FrostLine

by Justin Scott

  Sky, treetops and house and garage whirled. I was dead if I didn’t get back on my feet. Three on one, how dumb could I be? Find my feet. Find the guy with the wrench.

  I heard him yell like a Viking, a bad mistake. I was sufficiently frightened already, but now I saw where he was, swinging the wrench with both hands, a sight that focused my mind remarkably. I went down again, threw my shoulders at his knees, tumbled him over my back, and came up landing a right that his booted friend would remember to his grave.

  For a moment I felt like Dicky Butler fighting my cousins—pure motion and deadly force. Until a punch in the back of my neck reminded me he’d been fighting two, while I had three of this Derby Death subchapter all to myself. I kept my feet, whirled, and brought up my guard.

  J.J. was ready and waiting. I slipped most of his straight left, but not enough of his roundhouse right, and again I went flying, crashing into the Harley this time, which hurt a lot, and falling over it to the pavement in a slow motion sprawl that gave the three of them plenty of time to close the circle.

  Boots was listing, but still dangerous. Wrenchman was flipping the damned thing from one hand to the other like a demented drum major. J.J. took charge, coordinating their next attack.

  I crouched into a boxing stance and sprang at Wrenchman with a flurry of left jabs. All missed. But they were supposed to and by then I was churning into the middle, dropping my hands, and kicking J.J. Topkis in the balls.

  It didn’t work. He went down with a scream, but not definitively. The wrench whizzed past my head and ripped my shoulder like a lance of fire, deadening my left arm. Boots grabbed me from behind, clamped my arms, and urged his friend with the wrench to try again.

  “Wait!” Topkis struggled to his feet, cursing me. He picked up his screwdriver and approached slowly, holding the thing like a rapier.

  The slowdown was killing me. I felt the pain where I’d been kicked and punched, felt the weariness in my arms and legs, the heat sucking up my strength, and fear gnawing my spirit. Again I thought of Dicky, exploding into motion.

  I stomped Boots’ instep. He let go howling, until I connected with a right cross that put him down, out cold. I tried to sprint for the Olds. But they blocked the driveway and backed me into the corner between the garage and the house.

  Things got real quiet, except for the breath storming through my lungs. I was past fear now, into the stage where I knew I’d lost and all I could hope was to keep the damage below the fatal line.

  Chapter 19

  I got my hands up and debated my options. Wrench in the skull? Screwdriver in the gut?

  I deserved this. I was supposed to be a survivor, but somewhere along the line I’d stopped paying attention. Blundering into three-on-one fit a pattern of royally messing up. Too solitary, unfocused, I was all over the place—lurching clumsily after three women at once—hoping to somehow connect with Julia Devlin, hoping Rita Long would come home from Hong Kong saying she’d suddenly known I was the one. While in the process, screwing up with Vicky. What a gorgeous trio they’d make, visiting me in Intensive Care.

  J.J. cocked his head.

  Then we all heard it, the measured click of heels coming up the driveway. Get me out of this, I thought, and I promise I’ll be good. Fat chance. It sounded like only one man—probably bringing beer.

  The biker with the wrench turned to watch.

  Thank you, Lord.

  I knocked him down with a left hook to his ear, and eluded J.J.’s belated slash with the screwdriver.

  Around the house came Detective-Sergeant Arnie Bender. Wrenchman got up, quickly. J.J. snickered when he saw that Arnie was not very big. Their booted colleague was waking up. I could almost see the Derby Death thinking, We’ll throw both bodies in the mill race.

  But right behind Arnie came Marian Boyce wearing running shoes, which hadn’t clicked, and a mad-dog street face I had never seen before. She wasn’t any less womanly—it would take industrious transsexual surgeons a long time to change that—but she looked ready, able, and eager to shoot someone and didn’t particularly care who.

  Their weapons appeared at some silent signal.

  “State Police.”

