Applaud the Hollow Ghost

by David J. Walker

  “Yes, but … are you—”

  “I’ll try to join up with you.” That wasn’t true. “But if I don’t, remember, I’ll be in big trouble if the police find out I was here.” I wondered if Lammy saw the inconsistency in what I’d said. If Steve didn’t bring me down—about a fifty-fifty proposition, at best—I wasn’t going toward the cops if I could help it. Anders would blame me for the collapse of his scheme. “I run this way,” I whispered. “And, no matter what I yell, you walk that way. Got it?”

  “I … I guess so.”

  “Now Lammy!” I shouted. “Follow me!” I took off, running, stumbling, crashing through the frozen snow, taking as many crunching steps as possible, making as much noise as I could, as fast as I could. I glanced back once and saw Lammy headed in the other direction.

  I knew eventually I’d come up against Gus’s wall, too. And I knew his entrance road crossed a bridge over a stream that ran through his property. The stream had to get under the wall somehow, or through it. My plan was to follow the wall to the spot where the stream went out … and see if I could join the stream.

  Maybe I’d fooled Steve into thinking Lammy was with me, and maybe he’d just decided he wanted me more. Whichever, he was coming after me. At first he ran parallel to me, staying in the cleared area. But as I angled away, he had to come into the woods, too. I heard him crashing through the brush. A gunshot exploded. I thought I heard the bullet whistling past me. And if I didn’t hear it going past, at least I didn’t feel it coming in.

  He was armed and I wasn’t. But he had a bullet lodged inside him somewhere and I didn’t—not yet. I didn’t know just where the .22 slug had entered his torso, but I was amazed at his stamina. Psychotic rage may have had something to do with it.

  It was very dark, nearly impossible to see. I kept plunging forward, not worrying now about making noise enough for two. My legs were turning to lead and it would have been a struggle just running in the snow, even without the undergrowth grabbing at my knees and a thousand low-hanging branches slashing my face. You’d have thought a smart guy like Gus would clear away the trees and brush on his property to give his people a better view—and a clearer shot—at intruders. But maybe that wasn’t so important, what with the dogs and …

  Jesus! The dogs.

  I heard them, then. Barking, yelping. In the distance, but drawing nearer, it seemed. I wanted to stop and listen, to determine whether they were actually coming our way. But I had to keep chugging ahead. Steve was maybe twenty yards behind, I thought. Too tired to zig and zag. I had to hope the trees and the darkness, and his need to keep running to stay close to me, would keep him from firing more shots.

  My breath came in great sucking gulps now, bitterly cold breaths that seared my lungs. I could hear Steve, gasping and grunting and muttering as he plowed after me. I thought I was in great shape, but somehow this wounded drunk of a man was keeping up with me.

  And now there was no question about it. The dogs were on their way. Not from behind us, but from somewhere off to the left.

  Suddenly I broke out of the woods. I was face to face with the high, stuccoed wall, about fifteen yards away. The woods had been cleared, leaving a strip of open land running all along the wall. I turned right and ran parallel to the wall, but staying just within the trees. The baying of the dogs grew louder. I veered to my left, to the edge of the clearing, and slowed a little to look back. They were coming. Two that I could see. Long-legged, dark shapes, visible against the snow in the cleared space between the woods and the wall. They had their own problems, sometimes breaking through the frozen crust and floundering, sometimes skidding along across the top.

  I accelerated again and, just as I did, a sharp, howling wail rose up from behind me, a shrill cry of pain—from Steve—and I heard him crash to the ground. “… fucking ankle!” he was screaming. “I broke my fucking ankle. You gotta help me!”

  I kept going, though, running clumsily along the edge of the woods, driven now by a new fear—the dogs—and fighting the impulse to climb up a tree to escape them. Finally, up ahead and across the cleared space, I saw what I was looking for. A dark opening in the white wall, a half-circle cut out close to the ground, where the stream went through. From that distance, it was impossible to judge how large the opening was, and too dark to see what sort of fence or screen covered it. I turned that way, plowing into the deeper snow outside the woods.

