by Gerry Boyle
Back to the harbor, up the front side of the block again. This time the BMW women were leaving and I cut across and into the space.
“You don’t have to come up,” Mandi said.
“I’ll help you,” I said, and I got out, came around, and opened her door. As she eased her legs out, I looked up and down the street. No black SUV in sight. No cops, that I could see.
She looked up at me. “All clear?” she said.
“For now,” I said. “But Marty’s going to figure out that you’re back.”
“I’ll keep the curtains closed.”
I took the cat box from her, Lulu’s cries weak but still incessant. Mandi stood and I started to hand her the crutch but the cushion part was soaked from the rain. I put the cat back in the truck and closed the door. Took Mandi by the arm and helped her up onto the sidewalk.
We walked to the door and I opened it and held it for her. She stepped in and took a breath and we started up. I held her by her right upper arm and she gripped the railing with her left hand, leaning to take the weight off her left foot and half-hopping up each stair.
It was slow going, like holding Sophie’s hand when she had just begun to walk. We made it to the first landing, paused to rest.
“All set?” I said.
“No problem,” Mandi said.
We did the next set of stairs, and I stood beside her as she fished in the pocket of her shorts and took out a key. She unlocked the door and pushed it open. There was a rush of stale air, a faint smell of trash.
“Uck,” Mandi said, and I helped her in. We shuffled into the living room, crossed to the couch, and she turned and fell back, holding her right hand in front of her, reaching back with her left.
She sighed, smiled at me. “Thanks,” she said. “Sorry to be such a poop.”
“You’re getting stronger,” I said. “You should still go to the orthopedic doctor.”
“I’ll call this morning.”
“I’ll get your stuff,” I said.
I started for the door, looking toward the bedroom. I stopped, listened. Walked to the bedroom door and peered in. The bed still was unmade, blood on the sheet. She’d need help with that. Turning back, I said, “You have clean sheets and stuff?”
“Yes, in the closet,” Mandi said from the couch.
“And you’ll need groceries, right?”
“I’ll call. They deliver for ten bucks.”
“Is your phone dead?”
“The charger is on the counter in the kitchen.”
“I’ll plug it in for you, somewhere out here.”
I left, leaving the door ajar behind me. It was one trip, the cat, the bag, the crutches. I paused, opened the glove box, and took out a can of pepper spray. Went back upstairs.
Mandi was on her feet, using the back of the couch to make her way toward the kitchen. I handed her a crutch, still wet, but she took it and hopped across the room. I put the stuff down, opened the box, and the cat leapt out. It froze, scurried into the bedroom. After a moment, it scurried back out, claws skittering on the wooden floor, headed for the kitchen.
“Hey,” Mandi said. “Easy.”
I walked to the kitchen entryway. Mandi was in front of the refrigerator, pulling out stuff and tossing it into the sink.
“I can take a bag of trash,” I said, and she said, “Okay.” I took the bag from the trash can, put the stuff from the sink—brown grapes, wilted lettuce—into it. I pulled the drawstring tight.
“I’m gonna go,” I said.
Mandi turned, hopped to the counter, and leaned.
“Thanks,” she said. “For everything.”
“No, thank you,” I said.
“I’ll worry about you guys.”
“We’ll be okay. They’ll take care of it.”
“If you want to do that story, let me know.”
“Right,” I said. “Seems like years ago.”
“Doesn’t it,” she said, and she smiled.
“What are your plans?” I said.
“A nap,” Mandi said.
“You staying around here? For a while?”
“I don’t know.”
I took the pepper spray from my jeans pocket. “I had this in the truck. It might come in handy.”
I handed it to her and she looked at the label. “Oh. I’d probably spray myself.”
“Spray and run,” I said. “It won’t drop somebody, but it’ll give you a chance to get away.”
“Maybe,” Mandi said, looking down at her foot.
“Right,” I said.
