The right front tire was missing.
The police and the Durham Fire Department and the volunteer Durham ambulance corps made their arrival shortly. The fire department hosed down whatever gasoline had been spilled during my Explorer's imitation of a figure skater going down hard. A man and woman EMT fussed over me for a few minutes, asking me the usual questions, flashing a tiny light into my eyes, checking me over for anything broken. With an icepack at the bridge of my nose, the bleeding stopped pretty quickly, and the young lady --- who told me she was a nursing student at UNH --- gently wiped down my face with a moist towel. They offered to take me to Wentworth-Douglas Hospital in Dover for a checkup, but I refused. I was stiff and I knew I would be sore in the morning, but I was also slightly embarrassed, with all the rubberneckers slowing down on Route 4, watching the free show taking place just yards away from their own safe and functional vehicles. I felt like somebody going to a Broadway play and then being pulled from the audience moments before the curtain rises to play the leading role. The EMTs went back to their equipment, and then a Durham police officer strolled over, face clean-shaven save for a tidy black mustache. His nameplate said SCOTT, and he had a clipboard with him and said, "You doing all right, Mr. Cole?"
"I've had better mornings," I said.
"That I can see. Care to sit for a bit in the cruiser, tell me what happened?"
“Sure." I stood up and the ground seemed to sway under my feet for a moment, and I was hoping that the two EMTs hadn't spotted me. I had plenty of things to do, and spending the rest of the day in an emergency room up in Dover wasn't one of them. Inside, the cushioned seat of the cruiser seemed like the softest pillow in the world after the ground I had been sitting on, and I politely answered Officer Scott's questions as he started with my name, address, date of birth, social security number, occupation, and right up to what had just happened about twenty minutes ago.
"So," he said. "You were heading east, getting ready to get back on the Interstate and head south. Right after your interview with Professor Hendricks."
"That's correct."
"And then the steering wheel started vibrating?"
"Yes, it did."
"Did you hit anything before the vibration? Any debris in the road? A pothole, anything to cause damage to your front wheel?"
"Nope."
"Hmmm," he said. "Okay. What then?"
"The vibration got worse, so much that I couldn't hold on to the steering wheel. I punched the brakes and we went into a spin, and then into this field."
He turned the accident report over and I helped him sketch out what had occurred, and he looked over at me and said, "You're a lucky guy."
"Tell me about it."
"Okay, I will. After you lost the right front tire, Mister Cole, you went across an oncoming lane of traffic. You were probably about a few seconds away from a head-on collision. And another minute or two of driving, you would have been near a bay off the Oyster River. You got out pretty good on dry land. I don't know if you would have been so lucky, trying to get out while you're in a dozen feet or so of water."
I nodded, my hands clasped firmly in my lap, for I was certain that if I let them go, they would start shaking, and I didn't want this young cop to see that. He made another notation on the report and said, "Anybody you'd like to call?"
“Yes, but I don't have a cell phone."
From the center console he opened a tiny drawer, pulled out an even tinier cell phone. "Here. I'm feeling generous today. Maybe some of your luck will rub off on me. You make your call and I'm going outside, take a few pictures."
"Thanks."
With the cell phone, I lucked out again, for I managed to catch Felix Tinios at home, and when I told him what happened and where it had happened, he interrupted me and said, "You going to the hospital?"
"Nope."
"You with a cop?"
"Yeah."
"Okay, I'm on my way. You sit tight and in public. Don't take any rides from any Good Samaritans, all right? You just sit there and wait."
"Thanks," I said, but I think I said it to empty air, for Felix had already disconnected his end of the conversation and like he said, he was on his way.·
I liked the way that sounded.
After a few minutes more of sitting, Officer Scott came over and rapped on the window, and I stepped out. "You have any preferred tow company in the area?"
"No, I don't."
"All right, we'll just work down our call list," and he turned his head and keyed a microphone clipped to a shirt lapel and asked dispatch to send along a tow truck. When that was done, he looked at me strangely and said, "Come with me for a moment, will you?"