  Steve kept screaming behind me, and there was no question that his cries were genuine. He was hurt and he was down. The dogs must have sensed that, too. Their baying had gone up in pitch, turning more furious—and perhaps more gleeful at the same time.

  I forced myself to keep going. My lungs were on fire. My one chance to escape the dogs was that they’d get first to Steve, and be too busy to bother with me. Finally, though, I had to stop to get my breath, and found myself shivering uncontrollably, even though my clothes were soaked with sweat. I could still hear the dogs, but couldn’t see them. They were in the woods. And what I heard wasn’t baying or barking anymore, but snarling, growling.

  “The fucking dogs, Foley,” Steve cried. “You gotta help me. They’ll tear me apart.”

  He was a stone-cold killer, with no more concern for my life than the dogs had. His desperate demands for help infuriated me. I wanted to hate him. I did hate him, goddamn it. He deserved whatever he got.

  But Jesus, those dogs …

  CHAPTER

  43

  I TURNED AROUND AND stumbled back toward Steve, along the path I’d broken in the snow.

  When I got there the dogs were moving in on him, slipping among the trees in the darkness, excited, snarling and snapping at each other. They slid in and out of sight, so that first it seemed there were three of them, or even four. But I kept watching and there were only two. Dobermans, I thought. Steve was flat on his ass in the snow, both legs straight out in front of him, his right foot pointing at a weird angle to the leg. He was waving his gun back and forth, trying to draw a bead on the creatures moving through the snow and brush around him. He hadn’t seen me yet, and I couldn’t decide just what to do.

  It was decided for me. One of the dogs caught my scent. It stopped, sniffed the air. Swiveling its head from side to side, whining, honing in on me as though with radar. Then, with the whine dropping into a throaty growl, the dog began to walk my way. I didn’t move a muscle and it probably hadn’t seen me yet, but it kept on coming—stalking me with stiff, tentative steps. Its companion was still focused on Steve, but this dog was locked in on me.

  It was useless to turn and run. Maybe if I took off my coat, I could wrap it around my arm and …

  The instant I moved, the dog snarled and rushed toward me.

  “Stay!”

  The voice came from my left. A strong voice. Confident. A voice the dog seemed to recognize as having authority. The creature stopped, turned its head. Still snarling, but with a new, almost questioning tone. A tone that asked: Whose voice is this?

  I knew.

  “Stay!”

  The same voice. Lammy’s voice. He stumbled forward through the underbrush. Not toward me. Directly at the Doberman, who didn’t back away, but was silent now. The other dog stood still and silent, too.

  “Jesus,” Steve called out. “What the fuck is—”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  Lammy spoke directly to the dog closer to me, but clearly had the other one’s attention, too. He was talking nonstop. The words were nothing unusual. “Stay … good dog … atta boy…” The same words everyone uses with dogs. “Atta boy … easy … get back … good dog…” But the message had more to do with the tone, the inflection, it seemed, than with any rational meaning. I remembered Lynette Daniels’ comments about whether dogs think, and about intuition and instinct—and Lammy.

  Whatever did it, the closer dog turned around to slink away and join its partner. Half hidden in the trees, they stood together, on the other side of Steve from us. Motionless, emitting occasional ominous th
roaty comments.

  Lammy stood beside me. He was shaking visibly, despite the confident tone he’d used with the dogs. “I got scared when we split up,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well, you don’t have to—”

  “We gotta go now. These dogs, they’re smart animals. But I’m going against their training. And they don’t know me.”

  “What about Steve?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you, motherfucker.” That was Steve, still sitting in the snow. I turned … and stared into the barrel of the pistol he held trained on my face. “I’ll tell you what about Steve,” he said. “Steve’s gonna blow your fucking brains out, unless this faggoty freak here sends these goddamn dogs away and you get me outta here.”

  The dogs started snarling again.

  “I can’t.” Lammy’s voice was soft, tentative.

  “Don’t give me that shit, you prick,” Steve said. “Get rid of the stupid goddamn fuckers.” One of the dogs started barking furiously.

