Sixkill

by Robert B. Parker

"Henry speaks many languages," I said.

  Z studied Henry for a minute.

  "You're a big, strong guy," Henry said. "And you got nice natural reflexes. I don't want to close with you until you're ready to puke."

  "No wind," Z said.

  Henry nodded.

  "And you don't know how to fight," Henry said. "Ever been a bouncer?"

  "Yeah."

  "Figures, they like guys like you," Henry said. "Big, scary. Stop a lot of fights before they start."

  "And most of them are drunk," Z said.

  "Like you were," I said. "When we fought."

  "Drunk's never an asset in a fight," Henry said.

  "I don't need to be drunk," Z said.

  "Sure," Henry said. "Guy like you . . . You grab some guy, don't know any more than you. You slam him up against a wall, give him one big punch on the side of the head. Fight over."

  Z nodded.

  "Been winning fights all my life," Z said. "Never had a problem until the other day."

  Henry nodded toward me.

  "Then you ran into him?" Henry said. "And he knew more than you."

  Z nodded.

  "Well," Henry said. "There you go."

  Zebulon Sixkill IV

  After the second game of his junior year, Harmon Stockard called Zebulon into the football office.

  "What's going on, Z?" he said.

  "What?" Zebulon said.

  "Coach Brock says you're not in the weight room much anymore, and when you do show up, you dog it."

  "I work hard, Coach," Zebulon said.

  "They tell me you are ten pounds heavier than you were last spring."

  Zebulon shrugged.

  "Against Oregon last week you carried twenty-eight times and gained forty yards. Against Michigan this week, you carried twenty-three times and gained fifty-one yards."

  Zebulon didn't say anything.

  "You used to explode into the line," Stockard said. "You hit the hole so quick Turk had to hurry to get the handoff out there."

  Zebulon was silent.

  "Now the hole closes before you get to it."

  "Maybe guys aren't holding their blocks," Zebulon said.

  "Hell they aren't," Stockard said. "Turk's turned and holding the ball and looking for you and here you come a step later. It's all it takes. It's the difference between everything and nothing."

  Zebulon looked at Stockard and looked away. He didn't speak.

  "You are throwing it away, kid," Stockard said. "You were a first-round lock."

  Zebulon shrugged.

  "I'm going to start Rollie next week," Stockard said. "I'm gonna sit you until you're ready to play."

  Zebulon nodded. They both sat for a moment. Then Stockard got up and came to stand in front of Zebulon.

  "Goddamn it, Z, you're special, you got a chance to be Riggins, Csonka, Jimmy Taylor."

  Zebulon didn't know who those men were.

  "Don't let it go," Stockard said. "Most people never get the chance. You got the chance. Don't let it go."

  Zebulon shook his head as if there was something in his ear. He stood, and in standing, pushed Stockard a step back from him.

  "Fuck this," Zebulon said.

  He walked out of the office. Stockard watched him go. Kid was the best he ever coached. Stockard wanted to save him but didn't know how. He couldn't let one of his players shove him, for crissake. Kid was always kind of sullen. No, that wasn't fair. Kid was always very quiet. No excitement. He was so good. It came so easy. But he seemed to have no rah-rah. Play this game, you needed a little rah-rah. Rollie wasn't as good as Z. No one was. But Rollie was good. And he was excited with it. And excited with the game. Maybe if it wasn't so easy for Z. After the Arizona State game, Stockard took a deep breath and cut him.

  16

  IT WAS KIND OF COLD for a picnic, so Susan and I sat in the front seat of my car and ate submarine sandwiches and looked at the river from a parking lot near WBZ. That is to say, I ate my sandwich. Susan deconstructed hers and ate it like a composed salad from the wrapper in her lap.

  "Did you arrange for Henry to be there?" Susan said. "Or was it serendipity?"

  "Serendipity," I said.

  Susan plucked a small slice of pickle from the sandwich and ate it.

