Riders on the Storm (19 page)

She was in the process of using a fork to test the progress of the pasta boiling in the metal stockpot on the gas stove. “What is it you want to do?”

“Donlon says that over the years Lon Anders has had him deliver shipping materials to this cabin he owns. Donlon thinks there's something illegal going on. So do I. I thought I'd check it out tonight.”

She went back to pulling strands of pasta from the boiling stockpot and then nibbling on them. “Sounds like something Foster should be doing. Since he's the law and everything.”

“I probably won't have much trouble getting inside.”

She set down the fork she'd been using to waggle pasta strands from the stockpot and faced me. Workday weariness and apprehension and an anger she was trying not to give in to—all of these played across her face. “Have you given any thought to what you'll do for a living?”

“What're you talking about?”

“When Foster finds out he'll undoubtedly ask for your license to be lifted. And what will the state board think about a lawyer breaking and entering? You always liked that job you had in high school, bagging groceries. Maybe you could get that back.”

“I'm hungry!” Kate announced as she raced into the kitchen.

“Honey, go get your sister and you both sit down and by then I'll be bringing out supper.”

“Nicole said you brought home ice cream. She saw it.”

Mary swept her up. “Your sister is a very good spy. But it's not ice cream. It's sherbet.”

“What's sherbet?”

“You'll just have to find out. But you'll love it. Now go get your sister.”

She set Kate down. Kate said to me, “Do
you
like sherbet, Sam?”

I patted my stomach. “I love it.”

And then she was running away in that awkward, endearing way of hers, shouting, “Nicole, we're having sherbet tonight!”

This was when the whispering started. The girls would be near us now.

“I thought you cared about us.”

“You know damned well I do. Don't pull this on me.”

“All right. Then I'll just say Please don't do this, Sam. You know what kind of guy Anders is. Think of us.”

Nicole said, “Is everything all right, Mom?”

She'd caught us gritting whispers back and forth.

“Everything's fine, honey. Please go get your plate and tell Kate to get hers, too. I'll dish you up some pasta.”

“I'm not sure I like sherbet.”

“Oh, you'll like this.”

“Eve had it one night for dinner. I didn't like the taste.”

Easy for Mary to take a cheap shot here, but she declined. Bad woman Eve, the one who stole your dad from me, of course her sherbet would taste bad. “There're a lot of different flavors of sherbet, sweetie. This one is peach. Remember how much you like peaches?”

That satisfied Nicole and off she went to supper.

For the next half hour not even the whisper war was allowed. Only angry looks from Mary and me trying to appear misunderstood and innocent.

The girls were put to bed early—under much protest from Kate who insisted it was “still light out”—with Mary staying with them at least twenty minutes.

A beer would've tasted good; I hadn't had any alcohol all day. But I knew about the cabin now and I needed to be sober when I got inside.

When Mary came back I said, “I need to do this for Will.”

“Then at least call Foster.”

“I don't have the faith in Foster you do. He's like too many cops I've known.”

Significantly, she sat in the armchair across from me. “Everybody I know likes him.”

“Oh, he's likable and all that. But he's still the kind of cop who gets fixated on one suspect and won't consider anyone else.”

“I know how much you care about Will, Sam. And so do I. But you have to agree that things look bad for him.”

“I know how bad they look, Mary. But that still doesn't mean he's guilty.”

“Oh, God, Sam.”

She came over and drew her legs up on the couch and put her head on my shoulder.

“Not fair.” Her warmth, her flesh, the scent of her hair. I wanted to forget the cabin.

“Of course it's not fair. Look what I'm up against. An obsessed man who's too stubborn to ask the police for help.”

Then she really got not fair. She sat up and took my face in her hands and gave me the kind of savage kiss that was more redolent of desperation and fear than sex.

I had to push away and stand up.

“Then you're really going?”

“I'm really going.”

