Comeback (Gun Pedersen Book 1) (15 page)

25

The street was quiet as Gun burst from the Ford, vaulted the front end of the Thunderbird, and ran
through Rutherford’s yard like it was center field. A
few steps from the door he remembered the Smith &
Wesson, but he didn’t stop. If Rutherford was taking
those baseball-bat blows, he needed speed before
force. Then Gun was through the door and twisted
screws and hinges were zinging through the darkened
room, and two men in light polo shirts stood over a crumpled-up bloodied figure. Too late.

The one holding the bat was about six-two, and
spread upward from his pencil waist like an
overturned volcano.

“The door was unlocked,” he said. His voice was low and liquid, full of potential. “You didn’t have to
mess it up that way.”

Gun stood still while his eyes adjusted to the
dimness. He was glad the man with the bat had
spoken. It meant he was the type who liked to

intimidate with his mouth before doing the real
damage.

Gun didn’t answer. He kept his eyes open, his hands
low. He charged.

The guy with the bat wasn’t looking for it. He had to
pull back his arms for a swing, and Gun’s height and speed pushed his hurried blow too high. Gun ducked it easily and caught the man’s breastbone with a
powder-keg shoulder. It broke his grip on the bat and made a loud crack in the plaster when the man hit the
wall. Gun turned and looked for the other one. He was
taller and leaner and took Gun more seriously. He
moved on his toes like a boxer, fists making circlets in
the air. Gun could hear him blowing soft jabs of air through his nose.

Gun didn’t dance. He stood on the balls of his feet,
heels a half inch from the floor, one foot slightly ahead of the other, and waited. The boxer seemed impatient.
He shuffled. Gun didn’t move. The boxer’s head
bobbed side to side across his shoulders, anxious. Gun
could hear the first man moving now, probably grop
ing for the bat. The boxer couldn’t wait any longer. He
sent a lanky jab at Gun’s face, and Gun slapped it
away with an open hand. Behind Gun the first man
rummaged on the floor. The boxer feinted with his left
and came in with a roundhouse right, and this time
Gun did not slap the hand but caught it in his own and
snapped it downward, clenching his jaw as he felt the snap of wrist bones. The boxer screamed and went to
his knees. Gun released the hand.

The first man had recovered the bat and enough of
his nerve to belt Gun from behind. The blow was vertical, like those Gun had witnessed through the window. It landed on Gun’s collarbone. He felt the
swoosh of air in his right ear just before the pain.

It was flat and numbing and thick, like being hit
from behind by a quiet Kenworth, and the swelling
fire of it made Gun feel like he was expanding to fill
the room. He locked his knees, fighting blackout, then
turned to see what he could do to keep it from
happening again.

The man with the bat was breathing hard. His chest
was rumbling as he recovered from the effort of the
swing. Gun watched from a cloud as he brought the
bat back, sighting in, shifting his feet for balance. He
saw the man in stop motion: pant, screw his knuckles down tight on the bat handle, spit red on Rutherford’s
dark carpet. Then he swung.

The action pulled free Gun’s sunken reflexes. His
left hand shot up, palm open to protect his head. It
was like catching a cannonball. Bat met flesh with a
cherry-bomb crack, icing Gun’s entire forearm in a
glow of shock. He closed his fingers and found them
encircling the bat. It had stopped cold, two inches
from his temple. The attempt made him angry, and he
squeezed the bat and ripped it away. He grabbed the man’s shoulders and pushed him into a silver-framed print of
Guernica,
breaking the glass.

“You’re working for Hedman,” Gun said. “Tell me
all of it. Now.”

The man looked down at his buddy, who was
rocking his wrist and sobbing on the floor. He looked
sullenly at the walls. Then his eyes went to the dark
door of an adjoining room, and at the same moment
Gun heard the soft squeal of floorboards. He dropped
his hold and spun, saw two guys dressed in jeans and
black T-shirts. One was tall and skinny and carried
some weapon Gun had seen once in a terrible movie
on a coach flight: two smooth sticks joined at the ends
by a short chain. The wood was lacquered black,
shiny. The other guy was short to medium, empty-
handed, and had a high-school mustache on his lip.

“You jerks took your time getting in here,” said the
guy Gun had let go.

“We been havin’ a look. Rutherford didn’t keep
much stuff around, did he?” The tall skinny one
looked at Gun and shook his head. He was holding
one of the sticks loosely in his right hand so the other stick dangled free, and now he started a slow wrist motion that made the dangler do unhurried circles.
“You’re large sonovabitch,” he said.