  For two people who disliked each other, Marian and Arnie put up a very convincing front. Neither biker questioned their solidarity, much less their jurisdiction within the city limits of Derby. Wrench and screwdriver thunked and clattered to the cement.

  “Hit the deck,” said Arnie, gesturing with his weapon, a .357 Magnum, which looked enormous in his little hand.

  The Derby Death lay down on the cement beside their awakening colleague. Old hands at this sort of thing, all three crossed their arms behind their backs and waited to be cuffed.

  “Boy am I glad to see you,” I said.

  “You too, jailbird. On your face!”

  If the prisoners were hoping to garner some advantage from jurisdictional discord, they were disappointed. The Derby Police provided the paddy wagon and seemed on excellent terms with their colleagues from the state. Marian stood by joking with a Derby uniform, while Arnie and a couple of local plainclothes frisked us and marched the Derby Death one by one into the van.

  “What the hell’s the charges?” yelled J.J. when his turn came.

  “You were caught in the act of assaulting a tourist.”

  This was my third time handcuffed in three months and I liked it even less than the night in Ollie’s cruiser. My face hurt, so did the back of my neck and my ribs, not to mention the various parts that had collided with the remarkably sharp and pointy Harley.

  The plainclothes cops hoisted me to my feet like a fence post. The Derby Death watched intently as they marched me to the paddy wagon.

  “We’ll take that one,” said Marian. “He isn’t worth the paperwork.”

  “We need him for the complaint.”

  Marian nodded the Derby plainclothes out of earshot. They spoke awhile, then another nod, and my handlers marched me over. “Ben,” said Marian. “We’ll need you to press charges against these guys who beat you up.”

  “What guys?”

  “You see what I mean?” she said to the Derby detective.

  “Look, Abbott, we’ll run you in and charge you right along with those whacked-out scum.”

  “Charge me with what?”

  “Disturbing the fucking peace, fighting, and brawling.”

  “There was no fight.”

  “No fight? Where’d you get the face?”

  “Tripped over a motorcycle.”

  Marian said, “He majored in Ethics at Leavenworth U.” I looked at her. She knew damned well I had never ratted in prep school either.

  “Yeah, well if there’s no fight maybe he wants to ride with his friends. Maybe we’ll park it down by the river for an hour. Let you get to know each other even better.”

  Nothing in Marian’s expression suggested she would come to my rescue and not let that happen.

  The Derby plainclothes grabbed me. “Okay, tough guy. Let’s go.”

  When your hands are cuffed behind your back, and you ache all over, and your face looks like Lennox Lewis’ speed bag, all you’ve got left of Main Street privilege is your voice. “I know an excellent criminal lawyer. You’ll want his number if a prisoner you’re responsible for is ever injured while in your custody.”

  Arnie and Marian stuffed me in the back of their unmarked cruiser. I said, “They’ll trash my car if you leave it on the street.”

  “No problem,” said Arnie. “Derby’s impounding it.”

  “For what?”

  “Look for drugs. You’ll get it back after they chop it.”

  I said, “Detective-Sergeant Bender. I know you’ve always wanted to see how fast she’ll go. Now would be a good time. You have my permission to borrow my car.”

  Arnie’s eyes gleamed. The bored and stroked Caddy V-6 that a mechanically gifted Chevalley had shoehorned under the hood had some miles on it, but when
the Olds lunched, Jags and BMWs went hungry.

  Marian passed him their FBI light. “You owe me, Little Boy.”

  Bender fished my keys out of my pocket and started the engine, his weasely face benign with ecstasy. He clapped the FBI light on my roof. He laid rubber all the way up the street, narrowly missing the only late-model car on the block, a shiny Ford Taurus that hadn’t been parked at the corner when I arrived.

  Marian followed, sedately, eyes straight ahead as we passed the Taurus and Josh Wiggens tossed me an ironic salute.

  ***

  In the back seat, still handcuffed, I said, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Try.”

  “How’d you happen to stop by J.J.’s?”

