Wilderness

by Robert B. Parker

  He got into bed beside her without touching and lay on his back in the cool silent room. He stifled real crying that came up on him. He stifled it hard by putting the pillow over his face. But he hoped as well that she'd hear him, know he was stifling tears and lean over to him and put her arm around him and say "Don't cry, I love you" and pull away the pillow and kiss him, and say "I'm sorry I hurt you. You're everything I ever wanted." But she didn't. He could not remember that she had ever done such a thing, and he wondered why he thought she might, each time. Twenty-three years you'd think I'd learn something.

  Know what I could expect and what I couldn't. Jesus Christ, what a jerk I am.

  With an angry effort of will he stopped crying and lay silent and full of pity in the dark room staring at the ceiling, his hands folded on his stomach. His eyes wide open in the dark.

  CHAPTER 12.

  From the window of the room on the ninth floor of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Cambridge, a man named Steiger looked out at the Charles River and across it at the buildings of Boston University and beyond them at red-brick Back Bay.

  Behind him a blond woman with dark eyes lay naked on the bed reading a guide to Boston. Steiger turned to look at her.

  "Angie," he said, "if you're going to bleach your hair why don't you do it all over?" "You know the truth," she said. "Nobody else gets to look." "Just me," he said.

  She smiled. "Just you." "You want something sent up?" he said.

  She shook her head.

  "Wine, beer, some hors d'oeuvres?"

  "No. Just let me lie here and cool off."

  There was a knock at the door. Steiger walked across and opened it. A man handed him a package wrapped in brown paper. Steiger took it silently and closed the door. He came back into the room with the package.

  "What's that?" the blond woman said.

  "It's a piece," Steiger said. "I don't carry one on airplanes, so they said they'd furnish me one when I got here."

  He unwrapped the brown paper. Inside was a shoebox with Florsheim printed on it. He opened the box and took out a handgun wrapped in a blue terrycloth hand towel. He unwrapped the hand towel. The gun was a Ruger Blackhawk in a hip holster. In the shoebox was a box of Remington ammunition,.44 caliber.

  Steiger took the gun from the holster, checked that it was empty, tried the action, examined the firing pin and the barrel, spun the cylinder, and nodded once to himself. He put the gun back in the holster, put the holster and gun back in the shoebox, and put the shoebox on the closet shelf.

  "Who are you going to use that on?" the blond woman said.

  "Guy named Newman," Steiger said. "Aaron Newman. He's a writer."

  "What did he do?"

  Steiger took off his shirt and hung it carefully on a hanger in the closet. There were two suits in the closet and three pairs of slacks and two sports jackets. Each was hung precisely. Each had space around it.

  "He saw something he shouldn't have and they're afraid he might testify."

  "You supposed to kill him or just tell him to keep his mouth shut?"

  Steiger stepped out of his slacks and hung them over a hanger. He smoothed the crease with his thumb and forefinger. "They already told him to keep his mouth shut," Steiger said. "But now the man is getting worried. He thinks the cops are following him, and he figures maybe he better close any doors he left open before. I guess if he takes a fall on this it will be a big one."

  "So you're going to kill whatsisface?"

  "Newman," Steiger said. "Yes."

  "How long will it take?"

  "A week maybe. I like to look everything over before I move. You come into a town and try to whack the guy out first thing, you're not likely to get ahead. I been doing this a long time now and I don't even have an armed assault bust. You know why?"

  "Because you're careful," she said.

  "And I have never been in the joint since the year I met you. You know why?"

  "Because you're careful," she said.

  "Right with Eversharp," he said. "Besides, I do it too quick, we don't get to see Boston and have our tab picked up in this hotel. No point rushing things," he said.

  He went into the shower. The blond woman read her travel guide. He came out in ten minutes, his body smooth and shiny from the shower, drying his hair with a towel. She looked at him.

  "You're really something," she said. "Forty years old and you haven't got two ounces of fat on your body. What did you weigh when I met you?"

  "One-eighty."

  "What'd you weigh now?" Steiger smiled. "One-eighty and two ounces."

