He crossed several clearings. One was particularly wide, had blackberries growing in a thorny patch. He picked as many as his hand could contain and ate them on the way out to the bluff overlooking the Hudson. The wide river, two hundred feet below, was silvery green. It seemed to be at a standstill. The deceptive river, hiding its currents. It was too formidable to be friendly, Mitch thought. He climbed down the bluff by way of the unapparent, back-and-forth trail that he was certain had once been used by the Mohicans. There was a more accessible, roundabout way down to the Strawbridge boathouse but Mitch had seldom used it.
The boathouse was a well-preserved wooden structure situated on a float that allowed it to adjust to the rise or fall of the river. It consisted of three slips below a room used for storing boating equipment, life jackets, oars, seat cushions, pennants and the like. Its interior smelled of oil and gasoline and baked wood. There were three boats:
Two were Chris-Craft speedboats: a relatively new one and a sixty-year-old classic. The other boat was far more ordinary: an outboard with a fiberglass hull. Mitch had been out in the Chris-Craft several times with Uncle Straw, but the outboard was the one they used to go upstream to fish the mouths of the tributaries for trout.
Mitch took a comprehensive look around the boathouse. Then climbed the bluff and went straight home. Maddie was in the kitchen, barefoot and half dressed. Her hair was spiking every which way. She was about to scramble a half dozen eggs. The butter in the pan was scorched. She poured the bowl of disturbed eggs into the pan and overdosed them with Worcestershire.
“Great coffee!” she said, raising her mug to the level of her smile.
Mitch poured some. It was a little too strong, on the bitter side. He was hungry, tempted to settle for a bowl of cereal and raisins; however he waited for her eggs, endured them with large bites and quick swallows. “Good eggs,” he fibbed.
She knew better. “You’re nice,” she told him.
“What would you like to do today?” he asked.
“You,” she replied wickedly, “but later.”
There were three phone calls that morning. The first was from Shirley to say she was staying at a charming hotel off Boulevard St. Germain and that if she wasn’t so worried about them she’d be having a marvelous time. When would this crisis be over? She’d met an extremely attractive businessman on the plane. Please let her know as soon as all was well so she could breathe easy and take full advantage of him.
The second call, not a half hour later, was from Uncle Straw and Wally, both on the line at the same time, so it was a four-way conversation. They’d done well at the casino in London, although actually, they hadn’t spent all that much time at the tables. Now they were in Monaco, staying at the Hôtel de Paris, had been there two days and hardly been out of the suite. They had some surprising news, Straw said, and Maddie tried to drag it out of him, but he remained cryptic, would only say it was happy news, which caused Wally to confirm that it couldn’t be happier. Maddie had all she could do to keep from guessing aloud that they were either married or had agreed to be. She was sure that was it, that Straw wanted to wait until he got home to more intimately share it. When were they coming home? They weren’t sure, thought they might go on to Baden-Baden or somewhere or anywhere. They sounded so up. Pick the tomatoes were Straw’s words before disconnecting.
The third call came an hour later. Mitch picked it up. His several hellos got no response. He heard background sounds and what he took to be breathing and then only dial tone.
“Who was that?” Maddie asked.
“A wrong number,” he told her.
While Maddie went out to the garden to pick some tomatoes, Mitch went into Straw’s study. A cabinet there was where Straw kept his guns. Three shotguns, a rifle and four pistols. Mitch settled on a shotgun. The one he liked the weight and feel of was a Moss-berg 500 pump-action 12-gauge with a short eighteen-and-a-half-inch barrel. It wasn’t loaded and there didn’t seem to be any ammunition in the drawers of the cabinet.
He took the shotgun up to his bedroom and placed it on the bed. Also his own two weapons, the Beretta and the Glock. He examined each in turn, saw that they were clean and in surely reliable working order. He cocked and dry-fired the automatics, released and inserted clips.
