Very Bad Men

by Harry Dolan

  I had a vision of her sitting on a hotel bed. Her legs bare. A drink in her hand. Attribute it to my active imagination. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said.

  “I’m serious. They’ll cover it.”

  “That’s not the problem.”

  “Then what—” She took a second to catch on. “You’re afraid to come up to my room.”

  “I’m not afraid,” I said.

  “You are. That’s sweet. And puritanical. What about meeting in the hotel lobby?”

  I leafed through the pages of the manuscript. Six more and I’d be done.

  “I think I’ll pass,” I said. “There’s something I want to finish here.”

  “Puritanical,” she said again. “All right, Loogan. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  We said our good-byes and I went back to the detective and the heiress. The pair of them had worked out a scam to swindle her father out of half a million dollars. I got through two more pages, jotting the edits in the white spaces between the lines of type. They were laughing and counting the loot. I’d read the thing before and I knew that in the next paragraph she would haul out a cute little chrome-plated twenty-two and shoot him in the gut.

  I tossed my pencil onto the desk. The pair of them could wait until the morning. I was more curious about the story of Callie Spencer and Lucy Navarro.

  I closed the window and locked the office. The stairs at the end of the hall took me down to the service entrance, to the alley behind the building. I got in my car and aimed it toward Lucy’s hotel.

  LARK WATCHED THE WOMAN close her phone and walk back the way she’d come. The fading sound of her footsteps reached him through the open car window.

  He returned Delacorte’s pistol to the passenger seat, re-engaging the safety with his thumb. The window of the cottage had gone dark.

  The beer was colder now. He killed the bottle in three swallows. The woman reached her car. Lark heard the engine start, saw the headlights flare. The car pulled away from the curb, rolled toward him, and turned right onto Arlington Boulevard.

  He cranked his key in the ignition and powered up the window. Drove past the cottage in the dark and put his lights on only after he made the turn.

  FOLLOWING HER WAS EASY. A yellow Beetle has a distinctive look.

  She traveled west and south, coming eventually to State Street. Familiar territory for Lark, not far from his apartment.

  By the time she turned into the parking lot of the Winston Hotel, there were three cars between them. He lost sight of her for a moment, and when he spotted the Beetle again it was parked on the western edge of the lot, away from the hotel itself.

  There were picnic tables there on a patch of lawn, and a line of tall evergreens intended to drown out the sound of semi trucks passing on the interstate nearby.

  Lark pulled into a space closer to the hotel. From there he could watch her and make up his mind. Because he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do about her. She had been loitering around Callie Spencer’s house. He still wondered if a bullet might not be the best solution.

  A blue minivan drove along the row in front of him—slow as if it were searching for a spot. It obscured his view of the woman, but when it passed he saw that she had gotten out of the Beetle. She had plastic water bottles and fast-food wrappers in her hands. She carried them to a trash barrel near the picnic tables and dropped them in.

  She made another trip: more bottles and cardboard cups. A woman who had spent a lot of time in her car. One of the bottles got away from her and rolled along the ground.

  Lark took out his notebook and his father’s Waterman pen. He didn’t know her name, so he found a blank page and wrote, The woman from the Eightball Saloon. The letters looked orange to him. A pale orange, not as bad as red, not as benign as green. They rippled and swayed, as if he were viewing them through air rising from hot asphalt.

  He didn’t know what that meant.

  He looked up from the notebook and saw the blue minivan again. He saw it pull up next to the yellow Beetle.

  Interesting.

  When he glanced down at the page once more, the letters were still orange. No guidance there. Lark closed the notebook and left it on the seat. He picked up Walter Delacorte’s pistol.

  When he opened the door, the rumble of a diesel engine was loud in his ears. One of the semis had pulled off the interstate and into the hotel lot. He turned his head automatically to look at it. Big block letters along the length of the trailer: COLEMAN TRUCKING.

