Life's Work

by Jonathan Valin

“Watch your mouth, Jewel,” Parks said again. “I’m warning you.”

  The woman glared at him. “You’re warning me,” she said contemptuously. “Just take your bottle, Lew, and go outside and play with the animals.”

  For a moment I thought he was going to hit her. But, of course, he didn’t. It was a scene they must have played out time and again, although the urgency of the situation made it seem particularly ugly. Giving his wife a vicious look, he snatched the whiskey bottle up by the neck and stalked out of the room.

  Once Parks was gone, Jewel sat down on the corner of the desk and eyed each of us, in turn—malevolently, as if we were minions of Satan.

  “Why did you come here?” she said. “What did you expect to find?”

  “We want to help him, Mrs. Parks,” Bluerock said.

  “He’s in danger,” I said.

  She laughed. “Danger?” She sucked her breath in sharply, as if the sight of us gave her pain. “You are the danger that my son is in. You and that awful woman who seduced him. You are the ones who led him astray. Who taught him evil habits.”

  “Try to understand this,” I said. “Some men are coming to kill him. We have to find him, or else they will kill him.”

  “Lies!” she said stoutly. “He is God’s perfect child, and Jesus will protect him.”

  “Not unless Jesus has a gun,” Bluerock said under his breath.

  The woman stood up suddenly and walked over to the sideboard. Bluerock leaped out of her way.

  “I want you to see something,” she said and pulled a framed picture off the wall. She stared at it for a second, then handed it to me.

  It was a faded color picture of her and her husband taken in a prosperous year. They were standing in front of the farmhouse, which in the photo looked as solid as a castle. The woman was young and smiling, dressed in gingham, her sunlit hair blowing about her face. Lew Parks was grinning, too. He looked lean and handsome. A cap, tilted at a jaunty angle, sat on his head like a crown. Behind them the fields were tall with grass, turned yellow in the photo by age. Between them, a good-looking boy of about five or six stood smiling.

  “Jesus will protect my son,” she said. She pulled the picture from my hands and hugged it to her breasts. “My son,” she said heavily. Her face bunched up, but she held back the tears by sheer force of will.

  “Get out!” she shouted angrily. “Get out. And leave him alone. For God’s sake, leave him alone. You’ve done enough to him, you and your kind. You’ve ruined his life. At least have the mercy to let him die in peace.”

  33

  WE LEFT Jewel Parks alone in the study, clutching that sad memory to her chest. Lew Parks was sitting outside on the stoop, head bowed, the bottle of whiskey held loosely in one hand.

  He didn’t look up as we walked by him to the car. But as we started to drive away, he came running across the yard, waving his hands at us wildly.

  “Slow down,” I said to Bluerock.

  Parks leaned in at my window, panting and sobbing.

  “He’s in terrible trouble, isn’t he?” he said. “My boy?”

  I nodded. “The worst kind of trouble.”

  “You’ve got to help him,” he said, looking desperately around him as if he were afraid she was listening in.

  “We have to find him first,” Bluerock said.

  “He’s at Mary Reno’s house,” he whispered. “On Big Flat.” His lips trembled into a smile. “She used to be his girlfriend in high school. She’s looking after him now.”

  “Where is Big Flat?” Bluerock said.

  “Take Ninety-three back east, then turn north at Blue Mountain. Sixty-six Big Flat. It’s a nice house. She’s a nice girl.”

  Bluerock gunned the motor, leaving the man standing there in the dust of the tires.

  ******

  It was completely dark by the time we got to Big Flat Road—a two-lane highway running north along the base of Blue Mountain. To our left the mountain blocked the night sky. To our right the Missoula valley stretched out beneath us—a sprinkling of white lights in the far distance. The road was tree-lined, the oaks arching over the roadway from either embankment like a canopy. About three miles north of the 93 cutoff, we started to see houses to our right, perched on the ridge overlooking the valley. They were modern-looking ranches and A-frames—a hell of a lot more elaborate and more expensive than anything I’d seen in the town. Whoever Mary Reno was, she had some money.

