West 47th (40 page)

“Oh? I say speculation is next best to a sure thing.”

“I've never heard you say that.”

“You probably weren't listening. Quite often speculations
are
sure things; they're just not apparent.”

Mitch was amused. He kissed her a short, adoring one high on her cheek.

“With that twenty-five you'd no longer have to endure West 47th.”

“I don't endure it,” he contended and immediately realized that was only partially true. “Not all the time,” he added.

“Naturally, you'd miss it for a while.”

“I'd miss it,” he admitted.

“But only for a while, and it would go on and on missing you.”

He scoffed.

“We'd be miles away, wouldn't we?”

“Like where?”

She didn't have to give it even a moment's thought. “You'd be picking up big tabs at lots of extravagant places. Maybe we'd have a sort of permanent place on the lake to convenience your going to the Geneva auctions. You'd have clients in Milan and Paris. Maybe a small, flawless office in Zurich with a secretary who'd know the perfect way to say you weren't in, in ten languages. You'd only dabble in fine jewelry. You'd temperamentally dole out your expertise to the huge spenders. We'd motor the Loire and you'd describe. You'd keep me from dancing off edges into canals in Venice and St. Petersburg. You'd walk me into the rose fields of Grasse.” She paused a digestive beat. “What do you think?”

“Sounds good,” Mitch replied as brightly as he could manage, and, rather than allow futility to further blunt his edge, he asked, “How would you like me to read to you tonight? Some Carlos Fuentes perhaps.”

“Uh uh,” she said emphatically, “this morning I told you what I wanted to do but later, and later is now.”

Chapter 29

The summer night embraced the house, pressed it with fragrances and every so often sent a scuff of wind to the open bedroom windows to play spectrally with the sheer curtains. All was dark. The nearest prevailing light was a moon distant, and that but only the merest silver, unproviding.

Thus, even when Mitch was open-eyed he was equally blind.

Her hands were vessels, nearly weightless. They skimmed along him, his sea of flesh. She knew his courses and currents, where she was most likely to encounter maelstroms. Her hands drifted, here and there and here, persistently under way but avoiding destination, just barely, tacking at the last moment.

He lay still, as he knew she wanted. Already his cock did not seem to have enough skin to contain itself. It would burst from sensation when her mouth enclosed it, when her tongue lashed and her teeth made brief, inflicting visits.

She was such a greedy lover, greedy taker and greedy giver. Or, wasn't it generous giver and generous taker?

Frequently she removed her mouth, all at once, and breathed upon the warmth and wet she'd caused. Cooled his cock before resuming. Her hands never stopped. Burrowing, gliding, fingernails threatening.

Having her way with him.

She was sopping, puffed apart by the time she legged over and found herself with him. She did not ride him. She did not move at all immediately. The slick, tight channel of her held him surrounded. Oppositely, she had impaled herself all the way to her belly. The sop ran from her.

She did not ride him. Did not need to. She leaned forward up over him, just so, to become more parted below, just so, and helped herself to as much sensitivity as she wanted.

Her want. She took it in portions, marveled at his restraint, shared the sixth time she came.

With him.

Chapter 30

Nudged by all he had to do, Mitch came awake at first light. He got up immediately, dressed and went downstairs and out to the shed. Temporary diamonds on the grass. Much of the sky a funereal mauve. Sparrows frightened to fly from under the eaves.

He applied paint to the places on the plywood sections that Maddie had missed, and then went into the shed to check on the wolf trap. The trap appeared unchanged but, when he picked it up, flakes and clumps of rust fell from it. The solvent had lived up to its claims. The parts that made the trap a trap, its hinges, spring and release, now worked freely, easily. Mitch set the trap and sprung it with an old hardwood broom handle. He sharpened the trap's double set of triangular teeth. First with a metal file and then more with a whetstone. He set the trap again, sprung it again. The razor-sharp teeth crunched clear through the broom handle.