I went into the bathroom and closed the door. Usually about this time I went upstairs and peeked in on the girls from the doorway. Their soft snoring and their Big Bird night-light and the dolls and stuffed animals they both slept with. My attachment to the three of them grew tighter every day. The girls would be as terrified as their mother if they could understand what I was going to do. As Mary had pointed out, the real danger was in the legal ramifications of what I proposed to do. I could indeed find myself out of a job. An unemployed step-dad was a real drag.

But searching the cabin was the logical end result of my entire investigation. There was no guarantee that I would find anything incriminating there but I still needed to do it.

I stopped in the kitchen and drew a quick but precise map to the cabin for Mary. When I got back to the living room I handed it to her. She glanced at it.

“I wish you were Batman. Then I wouldn't be worried so much.”

“I wish I was Batman, too. This would be easy for him.”

She'd been waiting right outside the bathroom door the way Kate did sometimes when she just couldn't get enough of me.

“Do I get a kiss, Sam?”

“Let's see now—a kiss—”

If we'd gotten any more passionate we would have ended up on the floor. But once again I eased out of the embrace.

“I'm going to say some prayers.”

“It couldn't hurt.” And then right there as I moved toward the side door I felt a ridiculous sadness. I even had a moment when I resented Will a bit. My life would be so easy if I didn't have to worry that he'd be sent to a mental hospital and then to prison.

For life.

“It's wave after wave of planes. You see, they can't see the B-52 and they dropped a million pounds of bombs … I bet you we will have had more planes over there in one day than Johnson had in a month … each plane can carry about ten times the load a World War II plane could carry.”

—Henry Kissinger

T
HE NIGHT, AS
I
KNEW IT, VANISHED.

The houses, the stoplights, the store lights were gone as soon as I found the turnoff Donlon's map led me to. The road was gravel and tall summer corn walled me in on both sides. The quarter-moon hung low and stark. The day had cooled sufficiently so I kept my window down. I also kept the radio off. On the passenger seat were a cop-sized flashlight and my dad's forty-five.

I thought about Karen. The affair Will had had with Cathy Vance had made me think even more of her and less of Will. She was apparently able to justify it to herself because of his terrible experience in Nam. I tried to do that, too, but somehow I couldn't. Then I smiled to myself. Monsignor Sam McCain was doing it again, judging people
from on high. I was in no position to judge Will. Not after what he'd been through.

A sudden wind tasted and smelled of impending rain.

The intersection of rural gravel roads I was looking for was several yards from a narrow wooden bridge that spanned a ravine. I found it and turned right.

More walls of corn, more gravel banging off my car.

Ahead I saw the silhouetted line of trees that marked the long area of woods I wanted. Hidden somewhere in there was Anders's cabin. I sped up.

A few times I glanced at the forty-five. Would I actually shoot and maybe kill somebody?

One more turn and I was facing the narrow lane almost lost in the barrier of looming pine trees. I cut my headlights.

To reach the cabin you traveled a dirt path that was potholed as if by intention. I had to slow to under ten miles an hour to keep from being bounced to the ceiling and cracking my head. My window was rolled up again. Mosquitoes dive-bombed in squadrons.

Donlon's map indicated that this dirt lane was approximately a quarter mile from the cabin. I kept close watch on my odometer. When I'd covered about half that distance I swung off the road and parked in an open area just wide enough to accommodate my car. I grabbed the gun and the flashlight, then got out. I locked my car and set off.

The woods provided a cacophony of sounds, some sweet, some vulnerable, some threatening. Animals of various kinds prowling, feasting, hiding.

Even among the cathedral-like trees the scent of rain was still sharp. The other sharp smell came from the pine trees.

Just before I reached the cabin I came to an open area in the woods. The grass had been mown for one thing and for another there was a green, white-trimmed wooden gazebo sitting arrogant and citylike in the middle of this nowhere.