  The houses were clustered relatively close together, a little monied enclave dotted with spruce trees and pines. The first one in the group was number 60. It was set back a dozen yards from the roadway, with a cement driveway leading up to it. There were no lights on in the house. Sixty-one and two also looked deserted. But as we got closer to sixty-six, I could see a porch light twinkling in the darkness. There was a man standing on the front stoop of Mary Reno’s small redwood A-frame. There were also two cars parked in the driveway leading to the carport.

  “Goddamn it,” I said, half to myself, knowing already that it was them. Knowing, as well, what that meant for Parks, and for Bluerock and me.

  Bluerock started to slow down as we neared the Reno house.

  “Keep going!” I shouted at him.

  He glanced at me nervously and pressed the accelerator.

  By the time we passed sixty-six we were going at a pretty good clip. The man on the stoop watched us as we whizzed by. I could see his face clearly in the headlights. It was Mickey—big, dumb Mickey. He was holding something in his right hand. He tried to hide it as we came near him, but I got a glimpse of the rectangular barrel and the long cylindrical grip extending beneath it.

  “Christ,” I said. “He’s got a Mac-Ten.”

  “What’s a Mac-10?” Bluerock said.

  “A machine pistol.”

  “Shit,” Bluerock said grimly. “A machine gun.”

  We kept driving for a half mile beyond Mary Reno’s home. We came to a roadside turnaround, and I told Bluerock to pull over.

  “This is all wrong,” I said to him when we stopped. “We have no idea who’s in that house or what they’re packing.”

  “Bill’s in that house,” he said with anguish in his voice. “We’ve got to go back.”

  The sane part of me was saying, Wait them out. Wait until they’ve finished with Bill. But the sane part also knew that if Parks was in there, the girlfriend was in there too. Mary Reno. And I knew perfectly well what they would do to her, how they would arrange it to make it look as if Bill had butchered her and then killed himself. Another dead girl, like C.W. Like Laurel. I thought about that for a minute more and went cold inside. I simply couldn’t let it happen again. I couldn’t sit back and wait for them to finish.

  I stared into Bluerock’s anguished face. “I’ll go back there alone,” he said to me, “if I have to.”

  “You will, will you?” I said, smiling at his bravado.

  “Yes,” he said fiercely.

  I took a deep breath and felt it all melt away—all logic, all constraint, all sanity. “Fuck it,” I said to him. “I guess it’s as good a day as any to die.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Otto said with a laugh, and pounded me on the shoulder.

  We were both out of control by then. Two good buddies out on a little hunt in the big dark woods. It was suicidal madness, and yet I couldn’t have stopped it if I’d wanted to. And I didn’t want to.

  “Are we going to kick some ass?” Bluerock said, putting on his game face.

  “I guess we are,” I said, putting on mine.

  I reached into the back seat and got the shotguns. They were Winchester pumps. I loaded five shells in each. Took a handful of shells and stuffed them in my pants pocket. Bluerock took an ammunition box in his mitt and shoved it inside his shirt. I had one extra loaded clip for the .45. I stuck it in my other pants pocket. I pumped one of the shotguns, flipped the safety off, and laid it on the seat beside Bluerock. Then I cocked the other one and flipped the safety off.

  “
The best way to do it is to go straight through the front door,” I said, fighting like hell to think straight. “If we dick around trying to find some tricky way in there, we’re probably going to get killed before we get inside.”

  “Straight in,” Bluerock said, and swallowed hard.

  I took a big deep breath. “Pull up in the driveway and park behind the last car. We have to take Mickey out first. Get out of the car and shoot him. Aim low. Try to hit him in the middle of the body. You’ve got five shots, so don’t waste any. And reload as quickly as you can. You do know how to load that thing?”

  He nodded.

  “Once we knock Mickey down, we go straight through the door. Blow the damn thing off its hinges and go straight in, like a narcotics bust. For chrissake, don’t waste time. Straight through the door. Shoot anything that shoots back.”

  “Anything?”

  “We don’t have time to ask questions, Blue.”

  “What about Bill? And the girl?”

