Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (11 page)

Hawk was silent for a while. When the sun went down floodlights went on all around the lodge, lighting the entire area.

“Photoelectric switch,” I said.

Hawk said, “You saying we go easy on Russell?”

“I don’t know, exactly, what I’m saying. I don’t know enough. I am trying to make sense out of stuff I don’t understand.”

“That called life, babe,” Hawk said.

“Maybe she needs to be able to save herself and that may mean dealing with Russell.”

“I been working on the assumption,” Hawk said, “that Russell is a dead man. I owe Russell some things.”

“I know,” I said. “I been thinking about how we’d decide which one gets him. But maybe not.”

“Ah’s jess a simple darkie, bawse. Killing the motherfucker seem like a good idea to me.”

“But if it’s bad for Susan?”

“Then we don’t,” Hawk said. “Ah ain’t that simple. We not here to fuck her up. I don’t need to kill Russell, I’d just like it.”

“I’d like it too,” I said. “Maybe more than you.”

“I would guess, maybe more than anybody,” Hawk said.

“At the moment I think we shouldn’t unless we have to,” I said.

In the light that spilled into the woods from the floodlit clearing I could see Hawk shrug.

“Delayed gratification, babe,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

Lights went on and off inside the lodge but there was nothing in the pattern that told us anything. We couldn’t see enough through the windows to help. The outdoor guard shifts changed. Hawk and I put our hands into our pockets and sat and watched. We ate some granola bars and some trail mix. We dozed a little, but not much. The night went on. The lights inside the lodge went off, except for one downstairs. The outside floods stayed on. The outdoor shifts changed again. Toward morning it rained. I stood slowly in the downpour and shrugged my back and neck. I felt like a junk car.

“Russell show up now,” Hawk said, “I think we overmatched.”

“Have some trail mix,” I said.

Hawk took a handful and chewed it without pleasure.

“I look like fucking trail mix to you?” he said. “I look like a fucking granola bar? I eggs Benedict, and mimosa, I room service, man.”

“The rain is nice,” I said.

“Refreshing,” Hawk said.

Along with the woodsmoke I could smell coffee, from the lodge.

“If they start to fry bacon in there,” I said, “I’m going to cry.” We were both on our feet, stretching quietly, talking softly, trying to get warm and loose without disturbing the lodge patrol. It was raining steadily and still dark.

“We plug that chimney,” I said, “and the smoke will back up into the house and drive people out.”

“What if Susan in there?”

“They would bring her out too,” I said. “They got no reason to want her dead. I assume Russell likes her.”

“Means one of us got to get up on the roof,” Hawk said.

“Yes.”

We stood in the rain watching the house. There were no birds today, no squirrels. I was looking at the power and phone cable where it ran to the house.

“We need to do some stuff,” I said. “We need to confuse and distract them. We need to cause a diversion.”

“We good at causing diversions,” Hawk said.

“Think we could shoot that power cable out?”

“From here?” Hawk said. “Not with a handgun.”

“We could get a rifle,” I said.

Hawk smiled. “Yes, we can. I know where there’s four.”

“Closest one is down there,” I said. “Maybe seventy-five yards.”

Hawk said, “I’ll get the rifle. You circle around behind the house on the hill back of it. When I shoot out the power cables they’ll all come charging over here. You get on the roof and stuff something in the chimney.”

“While they’re chasing you.”

“While I shooting their ass with my new rifle,” Hawk said.

“I like it,” I said. “Give me time to get around there. I’ll go for the roof when you start shooting.”

“No hurry,” Hawk said. “I be getting my new rifle while you circling.”

I moved off through the woods, staying crouched, moving slowly through the rain. Stepping carefully in the spongy wet leaf mold on the forest floor. The sound of the rain spattering down among the evergreens deadened the sound of my movement. I took a careful slow half hour to get around behind the house. From the slope behind it I could see that the lodge was built into the side of the hill and from a tree I could jump to the roof. Maybe.

