Robert B. Parker (8 page)

Chris Hood came out of Union Furniture and walked slowly down Portland Street toward Newman. He got in the car.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Karl in there?”

“If he was I didn’t see him. There were a couple of salesmen. Then there’s some stairs along the left wall in the back, and like a balcony of offices across the back on the second floor. I would assume Karl was up there.”

“Did it look like a place we could hit him?”

Hood shrugged. “Got to see the upstairs layout. In the store itself it doesn’t look promising.”

“Do we really need to see upstairs too?”

Hood looked at him for a span of ten seconds. “Yeah, we have to see upstairs. We have to see everything. This isn’t Capture The Flag, Aaron. You don’t go in unprepared. Here, anywhere. You gotta know what you can expect.”

Newman said, “Okay. You’re probably right. How we going to do it?”

Hood picked the card off the defroster slot and read it. “First let’s park this thing,” he said.

Newman found a meter past the store on the right.

“First off, it’s gotta be you,” Hood said. He put the card back in the defroster slot. “The salesmen have seen me in there. They’ll be too suspicious if I’m caught trying to go up to the offices.”

Newman felt the fear again. It surged in his stomach and flashed along his arms and into his fingertips. He kept his face still.

“How about I use that card?”

Hood looked at the card again.

“Go in and pretend to be a deaf-mute beggar and go upstairs and wander around?”

“Yes,” Newman said. His throat was stiff. “And if anyone catches me I hand them the card.”

Hood pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows. “Not bad,” he said. “But you look too good.”

He reached into the glove compartment and brought out a felt fishing hat. “Try the crusher,” he said. “Just put it on and let it be as wrinkled and mangy as it is. Don’t smooth it out.”

Newman put the hat on. “Okay,” Hood said. “And we’ll have to do something with the shirt.” He took
the skinning knife from his pocket and opened the blade. “Mind if I ruin the shirt? I’ll cut the sleeves off almost at your shoulders.”

“Go ahead,” Newman said. His breath was short.

Hood cut the sleeves off. When he finished Newman leaned over and rolled his pants legs up over his ankles. His bare legs were pale above his blue Pumas. He put the deaf-mute card in his hat band.

“I’ll go in first,” Hood said. “I told them I wanted to shop around and I might be back. Then you come in and head for the back left. You’ll see the stairs.”

Newman nodded.

“If there’s trouble, start yelling. I’ll be up in half a second. And don’t be afraid to use the gun. That’s what you got it for.”

“Okay.”

Hood grinned. “Okay, I’m going. You come right behind me.”

“Okay.”

Hood grinned again. Made a thumbs-up gesture and got out of the car. Newman sat in stillness. He felt thick, as if there were insulation around him and reality were distant and unclear. Hood went into the store and Newman got out of the car and went to the store behind him.

The store was shabby and the furniture was cheap and garish, imitation plush in bright reds and blues. Wooden love seats with small print slipcovering that pretended to be colonial. To his right as he went in, Newman had a sense of Hood talking to a salesman. In the far right back corner of the store another salesman bent over a table, writing in a notebook. Newman walked straight to the back left and up the stairs. Nobody said anything. At the top of the stairs there
was a balcony that ran off at right angles to the stairs across the back of the store. There were three frosted glass doors at intervals in the back wall of the balcony. The salesman who’d been writing was now out of sight under the balcony, the other was still talking with Hood.

Newman felt disconnected. His jaws hurt and he realized he was clenching his teeth. He relaxed his jaw. He couldn’t seem to feel the gun against his groin as he had before. He ran his left hand over the area as if scratching a bite. The gun was there. He waited for the surge of reassurance but nothing came.

Emptily he moved onto the balcony and opened the first glass door. The room was windowless and empty. The only light came through the open door and the frosted glass partition that separated it from the next office. There was a gray metal conference table and five folding chairs in the room. On the table was a newspaper and an empty cardboard pizza box in which a few crusts of pizza remained. Two paper coffee cups were near the box. In the corner of the room there was a stand-up electric fan. There was nothing else in the room.

