Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (10 page)

I didn’t say anything. I knew what I said wouldn’t be what decided Dr. Hilliard.

“It is important for you to remember that she fears dependency, despite, in fact because of, its attractiveness to her. Being rescued will do nothing to dispel those fears. It will present you as more complete, more dangerous to her because she’s still incomplete.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

“Exactly,” Dr. Hilliard said.

The sunlight filtered in through the Venetian blinds on the window above Dr. Hilliard’s desk. It splashed across Dr. Hilliard’s muted beige carpet.

“She’ll want to be rescued,” I said. “But she won’t like me for it.”

I sat still for a time rubbing the knuckles of my left hand along my chin. “But if I don’t rescue her …”

“Don’t misunderstand. She must be rescued. Duress is never positive. And everything I know of you suggests you are the best one to do it. I say all this only so that you will understand what may come afterward. If you succeed.”

“If I don’t succeed, I’ll be dead,” I said. “And the matter will be less pressing to me. Best plan for success.”

“I think so,” Dr. Hilliard said.

“I’ll rescue her from Costigan and she can then rescue herself from me.”

“As long as you understand that,” Dr. Hilliard said.

“I do.”

“And when she has rescued herself. If she chooses to be with you, do you want that?”

“Yes.”

“And Costigan doesn’t matter?”

“He matters,” I said. “But not as much as she does. She’s been doing the best she could, right from the start. He was something she had to do.”

“And you’ll forgive her?”

I shook my head. “Forgiveness has nothing to do with it.”

“What does have something to do with it?”

“Love,” I said.

“And need,” Dr. Hilliard said. “I too believe in love. But you forget need only at great peril.”

“Frost,” I said.

Dr. Hilliard raised her eyebrows.

“ ‘Only where love and need are one,’ ” I said.

“And the next line?” she said.

“ ‘And the work is play for mortal stakes,’ ” I said.

She nodded. “Do you have eighty dollars, Mr. Spenser?”

“Yes.”

“That is what I charge an hour. If you pay me for this hour, I can make a defensible argument that you are a patient and that patient-doctor transactions are privileged.”

I gave her four twenties. She gave me a receipt.

“I guess that means you’re not going to call the cops,” I said.

“It does,” she said.

“Anything else I can know?”

“Russell Costigan sounds like a man,” she said, “unhampered by morality or law.”

“Me too,” I said.

We bought a road atlas in a Waldenbooks on Market Street, and then we went to a flossy sporting goods store near the corner of O’Farrell and outfitted for our assault on the lodge.

To drive north from San Francisco you had your choice of the Golden Gate Bridge and the coast road, 101. Or the Oakland Bay Bridge and connection to Interstate 5. For people on the run toll bridges were bad places. Traffic slowed, and cops could stand there and look at you when you paid your toll. It was a favorite stakeout for cops.

“They’ll stop every car with a black guy and a white guy in it,” Hawk said.

“We’ll go around,” I said.

And we did. With me driving and Hawk reading the road atlas we went south on secondary roads all the way to Palo Alto and swung around the tip of the bay and headed north along the east side of it. We never went on a big throughway until we finally went on to Interstate 5 north of Sacramento, in a town called Arbuckle.

From Arbuckle it took us seventeen hours to get to Route 12 in Washington State, south of Centralia, and another two hours to get ourselves up into
the Cascades near Crystal Mountain, northeast of Mount Rainier. Near Chinook Pass, where Route 410 makes a kind of Y fork, we found a store and snack bar. A sign out front said
BREAKFAST SERVED ALL DAY
. In front of the store was a gravel parking lot. It had been fenced by embedding truck tires halfway into the ground so that the lot was outlined with black half-moon shapes. An oil drum had been converted to a trash barrel and placed near the front door. As far as I could tell it hadn’t ever been emptied. Styrofoam cups, sandwich wrappers, beer bottles, cigarette packages, straws, chicken bones, and a lot of stuff that was no longer recognizable spilled out of it and littered around it in a spread of maybe eight feet. The store itself was one story and looked as if it had once been a bungalow, the kind they put up in a couple of days right after the Second World War so that the returning GI’s could get going on the baby boom. It had brick red asphalt shingles for both siding and roof. A front porch had been scabbed onto the front, running the entire length of the store, and it had a rustic look that may have been intentional, or may have been bad carpentry. A pair of antlers hung over the two steps that led onto the porch, and the glassy-eyed head of an elk stared down at us from over the door.