The “cabin” lay to the right of the gazebo and it was not a cabin at all. It was a summer home, of course, two stories of wood and stone
with a long, screened-in porch covering the front. The people who owned expensive places like these liked to take pleasure in dubbing them “cabins.” Rustic, you know.

As soon as I reached the clearing some cosmic force threw the switch on my paranoia. I felt observed. I started studying the darkened windows under the dormered roof. They reminded me of the paperback gothic novels my sister was always reading. Ominous, rife with suggestions and secrets. Her husband joked fondly that she bought them four and five at a time.

The quarter-moon provided enough light that I didn't need my flashlight even as I got within a few feet of the house. I stood and listened for any sound I could hear above the familiar sounds of the wooded night.

I walked to the side of the house. I'd wondered how you got vehicles in and out of here. The din of a highway explained it.

Behind the house another wide dirt path began. It ran across a stretch of meadow leading to and over a hill on the other side of which was the access road. Two ways in and out.

There were no cars around.

I went back to the screened-in porch. I still had that feeling of being observed but by now I knew it was the situation that rattled me. After all, I was committing a crime.

My clients have paid me in a variety of ways. In lieu of actual currency I've been gifted with clothes, food, tune-ups, a banjo, photography lessons, and of course Jamie. Another of my gifts was a three-piece set of burglary tools. Occasionally I'd taken them out and practiced with them on locks at my apartment and at the office.

This was my first time for real. I tried not to think about it being a Class Six Felony.

I had no trouble getting inside.

The first few minutes I spent scanning the place with my flashlight beam. Anders lived well. A huge fieldstone fireplace with what appeared to be hand-tooled pokers (but of course); expensive hardwood flooring; an outsize TV screen mounted on the west wall; this
a prosperous man's idea of roughing it—the kind of pad that would give Hugh Hefner wet dreams. A little Frank on the stereo and the woman would be tearing her clothes off before she'd put even one three-inch high heel on the outside steps.

I had passed a partially open closet door and had started toward a hallway that I assumed would lead to the kitchen. I heard the closet door behind me make a faint but unmistakable sound. I spun around. He charged at me tiger fast and tiger sure. I was prey, long-awaited prey.

I raised the forty-five to fire but before I could he'd slammed into me. The gun hadn't even slowed him down. He was so sure of himself he knew slamming into me would knock it from my hand. As it had.

His massive hands did not intend to just choke me to death, they were trying to crush everything inside my neck. His force was so overwhelming I felt myself trying to slip to the floor just to make it more difficult for him to hold me up by gripping my neck with such power.

Teddy Byrnes was screaming the way the old Celtic warriors supposedly had. It was said they could half-paralyze their victims with their voices alone. There was great abiding mad pleasure in the sounds.

I was losing consciousness so quickly I operated on instinct. Somehow my knee came straight up. Somehow it reached its target. Somehow my power was enough to temporarily mitigate his power.

Dizzy, gagging, stumbling I searched the dark floor for my forty-five. He was behind me—I chanced looking back—bent over and clutching himself.

I knew it would be only seconds before he charged me again. I wouldn't have time to find my gun unless I literally stumbled over it.

A small metal statue of some presumably prominent figure stood on an end table. The head was so narrow it was almost pointed. I grabbed it just as the screaming started again.

The charge was pretty much the same kind of tackle-line maneuver he'd tried before. A mistake on his part. I knew when to step out of range. I also knew enough when to sink the statue in his forehead.

Between his rage and his shock and his pain he was temporarily disoriented. He staggered around, arms flailing for balance. The white T-shirt he wore was bloody from his hands swiping it.

I used the time to find my gun.

When I saw it I moved as fast as I could. It was under the coffee table.

And it was then that Byrnes decided to remind me of who and what he was. While I was grasping for the forty-five he got me around the hips, threw me over his shoulder and then heaved me into the fireplace. Bone and stone do not mix, not when bone is hurled against it at a great rate of speed.

Then he was pounding on me.