I found the best tree and crouched beside it. The rain had soaked through my jacket and some of it trickled down my neck and along my spine. I
stayed in the tree, crouched among the bottom branches, for maybe another fifteen minutes. Then I heard the first shot. It was a rifle, and there was a second and a third. The third shattered the porcelain mount on the lodge where the power cables went in. All the floodlights went out. The cable fell free and sparked as it hit the wet ground. There was movement in the woods below, and from the guesthouse some of the security people appeared. The rifle sounded again and one of the security people fell. Gunfire started back toward the woods. I went up the tree in the faint gray light, got high enough and launched out onto the roof of the lodge. The roof was covered with hand-split shakes and made a decent footing, even in the rain. I scrambled up to the roof ridge and along it to the chimney opening. There were two flues in the chimney. The woodsmoke was heavy and hot close up as it rose from the open flue. I shrugged out of my jacket, jammed the ammunition into my hip pocket, and shoved the wadded-up jacket into the flue. It made a sodden solid mass and no more smoke escaped. Below, the gunfire increased. Most of it aimed into the woods, and I was peripherally aware of movement in the open yard. I slid along the wet shakes down the front slope of the roof and landed on the cross balcony, and flattened out on the floor with the automatic in my hand. I could hear footsteps moving in the house
and men’s voices. There was yelling. The outside security people were firing at random into the woods. Smoke began to seep out from the glass doors. I heard doors open below and more voices and the sounds of confusion. I edged along the floor of the balcony and peered down into the yard. Four men came out of the house with handguns. One carried a flashlight. Two more men came out behind them.

A voice came up out of the hubbub, “What the fuck happened?” Humanity’s cry.

“Must be something blown in the wiring, the lights went out and there’s a fire somewhere.”

“How many shooting?”

“I don’t know.”

Rifle fire came from a different part of the woods.

“Jesus, they’re shooting at the vehicles.”

The flash trained on the Jeep Wagoneer and I saw it cant slightly as the air went out of a tire.

“Everybody out of the house?”

“I think so. How many of us were there?”

Another rifle shot from the woods and the flashlight spun and skittered along the ground.

“Jesus, they got Gino.”

“Fan out, God damn it, fan out.”

I turned and snake-walked across the deck on my stomach and slid open one of the glass doors. Smoke billowed out. I stayed on the floor and slithered
along into the house. Close to the floor there was still breathable air. And I had an advantage on everyone else. I knew the house wasn’t on fire.

There were four bedrooms on the top floor of the lodge, organized in a square around an interior balcony that opened onto a cathedral-ceilinged first-floor space that ran the length of the lodge. I moved as fast as I could on my stomach. My eyes were stinging and watering. It was hard to breathe. There was no one in any of the bedrooms. In the dawn half-light, muddled by the smoke, it was hard to see much more than that. I took a deep breath at floor level after the last bedroom proved empty. Then I stood and went down the stairs into the main room. There was no one there. I went to the fireplace that covered one wall at the far end, and raked the burning logs out onto the floor with a hooked poker. The carpet began to smolder. I was fighting to hold my breath. I moved the length of the room and dropped to the floor and breathed as shallow as I could. There was no one in the main hall. I hadn’t thought there would be, but the disappointment that she wasn’t here felt like something heavy in my chest. The back side of the lodge was set into the hillside so there were no windows on the first-floor back wall. Holding my breath I went back up to the second floor and out a back window. It was barely a five-foot drop into the woods on the hill. Behind me the
floor of the lodge had caught and I could see the tips of the flames shimmering against the second-floor windows.

The rain was pelting down now. I had shipped to Korea out of Fort Lewis some time back and I remembered how often it rained in Washington. I was moving through the woods in a crouch, circling back toward the road and the place where we’d parked the car. The rain was cold, and without my jacket it soaked through my black turtle-neck sweater. Behind me I heard a large
huff
as the flames burst out of the second-floor windows of the lodge. We hadn’t found Susan yet, but we were certainly annoying the Costigans. Better than nothing.

Hawk was sitting in the Volvo with the motor running as I sloshed out of the woods. He’d have the heater on. I got slapped one last time across the face with a wet branch and then the woods relinquished me and I stepped out onto the road about ten feet behind the Volvo.

When I did about ten guys with guns stepped out with me. From my side, from the other side, in front of the Volvo. One of them was the fat guy with skinny arms who had been working the counter where we’d had breakfast yesterday. He was pointing a double-barreled shotgun at me.