Inside the store was a lunch counter and six stools, along the left wall. The rest of the store had
shelves and tables that sold canned goods and frypans and fishing gear and toilet paper and insect repellent and souvenir mugs shaped like Smokey the Bear.

Behind the counter was a fat guy with thin arms and a patch over his right eye. On both forearms were tattoos. The one on the left said
For God and Country
. The one on the right said
Valerie
and had a wreath around it. The fat guy wore a T-shirt and a blue cap that said
CAT
on it. He was reading a paperback book by Barbara Cartland. We sat at the counter. No one else was in the store.

“You guys want to eat,” he said.

“Breakfast,” I said. “Two eggs, sunny side, ham, home fries, whole wheat toast, coffee.”

“Got no whole wheat. Got white.”

“No dark?” Hawk said.

The counterman looked at him sideways. “No,” he said. “Just white.”

“I’ll have white toast,” I said.

“Me too,” Hawk said. “Same order as his. ’Cept over easy on the eggs.”

The counterman drew us two cups of coffee and put them before us. He still didn’t look directly at Hawk. Then he turned to the grill and got going on the breakfast.

“We’re looking for Russell Costigan’s place,” I said. “Know where that is?”

“Yeah.”

“Feel like telling us?” I said.

“Wait’ll I get through cooking,” the counterman said. “You know? One thing at a fucking time.”

“Things are simpler in the country,” Hawk said to me.

I drank some coffee. Hawk and I had alternated driving and trying to sleep on the drive up. My eyes felt like there was sand under the lids.

The counterman had the eggs and ham and home fries on the plate just as the four-slice toaster popped. He brushed melted butter on the toast and served us breakfast. I took a bite. The home fries had been frying for a long time.

“Now what was it you wanted to know?”

“Russ Costigan,” I said. “We want to know how to get to his place.”

“Yeah, well, it’s easy enough. Biggest goddamned place in the mountains. Russ has got a bundle, you know? Good guy though. Acts just like folks. Just like folks, you know. No airs. Nothing fancy. Just comes in here buys his stuff and goes. Always got a pretty good story to tell, too, Russell.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Russ is a sketch, all right, and I’m dying to hear some good jokes. How do we get to his place?”

“Easy,” he said, and told us.

“Thank you,” I said. “Who thought of the nice fence idea outside?”

“The tires? Ain’t that something. The wife thought of it.”

“Dynamite,” Hawk said.

“When you see Russ,” the counterman said, “tell him it was me gave you directions.”

We finished breakfast and went out to the Volvo and headed up Route 410. Towering evergreen rain forest, bright air, streams splashing vigorously downhill.

Ah wilderness.

The road to the lodge was where the counterman had said it would be. A dirt road that curved up into the high evergreen forest without a sign of life. It was ten thirty on a warm fall morning. There was birdsong in the woods and the faint soft scent of Puget Sound easing in on a light breeze. I drove on past the road and parked a mile away.

“They ain’t going to buy Br’er Rabbit here,” Hawk said.

“I know.”

We got out of the car and stepped into the woods. The trees were so tall and dense at the top that the forest floor was relatively uncluttered and dark, with only modest undergrowth.

“We’ll go straight east,” I said. “Keep the sun in front of us. Then in maybe half an hour we’ll turn south, see if we can circle in around the lodge. If we miss it short we’ll cut the road.”

“We miss it long we walk to Oregon,” Hawk said.

The people at the lodge would expect us. But they didn’t know when to expect us. We had time. We could be patient. We could look carefully. Susan
maybe wasn’t happy but she was probably safe. Put her one up on me. The ground beneath our feet was thick with the accumulated autumns of a century. The trees through which we moved reached straight up, bare-trunked and austere, until the branches thickened near the sunlight and spread out and interlaced. Sometimes we had to skirt a tree that had fallen, the barrel of the trunk maybe five feet in diameter, its branches broken by the fall, the root mass suspended and higher than my head. There were birds in the woods but no sign of anything else. At eleven o’clock we turned south, keeping the sun now to our left.

