Stone Quarry (28 page)

Chapter 20

The rhythm of the car was soporific with my eyes closed, sickening with them open, but I needed, desperately, to stay awake. One chance; one place.

An argument started in the front seat and I concentrated on it.

"It ain't on the goddamn map, Frank," Ted was complaining. "I never been there."

Papers rustled loudly, Grice unfolding a highway map, not nearly detailed enough to show them the way to the quarry from the green house near Franklinton.

"Here," Grice said, with his finger on a place on the map. "This is where the truck road starts. Get us here. I can find it from there."

Ted peered over. The car drifted; he yanked at the wheel, swung us back from the shoulder. "Okay, Frank," he said. "Sure."

Arnold had brought the bottle. I asked for a drink. Arnold looked to Grice, in the front seat next to Otis. Grice shrugged, Arnold held the bottle for me, and against its better judgment my blood started to move again.

I wondered if Ted had been promoted to Wally Gould's old job, and how Otis felt about that. We drove north, hit the paved road a mile away at a featureless intersection. Lydia threw me a look, muttered, "Hess station, huh?"

Grice turned around. "What?"

"Private joke," I answered.

We kept moving. I kept trying to stay awake. Not much longer, I promised myself, feeling a trickle of blood slide down along my jawline from the throbbing place near my eye. For Lydia. For Jimmy. And not much longer.

I almost missed it. There was only one good way to the quarry from where we'd been; that was the basket all my eggs were in. But when we got to where I'd been waiting to get to, I was almost gone. The road climbed, ran straight, fell. I pushed myself back to consciousness, said, "Here."

"Here what?" Grice asked.

"Lydia gets out here."

Grice gestured to Ted. The car slowed, stopped. "Why here?"

"Because it's deserted. Because it'll take her an hour to find anyone, if she's looking. So she can't stop you doing whatever it is you're planning to do. So you'll let her go." Buy it, I begged him silently. Buy it. It's all I've got.

Grice nodded. Arnold reached across Lydia, opened her door. He untied her hands as Grice said, "Get out."

Lydia hesitated, looked at me. I met her eyes. "Walk back the way we came," I told her. "Don't turn around. And Lydia?" I added, "it's okay. Remember, it's just a game."

A light flashed in the depths of Lydia's eyes, or maybe I just needed to think I saw it there. She turned, slid swiftly from the car, and stalked rapidly away. She didn't look back.

I leaned back against the seat, shut my eyes. That was it. My part was almost over.

The car started to move again. "That was touching," Grice said.

"Screw you," I murmured.

"Where are the paintings?"

"Screw you."

Arnold grabbed my jacket, jerked me close to him. He smacked me with his open palm once, and again. Howling pain shot through my skull, blinding my left eye.

"No," I said weakly. "Wait." I didn't want to be hurt any more, and I was lying anyway. Arnold pushed me back against the seat. I lay there breathing unevenly, not speaking, as long as I dared. Make them look at you, Smith. Make them think about you, focus on you.

I felt Arnold's hand tighten on my collar again. "No," I whispered. I didn't even try to open my eyes. "Cobleskill. Self-storage rooms near the college."

"Where's the key?" Grice demanded.

Key. I hadn't thought about a key. "No key. Combination. Room number's one-twenty-four. Combination's eleven, twenty-five, fifty-one." I swallowed, said, "Give me a drink."

"Screw you." Grice laughed, Otis laughing with him. Arnold was probably grinning, but I didn't look to see.

I was cold. A drink would have helped, or a cigarette. Or a soft voice, or music. Schubert, maybe. I began to hear the soft opening chords of the B-flat Sonata, the one I didn't play. They faded, along with everything else, as the darkness thickened around me.

I woke when the car stopped moving. Outside, a silver sky pressed down like a weight on thick slate-colored clouds. Ted had brought us by the truck road to the flat, exhausted plain. I stared across the pit to the shadowed ridge rising against the sky. We had come along the road up there, the ridge road; from Franklinton it made sense. But the drive from there to the truck road was long, roundabout. You couldn't see the quarry pits from the ridge road, even in winter. If you didn't know the area well, if you didn't know where you were, you might not be able to tell anything about that road when you were on it, except that it was deserted, far from anywhere.

That was the reason I'd given Grice for letting Lydia go there.