"Sure."
We walked back down Route 4 for a short distance, the air crisp and cold, the traffic still moving along slowly. We didn't have far to go, for I noticed a gouge in the asphalt, where the exposed wheel drum of the Explorer had struck hard. Nearby, resting by itself in the short grass, was the offending right front tire. Officer Scott bent down and picked up the tire and said in a slightly amusing tone, "I'm no detective, Mister Cole, but I imagine that the accident happened right about here. What do you think?"
"I agree."
He let the tire flop to the ground, and then his mood changed a bit. "But this is when I want to be a detective, Mr. Cole. You want to know why?"
"I sure do."
Officer Scott reached into his pants pocket, pulled out a small piece of metal, and held it out for my inspection. A lug nut.
"Now here's the problem, Mr. Cole. I've gone up and down a good stretch of this roadway, and this is the only lug nut I could find. There should be six. And this one is in good shape, which means it didn't break or shatter. No, it means that it fell off, and that the other five are probably on the side of the road from here to the center of town. Are you following me, Mr. Cole?"
"That I am," I said, my feet getting cold again. "This was no accident. The lug nuts were loosened on purpose."
For a moment he juggled the lug nut in his hand, before putting it back into his pocket. "That's right. You have any enemies, Mr. Cole?"
"Some people who aren't particularly friendly toward me, but no, nobody who comes to mind that would do something like this. Maybe somebody mistook my Ford for somebody else's. A college prank, maybe?"
"Like a fraternity prank, something from a sorority house?" "That's what I was thinking."
"Unh-hunh," he said. "Problem is, Mr. Cole, we are intimately familiar with college pranks on our force, as you can imagine. Pledges stealing college trophies, pledges being dumped on the football field, naked and painted blue and white. That kind of stuff we're used to. But this mess... No, this is way beyond a prank. This was someone trying to cause you intentional harm. And going about it in a particularly nasty way. Do you hear what I'm saying?"
"I do."
"And you still don't think there's anybody out there who would cause you such harm?"
A quick memory, of Ray Ericson, drunk and pissed off on Jon's front lawn, tossing a punch my way, and I pushed the memory aside. "No, officer. I truly don't."
He slowly nodded, like he knew I was lying, and that the both of us knew what was going on, but he let it go. He handed over his business card and said, "Well, I'm going to write this up and give it to one of our detectives. It's serious business, and we don't intend to let it slide on by. You understand?"
"Perfectly."
"Good."
"All right, let's head back."
When a flatbed tow truck from Circle H towing arrived and I worked through the paperwork of showing my AAA card and filling out yet more forms, I took a break and sat against an old stone wall, positioning myself so that I had some mid-October sun in my face. Officer Scott had left, and it was just me and an enthusiastic young man from the tow company, who wanted to show me how this latest rig worked, with its computerized system and intricate hydraulics. Instead, I begged off and sat down and thought for a while. Orange and red leaves from a n
earby maple tree blew across the dying grass while I watched the tow truck operator do his thing. For a moment I wished I smoked, for it would have been nice to have something to do, something to calm me down. Ray Ericson. Missing, and the prime suspect in the murder of his brother. I had a feeling that he wasn't much missing, but was in the area. Mainly, my area. I rubbed my hands and watched as the young man worked some cables about the framework of my wounded Explorer. Traffic was still slowing down some, and I was eagerly awaiting the chance to stop being the latest tourist attraction on Route 4.
I rubbed my cold hands together and looked off to the left, where traffic would be coming down from the Interstate, and there I spotted some stones in a row, by the wall. I got up and went over and looked at them. Tombstones, most of them canted to one side or the other, grass thick around their base. All of the stones had the same last name: NUTE. And the latest date I could spot was 1898. There were about ten of them, a family plot no doubt, and I looked around the stone walls and imagined what had once been here before, a large farm, struggling to make a go of it, until the males left the farm and went to find work in the mills in Manchester and Lawrence. The passage of time. Flesh and bones to dust, barns and homes to rotten wood, and the trees and brush taking back the plowed land.
