HardScape (30 page)

“I'm only talking to him. Go wait in the car.”

Rose shifted from foot to foot like a worried bear.

“Now!” Long's voice cut like a whip.

Rose stepped back. “Okay. I'll wait. See you guys in a minute.” As he turned, he said, “Jesus Christ.”

Oliver Moody, who had finally heard enough, stepped out of the keeping room, both hands wrapped around his automatic. In full uniform and Smokey Bear hat, he looked nine feet tall.

***

I had neglected to warn Ollie that Jack Long had been a Marine. While Ollie, who should have known better, made the mistake of thinking rich men were soft. Long caught him flat-footed.

He launched his burly frame into a flying leap, hit the terrace rolling, and came up shooting with remarkable accuracy. The state trooper got off a round that went wild as he pitched forward, blood spraying from his neck.

“Jesus!” yelled Rose. “You shot a cop.”

I was stunned. Oliver Moody on the ground was an impossible sight.

“You shot a cop,” Rose yelled, his voice rising in panic. “You're crazy. You shot a cop.”

“That didn't happen,” said Long, eyeing me as he knelt coolly and picked up Oliver's pistol. “What happened was a shootout between our resident state trooper and his old enemy, the realtor convict. Tragic how these country feuds turn bloody.…” He turned to me with the smile of a man who knew that finally, a very messy situation would be contained. “Sorry about this, Ben. Like he said, it's really gotten out of hand.”

I looked to Rose. No help there. He wasn't smiling, but he looked relieved. Long's story would sell if they could just iron out a few details. Drive my car back to my house. Get in their car when no one was looking. And drive away.

Long aimed Ollie's gun at me. I felt my legs shaking and couldn't stop them. “I thought you hate partners, Jack.”

“You lost me there, Ben.”

“You kill me and you've formed a lifelong partnership with your tame detective. He'll have this on you forever.”

“Bullshit,” said Rose.

“No problem,” Long agreed. “Al got caught in the crossfire.” He raised Oliver's gun and it boomed like a cannon, twice.

Chapter 29

Long's first shot surprised me almost as much as it did Rose, whose jaw dropped like a brick when the bullet sent him reeling backward. The second shot was a little wide, tearing bloodily through the detective's arm and spinning his body in a complete circle before it landed. I dove on top of Oliver Moody.

I would have much preferred to run Long's gears with my pocketknife, but the distance between us was too great to reach him before he blew me to pieces with Oliver's sidearm. So it was the trooper's ankle gun or nothing, provided I could extract it from the holster and figure out how to disengage the safety, very quickly.

I got one break. Long mistakenly assumed I was hiding behind Oliver's body. He took a second to step closer and aim, and in that time I got my hand up Oliver's pants leg and around the Beretta, before Long tumbled. He snapped a shot. The slug whanged slate chips in my face, and then I was jerking on the trigger.

At Leavenworth NRA chapter meetings, all members agreed: Shoot. Shoot. Shoot. Don't ask. Don't aim. Just keep shooting. My mentors would have been proud. I figured out the safety and pulled the trigger over and over and over again. Long must have felt like he was back on his helicopter over Viet Cong territory. Bullets sprayed all around him. He threw his hands up as if to shield his face, and one of my shots finally caught him in the arm. He cried out, turned, and ran.

I grabbed my knife, started after him, slipped on Ollie's blood, and fell on my face. Before I could get to my feet, Jack Long was around the house with a twenty-yard lead. I charged after him, rounded the house, and saw him running for my car. Suddenly he skidded to a stop as a rusty '79 Ford pickup burst between the hedges that screened the road and roared up the rutted drive.

Jack Long ran. The pickup truck veered, cut him off, hit him with an enormously loud
boom
, and threw him thirty feet across the weed-strewn parking lot.

Long hit the ground, rolling like a log. The truck spun on a dime, spewing dust and gravel. Long tried to stand, dragging himself up on one knee, throwing up his arms and screaming in terror as the truck knocked him down again and ran him over. Red brake lights flared, then backup whites, and it backed on top of him and stopped.

Gwen Jervis jumped out. Ignoring me watching from the corner of the sunroom, she knelt under the truck and gazed silently into Long's face.

I heard a deep and desperate cry from the back of the house, an angry plea. “
Ben
!”

I ran back to Ollie. Blood spurting, he struggled to stand. I gentled him down in my arms, found a terrible gouge in his massive neck, and tried to squeeze it shut.