"Is that where he's been staying?" Grice's words tore the silence. He pointed toward the shack.

"I don't know." My voice sounded like sandpaper on a board.

"Drive closer," Grice told Ted. He drew his gun from his coat; so did Otis. Arnold's was already out, aimed casually at my belly.

We rolled slowly over the stones scattering the plain. Ted angled the car toward the shack. My heart, beating fast, jarred, then stopped as Jimmy's van came into view.

Lydia hadn't made it. She hadn't understood, or maybe she hadn't been able to handle the climb down. Whatever; it didn't matter; she hadn't made it.

The car stopped again. Arnold leaned across me, as he had across Lydia, and opened my door. He nudged the barrel of his gun against my temple, against the place where the blood was drying. "Out," said Grice. I swung my legs through the door, stood with an effort. From behind, Arnold grabbed my arm. We moved clear of the car. Grice got out, kept behind me. "Jimmy!" he shouted into the empty sky. The word echoed, faded; there was nothing else. "Jimmy! I just want to talk to you, kid. Come on out for a minute." There was no movement, no wind in the trees. "Jimmy! I got your friend here, kid, and he doesn't look good. You don't talk to me, Jimmy, he could get to look worse."

More silence. The clouds could have been painted; the surface of the water was polished marble. Grice tapped Arnold's arm, and we walked forward again, toward the shack.

Then, crashing through the stillness, a gunshot exploded, magnified by silence, multiplied by echoes. It seemed to come from everywhere around us, but as Arnold's grip suddenly slackened I spun around, ran with everything I had left toward the rock pile at the mouth of the other road.

What I had left wasn't enough. As shots came from behind me and another from ahead I tripped, stumbled, fell, and knew I couldn't get up; but strong hands seized me, yanked me forward, around the fortress of rock.

The world was reeling. Shots screamed through the air. I was hauled up, over stones and loose pebbles, until finally I was dropped, battered and breathing dust, my shoulders and arms burning with pain wherever I had feeling at all.

From somewhere above, Lydia said, "Is he okay?"

Jimmy's voice: "I guess." I was helped to sit, my back against a rock. At first my eyes showed me nothing but shape and movement. Then things started to make sense again. I squinted, made out Lydia's black-wrapped form kneeling between two boulders. She squeezed a shot out of Jimmy's Winchester, pulled back, and reloaded fast as a bullet chipped the stone at her shoulder.

"What the hell are you two idiots doing here?" I coughed on stone dust.

"Christ, he's crabby," Jimmy said to Lydia.

"He gets like that when he doesn't feel well," Lydia answered. She took aim, shot again. I heard glass shatter.

"I got my goddamn ass busted trying to save yours," I told them. "You were supposed to be gone by the time we got here."

"They weren't going to keep hauling you around if Jimmy was gone," Lydia pointed out. "They'd've killed you and dumped you here."

"So now they'll kill us all. I don't suppose it occurred to you two superheroes to go for help?"

"Not to me. Jimmy?"

"Uh-uh." He shook his head. Then he grinned at me. "I mean, not after we put it out on the CB."

The CB. Oh, beautiful consumer audio technology. "You called for help?"

Jimmy grinned again. "Man, I was so scared, I told the guy who picked it up to call the sheriff. Brinkman, man. Me—I called the fucking sheriff!"

But it wasn't Brinkman whose car came rocketing up the truck road, scaring a cloud of dust into the air.

Since the first storm of shots, Grice and his boys hadn't moved out from behind the Ford. They had reasons not to. Lydia was a deadly accurate shot. Otis and Ted were cowards. And Arnold was out of the picture, stretched still as stone where Lydia's first bullet had dropped him.

But we couldn't go anywhere either, and we had only one gun. Sooner or later, if we had to keep sniping to keep them pinned, our box of shells would be empty. They would know that moment, and that moment would be theirs.

We had no escape; we needed a rescue.

So fifteen minutes later, when we heard the whine of a heavy engine, the screech of brakes echoing off the stone walls, they were good sounds. "The fucking marines!" Jimmy cheered.

But Lydia, peering around a boulder, said, "It's not a cop."

She was wrong, but she was right.

"Civilian," she said. "One man." She whipped her head back as a bullet spewed stone chips into the air. She took aim, fired back, pulled her head in again. "He's out of the car. I can't see him now. He must be behind the other car with Grice." She reloaded, inched her head out. "Nothing." A pause. "But maybe he is a cop. There's a red light on the dash, the portable kind."