  “They’ll have to take their chances. They’ve got a better shot at surviving us than they do of surviving what Walt has planned for them.”

  “Who goes in first?” he said.

  “Whoever gets to the door first.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

  34

  BLUEROCK STARTED up the engine, put the car in gear, then turned in his seat to face me.

  “It’s been good knowing you, sport,” he said with his bulldog look. “I owe you a drink or two after this is over.”

  “We’ll get drunk as hell,” I told him.

  He turned back to the steering wheel, put one hand on it, and grabbed the shotgun in the other.

  Blue eased the car out on the highway, backed into the turnaround, and headed south toward Mary Reno’s house.

  In less than a minute I could see the light on the porch, glimmering through the pine trees. Then I could see the porch itself, and Mickey standing there. He lowered his arms when he saw our headlights—to hide the machine gun. The door behind him was situated in the middle of the A-frame window. The window was heavily draped, but there were lights on inside, filtering through the muslin folds of the curtains.

  Bluerock slowed down as he got close to the driveway. I clutched the shotgun in one hand and grabbed the door handle in the other. As we turned into the driveway, Mickey took a step off the porch. He peered at us quizzically, squinting through the headlights.

  My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat. Bluerock pulled to a stop and I shouted, “Go!”

  As soon as he opened the car door, Bluerock dived to the ground, rolling across the grass yard to his left. Mickey raised the machine pistol to his hip and trained it on Blue. By then I was out of the car with the shotgun at my shoulder. I fired as soon as the shotgun barrel cleared the roof of the car. The butt of the shotgun slammed back into my shoulder and the muzzle flash looked as if it extended all the way to where Mickey was standing. The roar of the piece was incredible—like a thunderclap.

  I’d aimed low—too low. The pellets hit Mickey below the knees, taking a bite out of the pavement that he was standing on and raising a cloud of cement dust and shrapnel, as if a grenade had gone off at his feet. Mickey fell backward, firing the machine gun as he went down. The gun made a vicious rattling brrapp!, spewing fire like the shotgun. The bullets flapped through the pine trees with a sound like a flock of birds taking flight.

  I saw Bluerock leap to his feet. Then I was around the car and heading for the front door. I almost tripped over Mickey as I ran to the stoop. It didn’t register at that moment, but one of his feet had been blown off at the ankle and was still standing, in its shoe, on the cement walk. There was blood everywhere on the walk and the grass.

  As he came up to the door Bluerock fired the shotgun from his hip. The wood exploded as if it had been hit by a wrecking ball, leaving a gaping hole in its center. Shoulder down, Blue crashed through the hole, firing as he went. I was right behind him.

  The blast of his shotgun had smashed a table lamp on the far wall. It was sparking like a firecracker on its broken base. One of the drapes had begun to smolder, and there was already a good deal of smoke in the room. I fired one blast to my left as I came through the door, tearing a hole in an overstuffed sofa. And another blast straight in front of me. I didn’t see Walt or Habib but I knew they were firing back at us. I could hear the brrapp of a machine pistol and the whizz and pop of the bullets as they shattered furnishings and windows and tattooed the plaster walls. I dived to the floor behind the sofa. I could see Bluerock crawling behind a table a couple of yards to the right of me. I shoved a few more rounds in the shotgun. Pumped it and came up, firing.

  I hit someone on the far side of the room. I heard him groan and cry out, “I’m hit!”

  I pumped again and kept firing in the direction of the cries. There was so much noise and so much smoke in the room that there was no way to pick a target. I fired at the sound of the guns and at the shifting shapes in the smoke. I fired five times, dived back down behind the sofa to reload, and felt my right arm go numb. I didn’t know how many times I’d been hit—I didn’t even know, until then that I had been hit. But when I looked down at my body, I saw that the right half of my shirt, from shoulder to wrist, was soaked with blood. I sat behind the sofa, breathing hard and listening to the machine pistol go off again and a shotgun roar. I pulled the Colt out of my belt with my left hand and stood up, firing at the muzzle flash of the machine pistol. I fired seven times, flipped out the empty clip and slammed in the fresh one with my bad hand, firing seven more times into the smoke and wreckage. It wasn’t until I’d squeezed off the last shot that I realized that I was the only one still firing.