Newman closed the door as quietly as he could. Every movement he made he had to think of. Nothing was natural. Nothing automatic. He stepped back from the door. There was light in the next office.
I could tell Chris I tried and it was locked and that there was no one up here. I could turn now and go down and out and go home. And be safe
.

He stepped to the next door. There was light behind it. He could hear a voice. From the floor below a voice said, “Hey, what the hell are you doing?”

His fear saved him. He was numb and slow with it
and didn’t react. Instead, mindless and terrified he turned the knob and walked in.

Adolph Karl sat at a desk facing the door with his feet up and his coat off talking into the telephone.
I could shoot him now
. To his left, at a small table against the wall, the two men who’d been with him all day were playing cards. In front of each there was a card up and a card down.
Blackjack
, Newman thought.

Karl said into the phone, “Hold on,” then he put the phone down on the desk and swung his feet down onto the floor. He looked at Newman.

“Yeah?” he said.

The two men against the wall both turned toward Newman. One stood up and took a gun from under his coat and held it against his leg. The man with the gun had thick lips and a long face. His hair was curly, and his skin was very white. The other man, still seated, was immense.
Three hundred pounds
, Newman thought. His chest was vast. His stomach stretched tight against his white shirt but it looked hard, like a Russian weight lifter’s. His shirt sleeves were rolled back two turns over his forearms, and his wrists were as thick as cordwood. He stood up too and took a step toward Newman. He was tall and his back arched slightly. He was clean-shaven and his hair was slicked back and shiny. He looked very clean.

“The man asked you a question, douche bag,” he said. Newman knew the voice.

There were no windows in this room either. Just a cinder-block back wall painted yellow. In the left corner a gray metal file cabinet. There was no rug on the floor. The only light was an overhead hanging fluorescent. The huge man took another step toward Newman.
The man with thick lips stood without movement, the gun held against his right thigh.

Newman took the card from his hat band and held it out to the big man. The man read it.

“It’s a fucking dummy, Dolph,” he said. “He’s scrounging.” The big man handed the card to Karl. Karl read it.

“Throw him the fuck out,” he said. He crumpled the card and threw it on the floor. The big man took hold of Newman’s shoulder and turned him around.

Karl said, “Tell those fucking assholes downstairs that if anybody comes wandering up here again I’m going to cut their balls off.”

The big man held onto Newman’s shoulder with his left hand and shoved him out the door. Newman made no resistance. He was afraid he might fall. His legs had no feeling. The big man shoved him along the corridor and down the stairs, moving him faster than he wanted to walk, so he stumbled and had to hold the banister going downstairs. Newman had a sense of Hood’s presence to the left of his periphery.

The big man stopped at the front door, opened it, planted his right foot against Newman’s buttocks, and shoved him sprawling, face first, into the street. He let the door close.

Newman lay a moment face down on the sidewalk, feeling the roughness of the concrete against his cheek. He felt as if he might urinate right there, lying down on the sidewalk. He was out of there. He was alive. They hadn’t hurt him. He’d done it and survived.

He got up and walked down Portland Street to Hood’s car. He got in the passenger side and sat as still as he could. His heart thumped in his chest the
way it did after intercourse. He waited for it to quiet. He pressed his open hands on the tops of his thighs. His hands felt sweaty and swollen.

Hood came out of the store and walked down to the car. He got in, took the keys from above the visor, and started the car. They drove down Portland Street, away from the Union Furniture Store.

“You all right?” Hood said.

“Sure,” Newman said. “Sure.”

“So how do you get him?” Janet Newman said.

They sat in the Newmans’ kitchen with beer and wine and sandwiches.

“We wait,” Hood said, “and watch. We’ll see the chance. Killing him’s easy. Getting away with it is the hard part.”

“Janet, you wouldn’t believe what it was like to walk in there on them,” Newman said. “The guys that tied you up, one was huge and kind of slick-looking?”

“Yes, and the other had thick lips and a long face. We already went through this.”

“That was them,” Newman said. He drank some beer. “The same ones, and Karl, sitting right there. The same man I saw kill that woman. And I walked right in on them and got away with it.”

“But you didn’t kill them,” Janet Newman said.

There was silence for a moment. Then Hood said, “It would have been suicide, Janet. We agreed before we went in there that Aaron wouldn’t do anything but look and get the layout.”