At twenty past eleven I smelled woodsmoke. I looked at Hawk. He nodded. We stopped, sniffing the air and listening. There was no human sound, only the bird sounds and the light wind moving in the woods.

“They waiting for us, they going to have people out in the area,” Hawk said softly. I nodded. The smell of the smoke lingered. We began to move slowly and carefully through the woods. It was hard to locate the direction the smell came from, but it seemed vaguely ahead and right and we inched along in that direction. I had the automatic out, a shell up in the chamber, the hammer half cocked. Ahead and off to my right I saw a glint of sunlight reflected off something. I touched Hawk’s arm. He nodded and we moved toward it, putting
each foot carefully down on the soft floor of the woods, walking very carefully, looking before each step, straining to listen and smell and see. Watching for people with guns, watching for sticks that would snap loudly if we stepped on them. Watching for electrified wire or television cameras.

Then below us, across an open area on the opposite wall of a small hollow, was the lodge. A huge chalet with a lot of glass and a high steep roof. There was a wide fieldstone chimney rising on the north end of the building and the smoke we had smelled had drifted from it. A balcony ran the length of the building across the second floor. The railing had fancy carved risers in it, and behind the balcony the wall was of glass sliding doors that faced southwest.

Hawk murmured beside me, “The hills alive with the sound of music, babe.”

In front of the lodge, on level ground on the floor of the draw, was a macadam drive with a turnaround circle. The drive was lined with a rustic fence and at intervals a streetlight that was made to seem a lantern. There was a red Jeep with a white canvas top parked in the turn around beside a black Jeep Wagoneer with fake wood side molding. The only movement was the woodsmoke curling up from the chimney.

“Homey,” I said.

“Y’all come,” Hawk said. “Walk on in and have some mulled cider by the fire.”

“No trouble expected.”

“Sure do look that way,” Hawk said.

“Think we ought to stroll in?” I said.

“Be easier just to shoot each other up here, save the walk.”

I nodded. “Let’s sit and watch for a while.”

We sat among the low spread of a big evergreen with our backs against the bare trunk beneath the limbs and looked at the lodge. Nothing happened. It was a pleasant fall day in the rain forest of the Pacific Northwest and the smell of woodsmoke spiced the easy wilderness air.

“You figure they staked out around the house in the woods?” Hawk said.

“Yes,” I said.

“They probably work in shifts,” Hawk said.

“And if we sit quiet maybe we can watch the shift change.”

“Un huh.”

We could see the whole lodge area maybe a hundred yards away in its little valley. Rustic with its shining glass and carefully fitted fieldstone. The power lines ran along one side of the road and crossed over and tied into the lodge near the southwest corner of the balcony.

“Takes a lot of discipline to sit quiet for hours in
the woods without any idea when someone going to show up,” Hawk said.

“Too much,” I said. “We’ll spot them in a while.”

“How long we going to sit.”

“Until something happens,” I said. “We got time. We’ll sit and watch until we see what’s going on.”

“Be nice to know what we’re doing,” Hawk said. “Been scrambling since we came out here.”

The shift change came around three in the afternoon. Four men with long guns came out of the lodge and went into the woods at four points around the clearing. Four other guys came out of the woods and went to the lodge.

“Rifles,” Hawk said. “Look like .30-.30’s.”

“Okay,” I said. “We know that setup. I wonder what’s in the house.”

“Some guns,” Hawk said. “But we don’t know where or how many.”

“And maybe Susan,” I said.

“Doubtful,” Hawk said.

“Got to know,” I said.

“Yes.”

There were some squirrels in the woods, looking oddly out of place away from the city. And there was bird sound. When the sun went down around five thirty it began to get colder.

“The best thing for Susan would be to save herself,” I said.

“Don’t look like she can right now,” Hawk said. “Maybe we just get her out and away and then let her save herself.”

“Yeah.”

“Course we eliminate Russell and then maybe there be nothing to save herself from.”

“Maybe that wouldn’t be good for her.”