Chapter Twenty-Two
My grandfather used to say that the most terrifying sound in the world was the sound of a shell being loaded into a pump-action shotgun, a shell that was meant for you. It woke me from my sleep in the motel as they came up the stairs, the hands of my watch glowing the time at 3.30 a.m. They came through the door seconds later, the sound of the explosions deafeningly loud in the silence of the night as shot after shot was fired into my bed, sending feathers and shreds of cotton into the air like a cloud of white moths.
But by then I was already on my feet, my gun in my hand. The sound of the shots was blocked slightly by the closed connecting door, just as the sound of the door opening into the hall was blocked from them, even when the firing had stopped and their ears sang with the hard notes of the gun and their eyes widened as they realised I was not in the bed. The decision not to make myself an easy target by sleeping in my assigned room had paid off.
I came into the hall quickly, turned and aimed. The man from the red jeep stood in the hall, the barrel of the Ithaca 12-gauge pump close to his face. Even in the dim hall light I could see that there were no shell casings on the ground at his feet. It had been the woman who fired the shots.
Now he spun towards me as the woman swore from inside the room. The barrel of the shotgun came down as he turned in my direction. I fired one shot and a dark rose bloomed at his throat and blood fell like a shower of petals on his white shirt. The shotgun dropped to the carpet as his hands clutched for his neck. He folded to his knees and fell flat on the floor, his body thrashing and jerking like a fish out of water.
The barrel of a shotgun appeared from behind the door jamb and the woman fired indiscriminately into the hall, plaster leaping from the walls. I felt a tug at my right shoulder and then sharp white-hot pain through my arm. I tried to hold on to my gun but I lost it on the ground as the woman continued firing, deadly shot zinging through the air and exploding in the walls around me.
I ran down the hall and through the door leading to the fire stairs, tripping and tumbling down the steps as the shooting stopped. I knew she would come after me as soon as she had made certain that her partner was dead. If there had been any chance of him surviving, I think she might have tried to save him, and herself.
I made it to the second floor but I could hear her steps pounding on the stairs above me. The pain in my arm was intense and I felt certain she would reach me before I got to the ground level.
I slipped through the door into the hallway. Plastic sheeting lay upon the ground and two step-ladders stood like steeples at either wall. The air was heavy with the smell of paint and spirits.
Twenty feet from the door was a small alcove, almost invisible until you were upon it, which contained a fire hose and a heavy, old-style water-based extinguisher. There was an identical alcove near my own room. I slipped into it, leaning against the wall and trying to control my breathing. Lifting the extinguisher with my left hand I tried to hold it underneath with my right in a vain effort to use it as a weapon but my arm, bleeding heavily by now, was useless and the extinguisher was too awkward to be effective. I heard the woman’s steps slowing and the door sighed softly as she moved into the hall. I listened to her steps on the plastic. There was a loud bang as she kicked open the door of the first room on the floor, then a second bang as she repeated the exercise at the next door. She was almost upon me now and, though she walked softly, the plastic betrayed her. I could feel blood pouring down my arm and dripping from the ends of my fingers as I unwound the hose and waited for her to come.
She was almost level with the alcove when I swung the hose forward like a whip. The heavy brass nozzle caught her in the middle of her face and I heard bone crunch. She staggered back, harmlessly loosing off a blast from the shotgun as she raised her left hand instinctively to her face. I swung the hose again, the rubber glancing against her outstretched hand while the nozzle connected with the side of her head. She moaned and I slipped from the alcove as quickly as I could, the brass nozzle of the hose now in my left hand, and wrapped the rubber around her neck like the coils of a snake.
She tried to move her hand on the shotgun, the stock against her thigh in an effort to pump a cartridge as blood from her battered face flowed between the fingers of her right hand. I kicked hard at the gun and it fell from her grasp as I pulled her tightly against my body, bracing myself against the wall, one leg entwined with hers so she could not pull away, the other holding the hose taut. And there we stood like lovers, the nozzle now warm with blood in my hand and the hose tight against my wrist, as she struggled and then went limp in my grip.