  “We’ve got an assist thing going with the Derby cops,” she lied. “In return, they were running registration checks on J.J.’s visitors. We heard about a certain light green Olds, and swung by for a look.”

  “Amazing,” I said. “Just in time.”

  “Well, we didn’t barge right in. Thought it best to watch what was going down.”

  “You watched those guys trying to kill me?”

  “What guys?”

  “Marian.”

  “You screwed up our surveillance, you jerk. We were praying you’d take them so we could maintain cover.”

  “There were three of them.”

  “I lost a buck to Arnie backing you.”

  “Sorry.”

  “My fault. Betting with my heart instead of my head.”

  She drove in silence, for a while. Then she found my eyes in the mirror and said, “I’m mildly curious. How’d you handle your no-rat policy at Annapolis? Don’t they have an Honor Code?”

  “I honored the Code.”

  “By the way, that was a neat strategy, letting those guys wear themselves out punching you. The dummies thought they were winning. I’m going to try that next time I fight three on one.”

  “I really appreciate your saving my ass. Could you tell me again how you happened to come along in the nick of time?”

  “Ben, I want you out of our faces.”

  “Your faces? Every place I go, you’ve been already.”

  “Like where?”

  “Josie Jervis, Party Box, the QE2, Mike’s Hardware, and now this jerk.” Was that a prideful shine in her eye? Was she toting up all the places she’d been to first? Or the others I hadn’t even thought of yet?

  She said, “That’s what the State of Connecticut pays me for.”

  “We could be partners, except I’m trying to free my client and you’re trying to hang him.”

  “I already have a partner.”

  “Unless he runs my car into a light pole.”

  “I wish you’d get a private detective license,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Then we could take it away.”

  As if I hadn’t thought of that a long time ago.

  “Seriously, Marian. Want to trade a little?”

  Her answer was along lines I’d been expecting. And she sounded a little weary. “We’re being dicked around from up above. I do not want to be dicked around by you below.”

  “Oh yeah? Who’s dicking from above?”

  Marian stopped the police car, slammed it into Park, turned around, and stared. She had great cheek bones and they were red with a degree of anger that surprised me.

  I spoke before she could.

  “Let me guess who’s yanking your chain. Henry King’s mega-clients would like to get on with their lives. They don’t care if Mr. Butler helped Dicky blow the dam. But you’re in their way, threatening their privacy with your highly imaginative investigation. So someone had a word with the Feds and now the Feds are slipping it to your bosses sideways. No actual threat. But if the Connecticut State Police don’t lay off, there’s suddenly a slight problem with funding for some nice little extras, like a new DNA lab or GPS locators for your road cops. Nothing you could put your finger on, of course.”

  “Basketball courts.”

  “They’re taking away your gym?”

  “Not our gym, you jerk. The kids’. The Feds were funneling money for lighted basketball courts in the neighborhoods. Give teenagers something better to do than shoot each other, make us look good.”

  “And of course no one is actually ordering you to lay off. But if you don’t, everyone knows that Sergeant Marian and Sergeant Arnie let underprivileged children drift into a life of crime.”

  “You’re not very funny.”

  “I’m on target.”

  “This is the kind of thing they wreck you on,” she answered quietly.

  No woman rose as swiftly in the state police unless she was very ambitious. Marian was that. Like Vicky, she had an agenda, which, ironically, was political, too. She was working on a law degree and planned to retire in her mid-forties to run for state office. But she was burdened with high standards.

  I said, “I feel for you. You’re standing in front of people who get what they want. Is that why you’re playing footsie with Josh Wiggens?”

  “Who?”

  “The guy who tipped you I was getting my head handed to me.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “The guy sitting in that Taurus on the corner.”

  “Friend of yours?”

  “No.”

  “Then why would he tip the police that you were getting beat up?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “It makes no sense, right?”

  “No sense at all,” I agreed. Unless Josh had some interest in keeping J.J. Topkis out of deeper trouble. Had King sent him? I wondered. Or was Josh playing his own game?