There was an awkward pause, like we were saying goodnight after a first date. There was traffic noise from outside, flies buzzing in the window, rain dripping into a gutter, the cries of gulls.
“Well,” I said.
“Yeah,” Mandi said.
“I’ll head out.”
“Right.”
She looked away, watched the cat sniffing around the floor in front of the refrigerator. Looked back at me.
“I’m glad I met you,” she said, “but in some ways, I’m not.”
“Why is that?”
“It’s hard,” Mandi said. “Kind of one of those what-might-have-been things, you know?”
“You can make a new life,” I said.
“Not really,” she said. “And not with you, Jack.”
So there it was. Roxanne’s instincts on target, as usual.
“A lot of guys out there, Mandi,” I said.
“I know that, me of all people.” She smiled. “But the good ones are all taken. And even if they weren’t—” The sentence ended. Her expression changed, some sort of veil falling over her. “Take care,” she said.
“I will,” I said, and she held out her hand. I took it and gave it a quick squeeze and let it fall. Turned and walked out of the kitchen, out of the apartment, down the stairs.
Outside, I got in the truck, gave the apartment windows another look. The cat had found its place on the sill, was crouched there. I pulled out, drove down the street, all the way down to the harbor. I looked out where Mandi had, saw boats riding moorings in the rain. Bare masts. Canvas up. A gray haze over the distant bay. What was out there? What had she been thinking?
I circled around and started back up the street. As I approached Mandi’s block, I slowed. I wondered if there was something else I could do, get her mail or bring her some magazines. I pulled into a parking space across the street. Got out and headed for the newsstand. As I walked, I glanced over.
The cat was gone. The curtains in the right window moved. A hand came through and eased one side of the curtain open. She was looking out. I wonder if she’d see me. I wondered if I could still do that story, if she were one of three or four women who—
It was the curtain on the right side. It was a right hand.
No bandage. Not Mandi.
Chapter 23
I bolted across the street, dodging cars. Slammed the door open, bounded up the stairs. As I neared the landing, I heard voices. A woman. A man. Mandi saying, “No, don’t.”
I kicked the door in, the jamb shattering, the door rattling back. Mandi was on the couch, a man in front of her, his back to me. She had her hands over her mouth, was screaming into them. He had a gun pressed to the side of his head.
He whirled, had two hands on it as he came around, fired once as I dove for the floor, the shot over my head. The recoil jerked the gun up and it was coming back down when I came off the floor, hitting him in the legs, shoulders first.
Mandi was trying to get to her feet, rolling to the side. He went down against the couch, tangling with her legs, the gun in his right hand. He was trying to bring it around.
It was a .45, black and short-barreled, and I got my hand on his right forearm, driving my fingers in. He was grunting, teeth clenched, and I punched him over and over.
Mandi was screaming, “Oh my God, oh my God.”
I hit his mouth, nose, eyes, blood spurted from his lip. He got his left forearm up, blocking me, and I l
unged, got both hands on his right wrist, the gun hand, squeezing, twisting, turning my head as he punched my neck, the side of my face.
We rolled onto the floor, the gun underneath us, the butt in my belly. Another shot, deafening, a pulse of heat, missing everyone, and I slammed his arm against the floor, dug my fingers into the tendons of his wrist.
“Get out,” I bellowed at Mandi.
She rolled and crawled toward the door, dragging a crutch, then out of sight. He was tearing at my ear, scraping my neck with his nails. And then his left arm came around me and he passed the gun to his left hand. There were numbers, P220, the knurled grip, then the side of the hot barrel pressed against my face. I grabbed for his left wrist but he pulled it away, tried to bring the gun to bear on my head.
I could see the muzzle, the black hole, and he shifted, bent his wrist so the gun was nearly pointed at my face. His finger was outside of the trigger guard and he tried to pull it back, and I grabbed for his hand, got his wrist but the finger was in now.
