by Gerry Boyle
“We’ve got to be able to find you guys,” she said.
“That’s easy. Just come to Prosperity, Maine, and ask.”
“How do we find Prosperity?”
“Head for Belfast and take a sharp left,” I said.
“I’d rather you both stayed here,” she said.
“We’ve got things to do in Maine. Speaking of which, have you called his wife?”
“Last time I checked they hadn’t reached her. No answer at the residence.”
“She may not be shocked,” I said. “She’s been expecting this ever since I told her Bobby had gone to Valley.”
“She pretty together?” Martucci asked.
“I’d say so. Maybe a little pushed around by him. I think he went off on these adventures and she trailed along. Not entirely, but a little of that.”
“So you said she expected her husband to be killed?”
“Yeah. In fact, last time we talked she said, ‘Oh, my God, they’ve killed him.’ Something like that.”
“She know who ‘they’ were?”
“I don’t know. It was hard to tell.”
Martucci stood there for a moment, looking away, her hands inside her blazer pockets.
“So the wife feared the worst and got it. And the pot-grower husband was sort of naive, just bopping around?”
“Yeah, I guess. He was very cocky, very persuasive. Made a good argument for legalization and rallied the troops pretty well. I don’t know. He really had some charisma.”
“But was he dumb enough to think he could screw around with the bad guys down here?” Martucci said. “I mean, these guys don’t take any shit. And if you’re a problem—big problem, little problem, in-between problem—they kill you.”
“Saves a lot of hemming and hawing,” Clair said.
“Sure does. So what made him think he could rattle their cages down here and walk away? Was he suicidal or something?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Martucci looked to Clair.
“Maybe he was just stupid,” Clair said.
“Maybe he thought he had Coyote covering him,” I said.
“Maybe it was Coyote in the car,” Martucci said.
“How long for an ID?” I asked.
“A couple of days anyway. It’s gonna be a dental job. We have to get the records from the guy’s dentist in Maine or wherever the hell it is. That’s why we need to talk to the wife right away. Find out the name of his dentist.”
“If he had one.”
“Oh, he had one. We peeked. Mouth full of silver.”
“That’s the thing about his generation,” I said. “Never learned to floss.”
Martucci very much wanted to keep us in town. She said she could hold us for putting the gun in the mailbox, which a detective had retrieved. Martucci said they were federal crimes: tampering with the mails, using the mails to transport firearms, possession of a sawed-off shotgun. I said the feds could find us in Prosperity. She said if we stayed she’d get the soliciting charge dropped. I said I’d take my chances. She gave me back my driver’s license. I said she should call a Maine DEA guy named Johnston. She said she would.
Martucci went back through the door. We walked toward the exit and stopped at the door to the dispatcher’s area. I stood for a moment, then knocked on the Plexiglas. A very blonde woman appeared.
“I’m a reporter,” I said. “I need to look at the arrest records from last night.”
She frowned.
“You’re a reporter?” she said, her voice muffled through the glass.
“Yeah, but they’re public record, aren’t they? I could be anybody and I’d still have a right to see them.”
She frowned again. Disappeared to our left.
“Pushy, aren’t you?” Clair said.
“Should have seen me in my prime,” I said.
The woman came back with a mimeographed sheet and shoved it through the hole in the window. I looked at it. Arrests and summonses. There were seventeen names. Drugs, drunk driving, domestic assault. And the six women and me.
We stopped at a pharmacy and bought a street map of the city. I thought the woman we wanted had been in the middle of the line when we were being processed. I found the street listed for woman number four. It was across a highway, near the projects. Clair drove and I navigated, peering at the map and directing. In ten minutes, we were in front of the house, on a short grimy block next to a big garage and a fenced lot full of delivery trucks. The house was mostly pale green. The address didn’t list an apartment number. There were many to choose from.
We parked in front and went to the front porch. There were several doorbells but they were painted over and stuck. The door was locked.
I went around back, and found a backyard full of brush and sumac and trash, and another door. That door was open and I went in and there was a stairway, lit by glaring bare bulbs. Two doors on each floor. I listened. Heard a television, somewhere. I knocked on both doors on the first floor and waited.
Nothing.
I went up the stairs and knocked on two more. I waited, then heard a door open. Downstairs.
“Day late and a dollar short, aren’t you?”
I came back down the stairs. An old, red-faced man stood by his open door. He was wearing slippers and baggy slacks and a white T-shirt. The T-shirt had a stain on the front like a birthmark.
“You guys didn’t find her dead someplace?”
“Who?”
“Jasmine.”
“What makes you say she’s dead?”
“Don’t play games. She ain’t dead, is she?”
“Not as of nine last night. Why would she be dead?”
He looked at me slyly.
“When cops come knocking, I figure it ain’t to give her a civic award.”
“You know her?”
“Oh, yeah. We talk. She likes me ’cause I’m too old to put the boots to her. I’m a nice change of pace.”
“You watch out for her?”
“I keep my ears open. Eyes, too.”
He gave me a sly leer.