Gun pointed at the tall man’s sticks. “I saw one of
those in a movie once.”

“Yeah?” A smile.

“Bad movie.”

The guy with the ruined wrist had dragged himself
over near the door. “How fast can you kill that
bastard?” he said, in a voice not soft enough to hide
the sniffles.

“Pretty fast,” said the guy with the sticks. Gun saw the swinging wood accelerate to a blur, saw a sudden
metal gleam in the hand of the short kid, felt his arms
yanked back by the guy he’d gone and let go of. His collarbone felt wrong, weak. There were too damn
many of them.

“Nice thing about the nunchuks,” said the stick
swinger, “you get them going like hell, you can’t even
see what hits you,” but then the front screen door
crashed in and Gun
could
see the nunchuks, could see them perfectly as they came free from the long skinny
hand and flew at the ceiling, splitting the plaster. He
heard the muffled
whup
that straightened the tall guy
up like a post and the second
whup
that brought spray
from his neck. There were two more people in the
room now, holding short black pistols with long black
silencers. The short kid was dead on his face,
whup,
and the boxer with the broken wrist hadn’t even had
time to get up off the floor. The guy that had been
holding Gun’s arms was out in front now, on his
knees.

“No, don’t, I got to pray,” he was saying to the

pistols, but one of them came forward to rest between
his eyebrows. Gun turned away.
Whup.

In the quiet Gun had his first chance to look at his
rescuers. If that’s what they were. They came toward
him now, not talking, one wearing a red
stocking cap, the other in camouflage fatigues. There
was a quick bitter scent of spent shells and copper.

The man in the stocking cap touched Gun’s elbow
and pointed to the kitchen. The other man, Gun
realized, the one in camo, he’d seen before. It was the
eyes. The right eye. The iris was abnormally small,
stranded like a little green island on a large white
globe. Now the eye winked at Gun.

Gun said, “Hi, Rudy.”

Rudy nodded and almost smiled. He led Gun
through the kitchen and opened the door for him. A van was backed up to the steps. Gun climbed in and took the chair Rudy offered, a padded office chair
bolted to the middle of the floor. Rudy and stocking
cap stashed their guns in compartments under the
carpeting of the van’s floor and sat on benches along
the windowless sides.

“Tell me, Gun, how is it everybody remembers my
face?”

“A gift and a curse, I bet.” Gun nodded at Rudy’s
right eye.

“How you been? Your hair turned white since I seen
you last, what, twenty years back now.”

“After the series,” Gun said. He remembered his confusion that day, answering the door and finding
this man standing there, unmatched eyeballs and a
comedian’s grin. “So tell me. What’s Friedrich’s stake
in all this? Must be a big one, you folks seem serious.”

“It’s Freddy now, part of the makeover. But he’ll
want to discuss it with you himself.”

“So we’re on our way to see him.”

Rudy nodded.

“Don’t tell me we’re going to Nevada.”

“No. Not even leaving town. Freddy’s got a tempo
rary office here. I think you might like it too.” Rudy
looked toward the front and called to the driver, “Almost there?”

The driver answered with a hard right turn. Gun felt
the van strain against a steep incline, then level off and
slow to a stop.

“Here we are,” said Rudy. He reached into his chest
pocket and said, “You’ll need this.” Before Gun was
aware of what Rudy had thrust into his hand, the
van’s double doors flew open and before them, hulk
ing beneath the city’s skyline like a buffalo in a field of
dazzling stars, was the hump-backed Metrodome. Gun looked at the ticket in his hand.

“In the mood for a game?” Rudy asked.

“I never did like warehouse ball,” Gun answered.

“Let’s go in, anyway.”

26

The wide cement corridor had T-shirt booths and TV
monitors and too many decibels of crowd noise. Rudy
stopped at a food stand, bought three brats and
handed one to Gun. “That way,” he shouted, point
ing.

Passing a gate, Gun had his first glimpse of the field.
It didn’t look like a ballfield so much as an illustrator’s
rendition of one. The perspective was all wrong. Everything was too green, too distant, too small. The
players were little plastic men on a shampooed rug.

Rudy knocked on a gray door in the corridor. It
opened and Gun was looking at Friedrich Cheeseman, who put out his hand. Gun wasn’t ready to take it. Not
yet.

“A pleasure, again,” Cheeseman said. Behind him
was a clear Plexiglas wall, and beyond that the playing
field.

“I hope so.”

