The Running Kind: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  Eliot shrugged. “If you can reach Dayton with them, and turn them over, then they’ll have their protection and you two will be effectively in the clear. Wouldn’t be any percentage in Scartelli’s outfit messing with the two of you any further.”

  Eliot drained his drink and nodded for a refill. He said, “Damn, I wish I still had a badge. I’d take six of my best men and we’d make that Dayton run. We’d get you there, safe and sound, by God. But it looks like it’s just me.”

  Hector scowled. “What the hell are you saying, El?”

  “I’ll come along with you, of course,” Eliot said. “If the weather clears a little, we could make Dayton before sunrise. I’ll follow, be extra muscle and help grease the grooves with Gibson when we get there. I speak those bastards’ language. The sorry tongue of bureaucratese, that is to say.”

  Jimmy said, “Eliot, you have that little boy, now. A wife. You have things to lose you didn’t have to risk back in the bad old good days.”

  “It should be a milk run, Jimmy,” Eliot said. “No arguments. Just tell me when we leave. I’ll follow. Trust I have your back covered.”

  It was clear to Hector that Eliot wouldn’t back down. Hector said, “I think we get one more night’s sleep here”—one more night with Meg, he was thinking—“then we make the run at dawn. Roads are treacherous enough without driving ’em at night. Be a sad irony killing ourselves on slick pavement when there are so many other options for a violent death in the twenty-four bloody hours ahead.”

  “I agree,” Jimmy said. “First we recharge our batteries. Then make that run south.” He winked at Eliot. “While we’re down there in Dayton, maybe we could visit our old friend. Make sure he’s still locked up in the loony bin, eh?”

  Hector guessed Jimmy meant their Mad Butcher suspect from the old days: the deranged and drunken doctor who had booby-hatched himself years before to evade possible prosecution for the string of torso killings, according to Eliot. Jimmy went and confirmed it: “We’ll make sure our boyo was accounted for when Robertson was slain and cut up.”

  “We’ll do that, Jimbo,” Eliot said. “Maybe I can at least scare him enough to stop writing me those crazy letters and postcards.” Ness nodded at Katy in the mirror. “We’re being eyeballed. Guess we better get over there.” He looked from Jimmy to Hector and back again. “We’re agreed then on the generalities?”

  “Think so,” Hector said. Hell, what else could he say?

  Jimmy said, “Eliot and I will work out the rest by phone, later. Now I think we need to start working on Katy. Get a better handle on what she can turn over to this shyster lawyer. I’d hate to make this Charge of the Light Brigade-style suicide run only to learn she can’t deliver the goods.” He stood up and stretched and said, “We better tell them how it is.”

  “You two do that,” Hector said, keeping to my barstool. “I haven’t the heart.” That was true, so far as it went. He hadn’t the stomach to sit at a table with selfish Kate Scartelli right now, not as Meg and Shannon’s time together was clearly drawing to a close.

  Meg joined Hector at the bar, her drink in hand. She slid onto the stool next to him. He closed a hand over her knee, stroking it through nylon. He said, “Don’t you want to hear the plan?”

  “Not really,” Meg said. “Honestly, it’s all beginning to seem appallingly academic to me. I have nothing to give that senator. I have nothing to trade for protection. And Katy’s use for me is all but finished. Katy knows I know it and she doesn’t even bother to pretend anymore.” Meg sipped some of the belly warming rum. “All that aside, I heard Dayton mentioned.”

  “We’ll start down that way tomorrow morning. Very early.”

  Meg looked back over her shoulder. She put her hand under the bar and pressed it to the back of Hector’s hand, pushing his hand from her knee up and inside to her inner thigh. She pressed it hard there. It was very warm—her hand and that other place. “Part of me says let them start,” she said. “Let them make their trip to Dayton without us. You and I could run the other way. Run away from it all. I’ve always been the kind to run away from the bad.”

  “You didn’t run from Youngstown after Shannon was born,” Hector said, searching her eyes. He brushed a wave of blond hair back from her right eye. “You hung in there solidly enough.”

