The Running Kind: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  “And Shannon?”

  “She’s perfectly fine,” Jimmy said. “The lassie let me in.”

  “Thanks, buddy,” Hector said. “You’re still the best in a tight.” Jimmy waved a meaty paw in forget it fashion.

  The other man said, “Don’t thank him—thank me, you bruiser. Who’s the doctor here, after all? James is just a meddlesome copper—a water-carrier for Mr. Headman Ness.”

  Hector looked over his physician, then swallowed hard. The guy was ungodly gangly: maybe stood six-five. Something effeminate there, despite all that size. And there was something very off-putting about the stranger. Hector hoped Jimmy knew what he was doing recruiting him to patch them up.

  Their strange doctor smiled and winked. Something in the man’s expression made Hector squirm. The man said, “The good news is that neither of you suffered artery or nerve damage. Isn’t that lucky?”

  “Lucky like aces over queens,” Hector said, wary. “Thanks for coming in a pinch, Sawbones.”

  That last elicited a giggle from the doctor. Hector shivered.

  “I’ll write a script for some pain medication,” the big stranger said. “Some penicillin, too. You should probably have a tetanus shot, as well. Bullets are filthy things, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Yes.” Hector frowned. Something about this giant had his radar fully up now.

  “Had me one of those shots a few months back,” Hector said. “There was a knife fight in a cantina in Old Juarez I got swept up in. Figure the dose from that shot is still doin’ its job.”

  “Oh dear,” the doctor said. “A knife fight?” He wiped his hands down with a hotel towel. “You seem perilously prone to these things, Mr. Lassiter. But yes, that shot should still take care of you now. Well, I’ll just go and wash up now, righty-o James?”

  Jimmy nodded, turning to face the bathroom door once the man closed it. The big man locked the door and they heard water running.

  “Jesus, Jimmy,” Hector said, “where’d you find that one?”

  “Like you said, couldn’t go to any upstanding sawbones,” Jimmy said, frowning. “Not with those bullet wounds they’d phone in to the cops. So I had to improvise, and I do mean furiously, boyo.”

  “That guy really a doctor?”

  “Sure, Hec. I mean, more or less.” Hector noticed then that Jimmy was holding his gun at his side. Hector guessed Jimmy had had the forty-five out the whole time the man was tending to their wounds.

  “Who the hell is that odd duck?”

  “You really don’t want to know,” Jimmy said. “Trust me on that.”

  “Now I really do want to know,” Hector said.

  Jimmy wet his lips. He whispered, “He’s the man Eliot, Pete and Arnold and I are here to visit. That’s our Kingsbury Butcher suspect.”

  Hector’s stomach rolled. He tasted bile. “Holy Jesus, Jim! The one from the madhouse?”

  “I know, I know. Keep it low, Hec. I’ve got this thing contained. Just need to get him back to the Veterans Center before my three friends get there and learn what I’ve done. I’ll drop him back there and beg off the planned interrogation. Get back here as quickly as I can. I’ll want to move your lodging when I return.” Jimmy paused then shrugged sheepishly. “Our friend in there was far too attentive regarding where we were going and how we got here.”

  That made Hector’s skin freshly crawl.

  The water shut off and the man came out, smiling. “Take it easy on that arm, Mr. Lassiter,” he said. “It’s going to be stiff for several weeks. No more knife fights for you!”

  Hector said cagily, “Could I drive? Say in a day or two?” He was thinking more in terms of minutes.

  “I suppose you could, though it’ll smart like the dickens.” Another strange smile. “You’re lucky, sir. An inch to the left and you might have lost that arm. I might even have had to am-pu-tate.” He winked at Jimmy. The doctor said, “That’s a little private joke, isn’t it, Jimbo?”

  Once again, Hector swallowed hard. He said, “And my lady friend? What about her leg?”