Cheeseman ushered Gun inside and dismissed

Rudy with a wave of his manicured hand. His face
was lined and leathery and round as an old-fash
ioned catcher’s mitt, but now as he smiled, it
turned oval with happiness. He hadn’t changed
much over the years—maybe put on a few more
pounds—but something was different. Gun couldn’t
tell what.

“But it is a pleasure. Please, sit down.” Cheeseman
gave Gun a stuffed chair next to a table loaded with
cold cuts, crackers, vegetables, and fruit. “Nice view,
don’t you think?” he asked, sitting down.

Gun nodded and took a bite of his bratwurst.
Below, Kent Hrbek hit a sharp single to left, scoring
Puckett from third.

“What about these guys!” Cheeseman cried, tilting
his head toward the playing field. His manner was
easy. Gun might have been an old friend Cheeseman
watched games with every week.

“Good bats,” Gun said.

“Damn right. A little help in the right places and
they could contend. I think I might buy them.”

“Pitching’ll cost you some.”

Cheeseman smiled. “I’ve dealt in arms before.” He laughed, then turned back to the game and swore as
Bush struck out to end the inning.

“Friedrich, what’s going on?”

“Freddy. Call me Freddy.”

“Part of the makeover.”

“I’ve come a long way, Gun.” Cheeseman sighed,
pouting a little. “I’m respectable. I’m clean. I don’t
even throw shadows anymore, you know? Me twenty
years ago, me now. Two different men. Nobody’s got anything on me. No embarrassing friends anymore.”
He winked. “Except a few in prison.”

“I don’t care about all that.”

“I know, but you do need to know what I’ve
become. It’s important that you trust me. You see,

there was Friedrich, and now there’s Freddy. Freddy’s
on the up and up.”

“And before—the man I met was Friedrich?”

“Friedrich turning.”

“All right.”

On the mound the Twins’ pitcher
pumped and fired. The pitch smoked into the dirt
right at the ankles of the left-handed hitter, who
backed away and glared.

“You’re right about the pitching, Gun,” said
Freddy.

“I’m ready to hear what you’ve got to say.”

“But you haven’t even thanked me yet. My driver
phoned and said you had your hands full over in that
poor guy’s house.”

Gun waited. Freddy wasn’t a man to be rushed, you
could tell by the serene set of his eyes, the way they
held to things like a pair of strong hands.

The two of them sat silently through the rest of the
sixth inning, then Freddy stood from his padded chair
and stepped right up to the Plexiglas, pressed his
hands to it and bowed his head for a few seconds. His shoulders were rigid. Then he turned and crossed
himself, let his arms drop to his sides, leaned back
against the glass.

“Gun, I had nothing to do with the ugliness, at least
not directly. Gospel truth.” His eyes and mouth were steady. “Let me start from the beginning, straighten
things out for you.”

“That would be nice.”

“You’re familiar with my import business.”

“Your treasures from the heart of darkness.” Gun
remembered the outlet in Detroit where he’d gone
trying to return Cheeseman’s check. “Banana plants,
stuffed cheetahs, I seem to recall a gorilla.”

Freddy smiled. “I did some bigger things too. An

elephant once in a while. You may have seen one of
them.”

“That’s how you met Lyle Hedman.”

“Yes, my casino in Reno. We got to talking one
time, oh, ten, eleven years ago now. He’s one of those
guys with idealized notions about everything. You
know the type. And he came on to me all chummy,
full of too many movies about,” he smiled, “the
family. Asking all sorts of questions, pretending my
life is a dark secret that I’m gonna share with him one
of these days. So I humor him. I mean, the man’s gonna drop a load into the wheel tonight, I wanna
keep him happy. Then it turns out he’s into Africa, so
I’m able to milk him coming and going. That ele
phant, for instance. I get five hundred percent markup
on it and send Lyle home happy as a worm in a
shitpile.

“So Lyle, anyway, he keeps coming back every
January. It’s the games, sure, but more than that. For
him it’s a chance to rub shoulders with a gangster. Maybe he’ll get invited to an initiation, or maybe I’ll
want him for a blood brother. Maybe we’ll burn each
other with live cigars.” Freddy shook his head and
laughed. “Then last year he had a proposition for me.
A good one too. He had drawings, market research,
seventy percent of the money already lined up. I can see it’s a sunny idea, this Loon Country, so I tell him
I’ll put up twenty-five percent, contingent on the
political go-ahead. It’s just my word, no papers,
nothing. He trusted me. We smoked Havanas and I
nicked my finger on a diamond lapel pin, dropped
blood into a burning candle. Gave the poor bastard a thrill. You should have heard my wife Margie howl
after Lyle left that night.”