  "Well, it was fortuitous," she said when she had finished chewing. "Don't you think?"

  "Susan," I said. "If you keep talking like you went to Harvard, I may be forced to withhold sex."

  "When's the last time you did that?" Susan said.

  "Well," I said. "I haven't ever had to actually withhold. The threat was always enough."

  "Besides," Susan said. "I did go to Harvard."

  "Well, I suppose that gives you a mulligan," I said.

  Susan said, "Whew," and carefully ate a tomato slice.

  There were a lot of high clouds in the sky, and the river was gray in the raw spring light, and it moved past, without seeming to, at a pretty good clip. The college crews were out. But they seemed always to be out, except when the river was frozen. There were recreational rowers, too. I ate some of my sandwich. Susan took a bite off of the edge of a cold cut.

  "How did he take it?" Susan said. "When Henry showed him up?"

  "Z? Not bad. Like he took it when I beat him. He was startled and then puzzled, except with Henry he wasn't drunk."

  "What time of day?" Susan said.

  "Early afternoon," I said.

  "Many people are not drunk in the early afternoon," Susan said.

  "But some are," I said. "And this particular early afternoon, he wasn't."

  Susan nodded.

  "And he gave you no excuses?"

  "No. He'd been beaten, and he knew it."

  "He wants you still to train him?"

  "He does," I said.

  "And you will," Susan said.

  "Yes. Try to get him in shape, too."

  "Has he told you anything new about that girl's death?" Susan said.

  "I haven't asked," I said.

  "Why not?" Susan said.

  I shrugged.

  Susan looked at me while she nibbled another quarter-inch bite off the edge of the cold cut.

  "Because you don't want him to think you're training him just to get information," Susan said.

  "That's probably correct," I said.

  "Are you?" Susan said.

  "Training him so he'll tell me stuff?"

  "Yes."

  "I'm training him for several reasons," I said.

  "Is information one of them?" Susan said.

  "It is," I said.

  Susan smiled and patted my thigh.

  "You wouldn't be you if it weren't," she said.

  "We wouldn't want that," I said.

  "No, we wouldn't," Susan said. "But you also want to help him."

  "You think?" I said.

  "Does anyone know you like I do?"

  "I hope not," I said.

  "He wants to be a tough guy," Susan said. "He's come to the right place."

  "I can't teach him how to be a tough guy," I said. "I can teach him how to fight. But he'll have to be tough on his own."

  "I know," Susan said.

  "You're as tough as I am," I said.

  "I know that, too," Susan said.

  "But you wouldn't win many fistfights," I said.

  "Depends who I was fighting," Susan said.

  "Yes," I said. "I guess it would."

  "And you would win a lot of fistfights," she said.

  "Depends who I was fighting," I said.

  Susan smiled and nibbled on a fragment of her sandwich. Mine had long ago disappeared. I was drinking coffee from a large paper cup.

  "Winning fistfights means being good at fistfighting," Susan said. "Being tough means looking straight at something ugly, and saying, 'That's ugly; I'll have to find a way to deal with it.' And doing so."

  "By that definition, most people in their lives have a chance to be tough," I said.

  "And aren't," Susan said.


  "And we are," I said.

  "It's sort of how we make our living," Susan said. "Each in our own way."

  "Shouldn't that be 'each in his own way'?" I said.

  "Not when we're talking about me," Susan said.

  "If you say so, Ms. Harvard Ph.D.," I said.

  Susan smiled again. I would be quite happy to sit around and watch her smile, for nearly ever.

  "Couple of tough guys," I said.

  Susan's smile widened.

  "Are we a pair?" she said.

  17

  I WENT TO THE LOBBY of the Inn on the Wharf and sat down in a designer armchair, and waited. If I sat there long enough, someone from security would come over and ask me if I was a guest at the hotel. It took a bit more than an hour of sitting before a slightly stocky blonde woman in a dark blue pantsuit came over. She wore a small earpiece, like they do.

