Back Story

by Robert B. Parker

  57

  If we can get her alone,” I said to Hawk, “I can get her to talk.”

  “Don’t you know enough?”

  “No. I need to know who killed Emily Gordon.”

  “You think you might be getting obsessive about this?” Hawk said.

  “Susan says it’s because I am my own grail.”

  “That’s probably it,” Hawk said. “But you already know more than the client wants to find out.”

  “I want to know,” I said.

  “Oh,” Hawk said. “Long as you has a reasonable explanation.”

  We were drinking coffee in Hawk’s car again in the parking lot at the end of the causeway in Paradise. It was a perfectly swell morning. The temperature was 78, the sun was out, the breeze was gentle. Behind us, the Atlantic Ocean was endlessly rocking. It was cool enough to reduce the number of exotic bathing suits. But in a fallen world, even perfection is flawed.

  “What are we looking for,” Hawk said, as a little silver Mercedes, the kind with the retractable hard top, drove past us toward the Neck.

  “Whatever we can see,” I said. “We’re really here to think up a way to get Bonnie Karnofsky alone.”

  “Now that you’ve shot up everyone but Bunny,” Hawk said. “So they won’t be expecting anything.”

  “I haven’t shot anybody named Karnofsky,” I said.

  “Yet,” Hawk said. “You figure she’s with Dad and Mom.”

  “Almost certainly,” I said. “There’s no sign of life at the house in Lynnfield. Whatever Sonny’s protecting her from, he’s running out of room. I’ll bet my reputation that he’s brought her home.”

  “You got no reputation,” Hawk said.

  “Okay, so it’s not a risky bet.”

  “And don’t we know what he’s protecting her from?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe the murder. Or maybe he doesn’t want anyone to know she’s guilty of miscegenation.”

  “Like the founding fathers,” Hawk said.

  “But not the founding mothers.”

  “You don’t know that,” Hawk said.

  “You mean there might have been a Solly Hemings?”

  Hawk grinned. “Probably my ancestor,” he said.

  I drank some more coffee. Nothing wrong with several cups of coffee. Stimulates the brain. If I drank enough of it, my brain got so stimulated that I couldn’t sleep. But trying to think through a difficult problem . . . I’d be a fool not to use it.

  “So how do we get to her?” I said.

  “I dress up like Solly Hemings and walk back and forth past the house until she sees me, and, overwhelmed by desire, she dash out and we grab her.”

  I put my head back against the headrest. “We better think of a backup plan,” I said. “In case that doesn’t work.”

  “Sho ’nuff,” Hawk said.

  We finished our coffee. I got out and went to the snack bar and got us two more cups.

  “We can go in and get her,” Hawk said. “Or we can lure her out.”

  “Place is like a Norman keep,” I said. “We go in, and a lot of people will get hurt.”

  “And we likely to be two of them,” Hawk said.

  “So how do we lure her out? Aside from the Solly Hemings ploy.”

  We thought about that for awhile. In front of the car, a squabble of gulls fought loudly over half an orange.

  “We got her daughter,” Hawk said.

  “Even if she cares about her daughter, I can’t do that.”

  “Use the daughter to trap the mother?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Man, you’re confusing,” Hawk said. “And not amusing. Couple days ago, you shot three guys. Now you won’t use the daughter against the mother.”

  “I confuse myself sometimes,” I said.

  We drank coffee. The gulls squawked at one another. A Ford pickup went past us, toward town, towing a large sailboat.

  “We gotta go in,” I said.

  Hawk took in a long breath and let it out slowly and didn’t say anything.

  “You know we do,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Two teenage girls in designer shades and miniscule bathing suits went past us, carrying beach bags and a blanket and a portable radio.

  “Too young,” I said.

  Hawk nodded sadly. “I know,” he said.

  Our coffee was gone. Hawk went and got some. Keep drinking it. It was bound to work.

  “The house backs up on the water,” I said.

  Hawk looked at me. His face brightened. “Think it got a private beach?” he said.

  “If you had all that dough and owned that property, would it have a private beach?”

  “It would.”