The plywood sections weren't yet thoroughly dry but he didn't want to wait. They were heavy and unwieldy. Once he got squatted beneath them and got them balanced he could manage three at a time layered on the bend of his back.

He had to pass through the woods to get them to the marsh, through the underbrush, the crazy vines and young trees. The young trees seemed capricious the way they hung on to his legs and the edges and corners of the plywood. He felt like telling them this wasn't a game.

Three round-trips with plywood sections. He placed them down at the edge of the marsh. He'd get back to them when he was done with the blackberry brambles.

The width of the bramble patch varied from twenty to fifty feet. It was wider across and thicker as well where the growth was new. Those greener, more vigorous canes were five to six feet high, thousands in the collective competing for the sun with familial strangle. Thorns on them like the spurs of a fighting cock.

Mitch put on the tough, leather gloves and began with the hedge trimmers. Before long he had cut a short ways into the patch, creating what appeared to be a shallow lair. It wasn't easy going. He was on his knees, having to crawl along hunched, being snagged and scratched at every turn. The canes seemed to resent his intrusion. Even the thorns dropped by those long dead stabbed through the fabric of his jeans.

What had appeared to be a lair became the tunnel that Mitch intended. He shaped it with the loppers, leaving the overhead canes as they were, intricately meshed.

Forty feet of bramble tunnel. He would add the final elements to it later.

He returned to the marsh, to the plywood sections. He sighted across and estimated that from where he stood the distance to the opposite bank was too great for his purpose. He moved along the edge where the summer had receded the water, leaving the silt dry and black like gunpowder. The huge green leaves of the skunk cabbage and the tufts of swamp grass were chest high. After a short ways he came upon a place where the temporary shore was somewhat elevated and jutted out. He went back for the plywood sections and got busy on them.

He laid two of the sections end to end, painted sides up and overlapped about six inches. He joined the two sections by driving two rows of one-inch staples into the overlap. He stapled the coiled length of quarter-inch nylon line to the first section and tied the free end of the line to the six-pound window sash weight. He twirled the weighted line until it was singing with momentum. Let it go. The weight, with the nylon line trailing after it, sailed high over the marsh and landed on the opposite shore some fifty feet away.

He went around the far end of the marsh to that spot, took up the line and gathered in its slack. He pulled the first plywood section into the water and most of the second. He went back around and stapled together the ends of two more sections and added those to the length of the first two. On the opposite shore again, he tugged all but the very end of those into the water.

It took all eight sections of plywood to complete the span, and even then it didn't quite reach, was a couple of feet short. He had to use rocks, some seventy-pounders, to weigh down each end and keep the span in place, and that, as it turned out, was for the better, because it concealed the ends nicely, caused them to be buried in the silt at the shoreline.

Now the span of plywood sections was below the water line, but barely, an inch or so at most. Just enough to not cause a break on the surface. The ugly green-black that the sections were painted was a good, close match to the murky color of the water.

Mitch, aware that the span was there, could make it out; however it wasn't obvious, would take some study for anyone to detect it.

He tested the span. Walked out a short ways onto its two-foot width. His weight caused it to go under another couple of inches. As he went on he found the coating of vinyl enamel was slippery when wet. He sloshed across to the other side, unsure of his footing. After a few back-and-forth crossings he got used to the feel of it and was able to hurry across. He ended up taking several round-trips running.

He was on his way to the pasture when he heard the first shot coming from the direction of the house. When he heard the next three he was already sprinting full out. The have-arounds had come, he thought. He'd underestimated Riccio.

Several more shots.

The sadistic bastards were peppering Maddie. He pictured her all shot up, bleeding, already dead, and, for their amusement, being disfigured by their bullets.

She wasn't.

When she came into sight he slowed to a walk, a casual walk the rest of the way, allowing him to catch his breath. He wouldn't tell her what he'd feared, how grisly and graphic it had been.

She was in the high grass off to one side of the old equipment barn. At that moment jamming another full clip into the Beretta. For a target she had nailed one of his best shirts to the side of the barn and was positioned about twenty paces from it.

