I glanced over at her. “I guess that’s an occupational hazard. Besides, you don’t want to see your grandfather make foolish moves when he’s getting along in years. That’s why Chip McGill put the heat under Stanley. He thought Andy was trying to roust him because, like any paranoid, he made it for a conspiracy.”
“When all it is is miscommunication,” Kitty suggested.
“All it is is Stanley trying to protect this guy.”
“From the rigors of the modern age,” she said.
“Yeah, well, my guess is that Creek Fortier has been lured into the modern age in a big way,” I said. “I think it’s the biker connection. Creek builds custom bikes. So long as people leave him alone to raise bees and build bikes, he’s got no kick with the twenty-first century. Stanley insulated him, but with Stanley gone he’d be on his own. If he didn’t think about it, somebody might have suggested it to him.”
She was ahead of me. “Chip McGill,” she said.
I stood on the gas to get around a pickup loaded with drywall. Kitty dug her feet into the floorboards as we swerved back into our own lane. “Creek was in the biker loop,” I told her. “I don’t mean he’s a card-carrying member of an outlaw club, but gear-heads know about each other, it’s word of mouth. So a Disciple comes by to talk bikes, and they hit it off. The guy sees an opportunity. Here’s a reclusive motorcycle freak living out in the sticks, no near neighbors. Kind of a Luddite even, except when it comes to tuning bike engines.”
“Which is what? Basically his only real social skill?”
“Exactly. And the Disciples persuade him his interests lie in diversification, expanding his horizons.”
“Including?”
“Better living through chemistry,” I said.
Her cell phone beeped. It was Tony. I’d slowed down coming into Groton. Kitty, the phone to her ear, pointed me up a back road north that led along the Nashua River, a tributary of the Merrimack. The narrow blacktop followed the contours of the hillsides that supplied the watershed and crossed the river on a covered bridge, coming into the foot of the village.
Pepperell is another one of those settlements that time forgot after the mills closed. It was as if the waters of a great flood had lapped at its doorstep and then left it high and dry. It was a dry town, literally. You couldn’t buy liquor there.
“Got it,” Kitty said into the phone. She glanced at me. “We go through town past the elementary school and take a right-hand fork at the Congregational Church,” she said.
I followed her instructions.
“Bald Hill Road,” Kitty said. “Okay.” She turned in her seat. “He’s starting to break up,” she told me. “We’re getting out of range.”
Cell coverage overlapped, but we were in a blind spot.
“I’m losing you,” Kitty said to Tony. “Say again.” She listened, had him repeat it a third time, and then broke the connection. “We look for a side road up here on the left,” she said to me. “Unpaved but graded. There should be horse barns and a riding ring maybe half a mile in. A mile or so past that, there’ll be a split-rail fence and a dirt driveway and kind of a shed. I didn’t quite get that, but it’s the best I could do.”
We took the turn we thought we were supposed to, and half a mile in we passed the horse barns. There was nobody there. After a mile point two by the odometer there was a little lean-to up against a split-rail fence. Inside the lean-to was a shelf with jars of honey for sale and a coffee can where you left the money on the honor system. The property was heavily wooded, and we couldn’t see a house from the road. I drove past slowly and pulled up a hundred yards farther along.
“You thinking to go in on foot?” Kitty asked me.
“That’s the plan,” I said.
“And this is where you tell me to wait here, right? With a cell phone that doesn’t work and no idea what’s going on.”
I’d already had second thoughts about bringing Kitty along, but she was right. “You weird with guns?” I asked her.
“No more than the next girl.”
I took out the Smith, checked the magazine, and tucked it away in the small of my back. I reached under the seat and got the compact nine out of its spring clip. I worked the slide, safed it, and held it out to Kitty. “Point it, snap the safety off, squeeze the trigger,” I said, showing her what I was talking about. “Don’t use it unless they get close and you can hit them square in the upper body, no chance of a miss.”
She nodded and took the gun. “Combat nine millimeter, double-action-only, pre-Brady double-stack, thirteen rounds. I’ve got a concealed carry permit, Jack,” she said. “My mistake, I left my own gun in my other pants.”
I was going to remark that she wasn’t wearing pants, she had on a navy jacket and a skirt that showed off her legs, but I figured I’d embarrassed myself enough already. She tucked the nine in the waistband of her skirt, under her jacket and behind her back, the same as I had. “What are we likely to run in to?” she asked me.
“Maybe just an emotionally disabled vet,” I said. “Maybe your partner come to warn him —” I held up my hand when Kitty started to protest. “Or come to explain things to him,” I went on. “Or we could be about to step into the deep end of the pool, and land in the heavy. Are you ready for that?”