  “And if you were Bonnie Karnofsky Czernak and you were shut up in there with Mom and Dad, what would you decide, sooner or later, to do?”

  “After I watched The View?”

  “After that,” I said.

  “Might take my blanket and my radio and go down to the sea.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “We need a boat,” Hawk said.

  “We need a lot of things,” I said. “But at least we have an idea.”

  “Don’t happen often,” Hawk said.

  “No,” I said. “I’m surprised I recognized it when it came.”

  58

  Hawk and I were with Jesse Stone in the town launch, which was throttled back and wallowing a little, one hundred yards off shore on the ocean side of Paradise Neck. The boat was being steered by the harbormaster, a heavy man named Phil who wore blue jeans and suspenders.

  “That’s Karnofsky’s beach,” Stone said.

  He had on his chief shirt with his badge on it, jeans, a baseball cap, and sneakers. He carried a Smith & Wesson .38 with a short barrel, just like mine. The perfect choice. Hawk, ever self-amusing, wore a blue blazer and white pants, and one of those boating caps with the long bill, like Hemingway.

  “Can we assume they’ve spotted us?” I said.

  “Sure. But it doesn’t matter. They’re used to us coming by.”

  “That little gully runs straight up between the rocks to the top of the hill behind Sonny’s house,” Stone said. “Got aerial photos, you want them.”

  “I do.”

  Stone nodded.

  “On the other side of the rocks, maybe two, three hundred feet,” he said, “is neighboring property.”

  “How about the other side?”

  “Further,” Stone said. “Other side of that point. There’s a right of way down to the water.”

  The harbormaster kept the nose of the boat into the waves, idling just enough to hold our position.

  “They use the beach much,” I said.

  “Sonny, never. The old lady, some.” I scanned the rocks and trees around the beach.

  There was a raft with a springboard anchored fifty feet from shore.

  “Their raft?” I said.

  Stone nodded.

  “They use it?”

  “Daughter comes to visit sometimes. She and her husband use it.”

  “How deep is it by the raft?”

  “Phil?” Stone said to the harbormaster.

  “Twenty feet,” Phil said. “Drops off pretty sharp from the beach.”

  We were quiet, while far out into the Atlantic beyond us some sailboats were swooping about, and a couple of fishing boats plodded into the wind. On shore, nothing moved except a couple small seabirds with long beaks, which poked around in the rocks without any visible result. I knew how they felt.

  “How often do they use the raft,” I said.

  “We don’t check it every day,” Stone said. “But when the weather’s good, she’s down here. She bakes for awhile and then goes in and swims to the raft. I assume it’s to cool off. Hubby goes sometimes. Sometimes doesn’t.”

  “I don’t suppose we can use your boat,” I said.

  “It’s the town’s.”

  “I still assume we can’t use it.”

/>   “You can’t.”

  “You don’t talk much,” I said. “Do you.”

  “It’s an experiment,” Stone said. “If I got nothing to say, I try not to say it.”

  “Maybe I’ll try it sometime,” I said.

  “You got a plan?” Stone said.

  “We off the record here?” I said.

  “I look like a fucking TV crew?” Stone said.

  “I’m planning to snatch Bonnie Czernak, née Karnofsky,” I said.

  “Good thing I’m not a fucking TV crew,” Stone said.

  “Where do you stand on that,” I said.

  “Off to the side.”

  “I’m not asking you to do anything but leave it alone,” I said.

  “I do that well,” Stone said.

  59

  We set up on the other side of the point at the bottom of the path that formed the right of way. The Zodiac that Hawk had acquired bobbed on the gentle chop of the water that lapped the rocks in the shelter of the cove. Hawk and I had a picnic basket to explain what we were doing on the rocks if anyone came by. Though, in truth, Hawk didn’t look that much like a picnic guy. But at the least it served to carry the bunch of sandwiches we’d bought at a take-out shop in Paradise. We had binoculars and a bird book to explain them, though Hawk didn’t look much like a birder, either. I was watching Karnofsky’s beach through the glasses, peering over the edge of the rock, while Hawk ate a roast beef sandwich and drank coffee from a Thermos.

