Short Squeeze (28 page)

The hand that grabbed a wad of my hair at the back of my head came out of nowhere. In the instant it secured its grip and shoved my head onto the car, I was able to literally turn the other cheek, so the right side of my face smashed down onto the hood, not the left side with all the lovely handiwork by the nice plastic surgeons.

Still, it hurt like hell. I felt my limbs go weak and start to crumple. Then the hand in my hair yanked me away from the car and I saw Denny Winthrop, his face a mask set in a mindless rage. He shoved me toward the back of the garage, dropped into a boxer’s stance, and looked me over as if he were picking out the perfect spot. I screamed, put my hands up to protect my head, and ran for the side door at the end of the building.

I almost made it. The door was partway open into the foyer, and
I only had a few feet to go when he came out of nowhere again and grabbed another handful of hair.

I have a lot of hair to grab, which Denny yanked hard enough to pull me right off my feet and back into the garage. I hit the floor shoulders first, then my head whiplashed smack onto the concrete with a sound I heard inside and out.

I closed my eyes and became Dead Girl, one of my easiest performances. I felt dead, or near it. I watched a swirling kaleidoscope on the backs of my eyelids and scolded myself yet again for my stupid, reckless curiosity. I could hear Denny breathing as he moved in front of the door and stood over me, deciding what to do next.

“Fucking lawyers,” he said, almost too quietly for me to hear, especially through the
thump thump
inside my skull. “Scum-sucking, bottom-feeding, elitist pigs.”

That last bit sounded closer. I felt the edge of his shoe brush against the outside of my calf. I opened my eyes and got a fix on where he was standing. I wasn’t looking at his face, so I don’t know what he thought was happening, but his reaction time wasn’t up to professional kickboxing standards.

Mine was. Straight up into his balls.

As he went down, clutching at his groin, I stumbled to my feet. It took my head a few seconds to catch up with the rest of me, but I kept my balance. Denny was pulling himself off the floor, breathing hard. There was no room to get around him and through the side door, so I turned to make a run for one of the bays, but he dove after me and caught my ankle, and with the help of my forward momentum, caused me to sprawl across the floor. I landed boobs first, which knocked the wind out of me. I gasped for breath as I rolled over onto my back, hoping to get my feet back into the action.

Denny stood up. He said some other nasty thing, which I couldn’t quite make out, then loped forward, swinging his right leg to get maximum momentum behind the impending kick.

Then he abruptly stopped and flew backward, his arms and legs thrashing wildly.

“Excuse me,” said Harry, holding him by the back of the neck. “What do you think
you’re
doing?”

Denny twisted in Harry’s grip, swinging wildly with his fists. Harry tried to bob his head out of the way, telling Denny to knock it off, but when one of the punches grazed his cheek, Harry pulled back his own basketball-size fist and drove it straight into Denny’s face.

Harry held Denny’s limp body for a moment, shook him as a terrier would shake a dead rat, then dropped him to the floor. He walked over and knelt next to me.

“You okay?” he asked. “What happened to your face?”

I grabbed him by the shirtfront and made him get close enough for me to plant a kiss on his cheek, then used the purchase on his shirt to drag myself to my feet.

I walked over to Denny and checked to see if he was still breathing, relieved to see him pop open his eyes. I squatted down and grabbed a handful of his own hair. I used it to smack his head on the floor.

“User name and password,” I yelled at him.

He looked at me, then over my shoulder at Harry, glowering down from a hundred feet up.

“Tell me now or you’re all his,” I said.

“User name RipMan,” he said. “Password dragon. Like Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson.”

I looked over at the kickboxer posters and thought, Of course.

I stood up again, a little unsteadily, and told Denny to stay put.

“Shouldn’t we be calling the police?” Harry asked.

“Just give me five minutes. If Denny makes a sound, step on his head.”

I went over to the computer in the makeshift cubicle and logged on. The desktop had a blurry image of Denny surfing down the side of a wave. I searched out the browser icon, clicked on it, then waited an agonizing
few seconds for the home page to come up. It was a site that aggregated blogs. I clicked on “My Favorites.” Fuzzy was right at the top.

I clicked on the link and Fuzzy’s blog jumped onto the screen. I clicked on “Discussion,” and there he was, ranting away as usual.