"What does he look like?"

"I couldn't really see. Thin face, reddish hair."

A cold shock hit me. I heard a wordless sound of surprise and sorrow; I realized it had come from me.

This was the piece I hadn't had.

"Smith!" MacGregor's voice burst, loud and distorted, from the electronic bullhorn all state cop cars carry, even unmarked ones. "Don't shoot. I'm coming up there."

Lydia turned to me. I said, "Let him come."

I heard MacGregor scramble up the rocks, watched as he appeared, crouching, in the narrow cleft we occupied. His face darkened when he saw me, the cuffs, the blood.

"What happened?" His voice was tight, cold.

"Your friends."

"They're no friends of mine."

"Crap, MacGregor." A shiver overtook me. "You're Grice's hip-pocket cop. You're why he's always a step ahead."

MacGregor exploded. "I warned you, you son of a bitch!" His voice was driven, full of fury. I squinted to look at him. "I begged you, stay out of this fucking case! I told you to go the hell back to New York!"

"That's true," I agreed quietly. "You tried. And I smelled something wrong with the way you did it. But I didn't add it up. I guess I didn't want to know."

"Oh, Christ, Smith, don't get holy on me! Small shit, that's all it is. I pass on what I hear. I bury a file or take a guy off something before he gets too close. So what? I don't have the manpower to go after every crook around. Someone's going to get away with something. What's the difference if it's Grice?"

"Uh-huh," I said. "And the kids shooting up in the Creekside? And guys who're barely squeezing out a living, then splitting their chickenshit take-home with Grice so they don't get their legs broken? That's okay with you, Mac?"

"Oh, come off it! If it weren't Grice it would be somebody else!" His face was purple with anger, but in his eyes there was something like pleading.

"And Ginny Sanderson?" I said softly. "That's okay with you?

MacGregor looked quickly from Jimmy to me. "What about her?"

"She's dead. Grice shot her. I think you'll find her if you drag the quarry." I looked at Jimmy. He was white as marble.

"She was a
kid,"
Jimmy whispered. "She was a
kid."

"Yeah," I said. "A kid. That's what it was about, right, Mac? Kids?"

It took MacGregor a long time to answer. "Tuition," he said, not to anyone, not looking at anyone. "Books, clothes. Travel. Piano lessons, painting lessons. There had to be something for them besides this. I had to find them a way out." He faced me suddenly, the pleading back in his eyes. His voice wavered. "I had to, Smith. I'm their father; I had to."

I had trouble speaking, too. "Ginny Sanderson had a father, Mac."

"I didn't know about her. I didn't know."

No one spoke. We watched each other, motionless, silent. Statues, all of us, cold and separate, powerless, and alone.

Lydia, finally, broke the silence. A quick, worried glance at me; then to MacGregor, "What do they want?" MacGregor gave her a blank, lost look. "What?" "They let you come up here. They're holding their fire. Why?"

He swallowed. "Jimmy. They'll let you two leave with me. They want to talk to Jimmy."

"Do it." Jimmy's words came fast, but they caught in his throat.

"Talk, bullshit." I didn't look at Jimmy, spoke to MacGregor. "They'll kill him. Then they'll call Brinkman. Here he is, the guy who killed Wally, the guy who killed Ginny. Sorry he's dead, but it'll save the cost of a trial. Any problems, call MacGregor." I paused, said, "Then they'll come for Lydia and me later."

He met my eyes, nodded slowly. "I know that. It was all I could think of, to get Grice to let me come up here. It'll buy time."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm not the only cop who picked up the CB call. Brinkman's on his way, but he wasn't close."

I looked closely at him. "You could have stayed away, then," I said. "You could have kept out of it, and maybe you'd have stayed smelling clean."

"Yeah," he said. "But they said it was Jimmy, and he was asking for help. I had a feeling what was happening. And I'm a cop, Smith. Whatever you think." An engine roared to life below us. "Hey!" Lydia yelled. "They're moving!" "What the hell—!" MacGregor stuck his head up next to hers, dropped down again as a shot sliced the air. With a cop's instinct he reached for his gun, pawed an empty holster. He cursed, looked at me, shrugged. "Grice has it," he said. "That was the deal."