When she stopped moving I released her and she slumped to the ground. I unwound the hose from her neck and, taking her by the hand, I pulled her down the stairs to ground level. Her face was reddish-purple and I realised I had come close to killing her, but I still wanted her where I could see her.
Rudy Fry lay grey on the floor of his office, blood congealing on his face and around the dent in his fractured skull. I called the sheriff’s office, and, minutes later, heard the sirens and saw the red and blue glow of the lights spinning and reflecting around the darkened lobby, the blood and the flashes reminding me once again of another night and other deaths. When Alvin Martin entered with his gun in his hand I was nauseous with shock and barely able to stand, the red light like fire in my eyes.
‘You’re a lucky man,’ said the elderly doctor, her smile a mixture of surprise and concern. ‘Another couple of inches and Alvin here would have been composing a eulogy.’
‘I bet that would have been something to hear,’ I replied.
I was sitting on a table in the Emergency room of Haven’s small but well-equipped medical centre. The wound in my arm was minor but had bled heavily. Now it had been cleaned and strapped and my good hand clutched a bottle of pain-killers. I felt like I’d been sideswiped by a passing train.
Alvin Martin stood beside me. Wallace and another deputy I didn’t recognise were down the hall, guarding the room in which the woman was being kept. She had not regained consciousness and, from what I had heard of the doctor’s hurried conversation with Martin, I believed that she might have lapsed into a coma. Rudy Fry was also still unconscious, although he was expected to recover from his injuries.
‘Anything on the shooters?’ I asked Martin.
‘Not yet. We’ve sent photos and prints to the feds. They’re going to send someone from Richmond later today.’ The clock on the wall read 6.45 a.m. Outside the rain continued to fall.
Martin turned to the doctor. ‘Could you give us a minute or two in private, Elise?’
‘Certainly. Don’t strain him, though.’ He smiled at her as she left but when he turned back to me the smile was gone. ‘You came here with a price on your head?’
‘I’d heard a rumour, that’s all.’
‘Fuck you and your rumour. Rudy Fry almost died in there and I’ve got an unidentified corpse in the morgue with a hole in his neck. You know who called out the hit?’
‘I know who did it.’
‘You gonna tell me?’
‘No, not yet anyway. I’m not going to tell the feds, either. I need you to keep them off my back for a while.’
Martin almost laughed. ‘Now why am I gonna do that?’
‘I need to finish what I came down here to do. I need to find Catherine Demeter.’
‘This shooting have anything to do with her?’
‘I don’t know. It could have but I don’t see where she fits in. I need your help.’
Martin bit his lip. ‘The town council’s running wild. They reckon if the Japanese get wind of this they’ll open up a plant in White Sands before they come here. Everyone wants you gone.’
A nurse entered the room and Martin stopped talking, preferring instead to seethe quietly as she spoke. ‘There’s a call for you, Mr Parker,’ she said. ‘A Detective Cole from New York.’
I winced at the pain in my arm as I rose and she seemed to take pity on me. I wasn’t above accepting
pity at that point.
‘Stay where you are,’ she said with a smile. ‘I’ll bring in an extension and we can patch the call through.’
She returned minutes later with the phone and plugged the jack into a box on the wall. Alvin Martin hovered uncertainly for a moment beside me and then stomped out, leaving me alone.
‘Walter?’
‘A deputy called. What happened?’
‘Two of them tried to take me out in the motel. A man and a woman.’
‘How badly are you hurt?’
‘A nick on the arm. Nothing too serious.’
‘The shooters get away?’
‘Nope. The guy’s dead. The woman’s in a coma, I think. They’re patching in the pics and the prints at the moment. Anything at your end? Anything on Jennifer?’ I tried to block out the image of her face but it hung at the edge of my consciousness, like a figure glimpsed at the periphery of one’s vision.
‘The jar was spotless. It was a standard medical storage jar. We’ve tried checking the batch number with the manufacturers but they went out of business in nineteen ninety-two. We’ll keep trying, see if we can access old records, but the chances are slim. The wrapping paper must be sold in every damn gift shop in the country. Again, no prints. The lab is looking at skin samples to see if we can pick up anything from them. Technical guys figure he bounced the call and there’s probably no way we can trace it. I’ll let you know if there’s anything further.’