Freddy indulged himself with another chuckle and
turned to see what the crowd was humming about. A
collision at home plate had left two men sprawling, the baseball trickling away toward first base. The
runner pressed himself to extended push-up position and stood. The catcher rolled over, sat up, and threw
his glove in disgust. “God, that Gaetti’s a bull,”
Freddy said. “I don’t care if he
is
born-again, the man
can play.”

“What do you know about my daughter?”

Freddy put up a hand, his eyes still on the field.
“You’re getting ahead of me,” he said, then turned.
“Look, Lyle Hedman is a foolish, impressionable ass.
What went wrong is this. His imagination got the
better of him. I took a trip north to see his—your lake,
Gun. This was a month ago now. I saw that swampy land he’d bought and I told him I didn’t like it. Told
him I don’t throw my money away for fun, like those
little insects that buzz out to Reno once a year. I said if
he didn’t find a suitable place for fantasyland, I was
going to be very upset. To put it simply, I played the
role he’d cast me into, and I played it hard.”
Cheeseman took a breath and fogged the Plexiglas
blowing it out. “It backfired. Didn’t think the little
man had the testosterone to swim into the deep
water.”

“Don’t know if that’s what it took,” Gun said. “He
was probably crapping his pants, wondering what you
might be planning for him.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll tell you—what he did took me by
surprise. Setting up your county commissioner with
that poor fella you were checking up on this afternoon. I’m
still not sure how he did it. Don’t know who the
runner was. My man picked up the trail at a gay bar,
traced Rutherford back here to the city via that
rundown resort on Tornado Lake. When I heard about
the suicide, I put a watch on Rutherford’s house,
figuring Lyle might get nervous, try to take him out. I
don’t need any messiness in my life right now, Gun.
It’s taken me fifteen, twenty years to squeeze myself
into this respectable life, and I don’t want a dumbass like Hedman screwing it up. And he won’t.
Nobody’s gonna know I ever had anything to do with
his project. There’s no legal connection. His word
against mine.”

“So where were your boys when my head was
getting busted?” Gun asked.

“Lunch break,” Freddy said, laughing. Then his face went cold. “Hell, a month ago when I was up to
see Lyle I didn’t even know you had property on the
lake. Hedman never said anything. First I heard about
it was my man telling me Hedman snatched your
girl.”

“Do you know where they’ve got her?”

“I don’t. But you can be sure Lyle’s got nothing
good in mind for her. He’s gone this far, and now he’s
got to go all the way. He didn’t realize that when he
started. The little fish never do.” Cheeseman turned
toward the game again. It was the eighth inning and
Berenguer was trying to hold on to a one-run lead,
throwing bullets, enough of them off target to keep the
Detroit hitters away from the plate and swinging with
cautious respect.

“You can’t tell me anything more about Mazy?”
Cheeseman shook his head. “Wish I could.”

“I want to believe you,” said Gun. “Don’t know if I

should.”

“We’re ex-big-leaguers, Gun. That’s how I see it,
both of us. And to me there’s a brotherliness about
that. I respect you a hell of a lot and I don’t want to see
you—and certainly not your daughter—get jerked
around.” It occurred to Gun that the gray of Freddy’s
eyes was different this time. Before, when they had
met in the sixties, his eyes had been the color and dull
sheen of nickel, hard, protective, unchanging. They
seemed to have brightened and deepened into a softer
grayish-blue. It was like the difference between the
false sky of the Metrodome and the sky outside.
Maybe the man was simply wearing tinted contacts,
but Gun found himself convinced that Freddy
Cheeseman was speaking the truth.

“. . . so I asked myself,” Freddy was saying, “What
would I want if I were in your shoes, if Mazy were my
daughter—and the answer was easy. I’d want to take care of it myself. I’d want the man, and I’d want the man’s kid, and I wouldn’t want anyone else in my
goddamn way.”

“Which means you’re out of it. You don’t want
anything more to do with Hedman.”

Freddy smiled.

“But say, you did tell him good-bye, didn’t you? He
had a pretty sore face last time I saw him.”

“I heard about the blackmail stuff and had my boys pay him a visit and deliver a message. Then I heard
about your girl, and I broke things off. He’s all yours now.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t be kind to the man,” said Freddy, and he turned back to the game.