by Archer Mayor
The pain in my side brought me to an abrupt halt. I looked down at a broad red swatch that was leaking down my pants leg. His bullet must have hit me just above the belt line. I pressed it with my hand-it hurt, but it wasn’t unbearable, not like the pain in my head, which still gave everything a slightly pink tinge. I continued climbing, slowly, but steadily, hand over hand, foot over foot.
I could hear more shots above me, and several from across the way. We were no longer so close together, and the others could now feel free to try picking him off. But they didn’t have rifles. It didn’t mean their bullets couldn’t reach this far, but any accuracy was reduced to pure luck. By the time I reached the second ledge, he was almost to the top of the first, where the last ladder lay flat. I just hoped to God he was too preoccupied to look down.
I put my hands on the rungs to start climbing again, but then stopped, my head swimming so badly I had to close my eyes. I could feel my heartbeat through my temples, which felt like they must be ready to burst. With my eyes still closed, I began going up. I was beginning to lose the sensation of the wood under my hands, and the toes of my feet caught under the rungs instead of placing themselves confidently on top.
I realized I probably couldn’t make it to the top. No matter, I’d get the son of a bitch. The firing was pretty constant now, more from their side than from his. He, I could tell from the sounds, was struggling to put the last ladder in place. I opened my eyes and concentrated on what I was doing, movement by movement, ignoring that my vision seemed to be closing down from the outside in, and that everything was sounding farther and farther away. I got to the top of ledge number one. He was almost out of the pit.
I grabbed hold of his ladder and shook it. “Stop.” He froze suddenly, clutching the rails, and looked down. For a split second, everything stopped as we stared at each other. With the humming in my head and the increasing dizziness, I halfwondered if I was hallucinating, going back in time and reviewing the faces of the recent dead. For, above me, his eyes narrowed with malice, was Ed Sylvester’s bearded face-Julie’s cherished Fox, back from the grave, and here to kill me as he had Bruce Wingate before me. Idiotically, the only thought that crossed my mind was irritation at having been so stupid-we had all relied on Sarris’s information in determining the burned man’s identity. I was suddenly aware of the silence around us again, we were too %249 close together for them to risk shooting. In my dogged pursuit, I’d been too successful: I’d made of myself the perfect target. Sylvester began to fool with his rifle, bringing it around to bear on me.
I ducked under the ladder and put my back flat against the rock.
My hands were on the underside of the rungs. I heard the rifle’s bolt action snap into place, and the tinkling of a brass cartridge at my feet. All he had to do now was aim and I was dead. With a sudden, convulsive effort, I put all my remaining strength into pushing against the ladder. It trembled and jumped under my hands as Sylvester began to scramble, trying to reach the top. I felt the ladder begin to give, slowly at first, then with more conviction. I looked up and saw sky appear between the wall and the ladder’s top.
Sylvester dropped his rifle, which sailed by me on the way down, and grabbed for the cable I’d rigged earlier. For a moment, we froze there, the ladder angled away from the wall, Sylvester hanging onto the cable, me pushing for all I was worth.
Then, as had happened to me before, the steel line began to slip between his gloved hands. Farther and farther, in gradual slow motion, the ladder tilted into the void. Sylvester began to slip along the cable like a bead along a thread. The ladder twisted away and peeled off to the side; Sylvester continued on his arc out toward the middle of the pit. His gloves were hissing along the cable, smoking with the friction, leaving little plumes than hung in the air. At the end of the forty feet, man and cable separated in sudden, abrupt silence. I watched him spinning, spread-eagled, until he vanished in a geyser of viscous green water. The scream came from elsewhere far below, thin and high-pitched. My vision reduced to a pinhole, I swung my head to look near the edge of the water near the pit’s opening to the east. There was a girl there-half an inch tall from this distance, poised at the escape gap-on her knees with her hands over her face.
I slid down the wall into a sitting position and passed out.
The nurse paused, the paper cup still touching my lips. I followed her gaze to my hospital room door. Greta was standing there, a scowl on her face.
%250 “Hey there, Greta,” Buster spoke from the corner, where he’d enthroned himself in the room’s only armchair, surrounded by magazines.
She ignored him, and the nurse who squeezed past her on the way out. My God, you look like you been hit by a truck.” She shook her head and eyed me with gentle scorn. “I thought you were supposed to be the SA’s guy-a paper pusher.” I raised the one eyebrow that wasn’t bandaged.
“Dumb luckwrong place at the wrong time.” Greta looked across to Buster finally. “So what did he do to himself”’ “He was shot in the side, damaged his right eye, and suffered a concussion. No permanent damage.”
Greta snorted. “They wouldn’t know the difference.” I shook my head gingerly. These were two people I’d known for most of my life, playing roles so engrained, it had become almost impossible to see beyond them, until recently. Even now that it was over-the Natural Order disbanding, the Kingdom Restaurant closed, all within the thirty-six hours of my being shot I sensed a fragility underneath Greta’s familiar gruff veneer, the remnants of what I’d witnessed when she’d decked Gorman and had run off to God knows where.
“So what the hell happened? Did Bruce kill those people?” Based largely on what Spinney had told me that morning on the phone, I related to her what I knew that Bruce Wingate had returned to Fox’s house that night, armed with his.38, to find an unknown man in the house, a newcomer to the Order whom Fox had invited to stay in the house. Fox and Julie, however, were out. Holding the woman and children hostage in the upstairs bedroom, Wingate had sent the man to fetch Julie. When he returned with her, there, on the landing, an argument had broken out.