‘And Stephen Barton?’
‘Nothing there either. The amount I know, I’m starting to think that I may be in the wrong business. He was knocked unconscious by a blow to the head, like the ME said, and then strangled. Probably driven to the parking lot and tipped into the sewer.’
‘The feds still looking for Sonny?’
‘I haven’t heard otherwise but I assume they’re out of luck too.’
‘There doesn’t seem to be much luck around at the moment.’
‘It’ll break.’
‘Does Kooper know what happened here?’
I could hear what sounded like a choked laugh at the other end of the line. ‘Not yet. Maybe I’ll tell him later in the morning. Once the name of the Trust is kept out of it he should be okay, but I don’t know how he feels about the hired help whacking people outside motel rooms. I don’t imagine it’s happened before. What’s the situation at your end?’
‘The natives aren’t exactly greeting me with open arms and leis. No sign of her so far but something isn’t sitting right here. I can’t explain it, but everything feels wrong.’
He sighed. ‘Keep in touch. Anything I can do here?’
‘I guess there’s no way you can keep Ross off my back?’
‘None whatsoever. Ross couldn’t dislike you more if he heard that you screwed his mother and wrote her name on the wall of the men’s room. He’s on his way.’
Walter hung up. Seconds later, there was a click on the line. I kind of guessed Deputy Martin might be the cautious sort. He came back in after allowing enough time to elapse so that it didn’t look like he’d been listening. The expression on his face had changed, though. Maybe it hadn’t been such a bad thing that Martin heard what he did.
‘I need to find Catherine Demeter,’ I said. ‘That’s why I’m here. When that’s done, I’ll be gone.’
He nodded.
‘I had Burns call some of the motels in the area earlier,’ he said. ‘There’s no Catherine Demeter checked in at any of them.’
‘I tried that before I left the city. She could be using another name.’
‘I thought of that. If you give me a description I’ll send Burns around to check with the desk clerks.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Believe me, I ain’t doing this out of the kindness of my heart. I just want to see you gone from here.’
‘What about Walt Tyler?’
‘If we get time, I’ll drive out there with you later.’ He went to check with the deputies guarding the shooter. The elderly doctor appeared again and checked the dressing on my arm.
‘Are you sure you won’t rest up here for a time?’ she asked.
I thanked her for the offer but turned her down.
‘I partly guessed as much,’ she said. She nodded towards the phial of pain-killers. ‘They may make you drowsy.’
I thanked her for the warning and slipped them in my pocket as she helped me to put on my jacket over my shirtless chest. I had no intention of taking the pain-killers. Her expression told me that she knew that as well.
Martin drove me to the sheriff’s office. The motel had been sealed up and my clothes had been moved to his office. I showered, wrapping my bandaged arm with plastic first, and then slept fitfully in a cell until the rain stopped falling.
Two federal agents arrived shortly after midday and questioned me about what had taken place. The questioning was perfunctory, which surprised me until I remembered that Special Agent Ross was due to fly in later that evening. The woman had still not regained consciousness by 5.00 p.m., when Tyler came into the Haven diner.
‘Did Burns turn up anything on Catherine Demeter?’
‘Burns has been tied up with the feds since this afternoon. He said he’d check some of the motels before calling it a day. He’ll let me know if there’s any sign of her. You still want to see Walt Tyler, we’d better get going now.’
Chapter Twenty-Three
Walt Tyler lived in a dilapidated but clean white clapboard house, against one side of which leaned a teetering pile of car tyres that were, according to a sign on the road, ‘For Sale’. Other items of varying degrees of saleability, which rested on the gravel and the well-trimmed lawn, included two semi-restored lawn-mowers, various engines and parts of engines and some rusting gym equipment, including a full set of bars and weights.
Tyler himself was a tall, slightly stooped man with a full head of grey hair. He had been handsome once, as his picture had suggested, and he still held himself with a kind of loose-limbed grace, as if unwilling to admit that those looks were now largely gone, lost to cares and worries and the never-ending sorrow of a parent who has lost an only child.