  The semi’s brakes squealed as it came to a stop around ten yards away from him—obstructing his view of both the yellow Beetle and the blue minivan.

  Lark stepped out into the night and slipped Delacorte’s pistol into his pocket. He headed toward the semi at a jog. The driver of the truck had his window cracked, a cell phone to his ear. Lark called to him, waving to tell him to move along. The driver glared at him and went back to his call.

  Lark jogged between a pair of parked cars and then cut left in a long arc that took him around the front of the semi. He felt the idle of the engine in the soles of his feet. The yellow Beetle came into view. No one inside, no one nearby.

  The blue minivan was gone.

  The bulk of the semi obscured Lark’s view of the rest of the lot. He dashed around to the back of the trailer and saw the glow of brake lights in the distance: the blue minivan slowing at the exit of the lot and turning onto State Street.

  I USED TO BE AFRAID of parking lots, especially at night.

  If someone comes knocking on your door and he seems a little off, if he’s ill-groomed and shabbily dressed, you can refuse to let him in. If he hangs around, you can call the police. If you see the same guy in a parking lot, you’re out of luck. There’s nothing to be done.

  People are always on the move in parking lots. That guy walking toward you, the squirrelly one, is probably just heading for his car. He probably doesn’t mean you any harm. But you won’t know until he’s right next to you. Until he’s got his gun in your ribs and he’s demanding your wallet.

  I could go on, but here’s an experiment that should tell you everything you need to know. Turn to the police blotter in your local paper and count the number of incidents where someone was shot, stabbed, robbed, or beaten. Eliminate the ones that happened in somebody’s house or on their front lawn. Of the ones that are left, how many happened in a parking lot?

  It was after midnight when I drove into the lot of the Winston Hotel. It looked peaceful. Neat rows of cars and SUVs under the crisp light of arc lamps.

  No sound but the clean throb of a diesel engine. An eighteen-wheeler with COLEMAN TRUCKING in block letters on the back of the trailer. There was no room to pass the truck on the left. I moved to pass it on the right and saw Lucy Navarro’s yellow Beetle.

  The headlights were on, the driver’s door open. I couldn’t see Lucy anywhere, but there was someone in the car. I almost missed him, because the only part of him I could see was one of his shoes. It stuck out beneath the open door.

  I heard a change in the tone of the diesel engine and the truck began to roll forward.

  I hit my brakes and stopped twenty feet short of the Beetle. Shifted into park and got out. I remember my feet hitting the pavement. The Swiss Army knife already in my hand.

  I ran to Lucy’s car, folding out the blade as I went. The rumble of the diesel covered my approach.

  He was half sitting, half lying in the driver’s seat, reaching across to the open glove compartment. His gray dress shirt was untucked and fit him loosely. He never looked my way until I got hold of his arm and started dragging him from the car.

  His legs flailed and when I had him halfway out he kicked me in the thigh. It didn’t hurt much but it annoyed me and I stepped back and slammed the driver’s door on his shin. I grabbed his arm again and pulled him out. Threw him against the side of the car. I held him there with my hip and pressed my left forearm to his throat. The knife was in my right hand, the blade at his cheek.
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  I heard the diesel engine receding into the distance. The driver of the semi had made a wide U-turn and was heading for the exit. Which left no one watching.

  “Where’s Lucy?” I said.

  He leaned back to relieve the pressure on his throat. “I don’t know.”

  “What were you doing in her car?”

  He raised his left hand, which held a wrinkled square of paper: Lucy’s registration.

  “I wanted to know who she was,” he said. “I saw her at Callie Spencer’s house.”

  That caught me off guard. I still hadn’t placed him. His eyes were unfamiliar. But now, studying his face, I recognized his jawline and the shape of his mouth.

  “You’re the man in plaid.”

  He gave me a blank look.

  “What’s your name?” I asked him.

  “Anthony Lark.”

  Simple as that.

  I said, “Where’s Lucy, Anthony?”

