Rough Weather

by Robert B. Parker

  “Everyone is to stay calm and sit perfectly still,” he said.

  He looked at me, as if he knew right where I’d be.

  “Particularly,” he said, “you.”

  I nodded slightly. How flattering to be singled out.

  “Anyone who interferes with me will be killed,” Rugar said. “Anyone attempting to leave this room in the next hour will be killed. If I find you annoying, you will be killed.”

  The silence in the room was nearly impenetrable. Rugar took the bride’s arm.

  “Come along,” he said.

  She looked at her mother. Her mother was rigid. The groom was very pale. I could see him trying to get his breath. Don’t do it, kid. It won’t help her. It’ll get you killed. He was too young. He’d seen too many movies, where heroism is required and the hero doesn’t get killed.

  “You can’t do this,” he said.

  Rugar smiled almost sadly and shook his head almost sadly, and put his gun against the bridge of the kid’s nose and pulled the trigger. It blew the back of his head out, and there was a lot of blood and brains. A soft sigh ran through the room as he went down. Adelaide stared for a moment, then fainted. Rugar broke her fall easily and let her slide to the floor. He looked without expression around the chapel.

  “Anyone else?” he said.

  No one spoke. I could feel the tension in Susan as her shoulder pressed against mine. Rugar looked down at Adelaide.

  “Spenser,” he said. “You’re big and strong. You carry her.”

  Susan put her hand on my thigh.

  “I’ve got a roomful of hostages,” Rugar said. “I could kill some.”

  Susan patted my thigh and took her hand away.

  “I’ll carry her,” I said.

  9

  Whatever Rugar had worn as a raincoat coming to the chapel, he didn’t bother with on the way out. He stopped before we went out of the building and looked at me.

  “You understand about the hostages,” he said.

  “I do.”

  “That would include Dr. Silverman.”

  “I understand that,” I said.

  We went bareheaded and without rainwear out into the tempest. One of the gunmen came with us, walking two steps behind me with his MP9 pointing at my back, his shoulders hunched, squinting through the assault of the rain. The tempest was startling. The rain was almost horizontal, driven by what must have been hurricane-level winds. I had Adelaide over my shoulder like a sack of wheat. She seemed to have re-achieved a small level of consciousness but no strength. She was as limp as an overcooked bean sprout. The rain soaked all three of us almost instantly. With Adelaide adding to my wind resistance, it was hard to be agile. Rugar walked through it, bent forward slightly, without looking back at me. It was very dark. I realized suddenly that there were no lights on in the big house. I looked back at the chapel wing. I could see no lights there. The electrical power must have succumbed to the storm.

  Lightning flashed. Ahead of us there was something in the darkness. We had to get right next to it before I could be sure it was the helicopter. It was a big one. I knew little of recent helicopters, but this one was clearly capable of lifting at least a platoon of evildoers. Rugar opened a side door of the helicopter.

  “Strap her in the seat,” he said. “Here.”

  The pilot appeared with a big flashlight and held it while I maneuvered Adelaide into a seat along the side of the chopper and buckled her in. Her eyes were open, but she still looked as if without the seat belt she’d collapse.

  Rugar turned to the pilot.

  “Can you fly in this weather?” he said.

  “Oh my good God, no,” the pilot said. “We can’t get up until the storm passes.”

  “And if I order you?”

  “Order away,” the pilot said. “Even if we wanted to die, we can’t get off the ground.” He spoke like a native-born American, though not from the Northeast, but in the ambient light from the helicopter instrument panel I could see he was Asian. Japanese, probably. He wore a leather jacket unzipped, and a baseball hat. I could see the butt of a gun in a shoulder holster.

  “Will the vehicle survive on the ground?” Rugar said.

  “You mean will the hurricane blow it over?” the pilot said. “No, it’s big and heavy and low and aerodynamic. It should stay put.”

  “How long?”

  “Morning,” the pilot said. “In the morning it’ll be beautiful.”

  “How about a boat?” Rugar said.

  “I don’t do boats,” the pilot said. “But I’ll guarantee you that any boat on the island will swamp ten feet out from the dock, if they haven’t torn lose and blown away already.”

  Rugar nodded. He looked at me.

  “I’ll accept your surrender,” I said.

  He almost smiled, but didn’t answer me.

  “We can’t get out,” he said. “But no one can get in.”

  “What are we gonna do?” the guy with the MP9 said.

  “I’ll let you know,” Rugar said. “Take him back to the wedding and wait.”

  “Hold them there?”

  “Yes.”

  The gunny and I turned back toward the house. Five feet from the helicopter I couldn’t see it. The wind was blowing at my back now, making it hard not to fall forward.

  “We’re going the wrong way,” I said to the gunny.

  “Keep going,” he said.

  I turned a little so that the drenching wind slanted more at me from the side.

  “You want to wander around in this all night?” I said. “We’re going away from the house.”

  “Keep moving,” he said, but he turned the way I had.

  I did the small maneuver a couple more times, until the rain was driving like buckshot straight into our faces.

  “It was like this walking out here,” the gunny said, trying to see me through the pelting tempest.

  “The wind has shifted, you idiot,” I said. “It always does in a hurricane.”