Mitch paused, he noticed how indecisive her aim was before she fired a few rounds. He let her know he was there in case she completely lost her sense of direction.

“Getting in a little practice,” she said.

“Who is it you're shooting at?”

“Them,” she said toughly. “Be a love and go see how many I hit.”

He went to the shirt. The only holes in it were its button holes. He examined the barn siding around it and didn't find where any bullets had struck.

“Four hits,” he reported.

“Really?”

“Four right where the heart would be and a couple of just misses.”

Maddie didn't react as Mitch expected. No self-delight, no smartass grin. “You're fibbing me,” she said calmly. “I know you are, so don't bother to deny it.”

Best not to say anything, Mitch thought.

“I'm not blaming you. It's me,” she said. “I'm just so damn easy to fib to, aren't I? I'm always letting you get away with it because you have sweet intentions and it helps avoid a lot of the silly little bumps and potholes that would otherwise be in our way …”

“Maddie …”

“… but this time there's too much at stake.” She scoffed, a self-berating scoff. “Christ, I'm such a mess.”

“What happened?”

“I got the shirt nailed up without any trouble and was walking off ten paces when, on about the fifth pace, I stubbed my toe on something, a tuft of grass or an uneven spot or whatever, and I got all turned around. For some reason I just couldn't get my bearings.” She disliked admitting that. “I tried to sense where the barn and the shirt were but each time I thought I had doubt got to me and made me less and less certain and I didn't want to shoot in any old direction. Who knows what or who I might have hit.”

Mitch discerned the increasing change in her voice, a tightening. She was coming closer to crying with every syllable. As a rule she wasn't a crier. Anyway, not the usual sort. Plights and misfortunes, the hardest-luck and unfairest-unfair stories seldom brought forth a tear. Little patience for those. However, she was very susceptible to all forms of happiness. Merely hearing about happiness happening and various beautiful accomplishments coming about could cause her throat to lump up.

“I'm not going to be any help at all,” she said. “Without you, without your helping me to get aimed in the right direction I can't hit the broad side of a fucking barn.”

Mitch took her into his arms, held her. He felt her sag and let go. Her tears on his neck. The butt of the Beretta pressing his shoulder blade. “It'll be all right,” he told her.

“No fibbing?”

“We'll come out the other side of this and look back on it for shivers and laughs,” he said. His actual thought was she should have flown away. He should have insisted on it. There was still time. He could phone Billy and have him come get her, take her to Kennedy and the Concorde to Paris.

He suggested it.

She let it go right around her.

“Is my nose running?” she asked.

“No.”

“Feels like it is. What about my eyes?”

“A little red around the edges.”

“I'm famished.”

“Just do what I tell you and everything will be all right,” he reassured.

“How about some pancakes? I'll let you make them.”

After pancakes, Maddie sat on the rear porch steps and cleaned her Beretta while listening to an Elmore Leonard. Mitch drove into town with a grocery shopping list.

He was at the supermarket, had nearly everything in his cart and was waiting to be waited on at the deli counter when he spotted the have-around. The fat guy who was usually stationed on the landing halfway up to Riccio's offices; the one Mitch had twice pushed down the stairs. Their eyes caught upon one another simultaneously, caught and held. The have-around had a paper bag in one hand and a glazed donut, like a helpless victim, in the other. Mitch did a contemptible up and down and decided he might as well go over to him.

“What's your name?” he asked aggressively.

“Angelo,” the have-around replied.

“What do they call you around?”

“Fat Angelo.”

“I never would have guessed.”

“My real name is Anthony.”

“Fat Tony was taken.”

“Yeah.”

“A hundred times.”

“This is Little Mike. You know Little Mike?”

Little Mike stepped out from behind Fat Angelo. He was appropriately named. About five feet tall at most, a muscle-layered chunk with a bilious complexion. He looked like he'd have no trouble getting in under the axle of a car and holding it up while someone changed a tire. “I seen you around,” he said to Mitch. “On the street.”