  I felt his shoulders lift.

  “I told you. I don’t know,” he said. “Did you see the van?”

  “What van?”

  “A blue minivan. That’s all I can give you.”

  I grabbed a handful of his collar. “What did you do with her?”

  “I’m not the one you should be angry at,” he said. No emotion in his voice. “There’s something going on here, bigger than you and me.”

  I shoved him back against the car. “You’re going to tell me where she is.”

  “You’re hurting me,” he said. “There’s no call for that. I’ve been reasonable up till now.”

  I held the blade where he could see it. “Reasonable?”

  “I’ve answered your questions,” he said. “I think you should take that into account.”

  “You do, do you?”

  “Yes. I think you should let me go.”

  I adjusted my grip on his collar. “Why would I do that?”

  “Because I haven’t caused you any harm.”

  “Is that the best you can do?”

  He exhaled through his nose, one impatient breath.

  “No,” he said. “There’s another reason.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Because you only brought a knife.”

  A cryptic remark. I was slow to puzzle it out. He was fast.

  In a movie there might have been more warning. I might have heard a tiny mechanical click, the sound of him releasing the safety. But in reality that single impatient breath was the only warning I got. Then the muzzle brushed my side and he pulled the trigger.

  CHAPTER 33

  I read somewhere once that the impact of a bullet is usually not enough to knock you down. If it doesn’t stop your heart or blow out your knee, or something along those lines, there’s no reason for you to fall. But people do anyway, because they think they’re supposed to. They’ve seen too many westerns and cop shows. When the guy in the cowboy hat or the fedora gets shot, he falls over.

  So over they go.

  I fell when Anthony Lark shot me. In my defense, he pushed me.

  I let go of the knife on the way down. Landed on the grass not far from a picnic table. I remember looking up and seeing the silhouettes of tall pine trees.

  I remember Lark standing over me and dropping something that floated lazily down into the grass. Lucy Navarro’s registration.

  “Don’t come after me,” I remember him saying. “I’m not the one who took her.”

  The details are rough after that, like a series of underdeveloped photographs. I don’t remember sitting up, but I remember being on my feet. Looking down and seeing my pocketknife on the ground. Deciding that bending over to pick it up would be a bad idea.

  The smell of burning cotton—the fabric of my shirt smoldering from the heat of the muzzle blast.

  Lark in the distance, taking the last few steps to his car, favoring his left leg. He stood with the door open for a moment and stared back at me.

  People coming out of the hotel. Two girls in blazers who must have been desk clerks. Too young to be dealing with a bleeding man in the parking lot. An older couple came with them. I remember he wore suspenders; she had soft gray hair and a soothing voice. She sympathized when I told her Lark was getting away.

  By then his car was out of sight.

  When the EMTs came I was sitting on the bench of a picnic table with a hotel towel pressed against my side. Lucy Navarro’s yellow Beetle idling a few yards away.

  The EMTs wanted to put me on a gurney. I told them I wouldn’t need it. I explained my theory about people who fall over when they get shot.

  They let me ride in the ambulance sitting up.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, at home, Sarah asked me how it felt, being shot. I told her it stung a little but it wasn’t bad. The pain didn’t last.

  That was not entirely true.

  If you took your thumb and index finger and pinched a fold of flesh on your side, low down on your rib cage, and if you squeezed really hard, you might get an inkling of how it felt. And if you took something metal and sharp, like a railroad spike, and heated it in a fire and rammed it through that little fold of flesh—then you’d have an even better idea.

  I SAT UP IN THE AMBULANCE and felt every bump and jostle along the route like a fresh railroad spike. In the emergency room, the doctor asked me to lie down. He told me it would be easier for him to work on me that way. I went along for his sake.

  He was a compact man, young, from one of those countries where they speak English in a charming, lilting accent. He told me my gunshot wound was the finest he’d ever seen. “GSW through-and-through,” he said. “If you must be shot it is assuredly the best way.”