  If I was right, we were near the water’s edge, on the back side of a big stone barn. We moved on. The wind was heavier. The rain more dense. I could feel, more than I could see, the barn on my left, and we hunched against it as we moved along. It didn’t do much to shelter us. The wind and rain were howling along its side directly at us. I knew the far end of the barn was maybe thirty feet from the cliffs. Lightning blared for a moment. I was right. It was there, and forty or fifty feet below was the ocean. When we reached the far end, barely able to see, I stepped suddenly to the left, around the corner of the barn, and sprinted.

  “You sonova bitch,” I heard the gunny say, and heard his footsteps. I was far enough from him in the howling murk that I knew he couldn’t see me. I turned the next corner and flattened against the wall. When he came around after me, I lunged into him with my right shoulder. It staggered him, and his gun went flying. I brought my right forearm around and caught him on the side of his face. He got his arms around me and buried his cheek into my shoulder so it was hard to hit him, and both of us went down in the slick mud. It was like wrestling in deep oil sludge. He tried to get his knee into my groin and I twisted my hip so he couldn’t. I got hold of his hair and pulled his head out away from my shoulder. We rolled over in the muck. I banged his nose with my forehead. He let go of me and got his hands on my throat. I head-butted him again. He tried to choke me. I bit his forearm. He grunted but kept choking. I gave him another head-butt. He didn’t let go. I freed my left hand from under him and put my forearm against his throat and pushed his head up, pulling it back farther with my right hand in his hair. Suddenly he let go of my throat and tried to pull my forearm away. I kept the pressure. He rolled over beneath me. It was too slippery to stop him. I tried to get my forearm back under his neck but he wriggled away, and then we were on our feet again, wading through the saturated soil in mud past our ankles. I went after him as best I could. I think he wanted to run. But he wasn’t sure what direction. He tried to feint left, like a punt returner, and go
right. But in the swamp we were in, footwork was primitive. He slid a little and I was on him, trying to keep my feet under me. Neither of us had enough footing to land a decent punch. Then he made a mistake. He tried to kick me and lost his footing and staggered to his left. I turned my hip in a little and hit him with a big uppercut. Bingo! He staggered. I hit him again and he disappeared. I stared. I hadn’t knocked him down. He was gone. I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled forward, feeling ahead of me. Where was the lightning when I needed it? I felt the cliff edge. I had, in fact, knocked him down. A lot farther down than I had imagined.

  I inched forward slightly and looked down. Nothing but darkness. I listened. Nothing but storm. I inched back from the cliff and stood and walked to the barn, and sat down suddenly and without intending to, with my back on the barn wall and gasping. I was plastered with mud and grass. My tuxedo was infinitely wet. I’d have to get out of it before it dried, or it would probably strangle me. Though my clothes drying was not an immediate issue.

  The immediate issue was to get Susan out of there. If I got her safe, I could begin to do something about the other problems. But until she was safe there were no other problems.

  There was only Susan.

  10

  After a time I got enough oxygen in to stand up. The swarming rain had washed off some of the muck but not enough. I looked around a little for the MP9 that had been lost in the fight, but I couldn’t find it in the blackness, and I was very aware of the nearby precipice. Firepower was probably not the right approach anyway. Against at least six guys with automatic weapons, guile seemed the better strategy.

  I shrugged out of my waterlogged tuxedo jacket. My nice clip-on bow tie and several shirt studs had disappeared during the fight. I left the coat by the barn and began to push my way through the hurricane back toward the chapel. If Rugar went back there before I did, he would know that something was amiss. There was nothing I could do about that. It would make him very alert about Susan. He wouldn’t kill her. He’d know that she was a valuable commodity in dealing with me. If he was there before me, she was safe as long as I was alive and on the loose.

  I moved on, pressing against the palpable resistance of the storm. It was time now to stop feeling. Now I could do no one any good if I worked off of fear or rage or the frantic pressure to know that Susan was okay. Now I needed to put that away. Now, to rescue Susan, I would need to stop thinking of her. Now it was me and Rugar and no time for anything else.

  It was a little hard to plan ahead, since I didn’t know where Rugar was, or what was waiting back at the chapel. My guess was that Rugar would hold everyone hostage until the storm let up enough for him to get off the island. Even if some intrepid soul with a cell phone had alerted the cops on the mainland, they couldn’t get here any better than Rugar could get off. And with a roomful of hostages, Rugar could probably hold them at bay anyway until he could fly.

  If I were Rugar, that would be the best I could think of. Unless he knew stuff I didn’t. Which he probably did. Lightning flashed and I could see the big house starkly, and then nothing. I wondered where the Tashtego patrol was. Wherever they were, they weren’t doing me any good, and there was no point thinking about them, either. I was at the chapel now, standing close to the building among some large shrubs that thrashed about in the wind. I imagined the chapel inch by inch. Windows, doors, things to hide behind. I bent over and took my gun off my ankle and cleaned it the best I could with my shirttail. Then I held it in against my chest and bent over, shielding it the best I could. It was a revolver, a simple mechanism, not likely to jam, but caution is not a bad thing when it’s available.