I tapped in, “Hey, FuzzMan, it’s Rip. Code red, dude. Make contact like now.”

“Fuck,” Fuzzy wrote. I waited as long as I could stand it for him to send more, then cleared away all the open pages, revealing the desktop photo with RipMan ripping a wave.

I found a mailbox icon and clicked on it. I gripped the terminal with both hands, willing the e-mail to show itself. Another dialog box popped up. I prayed Denny was too enamored with his noms de plume to use a different user name and password.

“We really should call the police,” said Harry.

I leaned back in the chair and shouted, “Two minutes.”

Before I could touch the keys again, an instant message box popped into the upper left corner of the screen.

“What the fuck?” said the message from FuzzMan, the screen name in blue letters.

“Hot times at the homestead,” I wrote. The IM filled in “RipMan,” in red.

“Explain.”

“Two pigs from Shampt were just here talking to the old man,” I wrote.

The response took about twenty seconds. I couldn’t know if Fuzzy was hesitating or the IM was just finding its way around the world and back to Long Island.

“Did you lose the clunker?” he finally wrote back.

“No worries,” I wrote back.

Fuzzy came back much quicker this time.

“Lose the fucking clunker.”

“FuzzMan, Big C’s a righteous ride. She’s spick-and-span.”

Fuzzy came right back.

“You don’t watch fucking CSI? You can’t clean up enough. It’s humanly impossible. Lose the fucking car or Rip’s account is gonna seriously shit the bed.”

I waited a minute, then wrote back.

“Chill, brother. Consider it done.”

I thought that might end the exchange, but he came back one more time.

“And hands off the lawyer bitch,” Fuzzy wrote. “At least until she delivers the bucks. More to fund the RipMan’s fuckups. Can’t whack the hand that feeds you.”

It took a moment for that to sink in.

“Oh, Christ,” I said, before typing in “10-4,” and snapping open my cell phone.

Danny Izard was the first on the scene, followed immediately by Alden Winthrop. Denny was awake again but lying still, breathing shallow breaths and looking disoriented. Alden tried to run to his son, but Danny stopped him.

“Wait for the paramedics, sir. They know what to do.”

“What on earth happened?” he asked.

“The kid fell and hit his head,” I said, cleaving to a shortened version of the available facts.

Harry was leaning over Denny’s freezer, putting ice cubes in a plastic bag, which he wrapped in a dishtowel. After I had it pressed to my cheek, I said more gently than the words would suggest, “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Being a butt-insky,” he said.

“You’re not butting in when you’re saving my life.”

“I knew you’d come here on your own. I tried to pretend it didn’t worry me, but I couldn’t concentrate on my work. Sorry.”

Two more cops showed up, then the paramedics, whom the cops let in through one of the bay doors. They pulled in a gurney loaded down with equipment and started working on Denny. Izard walked over to us after the other cops took Winthrop off his hands.

“I bet you’ll be explaining this,” he said to me.

“Absolutely,” I said. “As soon as Joe Sullivan gets here. While we’re waiting, let’s take a walk.”

I had Danny and Harry follow me down the row of cars to the Chrysler 300.

“How many of these do you think there are in the Hamptons?” I asked.

“Man, it’s ugly,” said Harry.

“But well-maintained and sparkling clean.”

“Whose is it?” asked Danny.

“The late Pontecellos’. It’s supposed to be in their garage.”

“Any idea how it got here?”

“No, but I have a theory,” I said, shifting the ice bag on my cheek. “Wow, that hurts.”

“We should take you to the hospital,” said Harry.

“If I turn white and pass out, do that, will you? In the meantime, I’ve got to talk to Joe Sullivan.”

Who showed up a few moments later. He strode into the room with his hand resting on the butt of his service revolver, as if expecting to interrupt a full-out firefight. He saw us standing next to the Chrysler.

“What do we got here?” he asked Danny Izard, who looked over at me. Sullivan frowned and redirected the question.

“So, Jackie, what do we got here?”

I pointed at Denny Winthrop, whom the paramedics were locking into a neck brace.

“You can start with assault with intent to kill. I’m the intended.” I jerked my thumb at Harry. “He’s the witness.”

“Which one of you subdued the assailant?” he asked, looking up at Harry.

