THE FOURTH WATCH (59 page)

Then a bus came around the corner and she
sideswiped it, glancing off it and hitting the granite wall on the
left side of the road. Her horn went off in a series of bleating
sounds. The bus tried to tumble off the edge of the road but the
back side of it crumpled against a tree and it held up. It was all
quiet for a second, and then a window came busting out of the bus
with a fat chick right behind it. Then she was taking little kids
out of the window and putting them on the ground. The kids were
running around screaming. Then the broad with the big tits that was
driving the Volvo got out of her car looking healthy, and ran
across the street to help the bus people. Ronald Sullivan said,
"Shit!" and turned his car around and drove off in the opposite
direction.

*****

ELLEN WHORLEY WAS
driving with one hand on the wheel and chewing a
nail as she fishtailed out of Keli Chi's Hair & Beauty Salon,
and proceeded up the hill toward the airport. She had to get a
grip. Ten minutes ago she was screaming she didn't like the way her
nails had come out. She was out there on the frayed edge. Poor Keli
was in tears, bowing and apologizing for something that didn't even
happen. The nails were fine. It's just Ellen was jumpy and scared,
and she was taking it out on other people. Which was no
good.

Since Samantha came back from Paris, Ellen
thought that she was behaving ... different. She couldn't put a
finger on it really, just a hunch, but she thought that Sam was
watching her. Then today she called that lawyer that got shot with
Carolyn and went to see him. She wondered what they were talking
about. And ever since that weird little man came by the house
pretending to be a cop, Matte had been as cold as ice. It seemed
that way anyhow. Teddy had rushed off to Seattle to deal with a
business crisis out there and she had started to wonder if he
wasn't being a little strange all of a sudden. She chewed the new
nail from Keli Chi's as she raced around the rotary and headed up
Barron Ridge, worrying all the way.

When she crested the hill at the top of Barron
Ridge Ellie knew she was moving too fast.

She put her foot on the brake pedal and it went
right to the floor. Ought-Oh she thought, and knew she was in
trouble...and she thought: Matte. She pulled the automatic
transmission shift lever into low and yanked up on the emergency
brake. It came straight up without resistance.

"Shit," she said.

The engine was screaming, but the Volvo was
picking up speed anyway down the steep slope. She tried to move the
car in a slalom motion, to slow it down, but there was a snow
covered ledge wall on her left and a flimsy guard rail along the
cliff on her right. She didn't have a lot of room to maneuver. She
looked at the speedometer and saw she was doing 45mph and the curve
at the base of the hill was coming up at her fast. She was
dead.

And then the school bus came around the
corner.

Instinctively she pulled the wheel to the left,
but before anything happened she hit the bus just behind the door
well and was rocketed across the street, off the stone wall and
into a snow filled ditch. The air bag hit her in the face and she
heard her horn go.

*****

SCOTT MADIGAN WAS
using a pick-axe eighteen inches down in the
ground. The grave he was digging was turning out to be a pain in
the ass. His hands were cold, even inside his gloves. Little troll
couldn't be more than five and a half feet tall, he was thinking,
but you still had to get him down under the frost line. Banging on
a layer of ground ice with a pick was like pounding on an iron door
with a tin water cup. After what seemed like an eternity, finally,
he felt the flat blade slip through to soft dirt and he bent his
weight back against the handle and pried up a slab of dirty
ice.

The sun was tracking down in the west,
filtering through the snow covered pine-canopy.

It sagged above him, creating a ceiling above
the grave and laying cold bars of white light on the muck that was
part pine-straw and part dirty snow around the edge of the hole. He
worked the blade of the axe under the edges all around and lifted
the ice out of the pit, then he got his long-handled spade and dug,
keeping the walls of the grave square until he hit ledge four and
half feet down. The hole only had to be a couple of feet wide. He
could slide the little prick in sideways if he had to, like putting
a letter in an envelope. Madigan liked the image he got from that
and chuckled to himself as he dug.

When he was finished he was sweating, despite
the cold. He was in the deep woods, off a fire road in Rutland
State Park. Nobody was going to come out here this afternoon. Shit
there wouldn't be anyone out here until next summer, and if the
storm came in hard tonight, he wouldn't be able to find this place
tomorrow himself. He picked up the pick-axe and took it and the
spade back out the deer trail through the trees and down the fire
road to where he'd parked the city's 4-wheel drive Ford Explorer.
He had signed it out for the night because of the storm. He threw
his stuff in the back and rolled out of the woods with no one
watching.

*****

SAMANTHA WHORLEY WAS
home alone when the phone rang a little before
four o'clock that afternoon. She was waiting for Ellie, practicing
in her mind how to look her in the eye and be pleasant. She wanted
to scream at her and grab her by the neck and ask her why she had
betrayed them. But she knew if she really wanted answers, she'd
have to wait and do it Knight's way. Lure her in. Give her a false
sense of security.

She was standing in front of the mirror
watching her face as she made small talk, trying to visualize
Ellie's where her own was reflected, to see if there was anything
there that would give her away. So she was surprised when it was
her on the other end of the line, sounding shaky and close to
hysterical.

"Ellie, calm down, what's the
matter?"

"I hit a school bus full of kids." Ellie
started crying. "I think some of them are hurt, God."

"What school bus?" Sam asked, a little panic
creeping into her own voice. "What are you talking about? Where are
you?"

In a voice near breaking Ellen said, "My brakes
let go on Baron Ridge, I tried to swerve but the bus came around
the curve at the bottom of the hill. The one right before you go up
the hill to the house. I crashed into them and they almost went off
the side. Oh, Jesus, Sam, I hope those kids are alright. Some of
them were bleeding, just little kids." She was babbling now,
barking in high pitched bursts.