  I edged along the wall to the door that led into the anteroom. With my gun ready, I reached over and turned the handle. The door opened. I stepped in and closed it behind me. The room was dark. I stood stock-still with my gun ready and waited. Nothing moved. I felt unworldly after so long in the elements. I could hear the storm outside, but by comparison, with the wind shut out, and no rain driving into me, the anteroom seemed preternaturally still. As I stood I could see a hint of light through the peephole in the door opposite, the same door we had peered through earlier when the wedding was to begin.

  I walked to it and looked. The room was lit by a pair of big candles on six-foot candlesticks on either side of the entry door at the back of the chapel. Someone had wisely thought to extinguish the others to conserve candles in case they needed more later. Otherwise, everything was much as it had been. The remaining five guys with the MP9s were still along the wall. I could see Susan. She sat perfectly still, looking straight ahead, right where I’d left her. I counted the rows to where she sat. Occasionally an explosion of energy outside caused the candle flames to sway and flicker. Occasionally, as I would check the time, one of the gunmen would look at his watch. The time wasn’t going to get better. If Rugar arrived it would get worse.

  I took a deep breath and turned and opened the window behind me. The tempest came howling into the room, and I jumped to the anteroom door and pushed it open and dove onto the floor. The storm howled into the chapel and blew out both candles at once. Some people screamed. One of the guards, nerves shot from waiting, fired an aimless burst at the door. I was well below it, squirming along the floor in the dark behind the back row of pews. Several people stepped on me, probably the gunmen converging on the door. I turned the corner and bellied down the aisle, touching the pews with my left hand as I went. One . . . two . . . three . . . when I got to eight, I rose up and whispered.

  “It’s me, babe.”

  Susan’s voice said, “Yes.”

  I put my hand out and touched her thigh, and she took hold of my hand.

  “Down,” I said, “low, behind me. Door to the right of the altar.”

  The sudden blast of storm, the darkness, and the burst of gunfire had broken the vow of silence in the chapel, and people were scrambling to get out.

  Gun in my right hand, holding Susan’s hand with my left, I broke trail, ramming people out of the way as we moved. I couldn’t see if they were men or women or gunmen or hostages, but if they were in front of me, I shoved. Then we were at the door, I pushed it open, and we were out into the tempest.

  “Now we run,” I said.

  Susan kicked off her heels, and hanging on to each other, we sprinted away from the chapel into the roaring darkness, toward the barn.

  11

  There were horses in the barn. Probably the big Belgians. It was too dark to see them, but as we felt our way along the inside wall, I could hear them moving in their stalls and making that sort of lip-smacking snort that horses make sometimes, for reasons of their own. It was a stone barn, and the thick walls made the storm outside seem more distant. We found a bare space and sat down, our backs against the wall, and breathed for a while. I still had the gun in my right hand, and Susan’s hand in my left.

  “Do you think they’ll find us here?” Susan said.

  It was an actual question of interest. Not an expression of fear. Susan could approach hysteria over a bad hair day. But in matters of actual crisis she became calm, and lucid, and penetrating. If they might find us here, we’d best prepare.

  “I don’t think they’ll look,” I said. “At the moment, I doubt that anyone in the chapel quite knows what happened. Think about it. The door bursts open. The candles go out. Shots are fired. People scream and run out. Most of their hostages are scattered all over the island.”

  “What did happen?” Susan said. “I assume it had something to do with you.”

  “It did,” I said. “But you may well be the only one who knows that. For all they know the doors blew open and the rest of it followed.”

  “So what will they do?”

  “It’s what Rugar will do,” I said. “Once he knows the deal, he’ll collect what hostages he has left and assemble them with his shooters by the helicopter. The first moment the storm allows, he’ll ditch the hostages, except Adelaide, hop in the chopper with his shooters, and get out
of here.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Pretty sure,” I said.

  “Because?”

  “Because that’s what I’d do,” I said.

  “Should we try to stop him?” Susan said.

  I loved the “we.”

  “I have a thirty-eight with five rounds and a two-inch barrel,” I said. “Rugar’s got five guys with at least thirty rounds each, plus himself, who can shoot the balls off a flea at a hundred yards.”

  “I don’t think fleas have balls,” Susan said.

  “Their loss,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  The barn was warm. The horses generated some heat. And a comforting horsey smell.

  “All those circumstances existed when you came to get me,” Susan said.

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “I get special treatment,” she said.

  “You do,” I said.

  “If we get out of this,” Susan said, “people may be critical that you didn’t save the bride.”

  “Probably,” I said.

  “What would you tell them?”

  “Never complain,” I said. “Never explain.”

  “No,” Susan said. “I want to know.”

  “I would,” I said, “tell them that saving you was all I could manage, and trying to save anyone else would have endangered you.”

  “And if someone said you sacrificed Adelaide for me, what would you say?”

  “I’d say, ‘You bet your ass I did.’”

  “And you couldn’t do both,” Susan said.

  “No.”

  “It is one of your greatest strengths,” Susan said. “Since I have known you, you do what you can, and do not blame yourself for not doing more.”

  “There is no red S on my chest,” I said. “I cannot leap tall buildings at a single bound.”