  I threw the pistol to the floor, scooped up the shotgun, braced it against my left leg, and pumped it with one hand. I started across the room, but my legs wouldn’t hold me, and I went down heavily on my knees.

  I must have sat there for a full minute, listening to the dead silence of the room, watching the smoke swirling and sliding along the floor. There was a police siren wailing in the distance. It was another minute before I realized that they were headed our way.

  I tried to get up again, but I couldn’t stand. I’d lost too much blood. I crawled back toward the door, using the butt of the shotgun to pull me along. Somewhere in the chaos of the room something made a thud. If it was Walt or Habib, there was no way I could protect myself any longer, so I didn’t worry about it. I kept crawling, back to the spot where I’d last seen Bluerock.

  He was still there, lying faceup behind the table, the shotgun in his hands. I couldn’t tell if he was alive or not, but he’d been hit full in the chest. There was blood pulsing out of his shirt. There was blood everywhere—on his face and on the floor around him.

  I stared at him sadly and wondered what had happened to his friend Parks in all that smoke and madness—to the man for whom he had given his life. Something made a noise to my right. I looked up, dizzily, expecting to see a gun barrel pointed at me. Instead, I saw a cop, pistol in hand, staring into the room with a look of shock on his face. He was the last thing I saw before I passed out.

  35

  THEY TOOK me to a hospital in Missoula. I’d been hit three times. Once in the right shoulder. Once in the right hand. And once in the side. I should have died, the doctor told me. Like Bluerock.

  He had been declared dead on the scene. Him, Mickey, Walt, and Habib. And Clayton, too. Phil Clayton. Nobody seemed to know what he’d been doing there. Whether he was negotiating with Walt or trying to entrap him. The Cincinnati Police finally decided the matter by choosing to make a hero out of him. And out of me too.

  They sent Al Foster up personally to tell me the good news. By then I’d been in the hospital for two weeks, and my wounds had healed sufficiently to allow me to be wheeled around by a pretty, no-nonsense nurse named Flo.

  Al found me in the hospital cafeteria, sitting in my wheelchair.

  “How ya doing, Harry?�
�� he said, sitting down across from me at the table.

  I did a double take and smiled at him. “I’ve been better.”

  “I hear you lost a foot of intestine,” he said.

  “And a piece of my palm.” I waved my bandaged hand at him.

  “That’s tough.” He looked at me for a moment and shook his head. “You’re crazy, you know that?”

  I nodded at him.

  “You here to take me back?” I said.

  “I’m here to decorate you,” he said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. You’ve got some friends in high places. Even old George stuck his neck out on this one. And your friend Petrie at the Cougars too. George is going to testify that he swore you in as a special deputy before you left town—you and that guy, Bluerock. And Petrie is going to pick up the tab for your medical expenses. You’re a lucky guy.”

  “A lucky guy,” I said with a laugh.

  “The bad news is that Clayton’s getting a medal, too. His last one, thank God. Six, two, and even, he was up here planning to sell Parks out. After that, I don’t know what he had in mind. Some double cross, probably, that would have snared Walt Kaplan and made Phil look like a hero.” Al pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. “And now he is a hero. The way we’re going to tell it, he was with you when you busted Kaplan. He was on your side and got killed in the shoot-out.”

  “That stinks,” I said angrily. “For all I know, he shot me. Or Bluerock.”

  “I know, Harry,” Al said soothingly. “But it’s just too ugly the other way.”

  I stared at him for a moment. “I’m not going to go for it, Al. When I get home, I’m telling the truth. I owe it to Bluerock.”

  He sighed. “Think about it, Harry. You’re not going to do Bluerock any good now. And you’re going to make bad trouble for yourself.”

  “I can stand a little trouble,” I said.

  He laughed. “So it would appear.”

  ******

  We sat there for a while, talking. When Al got up to leave, I asked him what had happened to Parks. No one at the hospital had been willing to tell me, although I’d questioned a dozen people.