“Who’s minding the store,” I said.

“It’s Mr. Costigan’s store,” he said.

“I imagine so,” I said.

The Volvo engine suddenly snarled and its tires whined as they spun on the wet pavement. The guys in front of it had time to put one shot through the windshield before they dove out of the way and the Volvo screeched off uphill and around the curve in the road.

“Son of a bitch,” the counterman said.

“Greedy,” I said. “You wanted to wait and make sure of us both.”

“Got you,” the counterman said. He grinned at me over the gun. “Your buddy hauled ass and left you,” he said. “Most niggers’ll skedaddle like that.”

I shrugged. The Volvo was out of hearing already. The group gathered around me. The gunny who fired at Hawk said, “I mighta winged him, Warren,”

The counterman nodded. Even when the Volvo had bolted and the shooting had followed he’d never wavered. He’d kept looking straight at me down the long twin barrels of the shotgun. “Bobby, you and Raymond go get the cars. Soon’s I kill this boy we’ll get after the nigger,” he said.

Everyone was quiet as the two men walked down the highway. I could hear the hiss of the rain and the beat when it landed and the slower syncopated plop of the droplets that fell from the leaves and branches. The counterman stepped closer, so that the shotgun barrels were six inches from my face.

“I figure both barrels at once will blow most of your head off completely,” he said.

“Unless you miss,” I said.

He giggled. “Miss,” he said and giggled some more. “You dumb fucker. How can I miss with a shotgun from six inches.” His shoulders shook with the giggle.

“Come on, Warren,” one of the gunnies said.
“Shoot him and let’s get after the nigger. Mr. Costigan’s gonna be pissed.”

Warren nodded. “Okay, stand away less you want to get blood and brains all over you.” Then the smile vanished and his eyes narrowed slightly. He took in a slow breath, and while he was taking it in, his head jerked, a round red hole appeared in the middle of his forehead, and a gunshot sounded from the woods to the right. Warren staggered back a step and the shotgun sagged and then fell from his hands and he keeled over backward. Everything froze in that posture and I turned and plunged back into the woods. The rifle shots continued fast, at about the rate it would take to lever a shell into the chamber of a .30-.30 rifle.

I headed for the place the shots were coming from, my gun out now, forcing through the wet woods as hard as I could go. Running in a crouch, with my left forearm bent in front of me to keep from being blinded by a branch. Gunfire from the road cut leaves and branches around me as I ran, but most of it seemed aimed at where the rifle fire came from.

In front of me, Hawk said, “Spenser,” and I saw him standing behind a tree in a small clearing, feeding shells into the magazine of a Winchester. The gunfire from the road was nearly continuous. I scuttled on all fours across the clearing and behind
Hawk’s tree. A bullet thudded into it at eye level.

“Dumb to shoot so high,” Hawk said.

The clearing was maybe thirty feet higher than the road, and below me I could see three bodies sprawled in the angular repose of death. The rest of the gunnies were crouched off the shoulder of the road opposite, firing toward us.

“Road does almost a hairpin,” Hawk said. “Car’s about ten yards that way.” He jerked his head behind us. “With the motor running.”

“Let’s get out of here before they bring the cars up,” I said.

Hawk nodded. There was a cut under one eye, and blood ran in a neat trickle down his cheek, diffused pink by the rain before it dripped onto his shirt. He fired six shots down at the enemy as fast as he could work the lever on the Winchester. Then he dropped it behind the tree and we ran for the Volvo. They returned fire, but you tend to shoot high uphill and in five strides we were on the down side of the hill and the bullets hummed and whined harmlessly above us. We half slid, half scrambled the last ten yards as the muddy hill turned into a steep slick banking and then we were sprawling into the road beside the Volvo and, soaking and smeared with mud, we were in the Volvo and spinning rubber away from the hill with me driving. Fifty yards up the road, I jammed
the car into a screeching U-turn and headed back down toward the bad guys with the accelerator pressed to the floor. We roared by them and the two cars, which had just pulled up, heading in the other direction and were around the next curve with only three more shots at the car. One shot went through the back window, the other two missed.