He greeted Alvin warmly enough, although he shook my hand less cordially and seemed reluctant to invite us in. Instead he suggested that we sit on the porch, despite the prospect of further rain. Tyler sat in a comfortable-looking wicker chair and Martin and I on two ornate metal lawn chairs, the lost elements of a more complete set and also, according to the sign hung from the back of mine, ‘For Sale’.
Without Tyler making any effort to ask for it, coffee was brought out in clean china cups by a woman younger than him by maybe ten years. She, too, had been more beautiful once, although in her the beauty of youth had matured into something perhaps more attractive yet, the calm elegance of a woman for whom old age held no fears and in whom lines and wrinkles would alter but not erase her looks. She cast a glance at Tyler and, for the first time since we arrived, he smiled slightly. She returned it and went back into the house. We didn’t see her on the porch again.
The deputy began to speak but Tyler stopped him with a slight movement of his hand. ‘I know why you’re here, Deputy. There’s only one reason why you’d bring a stranger to my home.’ He looked hard at me, his eyes yellowing and rimmed with red but with an interested, almost amused, look in them.
‘You the fella been shooting up folks in the motel?’ he asked, and the smile flickered briefly. ‘Excitin’ life you lead. Your shoulder hurt?’
‘A little.’
‘I was shot once, in Korea. Shot in the thigh. Hurt more’n a little. Hurt like hell.’ He winced exaggeratedly at the memory and then was quiet again. I heard thunder rumble above us, and the porch seemed to grow dark for a time, but I could still see Walt Tyler looking at me and now the smile was gone.
‘Mr Parker’s an investigator, Walt. He used to be a detective,’ said Alvin.
‘I’m looking for someone, Mr Tyler,’ I began. ‘A woman. You probably remember her. Her name
is Catherine Demeter. She’s Amy Demeter’s younger sister.’
‘I knew you weren’t no writer. Alvin wouldn’t bring one o’ them . . .’ he searched for the word ‘. . . leeches here.’ He reached for his coffee and sipped long and quietly, as if to stop himself from saying more on the subject, and, I thought, to give him time to consider what I had said. ‘I remember her, but she ain’t been back since her pappy died and that’s better’n ten years. She ain’t got no reason to come back here.’
That statement was taking on the sensation of an echo. ‘Still, I think she did, and I think it can only be connected with what happened before,’ I replied. ‘You’re one of the only ones left, Mr Tyler, you and the sheriff and one or two others, the only ones involved with what took place here.’
I think it had been a long time since he had spoken of it aloud, yet I knew that no long period went by without him returning to it in his thoughts or without him being dimly or acutely aware of it, like an old ache that never fades but which is sometimes forgotten in the throes of another activity and then returns in the forgetting. And I thought that each return was etched with a line in his face, and so a once-handsome man could lose his looks like a fine marble statue slowly chipped away to a memory of its former self.
‘I still hear her sometimes, y’know. Can hear her step on the porch at night, can hear her singing in the garden. At first, I used to run out when I heard her, not knowing but I was sleeping or waking. But I never saw her and after a time I stopped running, though I still waked to her. She don’t come as often now.’
Perhaps he saw something in my face, even in the slow-darkening evening, which led him to understand. I do not know for certain and he gave no sign that he knew or that there was anything more between us than a need to know and a desire to tell, but he stopped for a moment in the telling and in that pause we all but touched, like two travellers who pass on a long, hard road and offer comfort to each other in the journey.
‘She was my only child,’ he continued. ‘She disappeared on the way back from town on a fall day and I never saw her alive again. Next I saw her, she was bone and paper and I didn’t know her. My wife – my late wife – she reported her missing to the police, but nobody came for a day or two and in that time we searched the fields and the houses and anywhere we could. We walked from door to door, knocking and asking, but nobody could tell us where she was or where she might have been. And then, three days after she went, a deputy came and arrested me and accused me of killing my child. They held me for two days, beat me, called me a rapist, an abuser of children, but I never said anything but what I knew to be true, and after a week they let me go. And my little girl never appeared.’
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