There was a sharp bang that made me flinch, and I quickly turned around, to see the Explorer was now up on its four wheels, sagging to the right where the tire was missing. The tow truck operator waved at me and I waved back, and then he went back to the truck, where the flatbed was now raised up. A low-pitched whining noise started up, and I looked back at the tombstones and said to them, "I hope you don't mind that I don't plan to join you for a long, long while."
A car horn honked. I looked over to the road, suddenly felt bettor. Felix had arrived, his Mercedes Benz convertible parked to the side. He got out of his car and started coming toward me, wearing blue jeans and a long leather coat. In his right hand he held a small paper bag, and as he got closer he looked over at me and said, "Your nose okay?"
I touched it reflexively. "Still sore, but doing better than it was an hour ago."
A crisp nod, as he looked around, and I felt that little sense of electricity coming from him, like the quiet hum from a power station.
Felix was on the job, on alert, and I was glad he was on my side. "Cops come and do the usual?"
"That they did."
"What happened? Besides the front tire of your car flying off."
I took a breath. "Looks like somebody undid the lug nuts. On purpose."
"Okay. That answers that."
"Excuse me?" I asked.
"Here." He handed over the bag. "This is yours, am I right?"
I opened up the paper bag, looked inside. My 9mm Beretta semiautomatic pistol, in its leather holster. "I'm pretty sure I locked the front door before I left this morning."
"Yeah, you did. But I thought you might want this. So I was a little creative, like I was at Seacoast Antiques the other night. Hope you don't mind."
I minded a hell of a lot, but coming from Felix, this was about as thoughtful and affectionate a gesture as one could expect. The paper hag seemed to grow heavier in my grasp. I knew what that Italian piece of metalwork represented, but I still didn't like it.
"Thanks, Felix. I appreciate it."
I took my coat off and he held it for me, as I quickly slipped on the shoulder holster, the pistol bumping against my left side. Felix had no expression on his face as he handed my coat back, and I said, "Okay. I guess we know what this means."
"Yeah. Somebody’s after you."
I slid the coat back on, feeling it tight against my left side, where the pistol hung. A heavy feeling, in more ways than one.
"I figured that out after the airbag punched me in the face." The whining noise from the tow truck stopped, and the young guy came over and said, "It'll be at our garage in Durham. Storage fee is twenty bucks a day, but tell you what, you might be able to drive it off with the spare if you'd like after I check the rim. It's not a real tire but it can get you home, or to a tire store."
The Explorer looked exposed and vulnerable, up on the flatbed of the tow truck, its side stained with dirt and grass. "Not today. Maybe tomorrow."
"Okay," he said, passing over a yellow sheet of paper. "Here's your receipt."
Felix said, "Hey, it's nice to be standing out here and passing the time of day, but I really think we need to get going."
With the tow truck operator climbing into the cab of his truck, I said, "Worried about snipers in the woods?"
He grasped my arm, started walking me back to his parked car.
"You should learn to be as worried as I am, my friend."
Inside the Mercedes, I stretched out and then the shakes started, little quivers in the lower part of my legs. That had been a close one, and I had a thought again of being upside down in the Explorer, seat belt secure across my waist, as water from the Oyster River flooded in through a broken window. I shivered again. Felix looked over at me and then pulled out into the road, where the traffic was thin and moving, since the show was now gone.
"You okay?" Felix asked. "Doing better, that's for sure."
"Yeah, breathing well after somebody tries to whack you one, there's nothing like it in the world."
Felix pulled into a driveway, backed out, and then we were heading east, toward the coast. I said, "I've been doing some thinking."
"I certainly hope so."
"Why me?"
'Well, why not you?" Felix replied. "There has to be a reason."
"And you think you've got the reason?"
