Pastime s-18

by Robert B. Parker

  "The hell I don't," Paul said.

  From where I stood I could look into the big round gilded Eagle mirror over the fireplace and see my car parked down the slope of the lawn-to-be.

  "What did you mean about safe?" Patty said.

  "Are you going to tell her?" Paul said to Rich. "Or am I?"

  "I am," Beaumont said. "It's not as bad as it sounds, but I was in business with a guy who turned out to have mob connections, and I took some money he says belongs to him."

  "And they want it back," Patty said.

  Beaumont nodded.

  "Well, just give it to them," Patty said.

  Beaumont shook his head.

  "Why not?" Patty said. "Tell them you're sorry and give them the money." "And this house?" Beaumont said.

  "Yes, certainly, sell it. Tell them you'll make good. You have some money."

  "None I haven't stolen," Beaumont said. There was no scornfulness in his voice this time, nor selfregard. It was the voice of someone noticing an ugly thing about himself.

  "I don't care. Give it to them. We have each other, we can start over, give them the money back."

  Beaumont was silent. Paul looked at me.

  "It's not that simple," I said. "They intend to kill him."

  Patty put her hand to her mouth again in the same gesture she'd used when

  Beaumont said fuck. Patty's reaction range was limited.

  "But if he gives the money back…" she said.

  Beaumont was looking past her out the sliding doors at the end of the living room, which opened out onto the green and yellow woods. He didn't say anything.

  "It's a matter of principle now," I said. "These particular people can't let him get away with it. They have to kill him."

  All of us were quiet.

  Patty said, "Richard?"

  Beaumont nodded.

  "He's right," Beaumont said. "It's why we had to come here and hide. It's why I couldn't let you tell anyone at all. Not even your kid."

  "Richard," she said, "we better go away then."

  "We're all right here," Beaumont said. "No one knows we're here." He looked at us. "Do they?"

  "No," I said. "No one followed you?"

  "No."

  "You're sure?"

  "Yes."

  "Richard, we can't stay here," Patty said. "They might find you."

  "How'd you find us?" Beaumont said.

  "A charge purchase from Lenox," I said.

  Beaumont looked at Patty. "I told you cash," he said. "No charges."

  "What harm? It was for us, like our honeymoon. Just that one time is all,

  Richard. I didn't know."

  "What harm? For Christ's sake, Patty, they found us." He tossed his chin at

  Paul and me. "What if it had been Gerry?"

  Who.

  Beaumont made a dismissive wave with his hand.

  "Is Gerry the one you took the money from?"

  "Yeah."

  "Richard, let's go somewhere else."

  Beaumont started to shake his head and then stopped and turned his gaze slowly toward Patty.

  "Why?" he said.

  "It's too close. They might find us."

  "What's going on, Patty?" Beaumont said. "Why might they find us?"

  Patty had both hands pressed against her mouth now. She shook her head soundlessly.

  "Ma," Paul said, "if you know something you have to say, this is-" He didn't finish.

  Patty kept shaking her head with her hands pressed against her mouth.

  "You told somebody," Beaumont said. "Goddamn you, you told somebody."

  With her head still down and her hands still pressed, she was able to squeeze out the word "Caitlin."

  "Caitlin Martinelli? You told her?"

  She nodded and took her hands away. "I was so excited," she said, "about buying our house…" She wanted to say more and she couldn't.

  "Who told her brother," I said, "who told Joe."

  Beaumont nodded and turned and went out of the room. He came back almost at once wearing one of those fleece-lined cattleman's jackets that you can buy in a catalogue and carrying a blue and red Nike gym bag with a shoulder strap.

  "I'm out of here," he said. "If you want to come, Patty, come right now. No packing, just come."

  As he turned toward her I could see that he had a white-handled automatic stuck in his belt.

  Patty looked at Beaumont and then at Paul, and then at her living room with all its fresh-from-theehowroom-floor furniture.

  "I…" she said and stopped. "I don't…"

  "Patty, damn you, decide," Beaumont said, moving toward the back door.