Newman opened another can of beer and drank some.

“Bullshit,” Newman said. “When I went in Chris said don’t be afraid to use the gun. I don’t need anyone alibiing to my wife for me, Chris.”

Hood shrugged and looked out the big picture window at the back lawn.

“So why didn’t you?” Janet Newman said.

“Because I was scared shit,” Newman said, “that’s why. I was in a fucking trance I was so scared.”

“Well, when won’t you be scared? How will you do the job if you’re in a trance?”

“Janet,” Hood said. “There were two other men in there. Three men with five shots is too much. He did the right thing.”

“Shut the fuck up, Chris,” Newman said. Hood looked at Newman a moment and something stirred in his eyes again. The muscles at his jaw-hinge tightened for a moment and relaxed. “She can think what she wants,” Newman said.

“What the hell is wrong with that question,” Janet said. “I am simply looking for information. I am not thinking anything. You got in. You had a gun. You didn’t shoot Karl. What’s wrong with asking why you didn’t?”

“If you don’t know, I’m not sure I could tell you,” Newman said.

“You tell me it was too dangerous, I understand that. I don’t want you to get killed. I don’t want you to take crazy risks. But how will I know if you don’t tell me?”

“Maybe you better do it yourself,” Newman said. He took two cans of beer from the refrigerator and handed one to Hood. Hood put it down on the table in front of him unopened. He sipped from the first can he’d taken. Newman snapped the ring tab off the
can and threw it hard at the kitchen sink. It missed and skidded along the counter. “Maybe you better get you a gun and get out and have a go at it. Maybe that will be harder than quarterbacking from your fucking armchair.”

The flint edge came into her voice, the one that scared him. “Maybe,” she said, “maybe I should be involved. Maybe if I’d been there with a gun this would be over now. Chris, can you teach me to shoot?”

“Either one of us can,” Hood said.

Newman sat silently looking at the beer can in his hands. His hands were big and muscular and brown. They were callused. He was a skillful man and could do carpentry and mason work and wiring. He had restored most of the old house they lived in.

“Well,” Janet said. “I think you should.”

Newman got up from the table and walked out of the kitchen, through the dining room, out of the house through the side porch.

He stood in the dark in his driveway under the spread of the three-hundred-year-old maple that shaded their bedroom during the day. His eyes stung again with tears and his face was wet.
Different
, he thought.
In the dark your own land looks different and feels different
. He walked down the driveway and onto the main street. Smithfield was small and had a New England common with a meetinghouse. At night when there were no cars Newman could imagine being back two hundred years when his house was built and Jefferson was president and the Revolution was but recently past.
Am I right? Or is it booze. Why are there always a few beers involved when I get mad at her? Does the beer distort what I hear, or does it
break down inhibitions and allow me to say what I’m too careful to say when I’m stone sober? What did I say? Actually I didn’t say anything. What the fuck am I mad at? How could she treat me that way? How could she be so fucking insensitive?

He walked past the small village shopping center. His face was still wet with tears. The lights were on in the shopping center, though the stores were closed. It would be embarrassing to be seen walking about crying. He prided himself on the goodness of his marriage and the loving relationship. He would admit no problems. He crossed the street, out of the light, and sat on the small curving stone wall that enclosed the old cemetery.
What fucking difference does it make? We’ll all be in the ground in forty years or so. At dinner with a body of politic worms. All there is is her
. He dropped his head and felt sorrow saturate him.
It’s her disapproval. I cannot take any hint of disapproval from her. I want too much. She has to provide the complete meaning in my life
. Moths fluttered in the arc of the streetlight.
I’ve got to separate at least a little. Like a kid going to kindergarten. It’s part of growing up. Like the girls going to college. I’ve got to make her less central
. A fluffy gray cat with a white saddle walked silently past, jumped the fence into the cemetery, and disappeared among the stones.
For crissake, I’m doing this for her and she’s bitching about it
. A ten-year-old Chevrolet Impala sedan turned the corner at the common. There were teenage children in the front and back. One of them yelled something at Newman. He couldn’t make out what it was. “How about I kill you, kid,” he murmured. “Teach you some manners.”