  He told me the bullet might have easily struck a rib, but he didn’t think it had.

  “Someone must have been smiling down upon you, my friend.”

  “He wasn’t smiling,” I said.

  A COUPLE HOURS LATER they were ready to let me go. By then the wound had been cleaned and debrided, closed at both the entry and the exit. Bandaged. They’d given me antibiotics, and an X-ray to rule out a fractured rib. (“An abundance of caution, my friend.”) Somewhere in there Elizabeth turned up. I’m not sure exactly when, because the doctor gave me something for the pain and I lost track of things. I remember him telling her about my condition. (“Very fortunate. No damage to any vital organ or structure.”) I remember him asking her about a white shape on the X-ray that looked like a flattened bullet lodged behind my lung.

  “Has he been shot before?”

  “Just once,” she said.

  “Is he with the police?”

  “No.”

  “Was he at one time a military man?”

  “No.”

  “Ah. He’s led a colorful life, then.”

  “You might say so.”

  SHE DROVE ME HOME. Sarah came out to help get me into the house and up the stairs. She asked her question about how it felt to be shot, and I told her my lie.

  She left us and Elizabeth got me out of my clothes. I remember her piling things on the floor: shoes and socks, pants, the hospital gown they’d given me in lieu of my ruined shirt. She had me lie down on her side of the bed and she climbed in on my side so she could be on my right, away from the wound.

  I remember waking sometime later and feeling her body against me, her right leg crossed over mine, her palm on my chest. I let my eyes adjust to the dark, focusing on the curve of her hip.

  From the pattern of her breathing I knew she was awake.

  “It was the man in plaid,” I said. “He’s the one who shot me.”

  “I know,” she said. “You told me at the hospital.”

  “His name is Anthony Lark.”

  “I know. Go to sleep, David.”

  Sometime later I woke again. I found Elizabeth propped on an elbow, watching over me.

  “He had a pistol,” I said.

  “Sleep.”

  “He’s never had a pistol before. Where did he get it?”

  She sighed and told me a
bout Lark’s apartment. She told me Walter Delacorte was dead. Paul Rhiner would recover, eventually.

  “He has a concussion, a broken nose, several broken ribs,” she said. “His right hand is swollen like something out of a cartoon.”

  She’d spoken to Rhiner at the hospital. He told her that Lark had taken his pistol, and Delacorte’s. That was all he would tell her about what had happened.

  “How did Lark manage to get away from them?” I asked.

  “No more questions, David.”

  “And how did they find him in the first place?”

  “No more. Go to sleep.”

  The night crept on toward dawn. I remember seeing Lucy Navarro in a dream; I saw her with the turtle, saw her giving water to the stray dog at Nick Dawtrey’s house. I remember trying to sit up, and wishing I hadn’t. Elizabeth easing me down again.

  “Lucy’s missing,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “Lark said he didn’t take her. Said it was a blue minivan.”

  “You already told me.”

  I lay still and tried to get back to a place where it didn’t hurt to breathe. Elizabeth brushed her fingertips over my brow.

  I said, “I don’t remember if you asked me what I was doing at Lucy’s hotel.”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “But the question crossed my mind.”

  “She wanted to talk. She needed advice. That’s all it was.”

  “All right.”

  “Lucy’s been staking out the Spencer house the past two days. Parked on the street in that Beetle of hers. There’s no way they didn’t notice.”

  “Maybe they did. That doesn’t mean they took her.”

  “They’re involved—the Spencers or Alan Beckett. I don’t trust Beckett.”

  Elizabeth bent close and kissed my mouth. “I don’t want you to worry about it, David. It’s not your problem to solve.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Thursday morning. Elizabeth met Carter Shan at eight in the bullpen of the Investigations Division at City Hall. He was transferring images from his digital camera to his computer—crime-scene photos from Anthony Lark’s apartment.