Death on the Mississippi (24 page)

Dalton turned his boat directly toward the shore below Nutmeg Hill promontory and ran it aground. He began to make his way up the steep hill toward the house and Bea.

“Take him out!” Rocco roared at the sailor at the mounted machine gun.

“He's behind rocks, I can't get a clear shot!”

Bea sat in the breakfast nook with half a cup of cold coffee in front of her and a yellow legal pad. Several crumpled sheets of paper were on the floor by her side. She had listed all the state senators on the page for the seventh time and had neatly placed her yea and nay tallies by each name. No matter how she calculated, her day-care amendment could pass, but there were not enough votes to override the Governor's veto. She took a sip of coffee and grimaced at its taste. She walked into the kitchen and poured fresh coffee from the electric percolator.

She saw out the double windows over the sink that there was activity on the river. A launch was moving from a Coast Guard cutter in the main channel toward the shore below the house. She smiled. That's good service, she thought. They were delivering the three men right to the doorstep, so to speak. She would write a very nice note to the commandant.

The kitchen door behind her opened and she turned with a smile. “Home is the hunter, home …” Dalton Turman stood in the door pointing an automatic rifle directly at her.

“Hi, honey,” he said. “How would you like a vacation?”

She knew instantly that Lyon had discovered what he was looking for, that Dalton knew it, and that the men landing at the base of the hill were after him. Her smile didn't fade. “Stop pointing that damn thing at me, Dalton. You're getting so that you aren't funny anymore.”

He pushed her aside to look out the window. “Don't play cute, Bea. You know why Lyon was out on the Sound today.”

“Did he find the body?”

“He said he did. They were at the right location.”

“Lyon's very good at putting things like that together,” she said.

He turned away from the window. “Yes, isn't he.”

“It won't take them long to get up the hill, Dalton. The car keys are on the pegboard in the corner. The car's in the drive and I filled the tank with gas earlier today.”

“I really appreciate your cooperation and concern, Beatrice,” Dalton said. “But what we have here now is what's called your basic hostage situation. You know that Rocco must have talked to his men by radio. I wouldn't get past the drive.”

“Oh, come on now, Dalton. You know these things never work out. No one ever gets away and Rocco wouldn't let you past the city limits if you had a busload of hostages.”

Dalton pressed the barrel of his weapon against her forehead. “I am not some idiot holed up in a bank who takes two clerks hostage and tries to escape on a Greyhound. I have some variations that will blow your mind.”

The phone startled both of them. “It's probably the hostage negotiators,” Bea said. “This is where you demand a seven-forty-seven and a million in cash.” The phone rang again.

“A small helicopter will do. Answer it.”

Bea carefully pushed the gun barrel away from her forehead, but Dalton kept it pointed at her midriff. She picked up the receiver. “Yes?” She listened a moment and then covered the mouthpiece with her hand. “It's the Governor,” she said to Dalton.

“I've got to hand it to Lyon, he goes to the top in no time at all. Tell the Governor I want a helicopter in ten minutes or I blow your head off.”

Bea nodded and began to speak slowly and clearly into the phone. “Please listen carefully. I am a hostage … No! Not to my liberal beliefs. I am a hostage hostage. There is a man in my kitchen holding a Klasnikov to my head … No, I am not making an ethnic joke … There is a man holding a machine gun in my kitchen … I don't care what I said about gun control last session! Will you listen to me, you idiot? I am about to be killed!”

“Now Rocco and Lyon are on the line too,” Bea said to Dalton.

He snatched the phone from her hand and shoved her into the corner. “This isn't party-line time! Listen out there! You have,” he looked at his watch, “eight minutes for the bird to be on the field in back of the house … You want a what, Wentworth? … An exchange? I take you in place of Bea? Fine, come on in. Make sure you come in the back way and walk in the yard spot so I can see you clearly. And strip … You heard me. Come in here in your underwear. Make it snappy!”

He started to slam the receiver back into its stanchion, but Bea took it from his hand. “I know you're recording this, so tell fearless leader that you'll release the transcript at my funeral if he doesn't approve my child-care amendment. Got that? Promise? … And for God's sake don't let Lyon come in here.”