  "Two ounces in twenty-two years. You're beautiful."

  Steiger plugged a maroon hair dryer into the outlet over the bedside table and sat on the bed to dry his hair.

  "Twenty-two years?" He took a Lucky Strike from a package on the table and put it in his mouth and lit it from a silver Zippo. "Jesus Christ, you were a baby. Ain't that something, twenty-two years." "I was fourteen," she said. She ran her hand along his thigh. "But not now."

  He put one hand on top of hers. "Your book tell you what we're looking at out our window?" he said.

  "I don't know," she said, "what's out there."

  "Take a look," he said.

  She got up and walked to the window. He looked at her naked back as she walked. She was tanned all over. She looked out of the window at the river and at Boston University beyond it.

  "It's a school," she said. "Some college, I imagine." She opened the book and looked at it. "It's Boston University, I think."

  He shut off the hair dryer and came and stood beside her. Her head did not reach his shoulders. She leaned her head against him. Below on the river a cabin cruiser headed slowly down the river toward the dam and the harbor. Behind it a wide and symmetrical V spread out over the surface of the river.

  "I wonder what it would have been like to have gone to college," she said. "You'd have played football and I'd have been a cheerleader. And we'd have learned stuff and could talk about books and…" She shrugged.

  Steiger held the burning cigarette in his mouth and let the smoke drift up past his dark narrow face.

  "We don't need no fucking college, kid," he said. "We got all we need." "We got each other," she said.

  He put his arm around her. "That's all we need, kid. We don't need any fucking other things else." "I know," she said. She put her arm around him and they stood looking down at the river as the powerboat moved out of sight and the wave V'd out and disappeared against the shoreline. "I know."

  CHAPTER 13.

  "What we need is a sniper gun with a scope," Hood said to Newman.

  "We got firepower, but it's short-range stuff and we're having trouble getting close." "You got anything?" Newman said.

  Hood shook his head. They had followed Karl to his furniture store again and were sitting in the Bronco parked up the street, eating hamburgers and drinking coffee.

  "You'll have to pick one up," Hood said. "There's a good gun shop in Watertown."

  "What should I get?"

  "Tell them you want something like a Springfield 1903 A4 If you can get one, get it. If they don't have one, get something comparable. Tell them you want it for competition, and be sure it's got a scope. Any.go/og-type rifle with a scope will do. Remington, Savage, whatever."

  "Okay, I'll go down tomorrow." "You have an ID card? "Hood asked.

  "Yes, I got one when I bought that shotgun I keep."

  "That's all you need," Hood said.

  They finished the hamburgers. In the back of the Bronco a big fly with a green tail buzzed at the rear window, bumping it again and again.

  "Let's look at the alley," Hood said.

  "What's down there?"

  "How will we know if we don't look?" Hood said. "You have to know everything, Aaron. The layout of everything, where everyone's deployed, all the options." Newman nodded. "Okay," he said.

  They got out of the car and strolled down toward the alley that ran between the furniture store and a restaurant. />
  "There's got to be some reason for an alley," Hood said. "There must be a door or a ventilator, or windows or something. Otherwise they'd just butt the buildings up together." His eyes moved back and forth across the mouth of the alley. He was moving on the balls of his feet and his fingers drummed very gently but steadily against his thighs.

  God, doesn't he love this, Newman thought.

  There were three rats in the alley; one was on the ground and two were in the trash barrel that sat outside the back door to the restaurant.

  The three rats scuttled away as Newman and Hood came down from the street. Besides the trash barrel there was nothing else in the alley.

  Opposite the restaurant door was an unmarked fire door with metal facing painted beige. Against the back wall of the alley there was an empty wine bottle leaning, and what might have been human feces in the corner.

  Hood reached the blank door into the furniture store. He put one hand quietly on the knob and turned. The door didn't open.

  "Locked," Hood said.

  Newman felt relief move through him along the nerve tracks. "Okay," he said. "Let's get out of this alley."

  Hood was looking up at the alley walls. "Wait a minute now," he said.