  “Be careful,” Lammy said. “You’re making them ner—”

  “Do it!” Steve yelled, jerking the gun in his hand. “Do it, or I blow fucking Foley away.”

  The dogs were shifting around again now, with louder, more menacing growls, snapping at each other again with excitement. And moving closer to Steve all the time.

  “Do it,” Steve screamed. “Get rid of them!” He was beyond control. He waved his pistol at the dogs. They had separated now, and were moving around him, whining and barking strange, soft barks. “Do it, you motherfucker!” he screamed, and swung the gun back in our direction.

  I yanked on Lammy’s arm and pulled him down with me and Steve’s shot went into the woods. We half-crawled, half-stumbled backward away from him, watching in horror as one of the Dobermans leaped forward at him. He fired two shots. The huge dog whirled away and dove back into the darkness, whimpering.

  Steve looked our way, but couldn’t spot us. Lammy and I both turned and ran as best we could. There were two more shots, followed at once by a furious cacophony of snarls and yelps and yapping barks—mindless, bestial sounds that were dissonant accents against the high keening screams of a man whose flesh was being torn away.

  Lammy and I kept on running.

  CHAPTER

  44

  YOU COULD HARDLY CALL it running, really. Lammy—overweight and flabby—was practically dead on his feet, and I had to half-carry, half-drag him along. Stumbling, tripping, dragging our feet through the snow. But we made it to where the stream went through the wall. The semicircular opening was about three feet across, and blocked with vertical iron bars set into the wall at six-inch intervals, their pointed ends extending down almost to the frozen surface of the stream.

  We crouched on our haunches in the snow and stared at the bars. From a distance came the sounds of cars, probably on the drive from the gate to Gus’s house.

  Then suddenly, from closer to where we’d left Steve, an unfamiliar male voice called out. “Rocco! Tony! Get over here.” Damn, I thought, three more of Gus’s thugs. But then the man shouted, “Stay, Rocco! Stay! Good dogs.” A few seconds of silence, and again the same voice, this time filled with fear and shock. “Oh my God! Holy Jesus Christ almighty! I’ll … I’ll go get help. C’mon, you two.” We could hear him crashing through the brush in the other direction, taking the dogs with him.

  I stood and looked back toward where the frozen stream left the woods. Most of the way across the clearing, it seemed, maybe four to six feet across, narrowing down just short of the opening in the wall. Where it passed through the opening, it ran along a man-made canal of concrete.

  When a stream narrows, I thought, it must deepen also—at least a little—to accommodate the flow.

  Hanging on to Lammy for balance, I stomped my foot on the ice and broke through to the water underneath. Then I waded right in, to see how deep it was. In its rounded concrete stream bed the water was still not much more than a foot deep below the iron bars.

  It was also very cold.

  “If we take off our coats and lie on our backs, we may be able to slide un—” I stopped and looked at Lammy. “Well,” I said, “maybe I can, anyway.”

  CHAPTER

  45

  IT WAS MORE OF a squeeze than a slide. The concrete stream bed wasn’t as deep as I thought it was and I got hung up for a while on the iron points. But once I was through to the other side, Lammy stuffed my coat between the bars. I was in a clump of trees beside a fairway on the golf course that abutted Gus’s estate, already running as I struggled to get my arms into the coat. Lammy’s hat, and my own gloves that he’d given back, were stuffed into the coat pockets. So the coat and the hat and the gloves were the only dry things about me.

  I hadn’t been thinking much about pain while I was squeezing under the bars—or maybe the icy water anesthetized me—and I didn’t know how deeply the points of the bars had gouged into my flesh until after I’d gotten Casey on the phone and he drove me back to the motel and got me soaking in a tub of hot water.

  Casey told me later that I was huddled in the tub, shaking and sobbing, when he left me there and drove back to see if he could find Lammy. I told him the sobbing part had to be bullshit.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, LAMMY described how he followed the wall to where the FBI had crashed through Gus’s gate. He said there were a couple of huge tow trucks and lots of police cars and other cars “parked all over the place.” People from the surrounding area were walking around, “and some TV people were there, with really bright lights.” Lammy claimed he walked right out the gate and nobody paid any attention to him.