  The “doctor” looked at Jimmy and smiled again. “That’ll hurt about like your arm will smart. No baths for her for a while. Not until it heals more. But she should be able to walk on a cane in a day or two. Of course, your rather hasty treatment is going to leave her scarred.”

  Jimmy said, “C’mon, Doc—time to travel, ya bloody degenerate pup, ya. Put out your paws, doc.” The doctor sighed and extended his hands behind his back for Jimmy to apply the cuffs.

  The doctor paused at the door. He was looking at Shannon. She was fussing with her doll and avoiding eye contact with the man.

  Kids and dogs—they know, Hector thought.

  The stranger said to Hector, “Now don’t hesitate to call if you need anything else, Tex. I should maybe check back with you in the morning. I’d be so happy to do that. I can take a cab here. You know, save our dear friend Jimmy the trouble of driving me back?”

  “You’ve done just plenty,” Hector said. “Really. Just all that’s needed. And we’ll be long gone by then. Long gone, mister. Truly. Thanks heaps.”

  When they left Hector struggled to his feet and locked the door. Shannon said, “He’s creepy.”

  “You said it,” Hector said, looking for his Colt. “Very creepy, kid. C’mon, honey, let’s see if we can’t find you something happy on the radio to listen to. Maybe some Christmas show.”

  ***

  Jimmy returned an hour later. Hector said, “Your doctor friend is beyond insane. Palpably nuts. You should just shoot the sick son of a bitch and save the courts the cost.”

  “I’ve thought hard about doing just that thing,” Jimmy said. “May yet come to that. Speaking of the mad bastard, I say we vacate this hovel without informing the front desk of your departure. I’d hate for this place to be occupied by some hapless traveler in the next day or two in case that bastard does attempt to follow-up with you three.”

  “Yeah, that’d louse up someone’s Merry Christmas, but good.” Shannon was sleeping on the bed with Meg, whom Hector thought was also asleep. But no: Meg said, “Where’s Kate?”

  Jimmy just looked at Hector and then at Meg.

  Hector answered. “Katy didn’t make it through, sorry to say.”

  Meg winced. She said rawly, “Oh, God.”

  “A tragedy,” Jimmy said. Hector couldn’t read his friend’s suddenly flat tone.

  Something there? Or maybe not.

  Meg said, “Where are we now?”

  “Hotel room not far from the police headquarters,” Jimmy said.

  Hector said, “You and I were both shot, honey. The bullets are out and we’re going to be okay, though not exactly fit for a few days. Still, we need to move our rooms and really ought to do that now, if you’re up to it.”

  “I’ll make it,” Meg said. “Just do whatever you two think we need to. I’ll cope.” She hesitated, then said, “Shannon, she didn’t see Katy—?”

  “No,” Hector said, “she didn’t.”

  “Thank God for that at least,” Meg said.

  Jimmy said, “Indeed. Either of you two need pain medication? I filled your prescriptions.” He held up a pair of paper envelopes.

  “I’m okay I think,” Meg said. “But let’s make this move fast, if we can. And I need a different favor from you James, and quite soon, if you’ll do it.”

  That neutral tone in his voice: Hector couldn’t quite figure what was up with Jimmy. The Irish cop said, “Ask it of me, Miss Dalton.” A beat, “And then we’ll see.”

  Meg nodded at Shannon, asleep in her arms. “Stores will close soon. I’d like her to have some kind of a Christmas.”

  That softened him: Jimmy nodded and held up a big hand. “Say no more, lass, I’m surely your man.”

  ***

  Shannon was still asleep when Jimmy placed her on the back seat next to Meg. He’d wiped down the interior of the Chevy—not a spot of blood to be seen.

  Hector said softly, “Regarding Katy�
��s fate, Shannon doesn’t know, Meg. She still expects Katy to turn up eventually.”

  “I’ll tell her when the time is right,” Meg said. “I need to be the one to tell her. I’ll break the news about Katy. Don’t know how yet, or when, but I’ll see to it. It should be me.”