“We both did,” I said. “While exercising remarkable restraint.”

“Save it for the civil case, Counselor. What else we got?”

I pointed at the Chrysler.

“You can add grand theft auto. This vehicle belonged to Sergey and Elizabeth Pontecello. As coadministrator of their estate, I’m prepared to assert that it was removed unlawfully from their garage, an assertion supported by the fact that young Mr. Winthrop, the person lying on the floor over there, attacked me when I discovered it.”

Joe pulled out his casebook and started to write things down.

“Okay, give me a second to record that, then you can make your closing arguments.”

“The son of a bitch tried to kill me, Joe. And he’s got a pickup, I’m guessing outside somewhere.”

He looked over his shoulder, trying to divine the truck’s exact location.

“I’d have forensics go over the pickup and this Chrysler with a fine-tooth comb,” I said. “If they don’t find anything, tell them they suck at forensics and to go back and look again.”

“They’ll love that.”

“Remind them me and Carlo Vendetti are like this,” I said, crossing my fingers.

“I wouldn’t be too eager to advertise that one,” he said.

Remarkably, another thought found its way into my battered brain. I asked to talk to Sullivan for a second in private.

“Say, Joe,” I said. “Can you keep Denny off the grid for a little while?”

We both watched as the paramedics wheeled out the gurney.

He frowned. “He gets a phone call. The lawyer call.”

I told him who I didn’t want Denny to contact. Sullivan shrugged. “Like I said, he only gets one call and that’s to his lawyer. Anyway, it’ll take Dr. Fairchild a while to determine if the human colossus over there did any permanent damage.”

“Be nice to Harry, Joe. He rescued me. More important, I’m dating him.”

He snorted and walked me back to where we’d left Harry and Danny Izard.

“Take her to the hospital,” he said to Harry. “Then both of you get to the HQ as soon as possible so we can take your statements.”

On my way out an ashen-looking Alden Winthrop tried to engage me in conversation, but I cut him off more curtly than I wanted to. It might have been my eagerness to flee the scene, or maybe I was afraid I’d tell him what I thought of his child-rearing skills. I’ve never had to rear a child, so that was probably unfair, but he wasn’t the one holding an ice bag to his face.

Markham was tied up with Denny Winthrop, so one of the other trauma docs looked me over. She was a tight little woman with short hair and a clipped, professional manner. She did a thorough job, I’m sure, but I wasn’t used to being examined at Southampton Hospital by anyone so small.

Neither of us thought any good would come from making me stay the night, so she wrote out a prescription for painkillers and shooed me out of there. Harry followed me to my house. He wanted to, and I didn’t think it right to discourage him after what had happened. Further soul-searching over the loss of personal identity would have to wait another day.

“I know you have things to do,” he said. “Just get me a beer and I’ll stand at the ready. Or maybe sit.”

I got beer for both of us, and after stripping down and pulling on my kimono, dragged him out to the porch. He stood patiently while I shoveled out a space for the two of us to sit at the HP.

A few minutes later I used Denny’s user name and password to log in to his e-mail provider. I found the instant message icon, clicked open the box, and wrote to Fuzzy:

“Got a plan for the Big C.”

Fuzzy came right back.

“I told you to get it the fuck out of there.”

“Chill. I moved it to another shed. Can’t complete the plan till it’s dark out.”

“They have another shed?” asked Harry.

“They do now,” I said.

“What plan?” Fuzzy wrote.

“Journey to the bottom of fucking Wood Pond,” I wrote.

Fuzzy didn’t write back right away. I felt my heart clench in my chest. I’d read a lamentable amount of their correspondence on the blog sites and thought I knew their style of discourse. But IM was different. They could use a whole different approach when it was just the two of them. A shorthand I wouldn’t know. The longer this went, the more likely Fuzzy would smell a rat.

I held my breath.

“Don’t get wet,” he finally wrote back.

I started breathing again and wrote, “I could use a ride. Long walk back from North Sea.”

“Not in the contract, RipMan. FuzzMan never strays far from the crib.”

“No honor among jerks,” said Harry.

“10-4,” I wrote.

I knew I should log off while I was ahead, but I hadn’t learned anything new. As I wondered how I was going to keep up the RipMan act and simultaneously tease out information, Fuzzy wrote, “What about the perdues?”