  "We haven't looked at everything. Maybe a window, a ledge, you don't know. You have to check everything out."

  "Why, Chris?" Newman said, "Why do you have to." Newman saw a darkness between him and the alley mouth. He looked at it. It was the enormous man from Karl's office. He stood perhaps three feet inside the alley, blocking it.

  Newman said, "Chris."

  Hood, his back turned to the man, looked over his shoulder. He said softly, "Yeah, I see. Don't touch your gun." The enormous man said nothing. He moved slowly down the alley toward them.

  Hood slid the P-g8 out of his shoulder holster. He was halfway behind Newman and the gesture was screened from the big man. Holding the gun at his side and behind his thigh, he turned. The big man kept coming.

  Newman felt weak. He knew he wasn't. He could bench-press more than two hundred pounds. He knew he was big and strong. But he felt the strength go out of him. His legs and arms felt limp, the muscles flaccid. He was tired. He faced toward the big man, his hands feeling awkward and out of place. Should he put them up like a prizefighter?

  Hold them waist high and half closed, ready for anything?

  The man was upon them. "What are you doing here," he said.

  The voice, Newman thought, Jesus what a scary voice. He tried to bunch the muscles in his shoulders to be ready.

  Hood stepped half a step forward and brought the Walther out from behind his leg. In a lateral karate-like movement he swung the gun up over the man's shoulder and hit him in the temple with the top of the barrel where the shells eject. It was so quick the big man never moved. The gun made a sound like a mallet hitting a grapefruit, and the man's knees buckled. Hood hit him again on the temple. The sound was squishier. And again. The man began to sag.

  Like a Peckinpah movie, for cris sake Newman thought. It was as if the man were too big to fall suddenly. And slowly, as if in slow motion, he went down and sprawled in the alley on his stomach. Blood showed at the temple in a small ooze, there was redness around it.

  Hood bent over and took the man's wallet from his left hip pocket. He pulled the man's wristwatch on its expandable bracelet off the nsan's left wrist. Then with a short jabbing motion of his right hand, the gun still in it, he gestured up the alley. "Go," he said.

  Newman first with Hood behind him ran up the alley. Newman didn't slow at the alley mouth but kept right on running. Hood was five steps behind as they reached the car.

  "Drive," Hood said, and Newman got behind the wheel, took the keys from over the visor, and started the car. They turned right on Causeway under the MBTA elevated, and left onto the Charlestown Bridge; in City Square, Newman went up the ramp onto Route 93 and headed north.

  "He didn't recognize me," Newman said.

  "No. Not without your deaf-mute getup," Hood said. "If he had I'd have killed him."

  "You sure he didn't?"

  "Yeah. I was watching his eyes; he didn't show any sign of recognizing you."

  "Lucky," Newman said.

  Hood looked at the contents of the man's wallet. "Not much," Hood said. "Two hundred and twenty-eight dollars, and a Massachusetts driver's license. His name is Tate. Gordon Tate. His address is the same as Karl's. He was born in 1940."

  Newman took in a deep breath and blew it out. "That was one of the guys from Karl's office, you know. The same one that tied up Janet." "I know," Hood said. "One thing, Aaron. You shouldn't have run right out of the alley like you did. You come to an alley mouth you stop and see what's out there. Then you move."

  Newman was silent as the Bronco rolled through Somerville toward Medford. "I was scared, Chris. I guess I wasn't thinking."

  Hood shrugged. Some powerboats rode at anchor in the Mystic River, narrower here by half than it was only a few miles closer to the sea where the bridge arched over it and the cargo ships sailed up it to the pallet docks.

  "I wasn't much help to you in the alley, Chris," Newman said.

  They went up slightly onto an overpass that crossed the river. "It takes learning, Aaron," Hood said. "You got a little combat experience today, that's all. Wasn't much you needed to do. You spotted him first."

  "Why'd you tell me not to touch my gun?"

  "Didn't want to spook them if we could help it. Shooting might bring cops, or bad guys with guns. I don't know. Kill that guy and maybe Karl would get nervous and be too hard to hit. I just wanted to get by without the guns if we could."