My fingers kept slipping on his blood. I took off my jacket. The tweed cloth was too rough. I pulled off my sweater and jammed the smoother wool into the wound.

Movement. I looked up.

“What—”

“Saw your dust.” Gwen Jervis, who had not been quite as drunk as I had thought the night before, took in the scene with a cold glance.

“Grab the phone in my car. Call for an ambulance.”

Instead, Gwen knelt. “Let me look.…I'll do him, you call.” Her hands were shaking, but they clamped surely on the wound. “Make it two ambulances. There's a guy out front got run over by a pickup truck.”

There was dead calm in her eyes. “Fell right under my wheels. Twice.”

I ran to my car and telephoned 911.

Thirty feet down the drive, Jack Long sprawled under Gwen's truck like a scarecrow blown off its pole. Newbury answered. I told them they had better bring the Morrisville and Frenchtown ambulances too. Then I knelt for a closer look at Long. His eyes flickered with light for a second, pale, dim, and fading fast.

The wheels had crushed his chest. His voice bubbled thin and bloody. “Why'd she run me over?” he asked. He looked bewildered.

I told him she did what she had to do and went back to help with Oliver.

***

The body count had dropped a full basis point in my absence. Alex Rose was sitting up. Ever cautious, the detective had worn a bullet-proof vest under his fancy shooting jacket. His arm was going to hurt a long time, as were his cracked ribs, but he was not dead. In fact, he was hoarsely gasping a story he thought we ought to present to the cops. I told him to make up his own story.

“Hey, I didn't know he offed Ron.”

“Not a clue?”

“Okay, so maybe I suspected, but that's not the same as knowing.”

Gwen looked over, with Ollie's blood on her face. “Ask him about Renny.”

“I was about to.”

“I didn't know anything about Renny.”

“Didn't you wonder why Jack told you to stash forty grand in Renny's closet?”

“I didn't do that. I swear it. Jack must have.”

I exchanged a look with Gwen. We must have looked dubious, because Rose protested indignantly, again. “I never touched the money.” Too indignantly, I thought. So did Gwen.

“Then what are you lying about?” she asked.

Rose thought a moment. We heard a siren on the wind. “Jack asked me to buy him a few grams of coke. That's all I did.”

“And never made the connection with the coke in Renny's plane?”

“Not right away.…I'm sorry. There was nothing I could have changed. The man was running his own program.”

I looked at Gwen, who shrugged. As far as she was concerned, Alex Rose was nothing.

“And you just kept hoping it would all work out?”

“Come on, Rita woulda beat it.”

I wondered whether Rose would have come to Rita's defense when the trial went against her. A waste of breath to ask.

“How'd Jack get your balls in his pocket?”

“Goddamned economy. In 1989 my outfit billed four million. 'Ninety-one, four hundred thousand. Last year I would have gone Chapter Eleven without my LTS retainer.”

The Newbury volunteer ambulance arrived first, Danny Butler driving, Cathy Chevalley the nurse. Both had done trauma courses, but they were afraid to move Ollie, so they radioed for the Life Star helicopter, which lifted him out before dark. By then we had a lot of bad-tempered state police on the Richardson place, including Bender and Boyce, who were clearly not talking to each other.

Gwen answered their questions with practiced ease, repeating simply that she had just come driving down Richardson Street, intending to pick apples from the abandoned orchard, and this guy ran out in front of her truck. “Hit him, threw him, and ran over the poor bastard.” She probed the hole between her teeth and reflected, “It was a terrible experience.”

The cops looked at me. “That what you saw?”

I wasn't a liar. Telling the truth was the foundation of the “Puritan claptrap” that Ira Roth had accused my “crazy Aunt Connie” of drumming into me. What Ira hadn't understood was the beauty of principle: the sheer simplicity that swept aside ambivalence and doubt. Connie taught me never to ask, Should I tell the truth?; she taught me that I must.

I looked at Gwen, who was as alone and fearless as a hawk that soared on instinct. She gazed back, asking nothing.

“What did you see, Ben?”

Like I told Jack Long, you drop the ball, you pay the penalty. I had made mistakes. I had paid the price. I paid for principle—paid willingly, even gladly. Clean slate, I had told Ira, though in my heart, at least, I had to wonder if I had spent coin that wasn't only mine.

“Ben?”

“I had my hands full with Trooper Moody. I thought he was a goner until Gwen came running and got the bleeding stopped.” (Something else Connie taught me: If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing right.)

