North Wing). Pellam looked at Ambler and kept his eyes very still.

He rocked forward. The chair swung back and then forward, his weight moved with it.

The knife.

On your mark.

Goddamn, shotguns were loud.

Get set.

Blood on the tiles? No, sir, there’d be blood on the ceiling, the walls, the fancy granite countertop. . . .

Go.

Ambler’s harsh voice asked, “What did you tell her?”

Pellam froze, stopped rocking. “Who?”

Ambler’s feverish eyes danced out the window for a moment, as a car drove past. It continued on.

Pellam rocked back. His quaking legs relaxed. Shotguns didn’t so much shoot you as obliterate you.

Ambler continued. “That you’d make her a star?”

“What are you talking about?”

Ambler said, “She told you she’d been a model, didn’t she? And you promised to get her jobs. Promised to take her out to California. ‘Leave this backwater little town. Leave your son’? And then you seduced her, didn’t you? You promised her a job and you fucked her.”

“I don’t—”

“She’s just fodder for you, isn’t she?”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

His first thought was: Janine. But then he asked cautiously, “Meg?”

Ambler nodded.

Him? He’s the one?

Meg, come on . . .
This
guy?

Ambler muttered sarcastically, “Oh, she’d be in
good hands with you. . . . Jesus. You gave Sam that fucking heroin or whatever it was and practically killed him. . . .”

The surprise in Pellam’s eyes must have seemed genuine. Ambler stopped talking.

“I didn’t give Sam that stuff.”

Ambler frowned. Finally he said, “You seduced her, didn’t you?”

“Nothing happened between us. We talked. We had dinner.”

Ambler looked at him for a moment, a lover’s examination of a possible rival. How they hang on every flutter of eyelash, every syllable.

Pellam said, “She’s a captivating person.”

Ambler said, “Too good for you.”

“That’s probably true.”

Ambler said, “I love her.”

“That’s why you did it?” Pellam asked. “Why you had me set up? Because you thought I was taking her away from you?”

“Yes! And here you come to threaten me, beat me up. To tell me to stop seeing her—”

Pellam said, “I didn’t even know you
were
seeing her.”

“Then what’re you doing here tonight?”

Pellam looked at Ambler’s face carefully, judging. Tommy Bernstein had said there were times when a man has to make a leap. He meant it philosophically, muttering something about a leap of faith, though when he said it he was drunk and poised to leap off the second story of his Beverly Hills house into the swimming pool that Liberace had supposedly done something scandalous in.

Pellam said, “I’m going to show you something.”

“What?”

“I’m going to reach into my pocket, okay? I just want to show you something.”

Pellam’s hand disappeared into his pocket and it returned with the two shell casings.

“What are those?”

“These are the shells from the shots that killed my partner. Whoever did that is the same person who’s been selling the drugs that Sam got. I assumed it was the same person who had me beat up.”

“And you thought it was me?” Ambler’s face was horrified. Pellam slowly rocked forward, off the balls of his feet. He’d forgotten about the knife. Ambler said, “I’m a Christian.”

Pellam laughed. “Well, you vandalized our camper, right? You planted the drugs in Marty’s car and you called the sheriff and said he was selling stuff, right?”

Ambler didn’t answer for a moment. “The day you and your friend came to town I was with Meg. She was so excited. I’ve never seen her that way. She was obsessed with the idea of being in a movie. That’s all she talked about. If you made a movie here, I was afraid I’d lose her. She’d try to get a part, she’d go off to Hollywood. I
did
have somebody plant something in the car. And then, yes, he called the police. But I didn’t have Marty killed. I’d never do that.”

“You were the one who ordered the parking lot plowed over?”

“When the accident happened—when the car blew up—I was terrified that I’d be accused of it.
I told Moorhouse to have it dozed so the tourists wouldn’t freak out. He does what I tell him.”

“And Sillman? The rental place.”

“I had my man talk to Sillman. We arranged to offer Marty’s family some money. A lot of money. It looked like an insurance settlement.”

“And you had those two locals pay me a visit? Beat me up?”