Sam cut her off. "Ellie, listen to me, where
are you?"

"I'm at the hospital."

"Which one?"

"UMass, I don't know if they ... "

"Are you alright, are you hurt?"

''No, I'm okay, I've got a cut on my head, but
the kids were coming out the windows ... " Sam heard her dissolve
again into slobbering. Jesus, God, she thought.

"Ellie listen, I'm going to come up there right
now, okay. I'll sit with you and we'll find out what's going on and
then I'll bring you home. You don't have your car,
right?"

''No, they towed it away somewhere, with the
bus. My God, Samantha, if you could have seen those little kids
coming out of the windows, I think I hit them on that little door
that they go in and out of so they were trapped and I...
"

"Alright, alright, you sit tight, I'm on my
way."

*****

"YOU FUCKING COCKSUCKER!"
Ellen hissed into a hospital courtesy phone in an
empty waiting room up the hall from urgent care.
"You try to kill me?
You
son-of-a-bitch!"

"What the hell are you talking about?" Matte
Genetassio yelled into his private line cell phone. "You crazy
bitch, where are you calling this number from?" He knew if he gave
her one inch here, hesitated for even a second, she'd know for
sure.

"I'm at the fucking hospital is where I'm at,
and I'm calling from their phone because someone did something with
my brakes and I almost got killed except that I was saved because I
crashed into a fucking bus loaded with little kids ... "

"Jesus, that was you," Genetassio said, doing
his best 'surprised to hear it' voice, "I just heard about that at
the station and ... "

"Yeah, yeah," Ellen cut him off, her voice was
still a low, harsh rasp, but rising, "and I'm thinking, you are the
only person in this entire fucking world with a reason to want me
dead, and the only bastard mean enough to ... "

"Ellie, listen to me, I had nothing
... do you know what nothing means? ... nothing to do with this.
Now I'm gonna hang up. And if you call this number again from a
public place ... " he stopped before he actually made the threat,
she knew. He wasn't giving ground. "I'm gonna find out what we know
down here and I'll come by the house tonight.
Do Not
do anything stupid. I don't
know what happened, but it didn't have anything to do with me. If
it was one of the spic's people, I'll find out. We'll figure this
out. Your husband still in Seattle?"

He could hear the doubt slip into her voice.
"Yes, but I don't want ... "

"Alright, good. I'll see you tonight. How are
those kids?

He smiled when he heard her start whimpering,
thinking: Gotcha. "Matte if you set me

up ... "

"Yeah, but I didn't, and if you thought about
it, instead of just freaking out, you'd know I didn't, because I
need your help more now than when this thing started."

She was sobbing now. "Matte, I swear ...I'll
know if you're bullshitting me, and I'll spill my guts on this
whole thing. I don't care. If you're gonna kill me anyway! My
fucking foot went right down to the floor. I was so fucking
scared!"

"I know," he said. "Just take a breath, and
wait to hear from me. I'll find out what's goin' on. I'll see you
tonight."

She hung up on him.

That fuckin' Sullivan, he thought.

*****

ELLEN SAT ON
the couch with a cup of tea looking at the flames curling
around the logs in the fireplace. Sam had built a fire and made
them tea, and now sat across from her, looking at the flames
reflecting in Ellie's wet eyes. Ellie had been withdrawn and
distracted since she met her at the hospital. The school bus
children had been shaken and bruised, one of them had a broken
nose, and the bus driver had a concussion and broken collar bone
from impact with the steering wheel and side window, but other than
that, no serious injuries. Ellie had a gash at the front of her
scalp that ripped down into the top of her forehead. The doctor had
closed it with eighteen stitches. The area had been shaved and a
large, square bandage covered the wound. She didn't remember how it
happened. The doctor gave her a pain killer, and a sedative. The
school teacher on the bus said that Ellie had jumped in with her,
pulling the kids out the windows as the principal pushed them
through. She didn't seem to remember that either. Anyway, Ellie's
preoccupation took the pressure off Sam's acting.

"Were you having trouble with your breaks?" she
asked her, holding her cup up in front of her lips with both
hands.

Ellie's face turned, slightly then her eyes
came away from the fire. "What?"

"Your car, have you been having trouble with
it, with the brakes?"

"No," she said. ''Not that I knew
about."

They listened to the fire crackling and spiting
against the coals.

"That's weird."

Some of the distance went out of Ellie's eyes
and she tilted her head. "What do you mean 'weird', Sam?" Her voice
had a little tremble to it.

"Nothing. I don't know," Samantha said, shaking
her head. "It's getting a little creepy around here though.
Carolyn, you know, getting shot, now the brakes in your car go out
going down the hill. I wonder what I have to look forward to,
God!"

Ellie put her face down in her hands and wept
bitterly. She wept for Carolyn and for the horrible mess she'd
caused. For the bus driver and those little kids on the bus and
even about old Red, because by agreeing to be part of that, she had
set this all in motion. She didn't trust Matte, but she never did,
and it could have been the other guy. Maybe she could still save
her marriage and her life. She was so messed up.

Sam put her cup down on the coffee table and
moved around it to the couch. She put her arm around Ellie's
shoulder, even though it made her skin crawl. "Honey, what is it,
what's the matter?"

At the touch Ellen jumped up. ''Nothing you can
help me with," she said, there was an edge in her voice. "I mean, I
don't know what's wrong with me."

"Do you want to talk about it?" Samantha
said.

She opened her mouth, and then closed it and
her eyes looked vacant. ''No. Thank you, Sam, and thank you for
coming to get me. I'm just going to lie down for a while. I just
need to be quiet." She bit her lip. "I haven't even called
Teddy."

"You should call him."

Ellen nodded her head up and down, up and down,
like it was lose on her neck. "I have to lie down," she
said.