Then the shotgun. He’d never fired a pump-action, never even had one in his hands, but how complicated could it be? The forward hand operated the action by pulling back to eject the fired shell and pushing forward to position the next round into the firing chamber. He snugged the butt of the gun to his shoulder, pumped and dry-fired it until he was comfortable with the required rhythm. Did the same from the hip, got really good at it from the hip.
Maddie walked in on him. “What on earth are you doing?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he told her, “just … just trying to get this door latch to work properly. It seems to be sticking.”
“Sounded to me like you were pumping a shotgun,” she said wryly.
“Any tomatoes?” he veered.
“Plenty.”
He wondered how she could tell the ripe ones, asked her.
“Squeeze,” she told him. He held back telling her that two of those she’d picked were green.
“I have to do some errands, get a few things. Want to stay here?”
“No, I’m with you.” Exactly what she’d said yesterday, when he’d tried to get her to fly to Paris to stay with friends, out of harm’s way until this Riccio thing simmered down. No words, not even his adamant, angry ones, could sway her. “I’m with you,” was how she wanted it no matter what.
They were in Straw’s blue Chevy pickup. Into town and then north on Route 9, the highway to Albany. First stop was at a building supply place for the planking. Mitch found that the widest they had in ready stock was fourteen inches. If he wanted wider it would be a special order. They’d have to mill it. That would take two days, maybe three. Mitch couldn’t count on having two days, maybe three. So, in place of planking he got four sheets of four-by-eight half-inch plywood and had the mill hand-rip them lengthwise down the middle to make eight pieces two feet wide, eight feet long.
In the hardware and paint section Mitch bought a battery-charged professional stapler and a supply of one-inch staples, three gallons of latex enamel, two black and a green and a couple of rollers and roller pans.
A mile or so further up Route 9 was a strip mall dominated by a nervous red neon that declared RICK’S GUNS AND AMMO. While Mitch went in Maddie waited in the pickup, scrunched down with her bare feet up on the dash and a Clint Black playing.
Rick’s offered just about everything imaginable for ordinary and fancy killing. Assault rifles on the left, power bows on the right. Ostensibly for animal hunting and benign target competitions. Rick was the man behind a locked glass counter crowded with handguns. He had a shaved head five days in need of a shave.
Mitch ordered up two cartons of double-ought buckshot shells and a carton of 12-gauge slugs. A couple of cartons of 9mm 115-grain Starfire balloon points and an equal number of 180-grain .40 calibers. “Want those forties in hollow point too?” Rick asked.
“Yeah.”
“A lot of shooting,” Rick commented passively while figuring the tab.
“Just stocking up.”
“Smart. Season will be here before we know it.”
Was there ever not a season for the Riccios? Mitch thought.
“Got a special on throwing knives in case you’re interested,” Rick said. “Ever throw a knife?”
“No.” But Hofritz steak knives taken from a dining room drawer to the backyard and, inspired by James Coburn in The Magnificent Seven, thrown from ten feet end over end at the tough trunk of an oak. Set of eight knives in a fitted case. Four for himself, four for Andy for alternate tries. Not enough force to make them stick. Only one out of every twenty or more throws hitting point first. Kenneth rightfully giving them hell for having broken the tips off two.
“Not as hard to do as you think, throwing a
knife,” Rick said. “Guy used to part-time here got about as good as anybody could at it. Word got around and nobody would mess with him.”
Mitch realized Rick wasn’t selling as much as he was merely telling.
“Another advantage with having a throwing knife for a weapon is you’re not required to be licensed to carry it,” Rick said.
Mitch had noticed camouflaged combat fatigues stacked on a table in the rear. He went to them and held up a pair. They were the leaf-mottled type with a great many different pockets. Evidently they weren’t marked for size. He grabbed up any two pair and a couple of matching beaked caps.
On Mitch’s mental shopping list next was an audio cassette player-recorder. A store on Elm Street in Kinderhook had one that would do. It was about the size of an average hardcover book, could be battery-powered and had outlets to accommodate two auxiliary speakers. Not that Mitch would need two. The speakers he bought were the miniature, cube-shaped sort about four by four by four. He also bought a fifty-foot length of speaker wire that had the appropriate male adapters on each end, a half dozen size C Duracell batteries and a Maxell XLII ninety-minute high-resonance audiotape cassette.