  “Waiting for something,” she said. “Waiting for something, but I hardly knew what. Still don’t know. And I don’t hold out hope for any future at all with my baby, now.”

  “A part of me feels like running away with you, too,” Hector said. “But we have to see Shannon through this. See she’s safely cared for and provided for by this damned committee. I couldn’t care less what happens to Katy, but Shannon’s fate concerns me almost as much as I know it does you. And I started down this bloody road with Jimmy. Can’t just leave him, and now Eliot, holding this sorry bag of misery.”

  “No,” she said. “You’re too loyal a friend, so you couldn’t do that. You’re that rarest of things, a finisher.” She drained her drink and tapped her fingers to signal she wanted a refill. The keep nodded. She said, “You wouldn’t consider a kidnapping, and then the three of us running, would you, Hector?”

  “You almost sound serious,” Hector said.

  “For my part, I am,” Meg said. “But for you? No. Though I’ve heard some important books were written in prison.”

  Hector smiled. “Important books, yes, but not particularly lucrative.”

  “You write for money?”

  “God yes,” Hector said. “I do this for a living. This is my trade. My preferred epitaph: ‘He did it for the art, but he wasn’t above the money.’”

  Meg smiled. “Because the pile was too high?”

  Hector laughed. “It’s going to mean a bigger bill from the stonecutter,” he said, “but I much prefer your version. I’m amending.”

  “Think we might drift off for a time again tonight? Some little dark place where we can dance?”

  “I’m sure it can be arranged,” he said.

  ***

  After they pulled up in front of the brownstone, Hector went around to the back of his car and popped the trunk. He rooted through a cardboard box filled with weapons they’d confiscated from all the bent officials and would-be torpedoes the past couple of days. Jimmy and Hector had amassed quite the little collection of handguns for themselves. Jimmy peered under the lid of the trunk to see what Hector was up to. Jimmy said, “What’s this?”

  “Though I don’t feel it is owed, I promised my FBI guy something,” Hector said.

  Hector dug out the guns they’d taken from the FBI agents outside their hotel. He slipped those in his pocket, along with the agents’ identifications. “Back in a jiffy,” he told Jimmy.

  The Feds watched Hector cross the street. The driver rolled down his window. He said, “Agent Tilly said you’d have something to give us.”

  He was careful pulling the guns from his pockets, holding them by the barrel between thumb and forefinger. Just in case, Hector wiped down each one and let the Fed behind the wheel lift them from his handkerchief.

  “You’re a careful man,” the driver said.

  “Your agency hasn’t done much to distinguish itself, nor breed trust, not this sorry trip to the well,” Hector said. “Mr. Hoover’s frankly pissing me off.”

  The one on the passenger side said, “And their identifications?”

  “Here,” Hector said, handing over the little leatherette cases. The driver opened each one, then showed them to his partner. The other agent partner grunted. “I don’t know ’em,” he said.

  The driver said, “Me either. And thank Himself for that.”

  “Whoever the head Bureau honcho is here in this goddamn city, he’s allegedly a problem for you boys, too,” Hector said. “The women were working through that fella to get protection for themselves. Near as I can tell, the bastard sold them out for a cold, hard hit.”

  The Feds looked slight queasy then. That gladdened Hector’s heart. H
e said, “Now, having done you boys all these unreciprocated favors, tell me—exactly what will it take for you two to exceed orders?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean when do you, you know, do something? What’s enough to make you raise a finger for us? What’s it going to take, hombres? Say a car rolls up and three thugs with guns climb out here.” Hector gestured across the street at the brownstone. “Then do you get off your asses?”

  “Hard to say,” the driver said. “We have a broad charter. Oodles of autonomous discretion. You know, mucho latitude.”

  “You must be very proud to engender such high-flying trust from J. Edgar,” Hector said. “So what happens now? You two just keep shadowing us? Stick to us like goddamn remoras?”

  “Not sure I like that comparison, but that’s about how it shapes, Lassiter,” the driver said.