Julie had pulled the 9 mm, shot at her father, missed and hit the newcomer in the throat, the bullet passing through the collar of his down-filled jacket and picking up the feather Hillstrom later found.
This was the murder attempt Gorman learned about the night of Wingate’s death. Wingate had fled, as had Julie. None of them had paused to think about the smoldering embers spread by the dead man’s falling against the stove, and by the time the fire had broken out, the people upstairs were doomed. “So Bruce lied to me, they both did.” Greta looked crestfallen. “I’m afraid so, to all of us. His only interest was his daughter. That’s why he never told anyone that the burned man wasn’t Fox. He didn’t want anyone to know he’d been in the house later, or that his daughter had killed the man.” %251 Which, of course, had put Fox in the catbird seat. From the supposed grave, he’d orchestrated Wingate’s murder and framed Rennie-in his eyes, the two most flagrant degraders of the woman he loved. Had Sarris not then immediately taken charge of Julie, Fox and she could have been long gone. Indeed, it wasn’t until this morning that the State Police got Ed Sylvester’s dental records from the Bloomington police and found they didn’t match the burned body’s. That was a surprise to Sarris, also.
He too had thought Fox was dead.
“I never believed Rennie did it.” I noticed the set of her chin was almost too defiant. This woman had lost more than she would ever admit.
“I didn’t either, Greta. But he sure didn’t help his cause any, lying about his whereabouts and running off from the police.” I saw her jaw tighten as she fought for composure. “Silly bastardalways had to do it his own way.” “Are you okay, Greta?” I asked, trying to keep the real concern out of my voice. “Better than you are.” “You going to be able to hang on to the Inn?” She looked at me in silence for a moment, pondering whether to deny what was now common knowledge. “We’ll see-the other restaurant closing wil
l probably help.” She looked embarrassed to have been so exposed and glanced toward the door.
I let her go with her dignity intact. “Thanks for coming. Good luck.”
She smiled, then quickly dug into her ample purse and handed me a small bouquet of flowers. She was gone almost before her mumbled “Get well soon” made it out of her mouth. I looked at the tiny, delicate collection of dried flowers and thought of her secret living room, that equally tasteful, feminine, and soothing enclosure buried inside that rotting heap of a building. Christ, I thought-circles within circles.
“How’re you doing’?” Buster asked.
I leaned back against the pillows and shut my one eye, which still ched from the granite splinters. “I don’t know. Kind of empty, like after a funeral.” “Rennie?” I thought about Rennie, another one whose inner soul had been lowly encased in an armature of hard living and bitter experience. But had mourned him already, even before he’d actually died. “Not him o much-more what he represented.” “The good old days.”
“Yeah.” %252 Buster dropped the magazine he’d been holding into his lap.
I didn’t know precisely how long he’d been here, but it had been most of the day.
“The good old days are still there, Joey. You just tried to make more out of ‘em than they deserve. They’re no cure for what ails you. He then grinned. “Speaking of which, is your friend Gail coming up?” I smiled at the thought. “Yup. I called her last night, after some of the drugs wore off. She’s due in a couple of hours.” “There’s your cure, if you ask me.” And how, I thought. The sound of her voice on the phone had done more good for me than anything currently oozing from the dripbag by the side of my bed. I was looking forward to seeing her, both here and back in Brattleboro, and I was looking forward to strengthening the friendship we’d almost dropped between us. Part of my resolve, I knew, stemmed from her own enthusiasm. “I think this has been good for us,” she’d said last night. “It shook things up a little, the way they should be. We were turning into turtles. I want to make love to you in the backseat of a car, or the floor of my office, as soon as you get better.” I’d laughed at that, threatening my stitches and causing myself a good deal of pain. But she was right. Being in love with another person shouldn’t be like standing hand in hand in a minefield, terrified of the slightest movement. Not to do so, however, takes a strong sense of security, and that had only come to me lately, as a result of all this.
I saw Buster was still watching me. “So what happens to Gannet now?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “We go back to work.” It was not a credible line. “You think that’ll do any good?” “Good bad. Who knows? We’re never going to amount to more than what we are. Maybe it’ll just bring us back to normal. I’d settle for that.” “You think Greta’ll pull it oIl?” He laughed and turned the question aside. “Who else would want the dump?”
But I persisted. “The bank might.” “Oh, Joey. I wouldn’t worry about it. We’ll take care of things.” By his tone I knew they would, as they always had, for despite the economic forecasts or the demographic predictions, these people were generally pretty good at dealing with what life handed them, and living with the consequences. Be it depression or murder, substance abuse or the visitations of strange outsiders, they managed to hold their stalwart own.
%253 That realization didn’t hold much promise, but I thought it was pretty accurate.
Buster seemed to have read my mind, and turned the tables on me.
“So, did you get anything out of all this?” Interesting question. Back in Brattleboro, feeling thwarted and lonely, I’d begun to contemplate my past, which was, as I saw it, my only monument of consequence. Now, with the endurance ofNadine and Buster and Greta in mind, and with Gail’s help, I knew I’d been grossly self-indulgent. It was time to turn away from what had drawn me back to Gannet. I nodded to him. “I sure as hell hope so.”