“No,” she said.
I sighed. “Neither am I,” I told her.
“Might as well get to it, then,” Kitty said. “It won’t get any easier if we wait.”
We stepped out of the car into the lingering late-afternoon light. The hum of insects buzzed in the grass, and birdsong sounded in the near distance. We walked back to Creek Fortier’s drive and started up it. The maples had turned, their leaves scarlet and bronze, the poplars lemon yellow, the birches dusty gold. It was quiet under the trees. The leaves smelled dry and spicy.
The road opened out into a meadow, and we stopped at the edge of the trees. There was a small clapboard farmhouse, and a shop building in back. Beyond the buildings was an apple orchard, untended but with beehives spaced between the trees, square boxes up on platforms, the orchard left for the bees, not for the apples. Fallen fruit lay on the ground, fermenting.
“Do bees hibernate?” Kitty asked.
“I think they go dormant in the winter, if they don’t die,” I said. “Maybe you have to take them in, like tomato plants or geraniums.”
“You’re full of vegetable lore,” she remarked, smiling.
I was looking at the open ground we had to cover. We’d be exposed to the house if anyone was watching for us. There were a couple of big bikes out back by the shop, and three cars — a GTO, vintage muscle; a ‘53 Ford clunker; and a new Audi. “That’s his car, the Audi,” Kitty said.
“Andy’s?”
She nodded.
I blew out my breath, trying to think.
“Suggestion?” Kitty asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“What’s to keep me from simply going over there?”
“And your story’s what?”
She shrugged. “I’m just some yuppie twit from Boston,” she said. “A leafpeeper looking for local color.”
“Andy won’t give you away, you walk in on them?”
“Andy’s a trial lawyer, and a good one,” she said. “He can improvise.”
I didn’t have anything better.
“You flank the house,” Kitty said, and off she went.
Flank? I thought. She sounded like a platoon sergeant. I let her get out in the open where she could be seen and worked my way around the meadow, keeping under cover of the trees.
Kitty was halfway to the house, and then she paused for a second, leaning down to straighten her heel or pick a stone out of her shoe. She didn’t look in my direction.
I froze where I was, wondering if she was trying to send me a signal, but I didn’t see that anything had changed. The place was completely still except for a few late-season cicadas sawing in the tall grass, and the air felt hot and somnolent.
Kitty went
on up the drive, approaching the house without any obvious apprehension, like somebody who’d run out of gas and needed to use the phone.
I’d stopped circling, watching her.
She went up onto the small porch and peered in the windows, and then she went around back toward the shop.
I waited to see if something happened, but nothing did.
Kitty came back out front and made a shrugging gesture, her hands out at her sides. I hobbled across the grass, favoring my bad leg. “Nobody home, tiddley-pum,” she said.
The sun was just below the tree line, the light taking on a metallic quality, sharp and coppery. A slight breeze lifted the leaves of the maples. There was the scent of water, a stream or a spring nearby, and something else, not acrid but steely, like a whiff of ammonia.
“What is that?” Kitty asked, sniffing the wind. “It smells like nail polish remover.”
“Acetone,” I said. It was very faint, though. From what Frank Dugan had told me about cooking meth, I’d expected more of a piercing odor.
“They’re here, then,” she said.
Did she still think Andy was an innocent bystander in this?
I didn’t ask her out loud.
We went through the orchard, moving carefully.
“Are bees territorial?” she asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Social insects, mated to their hives. They kill intruders, but beekeepers work around them all the time and don’t get stung.”
I wished I knew what I was talking about. The bees were everywhere under the apple trees, but they seemed sleepy, headed home with dusk. You could brush them aside gently, and they’d go on about their business. We were no more than objects in the way, and they went around. There was nothing angry about them.
“Jack,” Kitty said, stopping short.
A few trees off the path a bunch of bees were swarming, confused and without any apparent purpose, rising in a cloud and then settling again, like moths. It was uncharacteristic.
I ducked under the branches and went closer. The bees were agitated and uncertain. I didn’t want them any more worked up.
He lay his length on the ground, staring at the sky. I hadn’t seen him in over twenty years, but I knew it was Creek Fortier. The bees kept lighting on him, almost plucking at his hair, his clothes. I’d never seen anything like it. I couldn’t credit them with a dog’s intelligence or loyalty, but there it was. They seemed to be trying to coax him up. With the back of his head blown off, I didn’t think he’d rise to the occasion.