“I don’t miss much.”
“She does a lot of business here at home?”
“When she can.”
“Beats the backseat of a car, huh?” I said.
“Safer, ’cause we got a code. Three quick raps on the floor, then two, and I call 911. There’s a lot of goddamn crazies out there. I guess you know.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“You watch the guys come and go?”
“Oh, yeah. I write down their descriptions. I’m retired; I got nothing else to do.”
There was a step outside; then the door opened and Clair appeared.
“He with you?” the man asked.
“Yeah.”
“Little long in the tooth, ain’t he? What about twenty years and out and all that?”
Clair looked at me quizzically.
“Some people just have it in their blood,” I said.
I looked at Clair.
“This gentleman said Jasmine didn’t come home last night. Is that her real name, sir?”
“Jasmine? Nah, that’s her stage name. Street name.”
“Because the woman who was picked up last night was named Dora Santos.”
“I call her Jasmine. What’d she get picked up for?”
“Loitering for prostitution.”
“You guys ought to give her a break. She’s just trying to live, put food on the table. Why don’t you catch some real crooks? Catch these goddamn gang kids and these goddamn druggies.”
“Jasmine isn’t a druggie?”
“Hell no. I mean, she might smoke a little pot now and again, but none of this goddamn needle crap. Crack and all that. Those people are animals. Goddamn animals.”
“You speak Spanish, sir?”
“A little. You pick it up, you know. I’m a Scotsman.”
“Jasmine ever talk to you about a guy she called el indio?”
“Why don’t you
ask her? You got her in jail.”
“She was released on bond. Nine o’clock last night.”
“Then where the hell is she?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“This indio got her?” he asked, his face hardening with concern.
“You ever see this guy? Very tall and thin. Long black hair, way down his back. Sometimes it’s in a braid. Black eyes set deep. Eyes are really black. You can’t forget his eyes.”
The old man rocked on his slippered feet.
“Kind of a bony face?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, I seen a guy looked like that,” he said. “He waited in the car. A couple days ago.”
“Who was he with?”
“This girl. A girl like Jasmine. I’ve seen her here a couple times. She stops. You know. Says hello.”
“He just stayed in the car?”
“Sat there. He didn’t know I was watching him from the window. He just sat there in the driveway. It was dark but I was right in the window, the kitchen. I could see him. I figured he was a pimp or something. Not going in, I mean.”
“What kind of car was it?” Clair said.
The guy looked startled. He looked at Clair, then at me.
“It was a little white station wagon,” he said. “Foreign job. I think it was from out of state.”
22
“So Coyote was in the car and then the car ended up burned with a body in the backseat,” I said.
“Maybe it’s Coyote who’s dead. Maybe he looked for Bobby too hard.”
“But if it’s Bobby, then Coyote found him and then he was killed after that. So what happened to Coyote?”
“Probably nothing good,” Clair said.
We were sitting in the truck down the block from Jasmine’s house. There was a mill tower visible in the distance, a package store on the corner, some sort of fortified apartment building across the street. A guy stood outside of each.
“They sure stand around a lot down here,” Clair said.
“I’d sure like to find Jasmine again.”
“If she doesn’t want to be found, you could look for her around here for a month.”
“And find later that she was in Boston or Hartford.”
“Or East Overshoe.”
I looked at Clair.
“You’re ready to get out of here, aren’t you?”
“It isn’t that I don’t enjoy your company,” he said.
“Or the stench of urban decay?”
“That’s been fun, too,” Clair said. “But I think I’m a country mouse. It’s time to go home.”
“Then let’s go. I can do a lot over the phone. If I need to come back—”
“Don’t call me, I’ll call you.”
Clair smiled and put the truck in gear and we rolled up to the light. The men stared at us impassively from their respective corners on this dirty forgotten street in a dirty forgotten city. Even more than some grimy New York neighborhood, which at least was connected to something bigger and grander than itself, Valley seemed to have no purpose. It seemed a hopeless place to live a life, a pointless place to die.
I looked at the man on my right and nodded. He didn’teven flinch.
Clair drove in the direction of the highway that would take us south to the interstate. The streets were lined with triple-deckers, some ornate, some plain, all grim. There were bodegas with barred windows, an insurance office with heavy steel mesh over the door. What? Was somebody going to break in and steal actuarial tables?
I thought about Bobby and Coyote and the old man and Jasmine. I wondered who the woman was whom Coyote had been with. How did he know her? From his days as a biker with a crystal meth factory? What was he doing down here? For that matter, what was he doing in Florence? What were any of them doing in Florence?
At some point, I had to call Melanie. I had to call Roxanne. I could do it from a rest area on the interstate. Clair wouldn’t want to stop any sooner.
We drove out onto a main thoroughfare, past a brick church with a walled courtyard. There were more people walking. Several women carrying lunch baskets, going to or from a mill that still had jobs. A guy wearing a hard hat turned backward, carrying a cooler. So maybe all wasn’t lost here. There were people working, people performing a task in return for a paycheck. When we got back, that’s what I would have to do. I started to reach for my notebook and there he was.