  In the big mirror over the fireplace I saw a dark blue Buick sedan pull up behind my car on the gravel roadway. Another car, a white Oldsmobile, pulled in right behind it.

  "They're here," I said. "Beaumont, take Paul and Patty. Get the hell out of here. Paul, when you get safe, call Hawk."

  Eight men got out of the cars. Four from each. One of them had a shotgun.

  I knelt by the front window and knocked a diamond pane out with the muzzle of the Browning.

  Paul looked at me and then at his mother and didn't say a word. He took her arm and dragged her out through the sliders where Beaumont had already gone.

  Outside somebody yelled, "Window to the left of the door!"

  I thumbed back the hammer and shot the first guy up the walk in the middle of the chest. He went over backwards and fell on his back. The others dashed for cover behind the cars. Carefully I shot out the tires on each car. Two tires per car, so the spare wouldn't help. I'm a good shot, but

  I'm not Annie Oakley. It took six rounds. But it also served to pin them down since they didn't know I wasn't shooting at them. At the first gunshot

  Pearl sat straight upright, at the second round she bolted out through the still-open sliders. I opened my mouth to yell and closed it. It wouldn't do any good, a gun-shy dog will run no matter what, and she was probably bet ter off in the woods than she was going to be in here pretty soon.

  Everything was quiet for the moment. Beaumont must have kept his car stashed on the rutted track behind the house. I never heard it start up, never saw it leave. For all the outfit outside knew, I was Beaumont, still in the house.

  I had six rounds left in the Browning, and no spare clip. I hadn't thoughtStockbridge would require it. There were seven bad guys left. One of them was Gerry Broz. If I shot each of them with one bullet, I would still have

  Gerry to strangle. It didn't seem good odds. From behind the Buick there was movement and then my window shattered and the shotgun boomed. The odds weren't getting better. The shotgun fired again and I moved to another window in time to see two bad guys crouched low, running right, and two more doing the same thing in the opposite direction. They were going to close me in from all sides. Anyone would. I smashed another pane out and nailed one of the low-running bad guys with my eighth round, and rolled back against the wall as the glass billowed out of this window with the boom of the shotgun. Hard upon the shotgun was the chatter of some kind of smallbore automatic weapon. I had five rounds left and was badly outgunned.

  Pearl had the right idea. I crouched as low as I could and ran for the open patio door, my feet crunching on the scattered shards of window glass. I felt something slap my left leg and then I was through the door and into the woods. I was maybe thirty yards in before the automatic fire stopped behind me. Behind me there was silence again. And then more automatic fire.

  The gunfire ceased. All I could hear was the sounds of my own breathing, steady but deep, and the sound I made, moving as quietly as I could through the fall foliage, heading west. My left leg was starting to throb and I could feel the warmth where it wasbleeding. I stopped and peeled off my jacket. I ripped the sleeves off my sweatshirt, put my jacket back on. I folded one sleeve into a pad and tied it in place over my jeans, using the other sleeve. It was a bulky bandage and unsightly, but it seemed to suppress the bleeding.

  Behind me
I heard a yell that was nearly screaming. I knew it was Gerry.

  "Richie, you're a dead man! You hear me? We're coming, you motherfucker. We got a tracker, asshole, and we're right behind you."

  And then I didn't hear anything.

  CHAPTER 24

  As l moved into the woods it got thicker and the going got harder. There was still green on the trees, mixed with yellow, and the combination gave a soft dappled effect to the forest. I didn't feel soft and dappled. And as the afternoon dwindled it got darker. After about a mile I limped up a low swale and settled in behind a rock to take stock. Behind me the woods had thinned into some sort of meadow; maybe a fire, maybe a homestead, long since consumed by the slow fire of decay. Whatever it had been caused by, it made an open space where I could see anyone following me.

