Retribution: A Lew Fonesca Novel (Lew Fonesca Novels) (32 page)

“Stay here,” he told Pryor. “I’ll be right back.”

Wychovski ran to the parking lot, not caring anymore who might be watching, noticing. He opened the trunk and threw the bag in. When he turned, he saw the cop car coming down the street. Only one way in the lot. Only one way out. The same way. He grabbed six or seven more watches and another handful of little golden animals and quickly shoved them in his bulging pockets. Then he moved into the park, off the path, toward the rocks. Last stand? Glock on the rocks? Couldn’t be. It couldn’t end like this. He was caught between a cop and a hard place. Funny. Couldn’t laugh though. He hurried on, looking back to see the cop car enter the little lot.

Wouldn’t do to leave Pryor behind unless he was dead. But Pryor wasn’t dead.

Wychovski helped him up with one arm and urged him toward the little slice of moon. He found the rocks. Kids were crawling over them. Big rocks. Beyond them the night and the lake like an ocean of darkness, end of the world. Nothingness. He climbed out and down.

Three teenagers or college kids, male, watched him make his way down toward the water with Pryor. Stop looking
at us, he willed. Go back to playing with yourselves, telling lies, and being stupid. Just don’t look at me. Wychovski crouched behind a rock, pulling the zombie Pryor with him, the water touching his shoes.

He had no plan. Water and rocks. Pockets full of not much. Crawl along the rocks. Get out. Find a car. Drive to the motel. Get to St. Louis. Tanner might give him a few hundred, maybe more for what he had. Start again. No more Pryor. He would find a new Pryor to replace the prior Pryor, a Pryor without a gun.

Wychovski knew he couldn’t be alone.

“You see two men out here?” He heard a voice through the sound of the waves.

“Down there,” came a slightly younger voice.

Wychovski couldn’t swim. Give up or keep going. He pushed Pryor into the water and kept going. A flashlight beam from above now. Another from the direction he had come.

“Stop right there. Turn around and come back the way you came,” said a voice.

“He’s armed,” said another voice.

“Take out your gun and hold it by the barrel. Now.”

Wychovski considered. He took out the Glock. Great gun. Took it out slowly, looked up, and decided it was all a what-the-hell life anyway. He grabbed the gun by the handle, holding on to the rock with one hand. He aimed toward the flashlight above him. But the flashlight wasn’t aimed at him. It was shining on the floating, flailing Pryor.

Wychovski fell backward. His head hit a jutting rock. Hurt. But the water, the cold water was worst of all.

“Can you get to him, Dave?” someone called frantically.

“I’m trying.”

Pryor was floating on his back, bobbing in the black waves. I can float, he thought, looking at the flashlight. Float out to some little sailboat, climb on, get away.

He floated farther away. Pain gone cold.

“Can’t reach him.”

“Shit. He’s floating out. Call it in.”

No one was trying to reach Wychovski. There were no lights on him.

Footsteps. Wychovski looked up. On the rocks above him, Wychovski could see people in a line looking down at Pryor as he floated farther and farther from the shore into the blackness. Wychovski looked for the moon and stars. They weren’t there.

Maybe the anniversary hit hadn’t been such a good idea.

He closed his eyes and thought that he had never fired his Glock, never fired any gun. It was a damned good gun.

Wychovski crawled along the rocks, half in half out of the water.

He looked back. There was no sign or sound of Pryor.

“A polished follow-up to
Vengeance
… Kaminsky is such a pro that the pages fly by, and even though Lew is often such a sad sack, it’s hard not to root for him.”

—
The Chicago Tribune

Lew Fonesca is a world-weary guy who got in a car and just started driving after his wife died. He wound up in front of a Dairy Queen in Sarasota, Florida and now makes his way amid bail jumpers and lost wives, people who want to be found and those who will do anything to stay under their rock. He spends his days solving cases both big and small, trying to get by while attempting to figure out how to make the rest of his life make sense.

Lew has solved his share of cases and most of them—to his pride—have wound up having a happy ending; in
Vengeance
he saved a young runaway who has had a child-hood nobody should ever have. She finally seems to be turning her life around, but when she becomes involved with a reclusive bestselling author and several valuable manuscripts disappear, Lew knows that young Adele is in way over her head.

If Lew doesn’t act fast, not only could a few reputations get tarnished—but the bodies might start piling up.

“An excellent hard-boiled novel.”
—
The Sun-Sentinel