I backed away. “We got big trouble,” I murmured to Kitty.
“Who is it?” she asked.
“It’s not Andy, it’s Creek,” I told her.
She looked relieved.
“We should go to the car, and to town, and get some backup,” I said.
“Not if Andy’s down there,” she said.
“We’re in over our heads,” I said.
“You, maybe,” Kitty said, turning away.
Below the orchard the ground sloped off to a brook overhung with poplar and birch. We moved into a stand of trees to our left and worked our way down to the water. From there we made our way downstream, using what cover we could, and found what we were looking for.
“Like a moonshiner’s,” Kitty whispered to me.
It was a small shed built on a platform over the brook with outside ductwork to a hood on the roof and a tangle of copper piping that went under the surface of the water. It was a distillery, in effect, to condense and filter the residue, disguising the smell. Creek’s work, I figured.
“A peculiar genius,” Kitty remarked.
I nodded. “But why did they kill him?” I asked.
“They’re closing down,” she said.
Which made sense if the operation was compromised, but how sure of that were they?
We made our approach to the shed incrementally, move and then crouch, move and crouch, trying to make as little noise as possible. The running water chuckled in the stream bed loudly enough that we weren’t heard. When we got next to the little outbuilding, we hunkered down outside the windowless plywood sheathing. Nobody had raised an alarm.
Whoever was inside wasn’t listening for trespassers. They were too intent on something else. There was an indistinct murmur of voices and then an involuntary whimper and ragged, heavy breathing. What it sounded like was an interrogation, and a painful one.
Kitty and I probably had the same thought at the same time: Andy was being tortured.
We ducked around the corner of the shed and took up our positions on either side of the plank door, both of us with guns up, cocked and locked, fingers alongside the trigger guards. There was another sharp whimper of pain.
I nodded to Kitty, stepped back, and kicked the door open. We were inside before anybody had time to react.
Everything stopped for maybe a long three count, all of us taken by surprise.
Three guys, one tied in a chair. The guy in the chair was battered and bruised, but it wasn’t Andy. It was the redheaded biker from Charlestown. Andy was standing behind him with a pair of bloody pliers in his hand. The third guy was in front of the chair, caught in a half crouch, looking over his shoulder at us. I knew he was Chip McGill.
Sometimes things slow down, like it’s happening under water, but this was sudden and abrupt. McGill snapped out of his crouch, coming up with a stainless autoloader in his right hand. It was incredibly stupid of him, and he made the same mistake I’d made in back of the Blue Mirror, not watching the girl. Kitty shot him twice in the chest with the nine, punching two holes in him you could have covered with a quarter. He was dead when he hit the floor.
Andy jumped back, and Kitty shifted her aim. I thought for a second she was going to shoot Andy, too.
“Oh God, Kitty,” Andy bleated, dropping the pliers. “Look what he made me do.”
Kitty wasn’t having any. “Shut up,” she said tiredly. “Don’t give me any more reason to hate your guts.” But at least she lowered the gun.
They’d wired Red’s wrists together behind his back, and I had to use the pliers to get it off. I tried not to think about what else they’d been used for. “DEA,” he croaked, rubbing his hands together to bring back the circulation. “Working undercover with the state police.”
Well, at least he’d gotten my gun away from the speed freak before she killed me with it, I remembered.
We started back up toward the house. Red needed my help, which I didn’t wonder at. He was in bad shape. Kitty seemed to have gone numb, too, which I didn’t wonder at, either. It was a delayed reaction from shooting McGill. You don’t shake it off that easily.
We were still below the orchard when Andy took it into his head to make a run for it. He just suddenly bolted, pumping his legs through the tall grass, plowing uphill. None of us had the energy to chase him, and there wasn’t much point in shooting him. How far was he going to get, after all? Maybe he thought he could outrun his disgrace, his life in a shambles.
“Andy,” Kitty called after him wearily.
But he didn’t look back. He charged recklessly through the orchard, flailing at the aroused bees.
“Oh Jesus,” Kitty whispered.
I didn’t quite get what was happening. I saw Andy stumble and find his feet and then stumble again and go down.
Kitty had stopped where she stood, stricken.
Andy managed to stand again, his angry shouts turning into a terrified wail. The air around him was thick with insects, and bees had settled on him like a carpet, so many they obscured his shape. He fell a last time and didn’t get up.
The clamor of bees subsided in the gathering twilight, and the light breeze rustled through the maples.
We made a wide circle around the orchard, not speaking. If any of us had thoughts, we kept them to ourselves.
~ * ~
The Best American Mystery Stories 3 Page 19