  Hector shook his head and lit a cigarette. “Nice guy that I am, I’m going to give you two a tip. Why don’t y’all call it a night then? I may take the prettier of the ladies there out for drinks and a dance in a bit, but we’re all more or less in for the night. Having said that, we’ll be hittin’ the road, bright and early. Got a little road trip ahead of us. You may want to prepare for that.”

  The driver almost groaned. “Holy Christ. Where to?”

  Hector smiled. “I can’t really say. See, I’m exercising mucho latitude. Let’s just say you boys best have a full tank of gas.”

  “Shit,” the driver said, sour-faced. “How exactly early is early?”

  Hector shrugged, backing away from the FBI agents’ car. He half-turned, then stepped back quickly as a green Plymouth whipped by. Several men in the car: the guy in the backseat on the passenger looked back at Hector with dead eyes.

  He looked to Hector like a stone killer.

  18

  Meg swayed against Hector, dancing to Star Dust. She’d been softly singing the lyrics in his ear, but that sultry serenade had tapered off a stanza or so ago. She said, “Jim tells me you spend a lot of time on the road, that you’re a well-traveled man. He says your passport is a thing to behold.”

  “I just bore too easily,” Hector said. “I’d hate to leave this life wondering about anything. And I’ve got to feed the muse. It’s also an interesting way to live. Never settle, and you’re new every dandy place you go.”

  “But you’re a stranger, too.”

  Funny: Hector had long ago said a similar thing to another writer who had traveled even more widely than he had, to his first wife, Brinke Devlin. “There is that perspective, as well,” Hector said.

  “I have nowhere to go after tomorrow,” Meg said. She gripped his hand. “Were you serious about me coming down to New Mexico with you?”

  “Not if you’re doing it only because you have no place else to go,” he said. “I’d like to think there are deeper urges than no better options motivating you.”

  “You can trust that to be true,” she said. “I mean, if you’re not bothered by our age difference.”

  Jesus, had she been talking to Jimmy about that?

  Hector pulled back a bit to search her face. “Are you—bothered by that? You should know, up front, in a few days, I turn fifty-one. I came in with the New Year. Hell, with the new century.”

  Meg didn’t flinch, bless her. “So when’s your birthday?”

  “January 1st,” Hector said. “Landed at midnight. Like I said, I came in with the bloody present age.”

  “I’m fine with it. Does me being younger bother you, Hector?”

  “I’ll find some way to cope.”

  She smiled and leaned back against him. “I’m going to be a mess tomorrow, Hector. I just want to prepare you for that, up front. When Shannon is spirited off to whatever place they’ve found to hide her, I’m going to blow to pieces, you know.”

  “I’ll see you through it,” Hector said. “I promise you I’ll do my best to do that.”

  “I wish I’d known you six years ago,” she said. “I might have talked you into that kidnapping. Or you’d have talked sense into me. Kept me from that devil’s deal I made. Vito will never stop hunting any of us, you know that, don’t you? Not as long as he thinks there’s some threat. And I’m not sure he’ll be any less dangerous in prison.”

  “Don’t borrow trouble,” Hector said. “You’re thinking too far ahead, darlin’. Remember: man proposes then God promptly disposes. Or so the downcast believers say. Anyway, I hear old Vito’s slipping away upstairs. He may well forget us in time. Hell, to hear Katie talk, he may forget himself, inside next week.”

  Hector felt her head nod under his chin. “I don’t suppose you would spring for another hotel room? Too risky making love on the couch again,” she said. “I don’t want to be worrying about who might hear or walk in on us.”

  “I’ve already got us a room reserved. Figured we see that posh old Hollenden joint.”

  “We can’t be away more than another couple of hours,” Meg said. “The expense of that place for just a little bit we can be there? You’re crazy!”

  “Right,” Hector said, smiling. “So we should probably go there right now then, don’t you think?”

  19

  Five o’clock in the morning: the sun wasn’t yet up and city was sleeping, except for the fugitives and those two Feds parked across the street with their engine running.