He had thought he was leaving the most surely available thing until last. Red poster paint. The stationery and art supply store there in Kinderhook had poster paint in quite a few colors but was all out of bright red. Mitch had to drive the ten miles to Chatham to get it. It came in four- and six-ounce jars. He bought three of the sixes.
They arrived home mid-afternoon. Mitch went right to work, carried the plywood sections and the latex enamel to the large shed situated on the back side of the four-car garage. He transferred the enamel into a five-gallon plastic pail. One part green stirred into two parts black created what Mitch believed was a close enough murky shade. He leaned the eight plywood sections separately against the side of the shed and was about to start on them when Maddie came humming and da-da-tee-da-ing off key, bringing tomatoes in a basket and a shaker of imported LaBaleine sea salt. She made him stop and sit with her. The basket in her lap. The base of their backs against the shed’s warm boards.
She handed him one of the tomatoes and took one for herself. He hesitated. He watched. He suspected she knew he was watching, as she, not altogether subtly, ritualized, commencing with the twist and painful-looking plucking out of the star-like stem, followed by a long efficient lick up one area of the red skin to leave it wet. So the sprinkle of salt would adhere.
Mitch’s vision again seemed capable of magnification.
The intricacies of each motion he observed seemed slowed.
Her mouth opened, exposing her teeth, perfect and sharp, white unrelenting blades. The taut red skin no match for their incredible erotic precision. Juice tried to escape, was captured. The red pulp and seeds were at her mercy, chewed and sucked out.
Mitch forced himself to look away. How much he loved her, he thought against the blank sky. So much that everything about her had become extraordinary. Madly in love. That seemed to fit. Did all extreme lovers experience such close encounters with this special, pleasureful insanity or was he an anomaly, cursed and blessed? No doubt, he decided the imminence of danger, the possibility of losing all, was having its effect.
Two tomatoes eaten, Maddie dabbed at the corners of her mouth with the sleeve of her T-shirt.
“I’m ready to paint,” she said.
He’d promised she could help. He poured some of the enamel into one of the roller pans while she located the plywood sections and determined how he’d leaned them in a predictable row. She was anxious to begin, went at it enthusiastically.
“No need to do both sides, right?” she said.
“No.”
“But we have to do the edges, don’t we?”
“And the ends.”
“We mustn’t overlook the ends. Am I putting it on too thick?”
“No, you’re doing fine.”
“Why don’t you do something else? I can handle this.”
He went into the shed. It was where Straw kept his tools, gardening implements and other odds and ends. It wasn’t very orderly. Each spring Straw put it neat and from then on allowed it to become cluttered. For the past several years Mitch had helped with the annual straightening, so the place wasn’t unfamiliar to him.
He immediately spotted the lopping shears and the gasoline-powered hedge trimmers. He’d need those.
He might also put to use one of those sash window weights that Straw kept for old time’s sake. Shaped like a summer sausage with an eye on one end where a line could be tied. Mitch had to climb up onto the work bench to get one down and it was while he was up there that he noticed the trap. Heavily rusted old thing hanging on a nail by its anchor chain. He took it down and saw it was a leg trap, the common sort, that would, when sprung, clamp together two sets of steel teeth. At one time it must have had six, perhaps ten feet of anchor chain which would be secured around a tree or whatever to keep the caught varmint from making off with the trap. Now, for some reason there was only about four feet of chain. Along the base, barely readable because of the layers of rust, was ARMSTEAD WOLF TRAP and a patent number.
Mitch tried to work the trap. Its parts were frozen in place. He searched around and finally found an aerosol can of a substance that was especially meant to penetrate and dissolve rust. He sprayed the trap thoroughly with it and waited a couple of minutes. The trap’s parts still wouldn’t give. No matter, he thought, it wasn’t, after all, something he’d counted on but rather an added innovation. He gave the trap another spraying and left it for now.