A flinty-eyed state police captain who had battled Jervises his entire career asked dryly, “You've had experience with gunshot wounds, Gwen?”

“Hunting accidents,” Gwen confessed.

***

Dark set in, and we all adjourned to Town Hall, where the police set up a temporary HQ. The state's attorney himself came down from the county seat, and he was clearly less interested in Gwen's story than mine. Ollie had choked out a statement on the flight to the hospital, confirming the essence of Jack Long's confession. Now he was tubed and trached in Recovery, and his doctors would permit no more interviews until tomorrow. Alex Rose had either been on the wrong side of the house or unconscious in the grass. That left me as the state's attorney's best witness to the events that appeared to turn his case against Rita Long into low comedy.

He was not a happy man. Nor was he pleased when Ira Roth bustled in full three-piece regalia, assuring me
sotto voce
he was working
pro bono
.

The state's attorney said, “Let me get this straight. This man claims—”

“My client asserts.”

“Your client asserts that Jack Long shot Ron Pearlman in order to nullify a contract that would have ruined him financially. He further claims—asserts—that to maintain the illusion that he was in Washington, D.C., all day of the murder, Jack Long shot your client's cousin, Renny Chevalley, the pilot who flew him to Newbury, and made it look like a drug deal gone bad.”

“Where'd the coke come from?” asked Sergeant Bender.

“Certainly not from my client.”

“Since he knows so goddamned much about this case, could your client possibly assist us in our inquiries?”

“He'd be delighted, if he could. But how could he possibly know about cocaine? He had had only a passing acquaintance with Mr. Long at what I recall was a land trust meeting. Is that right, Ben?”

“That's right. We shook hands.”

“Do you recall whether Mr. Long had bags of cocaine with him at the land trust meeting?”

“Oh for chrissake, Ira!”

“Point being, Mister State's Attorney,” Ira answered his old foe, “you're asking the wrong man. Just as you're trying to stampede a grand jury into indicting the wrong woman.”

“Your other client.”

“If I didn't know better, I'd fear that the rule of law was under siege in Plainfield.”

“Goddammit!”

“Give thanks to Ben Abbott, Counselor. Better now than getting laughed out of court. And he clears up the Chevalley mystery, on which your people have not distinguished themselves, wouldn't you say?” He turned to me without even asking the state's attorney's or the police's permission, and said, “Ben, may I offer you a lift to your car?”

“It's impounded,” growled Marian Boyce. “I'll drive him.”

Ira said, “Can I trust you, Trooper, not to intimidate my client while you have him alone in your automobile?”

“You have my word,” said Marian, and turning to Bender, she asked, “Do I have your permission?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“In writing.”

***

“Where to?” said Marian, once we were in her car.

“The Castle.”

“I thought so, Mr. Romantic.”

“Does she know yet?”

“I told them to hold off. You'd tell her.”

***

The front door was open, the house dark but for a single light atop the turret. I made my way to the stairs by the glow of appliance clocks, smoke detectors, and security code pads. I climbed, footsteps echoing. Rita was on top, in the observation nest, seated at the little table and staring out at the night. Beside her sat a bottle of champagne on ice and two empty glasses. An Ithaca Deerslayer lay across her lap, sister to the weapon that had killed Ron Pearlman.

“Jack?” she asked as I reached the top of the stairs.

“Ben.”

Her shoulders sagged. “Did you kill him?”

“No. Renny's girlfriend ran him over with her truck.”

“Did he suffer?”

I recalled his scream. “Briefly.”

“He deserved to.”

“Yeah, right. What's the gun for?”

“He said we had to talk.”

“Who's the champagne for?”

“A man I used to love. Want some?”

“I'll pass. Maybe I can bring a new bottle one of these days.”

“Not too soon.”

I started down the stairs. My Aunt Connie was right. I was a fool for women. But this one would save me from myself.

“By the way, there's a wiretap on your guest-room phone. Just so you know.”

“I disconnected it.”

“When?”

“When you told me about the video I realized that Rose must have installed a tap.”

“It's not working?”

“No.”

“But I called you on that phone last night and—”

“I figured you were sending Alex Rose a message, so I called him up and told him.”

“Why?”

“I knew you were bluffing about proof. That meant you were bluffing Jack. Right? To force him out in the open. Right?”

“You knew he'd come after me?”

“Obviously, you had a plan.”

“What if I didn't?”

She patted the Deerslayer. “I did.”