We sped over the Scammel Bridge, heading into Dover, the Bellamy River on our left, the expanse of Great Bay off to the right. "Yeah, I do. The relics."
"The Viking relics?"
"The same," I said.
"What about them?"
I looked at Felix. "The killer didn't get them at Jon's house. They weren't there. He thinks I have him. That's what I think."
"Good going," Felix said. "That's what I thought, too, about one minute after you called me for a ride."
"Which begs another question," I said. "Our friend at the antique store?"
"Yep. That guy had hair, you remember. Which Ray doesn't. If it wasn't Ray, then who was it?"
"An accomplice," Felix said. "A rival. Who knows. What's more important is keeping you breathing until things get straightened out. And first things first, getting back to your house as soon as we can."
"And that's because... oh. Now I get it."
We were now in Lewington, on Route 16, the main north-south highway in this part of the state, which fed into 1-95 in Porter. On one side of the road were the two main shopping malls of Lewington, and on the other side of the road was McIntosh Air Force Base. Guns and butter, separated by four lanes of asphalt.
Felix said, "You do get it, then? Explain it to me, if you don't mind."
"The little exercise with the front tire. Designed one way or the other to disable me, until someone could go through my house."
Felix gently tapped the side of the steering wheel. "Very good, Lewis. Stick with me and who knows what else you'll learn about the dark sides of people's souls. Yeah, that makes sense. Delay or disable you to allow somebody a clean time with your house."
Little quivers returned to my legs. "Can I go out on a limb here?"
"Climb out as far as you'd like."
"I'm hoping that you had this little brainstorm before you headed north, and that you made some sort of arrangement before you left."
"Ah, Watson, you know my methods all too well," Felix said, in a fake British accent that made my ears ache. "By the time I got out of there with your Beretta, a couple of guys who've done freelance for me in the past had set up, both in the Lafayette House across the street and in a plumbing and heating van parked in the lot near your house. You shouldn't have any unwanted visitors, anytime soon."
The quivers in my legs stopped. My house is old and is creaky and t
he sand from the nearby beaches can blow into cracks in the woodwork and get into everything, but damn it, the house is mine. I didn't like the thought of strangers trooping through, upending drawers and going through my belongings. Once again, Felix had pulled through.
"Thanks," I said. "I owe you big-time."
"Friend, the things you owe me are beginning to get as big as Jupiter. And it's just started. I've been doing some talking to some old associates in Florida and I think I might have something to check out in the St. Petersburg area. Only thing is, the guy I want to talk to got burned years ago, talking over the telephone. Spent ten years as a guest of Uncle Sam out in Illinois. Will only agree to a face-to-face."
"What might be down there, waiting for you?"
"Don't know. No details, only something worth my while to check out. So off I go, and if it doesn't work out, Florida in October can be fun. But I'll make sure to let you know in either case."
"Fun," I said. "A nice word."
We sped south now, not much traffic heading toward the border with Massachusetts. Felix reached over and switched on the CD player, and Sarah McClachlan's voice started soothing its way into the interior. I tried to show some sort of surprise on my face, which Felix noted.
"Yes?"
"Nothing. Just wondering why you're not listening to something more ---"
"More operatic? Please. Another cliché’, in such a long series of them. I like Canada, and I like her voice. And that's why."
"Okay."
We slowed some, as traffic began to approach the tollbooths to Tyler. We took the exit that led us to Route 101, which eventually would return the both of us to Tyler Beach. But before that would happen, we would have to pass through a tollbooth.
Felix said, "Feel like repaying part of your debt to me?"
"Sure."
"Then come up with two quarters, will you?"
"Coming right up."
I dug two quarters out of my pants pocket, handed them over to Felix, who slowed down at the gate to about twenty miles per hour or thereabouts, and tossed them in. He sped ahead and we turned right, going to Tyler Beach.
"Debt to you still the size of Jupiter?"
"Yeah."
Buried Dreams Page 9