  "Excuse me, sir," she said. "Are you a guest of the hotel?"

  "No, ma'am," I said. "I want to talk to someone in security, but I don't know who is or isn't, you know?"

  "So you came here and sat and assumed after a while someone from security would present themselves," she said.

  "Exactly," I said.

  "Why didn't you ask at the desk?" she said.

  "Been told by a lawyer," I said, "that I'm not supposed to talk with you."

  "Really? What lawyer?"

  "Never got his name," I said. "Hotel Counsel."

  She shrugged.

  "Why do you want to talk with someone from security?" she said.

  "I'm a detective," I said. "Working on the Dawn Lopata case."

  "Who you work for," she said.

  The polished public self was beginning to wear away, revealing the presence of an actual person.

  "I'm private," I said. "Right now I'm working for Cone, Oakes, and Baldwin."

  "The law firm?"

  "Yes. They're defending Jumbo Nelson."

  "Pig," she said.

  "Agreed," I said. "But is he a guilty pig? I'd like to talk to the first people into the room after he called down."

  "I was one," she said.

  "What's your name?" I said.

  "Zoe," she said. "Zoe Foy."

  "Sit down, Zoe," I said. "Tell me what you saw."

  "Against the rules to sit with a guest," she said. "The big Indian let me in. It's a suite. Jumbo is there, in the living room, sipping some champagne."

  "Dressed?" I said.

  "Wearing some kind of velour sweat suit, 'bout size one hundred."

  "Shoes?"

  "The stupid-looking flip-flop slippers the hotel provides," she said. "Me and Arnie--Elmont, the other security person--go right past them into the master bedroom and she's on the bed, fully clothed, lying on her back, with her hands at her sides."

  "Bed made?" I said.

  "Yeah," she said. "Rumpled, but the spread was still on."

  "Was she alive?" I said.

  She shook her head.

  "When I was on the job in Quincy," she said. "I had some EMT training. Me and Arnie could see right away she was cooked. But I tried resuscitating her, until the ambulance arrived."

  "No luck?"

  "Nope."

  "They took her to Boston City?" I said.

  She smiled faintly.

  "Boston Medical Center," she said.

  "I'm old school," I said. "Anything else you saw that matters?"

  "Fatso looked a little worried," she said. "The Indian didn't look anything. Nobody looked, you know, like, sad that this kid had died."

  "You think they knew she was dead?"

  "She didn't look alive," Zoe said.

  "Anything else?" I said.

  She shook her head. I took my card from a shirt pocket and gave it to her.

  "If you or Arnie have any recollections of interest," I said, "give me a call."

  "The pig did it, you know," Zoe said.

  "You sure?" I said.

  "Creepy bastard," Zoe said.

  "Be nice if we could hang it on him," I said. "But maybe he didn't."

  She shrugged.

  "Idle question?" I said.

  "Sure."

  "How come you were willing to talk with me after I told you Hotel Counsel said no?"

  Zoe smiled.

  "Fuck him," she said.

  18

  THE ER DOCTOR who had worked on Dawn Lopata when they brought her in was a young guy named Cristalli. I talked with him in an examining room near the triage desk.

  "She was dead when she got here," he said. "We tried, why wouldn't we? But she was unresponsive."

  "Which is medical speak for dead," I said.

  "Just like discomfort," he said, "is medical speak for pain."

  "You have a thought about what killed her?" I said.

  "I'm not the ME," he said. "But we see a lot of death from trauma coming through here, and I'd say she was strangled."

  "You have a theory as to how?"

  "Ligature," he said.

  "How long before she would have lost consciousness?" I said.

  "Ten, fifteen seconds," he said.

  "And death?"

  "Minutes," Dr. Cristalli said.

  "So you'd need to keep the pressure on even after the vic loses consciousness," I said.

  "If it's death you're after," he said.

  "So can it happen accidentally?" I said.

  "Sure. We regularly get people who strangle themselves playing choking games, usually masturbatory."