  I was wearing New Balance running shoes, jeans, a blue sweatshirt, now sleeveless, and a leather jacket. I had five rounds in my gun, my car keys, a wristwatch, and Pearl's leash still stuck in my hip pocket. My leg was very sore and the pain pulsed steadily along it from hip to ankle. There was a Buck knife in my jacket pocket, and two packets of matches wrapped in foil to keep them dry. I always carried the gun, the keys, and the watch. The knife and the matches were for when I went west of the Charles River. The minute I noticed that I had no food, I started getting hungry. The sun was setting. That would be west. I could keep going until dark without getting turned around. I'd have to stop at night. The sun I could figure out. I couldn't read the stars to save my ass, which was not, in this case, a metaphor.

  I needed a plan. First I had to figure out if Gerry and his troops really were after me. Or Richie, which is who they thought I was. If they weren't

  I could simply backtrack to Stockbridge and wait for Pearl. But if they were behind me, between me and Stockbridge, and if any of them knew how to function in the woods, and if they really had a tracker, then I'd need to take the long way home.

  The way to find that out was to sit here behind these rocks, while I still had some ammo, and see if they showed up. They'd leave somebody behind to clean up the shooting scene and call Vinnie Morris and get some new tires.

  Unless someone came by at the wrong time, or somebody had heard the shoot ing and called the cops, they'd be okay. They had no way to know that

  Beaumont had bailed out with Patty and Paul, and that, in a while, Hawk was going to be coming out looking for me.

  It didn't figure for Gerry and his posse to blunder around in the woods for several days looking for me. Ordinarily I figured to outrun them even if they did. But my leg wasn't going to improve. And Gerry was crazy. I settled in to wait. The late sun was warm enough on my back, but above me and moving slowly westward was a mass of dark clouds. And as the evening crept in from the east with the clouds,

  I could feel the edge of cold that was going to come with darkness.

  They could have a tracker. They could have picked up a couple of shooters in Pittsfield. One of them could be a woodsman. Or Gerry could have made it up because he'd heard the word once on television.

  The woods through which I'd edged my way, and the ones which stretched out behind me, were mostly hardwoods, oak and maple, with some birch clumps scattered among them, dark-ringed white trunks that gleamed among the drabber trees like hope in the midst of sorrow. Sprinkled among the hardwoods were evergreens-a lot of white pine, now and then a good-looking fir tree. The forest floor was a tangle of roots, and fallen trees, and creeping vines. Many of the vines were thorny and would not only trip, but clutch. There were chokecherry bushes, many of them with caterpillar tents stretched across the more comfortable crotches near the trunk. In a pinch,

  I knew you could eat chokecherries, though they were pretty sharp. You could eat acorns too.

  The combination of rain clouds and evening fell darkly across the little open space in front of me. In the woods it would be quite dark. There was some wind. I had already zipped my jacket and turned up my collar. It left me out of options for the moment. To my right I heard movement in the woods. 223

  quietly I eased the hammer back on the Browning. The movement continued, and then Pearl emerged from the woods, her nose against the ground, her head moving from side to side, her tail erect; she came across the meadow walking very fast, and up the swale, and then raised her head and capered around the rock and began to turn tight circles. I tried to hug her but she was too excited. When she stopped the circles, she sniffed me all over at a great rate. When she sniffed the gun she shied away briefly, and I lowered it beside my thigh, out of sight. She sniffed with special attention at my wounded leg, smelling the blood.

  "Nice to see you," I said. She sat intensely and looked at me with her tongue out.

  "What are we going to do if I have to shoot again?" I said. "You'll bolt and where will you end up?,

  She had no answer. Neither did I. But it was bothersome.

  CHAPTER 25

  IT was full dark now, no moon, and the rain had begun. Pearl hated the rain and kept looking at me to do something about it. She also had not been fed since morning and was looking at me to do something about that, too.

  "You're supposed to be a goddamned hunting dog," I said. "Maybe you should go hunt up something to eat."

  She had curled in against the rock, behind me, with her head resting on her rear feet. The leather jacket kept my upper body dry, but my legs were soaked, and my hair, and a trickle of rain was worming down my neck inside the jacket. The bandage felt tight against the wound in my thigh. The leg was swelling.

  "It doesn't get much better than this, Pearl."