  The agents sipped coffee from thermos lids and stared all hell at them as Jimmy and Hector loaded the Chevy. It took the two men some time to wedge Meg and Katy’s suitcases in around Hector’s own luggage, his portable typewriter and their box of confiscated firearms. Meg, thankfully, was traveling light: it wasn’t as much trouble wedging in her single suitcase Hector had run around the city via cutouts on its way to them.

  Jimmy rubbed his hands together, his breath coming like smoke from his nose and mouth. “Godless goddamn weather,” he said. “We should be at your place in New Mexico about now, Hector. Nice and warm and flying on tequila or agave. Nibbling tortillas, staring off through the cacti. Away from all foolish young women and their silly little girls’ problems.”

  There Jimmy went again.

  “Days are still pretty warm down that way,” Hector said, “but the nights can be brisk there, too. It’s the way in the desert, you know.”

  “Well, Hector, the world turns the right way, this time tonight, we could be well shed of this mess,” Jimmy said. “Should have this one cleanly behind us. What were we thinking getting twisted up in this calamitous knot of misery?”

  “You ask that like we had a choice,” Hector said. “Once that kid tugged on my sleeve, we were both goners. Hell, you were the driving force behind this escapade on the front end.”

  “On that note, I’ll go get the wee one and bring her down first,” Jimmy said. “Car should be warmed up by now. Eliot should be by in about ten minutes. Maybe I’ll ride with him, see if he’ll let me drive. He’s never been much of a wheelman.”

  And chances were Ness could use a sober driver if he’d kept up his drinking at the same pace he had been putting them away at the hotel bar. Hector didn’t venture that opinion aloud, of course.

  Jimmy carried Shannon out and put her in the center of the back seat. The tyke was sleeping through it all. Meg followed them out. She said to Hector, “Katy’s fussing with one of her new dresses. I’d figure on at least five more minutes.”

  “Then you best get in the car with Shannon,” he said. “She might be afraid if she wakes up and finds herself alone and in some place other than the one where she fell asleep.”

  Eliot pulled up in front of the brownstone then. He drove a dark green Mercury. He rolled down the window and Hector walked over to Ness. Eliot smiled and said, “Those FBI agents aren’t exactly subtle, are they?”

  “I think we passed subtle with Hoover and his cronies at least two days ago,” Hector said. “You have a gun, Eliot?”

  He looked a little sad. “No.”

  “Then just a second.” Hector fetched a spare gun from
the box in the trunk of his car and passed it to Eliot. “It’s got a full clip. And here’s another couple.” He folded the clips into Eliot’s other hand. “It’s far off the books, so keep it if you don’t need to pitch it after use.”

  Ness beamed. “You can really spare it?”

  “We’ve got plenty of extras,” Hector said. “Jimmy’s planning on riding with you. He has the route. If we get separated, we’ve picked about five points along the path where we’ll hook up again. He has those written down, too.”

  “Sounds good,” Eliot said. “When do we roll?”

  “As soon as Mrs. Scartelli decides she’s ready for the road. Any minute, probably.”

  As they were talking, a milk delivery truck rolled up the street and parked on the wrong side, about a quarter block from the brownstone. The milkman got out and started fussing around the side of the truck. It looked like he had someone riding shotgun.

  A bird screeched and a couple of black crows took skittish wing from the roof of a building across the street. Hector thought he heard metal-on-metal from somewhere above and behind. He found himself getting jittery.

  Goddamn Katy: Hector just wanted to get the hell underway, lickety-split.

  The front door opened and Katy came out. She held tightly to the wrought-iron banister as she navigated the slick stairs down to the sidewalk.

  Cursing, Hector went to help her.

  That’s when the gunfire started.

  Bullets flew from every direction—even the flare of a couple of Tommy guns from the back of the milk truck.

  Hector gathered up Katy and pushed her down behind the concrete staircase, sheltered from the fire from the milk truck. Other bullets were almost finding them, though.

  Hector looked up and saw two men on the roof across the street. Both leveled high-powered rifles. Jimmy and Eliot began firing back; the latter from the cover of his car, already pocked with bullet holes.