  Newman nodded.

  "Guy was too cocky," Hood said. "Big huge guys like that are sometimes. Doesn't occur to them that they can be taken. He got too close. Should have had his gun out. Shouldn't have gone down an alley with two guys if he didn't. We're not his size, but we're not midgets.

  He should have noticed that."

  "I don't know if not being a midget outside makes any difference," Newman said. "Not if you're a midget inside."

  Newman was staring straight ahead as he drove. Hood looked at him and sucked on the inside of his cheeks and said nothing.

  CHAPTER 14.

  Lieutenant Murray Vincent sat in his office at 1010 Commonwealth Avenue and fingered a thick collection of computer print-out sheets. He sat square in his chair with both feet flat on the floor and the computer sheets on his spare neat desk. As he went through them he moved his eyes methodically down the names on the sheets, turned a sheet, read the names, turned a sheet, read the names. Occasionally he stopped and went back reading more data on a name he recognized. He did this for an hour and eight minutes. Then he yelled through the open door, "Bobby." A uniformed State Trooper appeared in the door. "Corporal Croft is out on a detail, sir. Sheet says he'll be back in about half an hour."

  "Send him in when he gets here," Vincent said.

  In half an hour Croft came into Vincent's office.

  Vincent said, "Close the door, Bobby."

  Croft did. Then he sat in a straight chair beside Vincent's desk.

  Vincent handed him a multifold print-out sheet, folded over. There was a name marked in blue pencil. "That a familiar name to you?" Vincent said.

  Croft read, "Aaron Newman. Sure. He's the guy that saw Karl kill the broad in Smithfield and then got scared off." "It appears," Vincent said, "that Newman has purchased a firearm."

  "Un-huh?"

  "Whyn't you look into it, Bobby."

  "You think he's still involved with Karl?"

  "Whyn't you look into it and see. See exactly what he purchased, and see if you can figure out why. But don't talk to Newman without first talking to me. Okay?"

  "How'd you happen to see this listing?" Croft said.

  "I try to thumb through them all each week," Vincent said. He made a small smile.

  "All the firearm purchases in the state? Every week?"

  "I just sort of scan them."

/>   "No wonder you're a lieutenant and I'm a corporal."

  "I take the Commonwealth's money," Vincent said, "I do the Commonwealth's work." "Amazing," Croft said. "A-fucking-ma zing "Bob, stop dazzling me with your vocabulary. Go find out about Newman and his gun. Maybe there's something in it for us."

  Croft nodded. He took the folded computer sheet and went out.

  Vincent took a brown paper bag out of the bottom right desk-drawer.

  From it he took a meatloaf sandwich with mayonnaise and lettuce, a nectarine, a Santa Rosa plum, half a dill pickle carefully wrapped in foil, two blue-checkered paper napkins, and a wedge-shaped plastic container in which there was a slice of homemade cherry pie. Taped neatly to the pie container with a piece of Scotch tape was a plastic fork. He spread a paper towel on his desk and carefully arranged his lunch on it. Then he took a big blue and white Thermos bottle from the same drawer and took off the cap. He poured skimmed milk into the cap and ate his lunch. He drank some milk and patted his mouth dry with the napkin and opened the pie container. On top of the pie was a small piece of paper with a heart and three kisses drawn on it. He smiled and put the paper in his desk drawer and ate the pie. When he was through he wrapped the plum and nectarine pits, along with the napkins and the plastic fork, in the foil from his pickle. He threw the foil away. He got up and went to the washroom and rinsed out the Thermos and the pie container. He washed his hands and face and went back to his desk. He put the Thermos and the pie container in the paper bag from which his lunch had come, put the bag away in the bottom right drawer of his desk. He took a toothpick from his shirt pocket and cleaned his teeth. Then he took a file folder from his in-basket and opened it and began to make notations in the margin with a blue pencil.

  At two-forty Bobby Croft came back into his office and sat down in the straight chair. He took a small notebook out of his inside coat pocket, leafed through it until he found what he wanted, and then looked up at Vincent.