  Pearl's eyes moved toward me when I spoke. The rest of her was motionless.

  "We're going to have to find something better," I said. "If Gerry's out there. He won't be chasing me in the rain, at night."

  I stood, and Pearl immediately uncurled and stood with me, pushing against my good leg. I started down the swale west toward the woods when I smelled something. I stopped, and with the wind coming from the east driving the rain, I breathed in carefully through my nose, my eyes closed, my head a little forward. What I smelled was woodsmoke. They were in the woods, east of me, and they had hunkered down for the night and gotten a fire going. It meant probably that whether he was a tracker or not, they had someone with them who knew his way in the woods. Gerry couldn't have started a fire in the Public Gardens.

  "I could slide over there and pick some of them off," I said.

  Pearl pricked her ears and wagged her tail. "But if I do you'll bolt again."

  I gazed obliquely off toward the area east, where the wind was bringing the smoke from. I was trying to spot the light of the fire. There had been eight. I had dropped two. At least one guy would have had to stay behind to clean things up at Beaumont's. That meant five people probably. It would need a proper fire to service five people. "I could put on your leash," I said. "But that means dragging you through the woods and holding you while

  I shoot and you're bucking and struggling to run, and then ducking through the woods with you still on the leash and several gunnies chasing me. And

  I've only got one leg that's really usable." I was staringup, above the treeline, looking for the glow of the fire. And I found it, east and a little south, some distance away. How far was more than I could estimate. Where was Jungle Jim when you really needed him?

  With them in the light and me in the dark, and taking time to aim, I could probably pick off two of them before they got under cover. That would im prove the odds. Maybe I could tie her here and pick her up on the way back.

  If I came back. If I could find this place, running, on one and a half legs, in the dark. I looked at the fire glow in the sky east of me, and looked at Pearl, and turned and began to walk west. Pearl came along, staying close in the cold rain.

  Working slowly, bumping into bushes and tree limbs, tripping over things on the forest floor, hurting my leg, I moved west, away from Broz. The dark ness was nearly impenetrable. We began to go uphill again. I couldn't see it
; I could tell by the increased resistance as I walked. Pearl was directly behind me, letting me break trail. I was cold now, and wet, and tired from fighting through the heavy cover.

  At the top of the rise I walked into a big tree that had fallen. I worked my way down toward the root ball and found what I had hoped, the uprooting had left a shallow declivity, with the root ball shielding it partially, so that it was relatively dry in there, close to the roots. Pearl and I went in. I scraped away some of the leaf cover until I found leaves that 229

  felt dry. I heaped the leaves against the root ball, crumpled a dollar bill from my wallet in among them, piled on some twigs, and carefully lit the bill. It caught and flickered and spread to the leaves. I hovered over it, shielding it from the wind and stray raindrops. When the twigs caught I had enough flame to cast a little light, and I could see more twigs, and bigger ones. Carefully I added them, and bigger sticks, until I had a committed fire. Then I went out into the ring of light that the fire cast and got real firewood in the form of fallen limbs. I piled these under the shelter of the root ball and added some judiciously until I had a big fire. I augmented the shelter of the root ball with evergreen boughs that I cut and laid carefully in a crisscross pattern. Then I got in under and tried to be comfortable.

  "They've got their own fire," I said. "They won't smell this one. Or see it." Pearl was in close to the root ball, near the fire. I could see the steam rise from her coat as she began to dry.

  "Tomorrow we'll swing north toward the Mass Pike. Route 90 runs all the way from Boston to Seattle, we're bound to hit it."

  I was so tired I couldn't hold my head up. I took the Browning out and held it in my right hand, and folded my left hand over it, and put my head back.

  "Okay, Pearl," I said. "Stay alert for prowlers."

  My eyes fell shut. I opened them once to look at the dog. She was asleep. "Better hope for no prowlers," I said. The fireglimmered briskly, the rain fell steadily, and the darkness endured. My eyes fell closed again. And stayed closed. And I slept, though all night I was aware that my leg was throbbing.