Maddie was finishing up on the last section of plywood. She gave it a couple of final rolls. “How did I do?” she asked. “Did I miss a lot of places?”
“No,” Mitch fibbed. Later, when he had the chance, he’d touch up the areas where raw board was visible. Actually, considering, Maddie had done well.
She put down the roller and roller pan. Her white sneakers were splattered, her hand coated to the wrist. “What’s next?” she asked, ready for anything.
They went into the house. After washing up in the kitchen sink they sat at the table there and saw to the guns. Mitch was undecided about which shells he should load into the pump shotgun, the buckshot or the slugs. Both had advantages, depending on circumstances. The slugs had more range and penetration, made one big hole. On the other hand, closer in with the buckshot it was almost impossible to miss. The shotgun could hold eight rounds. Mitch loaded in some of each in no particular order.
Meanwhile, Maddie was loading the clips for the pistols. Four for the Glock and the same number for the Beretta. She inserted a full clip into the butt of each pistol and rammed them home.
“We’ll each have three extra clips,” she said. “Think that’ll be enough?”
Mitch didn’t reply.
Maddie knew why. “The Glock is yours but the Beretta is mine,” she said.
That wasn’t how Mitch intended it. She wouldn’t be doing any shooting and no one would be shooting at her.
“The Beretta is mine,” she repeated, unequivocally.
“Yeah,” Mitch said as though that had been his understanding all along. There’d be clashes enough he figured.
The day was making its slow exit.
They went out and sat on the front steps. There were deer down in the apple orchard. Mitch counted eight. Two with antlers, four does and a pair of fawns. Foraging for windfalls, intent on that, but yet, alert, untrusting, bringing their heads up high, sniffing, glancing around frequently.
Mitch described the deer to Maddie. He couldn’t make out their eyes at that distance, and no doubt she realized that; however she allowed him to make much of their huge black pupils, dilated by possible danger, the way they didn’t dare blink.
“I could live on your descriptions,” she said gratefully.
What he didn’t describe to her was what he was foreseeing as he gazed down at the winding gravel drive. That was how they would come. They wouldn’t be stealt
hy, wouldn’t come sneaking from various directions. Their arrogance wouldn’t allow that. They would drive in and park just about there, he thought, settling on a spot about a hundred yards away. They would be so sure of themselves, the killings they’d been sent to do. They would get out of the car, nonchalantly re-tuck their shirts and straighten their suit jackets, and probably talk about something extraneous, perhaps about a meal they’d eaten or planned to eat, as they proceeded up the rest of the drive to the house. Mitch despised how sure of themselves they would be. Sure of his death, of Maddie’s.
The emeralds were no longer Riccio’s first issue, Mitch believed. The emeralds had been superseded by the call for old-mob satisfaction. That Mitch had had no choice but to refuse Riccio didn’t matter. Riccio hadn’t believed it and turning Riccio down was like wounding him, like throwing pepper in his eyes. It prevented him from seeing reasonableness. To put up with it, to just let it pass, would, according to Riccio’s code, shrink him. He’d be smaller inside himself for it. If he allowed it once he might allow it again and he’d become small enough inside himself to be stepped over, if not on.
The emeralds? If they came with the thing all the better. Twenty-five extra large was twenty-five extra large. However, in Riccio’s world the void left by lost money had a way of being surely and swiftly filled by other money. Riccio would consider himself ahead when his have-arounds returned and told him the thing had been done.
“That twenty-five million …” Maddie said.
“Which twenty-five million?” Mitch quipped.
“If you’d had those emeralds and if the Iranian had come across with the twenty-five for them as he said he would, what difference would it have made?”
“Who knows?”
“For you, I mean.”
“No use speculating.”
“Oh? I say speculation is next best to a sure thing.”
“I’ve never heard you say that.”
“You probably weren’t listening. Quite often speculations are sure things; they’re just not apparent.”
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