Dalton snatched the phone and pulled her around the corner into the protected confines of the hall. “You're nuts, do you know that?”

“Sometimes you have to use every available political weapon, and I have a feeling that I may not have many parliamentary alternatives in my future.”

In the shadows of the tree line, Lyon began removing his clothes. Across the lawn he saw the house, now ominous and dangerous. He arranged his clothes in a neat pile by his feet and took off everything except his jockey shorts. Dalton hadn't mentioned shoes, but he took them off also.

“You can't go,” Rocco said from the shadows at his side. Lyon didn't answer. “You do remember what he said to you by the seawall? He said he would kill you.”

“I know,” Lyon said, “and I don't believe he's going to let Bea go, but it has to be done.” The spotlight mounted over the back steps cast a swatch of light that carried half-across the yard nearly to the edge of the garden shed. Once past the shed, he would be in clear view of the kitchen door and a side window. It was at that point of no return where the ring of town and State Police with their M-l6s and other weapons would be of no help.

“I think we could tape a flat automatic pistol to the small of your back,” Rocco said. “That's the only way you can carry any sort of weapon in there. Or maybe a combat knife? We could hide that under the waistband.”

“God, Rocco, I'm not a knife fighter, and he's going to check me as soon as I'm in there. Just make sure the helicopter lands in a few minutes.” Lyon broke away from Rocco's restraining grip. He stepped out from the tree line and began the walk toward the rim of light near the house.

His legs felt leaden, his feet chunky, and the longish grass seemed to grasp his toes like restraining tentacles. He had no plan, only fear that he attempted to shove deep into the corner of his mind. He had walked this path twenty thousand times, and now the familiar had turned strange. The shape of trees and the configuration of the house appeared foreign.

He was only a few feet from the storage shed. Its door had never been properly closed since the dummy incident, and the evening wind caused it to wave back and forth and clunk against the wall with a hollow sound. He thought of the electric hedge clippers. He was probably the only gardener in the state who had recently managed to cut through his own clipper cord while trimming a bush. The useless clippers with their severed electric cord still hung on a nail in the shed.

He stepped into the shed and snaked the cut cord from its hook, coiled it quickly, and stuffed it into the rear of his shorts. Within seconds he was out of the shed and walking in the circle of light near the rear of the house.

Lyon stepped into the empty kitchen. He had expected to be shot crossing the yard while clearly outlined in the light, but he now realized that Dalton's firing might have triggered an immediate police assault. He obviously had other plans. They were probably in the hall, hidden from a direct sighting by police sharpshooters. He only had seconds left before he faced the man with the assault rifle. Lyon let the kitchen door noiselessly close behind him and tore the damaged electrical cord from his shorts. He plugged the line into the socket on the kitchen counter where the percolator still operated. Its naked end dangled over the counter rim and fell halfway to the floor.

He stood in the center of the room and urinated. He felt the warm fluid trickle down his legs, over his bare toes, and form a pool around his feet. “Anybody home?” he called.

“Don't move,” Dalton commanded from the hall.

Bea, with one arm bent behind her back, was shoved into the hallway door in such a manner that her shoulder touched the wall and provided a protected rest for Dalton's rifle. She tried to smile at Lyon, but her eyes were wide and there was a marked quaver to her voice. “You look ridiculous in those shorts,” she said.

“You've always said that.”

Only a small portion of Dalton's face was visible behind Bea, but the gun barrel on her shoulder rotated slightly until it was pointed directly at Lyon. “Raise your arms and turn around,” Dalton ordered.

Lyon did as directed. “Let her go.”

Dalton laughed. “You didn't really think that I would? I need both of you. One on each flank. Good God! You've wet yourself. Look at your brave husband, Bea. He just peed in his pants. Now that I think back, he did that in his foxhole in combat when I had to pull him out. Jesus, what a whimp.”

Lyon sagged forward as his hands clutched at his face. “I can't stand any more. Please let us go.”

“Don't, Lyon,” Bea said in a faraway voice.