  “Can you actually drive that thing?” I said.

  “Course I can,” Hawk said. “Used one for a year once.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Covert stuff,” Hawk said. “In Burma.”

  “Everything you do should be covert,” I said.

  “This the third day we be here,” Hawk said, “and we ain’t seen nothing but some seagulls.”

  “I looked in that bird book,” I said. “They are officially known as herring gulls.”

  “Hot damn,” Hawk said.

  He took another bite of his sandwich and another sip of coffee.

  “Susan okay?” Hawk said.

  “Yep. Quirk was there last night.”

  “What I like,” he said, “is when I thinking ’bout Quirk marching over there to relieve Ty-Bop on guard duty.”

  “I’m just hoping Ty-Bop doesn’t get a snootful of coke and shoot up West Cambridge.”

  “Ty-Bop be clean till we done,” Hawk said. “How long we going to hang here?”

  “Until she shows up or we think of something better,” I said.

  “That’s how long I figured,” Hawk said. “How’s Susan taking to the security stuff.”

  “She’s had to do it before.”

  “Kind of hard on her, ain’t it.”

  “It is, but she thinks I’m worth it.”

  “Goddamn,” Hawk said. “Think what I’d be worth.”

  “Hoo, hoo,” I said.

  “Hoo, hoo?”

  “Here she comes,” I said.

  Hawk ate the last of his sandwich and finished his coffee. Then he turned onto his belly and snaked up the rock and lay beside me, looking over at Bonnie Czernak and her husband. They were in bathing suits. Bonnie carried a beach bag. The two men who came down with them set up a couple beach chairs for them. And they sat.

  “That the husband?” Hawk said.

  “Ziggy,” I said.

  “He sing reggae?” Hawk said.

  “Not that Ziggy,” I said.

  Bonnie took a portable radio out of the beach bag and set it on the ground beside her chair and fiddled with it. In a moment, some rock music drifted over to us. Bonnie rubbed oil on herself and put opaque white shields over her eyes and lay back in her chair. Ziggy talked on his cell phone. The two bodyguards stood around under the trees and looked bored. Hawk and I lay behind the rock and took turns with the binoculars and were bored. Behind us, the Zodiac moved gently on its tether. The sun was clear and steady. The rocks were hot. On her reclining chair, her sun-dark skin slick with tanning oil, Bonnie fried in the sun.

  “We don’t get her pretty soon,” Hawk said, “she be dead with melanoma.”

  “When she swims to the raft,” I said. “Burn, baby, burn,” Hawk said.

  At about quarter of three in the afternoon, when I was near turning into a barnacle, Bonnie stood, dropped her eye shields on the sand, walked to the water, splashed herself to get used to it, and then plunged in.

  “Okay,” I said to Hawk.

  We slid down the rock and into the Zodiac. I hunched over the engine as if I were trying to fix it, and Hawk paddled us with one oar slowly around the rock and in toward the beach where Ziggy sat with the bodyguards. They’d seen me. But they hadn’t seen Hawk, so I kept my face turned away, hunched over the engine, trying to get it started. Bonnie paid us very little heed as she swam toward the raft. She was a strong swimmer, and she looked good. But she kept her head up out of the water, so she wasn’t much for speed. Susan swam the same way. It was about the hair.

  “I think we’re out of gas,” Hawk shouted to the men on the shore.

  “Well, this ain’t a fucking gas station,” Ziggy shouted back. He stayed seated. “Beat it.”

  “Just lemme use your cell,” Hawk shouted. “I only got one oar. I can’t row this sucker all the way around the Neck.”

  We were now between Bonnie and the shore.

  “What part of fucking beat it don’t you fucking understand,” Ziggy shouted.

  Bonnie pulled herself up on the raft and sort of rubbed the water off herself like Esther Williams. The two bodyguards came down to stand beside Ziggy and look menacing. One of them made a dismissive wave-away gesture. Hawk shrugged and turned the boat a little and began to paddle away, past the raft. He let the oar slip from his hand.

  “Shit,” he said loudly and stood up.