  Some of the cars that were parked all over the place had their motors running. He “wasn’t thinking so good,” and he was so cold and tired he decided to crawl into one, except most of them were squad cars. He finally found one that wasn’t, he said. It was “just a plain, dark-colored, four-door car,” and he laid down in the backseat. He fell asleep, but two men woke him up and told him they were federal officers and this was their car. One was a mean-looking man with black hair that came to a point over his forehead. He started “yelling and screaming” at Lammy when he found out who he was, and demanded to know if I was around.

  Finally Lammy couldn’t even talk and just started “crying like a baby,” he said. So they eventually took him in an ambulance to a hospital and the doctors made them leave him alone for a few days. He had hypothermia—and eventually pneumonia.

  Lammy doesn’t exactly have a vivid imagination, so you had to believe he didn’t make up the part about sleeping in Anders’ car.

  * * *

  OVER THE NEXT WEEK or so, no matter how many times they replayed their tape of what Dominic’s wire had picked up, and no matter how convinced they were that I’d been one of the people in Gus’s library, the Feds couldn’t find anything solid to back up their belief.

  Gus had been hit in the left hand by one of Steve’s shots. His hand was pretty well destroyed and he had a heart attack that put him out of the picture for a couple of days—and gave him lots of time to talk to his lawyers. He didn’t tell Anders, or anyone else, about my being there. In fact, he didn’t tell much at all about what really happened, just that Steve had—understandably, Gus claimed—lost it a bit when he found out Dominic had tried to rape his daughter. I figured it wasn’t Gus’s practice to be of help to the authorities. Besides, he probably wanted to handle Steve in his own way if he ever got the chance.

  The Feds threatened to charge me with a crime—interference with a federal investigation or some such thing—which gave me a good excuse to refuse to answer any questions. According to Renata, Anders was beside himself at losing Dominic, and blamed it on me. He was absolutely serious about getting my license lifted, at least, and preferably getting me a vacation at a prison farm for a while. I stuck with my right to remain silent and let Renata talk to Anders and his friends.

  Nobody interrogated Casey about it, thank God, because he’d
have had a hell of a struggle about whether to tell the truth and send me to jail. No one asked Trish, either, because it was months before she said anything again to anybody, even to Rosa. I never found out exactly what Lammy and Karen and Rosa said. They all must have lied, but I decided not to hold that against them.

  Steve Connolly was a different story. They managed to save his life—for what that was worth. The .22 slug had just buried itself inside him somewhere between a couple of ribs, but the dogs did the real damage. His face would be horribly disfigured, and none of the reconstructive specialists promised much hope, even if there’d be someone to pay for the years of reworking it would take. Within twenty-four hours after surgery, he was strong enough to tell the entire world that I was there at Gus’s, but he was raving and had to be kept in restraints most of the time, and no one was much interested in what he said. Later he clammed up, after Gus got him a lawyer, too.

  Ten days after the carnage at Gus’s place, Renata had her last meeting with Anders, the one where he threatened to have me indicted, despite the difficulties he’d have proving anything. She said she laughed at him so hard he changed his mind. There was probably more to it than that, but I wasn’t there and that’s what she told me.

  Dominic’s wire hadn’t picked up anything about Steve being the one who attacked Trish, and that didn’t come out from anyone. Why should it? Dominic was dead and, as far as we knew, didn’t care about his reputation. And telling the whole world that it was her own father who tried to rape her wouldn’t help Trish any, and it sure wasn’t going to happen again.

  Even the people who claimed they could understand how a father might freak out and shoot the man who tried to rape his little girl had to admit Steve had gone off the deep end a little too far. He’d seemed to admit on the tape that he’d killed Monsignor Borelli, too. But he’d been looking for a missing child, and the priest had such a bad heart it wouldn’t have taken much stress to blow it. At any rate, Steve was going to spend an awfully long time—maybe a lifetime—locked away somewhere. Or maybe Gus would carry out his own version of justice—or vengeance.