The kid.
I saw him and he saw us. He was riding in the passenger seat of a silver Toyota sedan and he turned and looked right at us. I could see his swollen mouth. Then I saw the Toyota brake and whip around so fast it slid sideways. Then it was three cars behind us and closing.
“You see that?”
“Yup,” Clair said.
“They’re coming after us.”
“Should never have mailed that gun.”
“Too late now,” I said.
“Maybe you can throw your notebook at them.” “Maybe we can hail a passing cop.”
“You know what they say,” Clair said, accelerating as the car in front of us turned off. “Where are they when you need one?”
We were doing fifty, the big tires drumming the pavement. The Toyota passed a van and was only two cars behind us. I could see the two figures in the front seat, two more in the back. A gang car pool.
A car pulled out in front of us and we slowed. It was an old beat-up junker trailing a plume of blue smoke and it lurched along. The Toyota was edging over the center line to pass the car behind us.
“You think they’ll just start shooting right in the road?” I said.
“Probably won’t be the first time.”
“We’ve got to do something. We’re just sitting here in this traffic. Turn off and double back and maybe we can get headed for the downtown. They won’t shoot us in front of the police station.”
“Maybe,” Clair said. “Maybe not.”
He yanked the wheel and the truck squealed around a corner to the right. The street was narrow and there were cars parked on both sides. A small pickup was coming the other way and Clair floored it and the truck pulled over and stopped, the driver giving us the finger as we passed. Clair slammed around the next right, downshifting, the big motor roaring. There was no sign of the Toyota, and Clair bounced through an intersection, and down another narrow sluice of a street.
The Toyota appeared, just making the first right.
“We gained on ’em,” I said. “Take another right and get back on the main drag.”
Clair hit the brakes and the rear end slung around and he hit the gas again and then stomped the brakes hard.
“Whoops,” I said.
It was a dead end, like a court with houses on all sides, the back of a brick building straight ahead, nobody around. Clair drove into a driveway behind a car and jumped out, saying, “Lock the hubs.”
I jumped out, too, and turned the dial on the front wheel on my side, locking the wheel for four-wheel-drive. We scrambled back in and Clair ground the gears into reverse and roared back out. We ended up facing the open end of the street. Clair pushed the lever for four-wheel-low.
We sat. Waited.
And then the Toyota started to go by the street, skidded to a stop, and backed up. The car turned into the court.
It accelerated and then slid to a halt, facing us, fifteen feet away. I could see the guys smiling and then both doors popped open. The kid had a handgun. The driver, older, had a handgun, too. They had their hoods up and they trotted toward us, guns low by their thighs. Clair tromped on the gas and the truck roared forward. The older guy stopped and turned, as if to run to get his car out of the way, but it was too late and the truck hit the Toyota head-on, the steel plow frame crumpling the car with a sound like balling-up paper.
The two guys were still in the back and I could see them covering their faces with their arms. The kid was behind us somewhere and I heard a shot, then another, then the transmission whining, the motor roaring, and all four tires scrabbling on
the pavement, driving the car forward like a rushing football lineman. The truck started to climb the hood and Clair kept the power on and the windshield shattered in front of us and then the car was flatter and wasn’t rolling but was scraping on the street. The two guys were hunched in the back, all arms and shoulders. The car suddenly slid sideways and Clair could have turned away and around it but he didn’t.
He turned with the car, so he had it broadside, and it was sliding and then the front of it hit the curb on the right and it spun and rolled over and it was still rocking on its roof when we turned the corner and Clair slowed, shifted from low to high and the motor stopped roaring.
“Can’t beat these old Ford three-sixties,” Clair said. “Gobs of low-end torque.”
We drove in silence, back through the downtown, down the highway south of the city and onto the interstate. After two or three miles, my heart stopped pounding. Clair pulled into the breakdown lane and we got out. Clair surveyed the damage.
The plow frame was scratched. The right headlight was cracked. There were two bullet holes in the tailgate.
“I’d say they got the worst of it,” Clair said.
“Ayuh,” I said.
We got back in and drove up Route 495 to Route 95, then got off the highway in Hampton, New Hampshire, to avoid scrutiny at the toll station.
“You think they’d call the cops? What are they going to say?”
“Somebody else might,” Clair said.
“In that neighborhood?”
Clair thought for a moment.
“Nah, you’re probably right,” he said.
But we stayed on Route l, just to be on the safe side. In twenty minutes we were in Portsmouth, where Clair pulled into a Dunkin’ Donuts so we could use the phone on the wall outside. I went in and bought coffee, tea, and muffins while he called Mary.
“Love you, too,” I heard him say as I came back. Clair hit the button and handed me the receiver.
“They’re fine?” I asked.
“Safe and sound.”
“You tell Mary what we’ve been doing?”
“I told her we’ve been doing some research.”
“At the public library.”
“Right,” Clair said. “I don’t know why I even bothered to come along.”
“I told you I’d be fine.”