  I stayed hunched over the big outboard. The motor had an electric start, off a heavy marine battery beneath it on the floor of the Zodiac. As we drifted next to the raft, Hawk stepped up onto it, picked up Bonnie around the waist, and stepped back into the Zodiac. I hit the electric start button and the motor roared and the boat jumped. Hawk fell over backward with Bonnie still clamped in his arms. On shore, the two bodyguards had their guns out but they couldn’t shoot for fear of hitting Bonnie. Ziggy, too, was on his feet. He was yelling, and I think Bonnie was screaming, but the engine was too loud and I couldn’t hear either of them.

  60

  Bonnie talked all the way from the point where we grabbed her until we ran the Zodiac up onto the beach on the town side of the causeway where we’d parked.

  “Who are you. . . . I know you. . . . You were at my house. . . . What are you going to do. . . . My father will kill you. . . . What are you going to do to me. . . . My father will find me. . . . My father is going to kill you. . . .” With one of us on each arm we ran Bonnie up the beach and stuffed her into the backseat of Hawk’s car. I got in with her. Hawk got in the front and drove it away with all deliberate speed.

  On the ride to Cambridge, she kept it up.

  “You better not hurt me. . . . If you touch me, my father will kill you. . . . Why are you doing this to me. . . . If you want money, my father will pay. . . . My father has tons of money. . . .”

  The years of sun had not been kind to Bonnie’s skin. It was deeply tanned and deeply weathered and rough with an infinity of small diamond-shaped wrinkles that you could only see if you were close. I was close. I didn’t want her opening the door and jumping or lowering the window and screaming. I would have been pleased had she shut up, but it was, I supposed, one of the hazards of kidnapping.

  We pulled into the driveway beside Susan’s house and went past Junior’s huge mass and up the back stairs to Susan’s apartment. After he saw who we were, Junior showed no interest. I opened the back door with my key, and we went in. Pearl appeared from the bedroom, walking very low and growling and making very short barks until she saw that it was me. Then she bounded past Bonnie
and jumped up as I’d often urged her not to do, put her paws on my shoulders, and gave sort of bitey kisses on the nose, some of which hurt. While I accepted my welcome from Pearl, Hawk sat Bonnie down in Susan’s living room. It was almost five. Susan would be up from her last appointment in a little while.

  “You’ll be sorry,” Bonnie said. “When my father finds you, you’re going to be really, really sorry.”

  Pearl came bounding across the room and jumped up on the couch beside Bonnie. Bonnie screamed. Pearl sniffed at her face and Bonnie huddled into a ball. Hawk looked amused. He made a little clucking noise to Pearl and she jumped off the couch and went over to him and the two of them sat in the big armchair and Hawk patted her. The front door opened and Vinnie Morris came in with a gun. He looked at me and Hawk and put the gun away. He paid no attention to Bonnie.

  “I heard people moving around up here,” Vinnie said.

  “Where’s Ty-Bop?” I said.

  “Out front.”

  “And you’re inside.”

  “Senior man,” Vinnie said.

  I nodded at Bonnie.

  “Now,” I said to Vinnie, “might be the time for extra alertness.”

  “Sure,” Vinnie said and went back downstairs.

  “Would you like a drink?” I said to Bonnie.

  “Like whisky?”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Gimme some Chivas on the rocks.”

  I looked at Hawk. He grinned.

  “Yassah, Boss,” he said and shuffled off toward the kitchen where Susan kept her booze.

  I got a straight chair and straddled it in front of Bonnie.

  “Whaddya want with me, anyway?” Bonnie said. “You got any idea who I am. You got any idea what kinda trouble you got yourself into?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Hawk came back and handed Bonnie her drink. Holding the thick lowball glass in both hands, she took in a lot of it. She didn’t seem to mind that it wasn’t Chivas Regal. Hawk looked at her for a moment and went back to the kitchen.

  “So why don’t you say something?” Bonnie said.

  “Do you prefer Bonnie or Bunny?” I said.

  She stared at me for a moment. “You came to my house,” she said. “It was you that came, and Ziggy and the guys chased you off.”