The finger on the trigger—
The muzzle moving—
There was a clang. Then another. And another. His wrist went limp, and the gun fell to the floor. I shoved it away as the clangs kept coming and I saw Mandi, on her knees behind him, swinging the crutch at his head.
He rolled off of me, came to rest on his back, facing her, and the crutch came down again, splitting his forehead. Again, it raked the side of his face, then his head. Again and again.
I got to my knees, grabbed her arms in mid-swing, and pushed her backward, landed on top of her. I could feel her breathing hard, moaning, then squirming to get loose. I let her go and she rolled to her knees again, and the crutch came up and then down.
“You’ll kill him,” I shouted, and she was swinging the crutch again and I blocked it with my shoulder, felt a jab of pain. I wrenched the crutch away from her and flung it aside.
“Mandi,” I said. “It’s okay.”
She panted, then seemed to calm. And then she looked at me like she was someone else, like she didn’t know me, like she’d just been jarred awake from a nightmare.
“You can stop,” I said.
There was blood on her arms, blood on her shirt. His blood, my blood, maybe hers. She wiped at her mouth and left a streak of dark red. Looked at it and fell back on her haunches.
I turned to him. He was unconscious, blood streaming from his forehead down his temple, running out of his mouth and nose, which was flattened. I could see white where the flesh had split at his hairline.
“We need an ambulance,” I said. I was digging in my pocket for my phone when I heard the sirens. “Who is he, Mandi?” I said.
She looked down at him, like she didn’t know how he had gotten there. “That’s Roger,” she said. “He said he wanted me to forgive him.”
There were cops with guns drawn, one with a shotgun, everyone barking orders, telling us to show our hands, stay on the floor. A big buzzcut kid kneeled beside me, his hand pressing down on my neck. Mandi said she was thirsty and an older cop went and got her a glass of water. He took the glass back. Held it and waited. When they finally told us to get up, Mandi said she couldn’t, not without some help.
And then there were paramedics, calm and efficient, sticking an IV in Roger’s arm, strapping him to a board, his head immobilized in a big collar. He was taken out first, the medics calling ahead to the hospital, saying they were coming in with a patient with a possible skull fracture.
Mandi and I sat against opposite walls, medics crouched beside us. They put big bandages on my neck and ear, and I looked like I should be playing a fife in a Revolutionary War band. Mandi told them her wrist and ankle hurt and they started to examine them all over again, not understanding that she’d brought those injuries to the fight, though swinging the crutch hadn’t helped.
A cop picked up the gun with a pen and dropped it in a plastic zip-lock bag. Then he looked around the room for the slugs in the walls.
“There should be three,” I told him. “They might have gone out into the hall.”
The first two had, one in the wall, one through a window in the stairwell. The third slug had gone through the ceiling and lodged in the floor of the apartment upstairs.
Raven told me that a while later as we sat in his cruiser out front.
“You know how I told you a case like this was like building a boat,” he said.
I nodded.
“Well, I gotta tell you. I feel like we keep adding pieces to this boat but instead of getting done, it just gets bigger.”
I thought about that, concluded that the boat metaphor didn’t quite fit. “I’m not sure it gets bigger,” I said. “It’s just that it isn’t what you thought it was when you started.”
“Me? I don’t know what it is now,” Raven said. “A young woman beat up, who has no obvious means of support. So I start from there and every time it seems like the fog is lifting, it settles back in.”
He dug for a package of gum, in the console between the seats. Offered a piece to me and I shook my head. Peeled it out of the foil and popped it in his mouth. The car filled with the scent of mint.
“Let’s hear it,” Raven said.
I told him about coming in, Roger with the gun, Mandi on the couch, the shots, Mandi crawling away, then coming back
“So she saved your butt,” Raven said.
“In the nick of time, as they say.”
“Tough little lady.
“In a strange way, yeah.”
He chewed. The gawkers milled, walking up, and down the sidewalk, looking to get a glimpse of Mandi in the other car, turning and coming back to get a look at me.
“Beats television,” Raven said.
“Yup.”