  “Ben. If you can’t tell me why such a thing would happen then it didn’t happen.”

  “What’s he offering? Is he helping you somehow?”

  “Who?”

  “Josh Wiggens. He works for Henry King.”

  “Oh, yeah. King’s security man.”

  “I’d be very careful of him, if I were you.”

  Marian turned around and drove. I asked, “Is Arnie pushing to sell out?”

  “As a matter of fact, no. He’s got his dander up.”

  “So you’ll do the right thing.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Except,” I said, “it’s the wrong thing.”

  “How’s that?”

  “There was no conspiracy. Mr. Butler did not put Dicky up to it and did not help him.”

  “Says the real estate agent.”

  She headed north on 34, along the river.

  My whole body ached. I’d been taught how to take a punch and I was not horribly wounded. But I still wanted a hot bath and to close my eyes in a cool, dark room for awhile.

  “You wouldn’t want to uncuff me, by any chance?”

  Silence. For miles. Finally, crossing the Stevenson Dam, she said, “What do you have to trade?”

  “You first.”

  “Up yours.”

  Silence, again. More miles. Deep into Plainfield County, on back roads even I didn’t know. My turn: “Mr. Butler did not conspire with Dicky to blow King’s dam.”

  “Sure of that?”

  “Positive.”

  “Why?”

  “You first.”

  “Up yours.”

  There was a fork in the road ahead that I recognized. Right led to Plainfield, the State Police Barracks, and jail. Left to Newbury.

  I said, “‘Up yours’ was essentially what Josie Jervis told you. I’ll tell you what she told me. If you’ll tell me what the Derby cops get out of J.J. Topkis.”

  “Everything she told you?”

  “Every fact,” I promised, damned if I was going to share Josie’s lunatic theory that Mr. Butler accidentally killed his son.

  “Deal,” said Marian, and veered left. “When Derby’s done with Topkis, I’ll decide if it’s worth a trade.”

  “Would you take these goddam
handcuffs off, please?”

  She tossed the key over her shoulder. “You didn’t mind them last time,” she reminded me.

  “Last time was different.”

  ***

  I found a note under my kitchen door. “I’m at the Drover, if you feel like a beer. Julia.”

  Chapter 20

  I felt like many beers. After some bourbon, a bath, and an ice pack. Many beers.

  It was nearly an hour before I limped into the Yankee Drover’s cellar bar, scrubbed and dressed in a clean shirt and pants, with Jack Daniels beginning to numb the pain. Aleve might have worked as well, but I’d miss the side effects.

  Julia had been at the jukebox again.

  There was a kind of a bittersweet pall hanging over the place, not exactly melancholy, but a lot of people not normally given to reflection appeared to be re-examining their lives. God knows what she had played first—Deus Irae, maybe—but Bob Seeger was just finishing “In Your Time,” and his promise that peace lay across the “unbroken void” did not seem to cheer those hoping things would straighten out sooner.

  I cranked in some Smoky Robinson and made for the bar on a tide of “Since I met you, baby.”

  Julia had reserved the stool next to her with her bag. Blue jeans, tonight, blue as her mood. Snug, sleeveless stretch top. Her hair long and loose. She saw me and a tired smile wavered uncertainly. “What happened to you?”

  “Slipped in the shower.”

  “Seriously, are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay.” I sat carefully, nodded at her Rolling Rock. “You did say beer?”

  Ann Marie, one of the new owners who had turned the Drover into a much friendlier place than their surly predecessor ran, hurried over.

  “Slipped in the shower,” I explained, adding that a beer would make things much better.

  Julia seemed too preoccupied to ask questions, which was fine because I was not in an answering mood. So we listened to the music. But when I suggested another round, she said, “I’ve a better idea. You’re getting swollen. Let’s go to your house and put ice on your face.”

  It was a better idea. In fact it would have been perfect, if we hadn’t run into Vicky as we were walking out. “Ben, what happened to your face?”