“I know he's going to kill us,” Lyon said as his knees wobbled.

The clatter of a helicopter's approach filled the room. “As soon as it lands we go out. And you two better be all over me or none of us makes it.”

“They'll follow us,” Bea said.

“Wait until you see how I make a helicopter disappear,” Dalton said.

Lyon sank to his knees on the kitchen floor. “He'll never let us land alive.”

“I promise you a landing one way or the other,” Dalton said.

“It's too much,” Lyon pleaded. “Kill me now.”

“And have them rush the house as soon as they hear a shot? No way,” Dalton said.

“I beg you,” Lyon pleaded.

“Please,” Bea said to Lyon.

“You sniveling bastard!” Dalton said as he pushed past Bea. He reversed the rifle preparatory to smashing a butt stroke to Lyon's head. “You're no good to me on your knees.”

“God help us,” Lyon said as his right hand closed around Dalton's ankle and his left simultaneously grasped the naked end of the plugged cord.

Bea screamed as the two men's bodies arced in a macabre dance of convoluted movements as the electricity surged through them. Lyon's nearly naked body, in direct contact with the liquid on the floor, flopped convulsively for several seconds before his heart went into arrest, and still the convulsing movements continued. Dalton's fingers were locked on the trigger guard of the assault rifle, and as they jerked, the weapon fired and sent half a magazine of bullets through his torso, and barely missed Bea as she flung herself into the hallway in her scrambled clawing for the circuit breaker box.

Bea stood on the patio at the parapet as she looked out over the river valley with unseeing eyes. She felt a grief too profound for tears, too intense for any immediate emotion other than a numb realization of what had just happened. She was aware that blood spatters pocked her clothes, arms, and face. It was the stigma of the final gift of the final prank of the man whose greed had destroyed so many. There was nothing she could do. Anything that could be done, would be done, by the large man struggling with the dead in the crowded kitchen.

Rocco's anguished cry of “No!” caused her to turn and look through the kitchen window. The large police chief held the medic with the body bag by the front of his shirt. “Out!” he yelled, and threw the man through the kitchen door.

She gave a stifled giggle in a display of inapproporiate emotion far removed from the horror of her reality. It would have been better if Rocco had opened the screen before he threw the medic out the door. The kitchen now had a broken door, snake-shot bullet holes in the cabinets, machine-gun bullet holes throughout the hall, blood everywhere, and a scorched floor. It didn't matter. The new owners could do the repairs, for she would never spend another night in the house that had murdered her husband.

“O Two, asshole,” Rocco bellowed inside the kitchen.

That has a certain cadence to it, Bea thought before the significance of what she had just heard caused her to rush to the hall and peer into the kitchen. Rocco rose from his CPR position at Lyon's nearly naked body. An oxygen mask was attached to her husband's face. A monitor sat on the kitchen counter with its leads running to Lyon.

Numbers flickered on the monitor. “We got him!” the EMT yelled.

Bea crumpled to the floor.

The Wobblies had grown gargantuan in size and clung to the exterior of the Empire State Building. Their eyes blazed in anger as their long tails flicked dangerously to and fro. A dozen helicopters buzzed around the building and took turns in their diving attacks against the rampaging monsters. The Wobblies' tails struck again and again as they crushed flying machines and knocked them from the sky.

Lyon rooted for the monsters and kept a running tally of their destructive score. Somewhere in the distance a pinball machine pinged with metronome regularity at each monster victory. Bea was huddled on a balcony, but he knew she was well protected by the benign monsters.

A brilliant flash of light briefly illuminated the whole scene, and then it was gone. He forced his eyes open to look into the face of the towheaded resident bent over him with a penlight in his hand.

“He's coming around,” the doctor said as he straightened up.

It took a few more moments for Lyon's eyes to focus and for his surroundings to merge into coherent shapes. Bea and Rocco stood at the foot of the bed, and beyond them he could see a glass window and a nurse at a monitoring station. Banks of instrumentation seemed to surround him with wire leads connected to his body. He knew he was in an intensive-care unit.