“Don’t often get excitement like this.”
“Glad to keep the populace entertained.”
“I guess you are. Heard about the incident at your house, up there in Prosperity.”
“Figured you had.”
“You’re a regular crime magnet,” Raven said.
“A tough stretch,” I said. “Hard on my wife.”
“I’ll bet. Bad enough doing that job without having it follow you home.”
“Yes,” I said.
The woman cop was turned to Mandi, and seemed to be doing all the talking.
“Heard our lady friend here stuck a guy with a kitchen knife.”
“A paring knife, actually. Three-inch blade.”
“Still impressive,” Raven said. “And now she beats this guy over the head with a crutch, practically busts his skull.”
“I think he was gonna kill her, then kill himself.”
“Lot of that going around. Control freaks. I think they’re basically kind of spoiled. You know a lot of ’em are real momma’s boys, when you dig into it?”
“Is that right?” I said.
“Can’t accept it when things don’t go their way.”
“Huh,” I said.
“Hey, good thing you showed up. The hand and the curtain and all that—quick thinking.”
“Lucky,” I said.
“Pretty tough yourself. For a reporter, I mean,” Raven said. “Take that gun off the guy—nice gun, by the way. Sig P220. Guy’s got good taste in firearms.”
“Yeah, well, when you have money,” I said.
“So you hold him down while your girlfriend beats the crap out of him.”
“That’s not what happened. And she’s not my girlfriend. Like you said, she saved my life. If she hadn’t hit him, who knows what would have happened.”
He shrugged. Chewed. Blew a tiny bubble and stuck his tongue threw it. Chewed some more. “You know, for one young woman, awful lot of guys around. You. Roger, with his head busted.”
“A guy named Marty, too,” I said. “I think he’s an ex-cop from Mass.”
“Oh, yeah. Ran into him. Not the kind of cop we usually see around here.”
“The cologne,” I said.
“Yeah,” Raven said. “We�
�re not much into that around here. But things are changing. Maybe cologne is coming. I mean, we got sushi now. Three hundred years of cooking fish, all of a sudden we start eating it raw.”
I waited. Raven did, too. He chewed, watched the ambulance pull away, a second one, not needed. With the ambulance gone, we could see the other cruiser, Mandi in the front seat talking to the woman cop.
“I think they’re all set here,” he said. “Let’s go for a ride. You okay for that? Cuts aren’t bothering you?”
“I’m fine,” I said
“Don’t want to keep you from anything,” Raven said, but he’d already pulled away from the curb.
We drove down Main Street to the harbor, swung right at the circle by the town landing and the boat launch. A steady drizzle fell, and in the distance on the bay, the sea and sky melded so there was no horizon, just different shades of gray.
A big sailboat was motoring into the harbor, figures in yellow rain gear on the foredeck and cockpit.
“Pretty boat,” Raven said. “Older wooden ketch. Like a piece of sculpture, don’t you think?”
“I guess.”
“More and more big sailboats in the harbor every year, fewer lobstermen. Turning into a theme park, place for rich people to play.”
We were driving along the shore, winding between metal buildings, boats on stands beside them, lobster traps in stacks. Raven suddenly pulled in beside an old garage, gray and sided with asphalt shingles. He parked by a big rolling door, got out and I followed. He unlocked a padlock, rolled the door sideways just enough for us to fit through.
He reached to his left, hit a switch and overhead lights glowed dimly. There was a half-painted lobster boat, a ladder leaning against it, a lift of lumber, some blue steel drums. Raven led the way and at the end of the room he stopped and unlocked another door. It was a small space, smelled of wood. There were hand tools on a bench, lumber scattered. In the center was the shell of a boat, the ribs showing where the planking was unfinished.
“Here she is,” Raven said.
He stood by the boat, ran a hand over the gunwale. Picked up a piece of sandpaper and started to rub it.
“Nice,” I said.
“Thanks. Awful pretty, don’t you think?”