  "You can tell?" I said.

  "That it was masturbatory?"

  "Yeah," I said.

  "It's usually pretty obvious at the death scene," Dr. Cristalli said.

  "It is?" I said. "Like how . . . Never mind."

  "Never mind?" Cristalli said.

  "I can guess, and it's all I want to do," I said.

  "Anyway," Cristalli said. "In this case, EMTs told me there was no sign of it."

  "She was fully dressed," I said. "Lying on her back on the bed."

  "That's what they told me," he said.

  "Presumably she'd been having sex," I said. "Odd that she'd be fully dressed."

  "I didn't check," Cristalli said. "Once it was clear that she wasn't coming back, she became a problem for the ME."

  "So you don't know if she was having sex or not," I said.

  "Nope," he said. "But there are a couple things about that, and I admit I wouldn't have registered it. One, she wasn't wearing a bra."

  "Not everyone does," I said.

  "Nurses insist that she would have."

  "Well-endowed?" I said.

  "Excessively, I would say, but it is, I suppose, a matter of personal preference."

  "What's the other thing?" I said.

  "Her underpants were on backward."

  "Backward," I said. "I'm not sure I could tell."

  "That's what they told me," he said.

  I nodded. We were quiet. Outside the exam room, a stretcher came in and stopped at the desk.

  "Somebody dressed her," I said.

  "The thought occurred," he said.

  Zebulon Sixkill V

  The deal was, Pat Calhoun said, "I take care of the money. You take care of the football."

  Zebulon nodded.

  "Well," Pat said. "You 're not taking care of the football no more."

  They were sitting in the red-leather front seat of Pat's silver Mercedes in a parking lot in Garden Grove.

  Zebulon was silent.

  "Looking back, I realize," Pat said, "that I'm at fault. I promised your grandfather I'd look after you, and . . . hell, I guess I trusted you too much."

  Zebulon shrugged.

  "You stopped running your sprints. You stopped pumping your iron. You weren't focused on the game. Hell, Harmon says you forgot half the plays; it's the same offense you ran in last year."

  Zebulon nodded. Pat shook his head.

  "Too much booze, too much dope, too many prom queens."

  "Just Lucy," Zebulon said.

  "Su
re," Pat said. "Too much fucking."

  "Don't talk about Lucy," Zebulon said.

  "Right, sorry," Pat said. "Anyway, you're out of shape, you're off the team, and I am not paying your way anymore."

  "How do I pay tuition?" Zebulon said.

  "Ain't that a good question," Pat said. "How you gonna eat, for crissake?"

  "Need a job," Zebulon said.

  "You do, and because I feel guilty, like I let your grandfather down, I'm gonna give you one. I own a club in Hollywood. They can use a bouncer. Big, tough guy like you. Good-looking don't hurt with the ladies. Don't know what they're paying, but I'll see to it you get enough to keep you going."

  "How about the condo," Zebulon said.

  "Gonna sell it," Pat said. "I'll give you a month to find another place."

  "Where's the club?" Zebulon said.

  "Sunset, west of Highland."

  "What time?"

  "Tomorrow night, nine o'clock. Wear black pants and a black T-shirt."

  Zebulon nodded.

  "Okay," he said.

  19

  HARVARD STADIUM LOOKED like a smaller version of the Roman Colosseum. Z and I were in the stadium, on the empty football field. We who are about to kick off salute you.

  "How far can you sprint?" I said.

  "I can run a ways," Z said.

  "How far can you do it full-out, like you were running the hundred."

  "We did forties when I was playing football."

  "Okay," I said. "We'll run some intervals. Sprint one hundred yards, walk two hundred. Sprint one hundred, walk two hundred. See how it works out."

  Z shrugged. We walked to the goal line.

  I said, "Go," and we sprinted for the other end zone. At the fifty, Z began to flag. And I was waiting for him in the end zone when he came slowly across the goal line, breathing very hard.