  Jimmy said, “I agree you should be the one. For certain, that’s true.”

  26

  Hector stood smoking outside their new motel room with Jimmy in a wet-falling snow. “We should get a move on,” Jimmy said. “Stores will close soon.”

  Hector said, “You have any idea what to buy that kid?”

  “Miss Dalton made me a list,” Jimmy said, passing Hector a slip of paper. Hector looked it over.

  “Something is missing,” Hector said. He took a pencil from his pocket and put the list down on the window ledge of the room’s single window and scrawled down a few extra items.

  He passed it to Jimmy along with some money. Jimmy looked over the addendum and smiled. “You goddamn sentimentalist, you. You sure about this, Hec? I mean, your car…?”

  “That’s why the box and all those newspapers.”

  Jimmy nodded. “And you, Hec? What do you do, now?”

  “My own Christmas shopping,” Hector said. “Headed across the street to that lot there to buy myself a tree. Then I’m going to hit that five-and-dime yonder and get me some decorations and lights for that tree. Then I want to make a stop at that jewelry store yonder. It’s Christmas for Meg, too, after all.”

  Jimmy said, “Seems to me, Meg’s gotten her gift.”

  The author shrugged. “Circumstances kind of cast a pall over that present, pal, yeah?”

  “Yes. One would think.” Jimmy folded up the Christmas list and shoved it in his pocket. He cast down the stub of his cigarette and it sizzled in the snow. “But all that shopping is the near-term thing,” he said. “I was asking you your plans in terms of the longer game. At our age, what could be a happier accident than the prospect of the instant family? Still, that child’s going to need loving when she learns what’s happened to Katherine, isn’t she?”

  Hector lightly ran his right hand over his wounded left arm. “Let’s let Shannon have her Christmas, eh, Jimmy? Let’s get some distance from this holiday before we tell her about Katy. Would be a shame for her to think of every Christmas as some memorial to her supposed mother.”

  Jimmy thought about that a while then said, “Upon that we’re agreed, Hector. Sound thought coming from a man thinking through the fog of high-tone pain pills. So be it, brother.”

  ***

  Hector ducked back inside and shook the snow from his coat with his good arm. He found Meg limping around the room. He said, “Meg, please don’t push it. You don’t want to make yourself worse or tear open any stitches.”

  She smiled, shaking her head. “Who dragged a five-foot Christmas tree across the street with one arm, then manhandled it into our hotel room?” She coiled the lights around the tree another turn and then limped back from it a bit to survey her work. “What will the hotel manager think when he comes across this?”

  “He’ll smile and think it’s Christmas,” Hector said. “It’s whimsical. We should probably plan on leaving day after tomorrow. By then I should have enough range of motion to steer the damned car. Be good to be moving in that holiday migration pack, too. You know, anonymous and in the crawling thick. Just one more in a sea of cars of families headed home to somewhere.”

  “We haven’t even celebrated Christmas yet,” Meg said. “Do we have to talk about it being over already?”

  “Sorry,” Hector said. He handed her the box. “Merry Christmas, Megan.”

  She smiled and wrinkled her brow. “I don’t have anything for you.”

  “Sing me a song tonight and we’ll call it better than even.”

  “Can I open it now?”

  “I insist.”

  She did that. “It’s beautiful jewlery. Put it on me.”

  Hector pointed at his left arm. “Can’t, not with this bum wing.”

  “Sorry, of course. Steady me?”

  Hector held her around the waist with his good arm as she leaned her cane against the foot of the bed and used both hands to fasten the antique necklace around her throat. “How’s it look?”

  “Perfect,” he said. They kissed. He heard the bedsprings squeak. Shannon was shifting on the bed in her sleep. “We probably should wake her soon. She’ll be up all night otherwise.”

  “Probably.” Meg looked up at him with sleepy eyes. “She insisted she was going to nap to improve her odds of being up when Santa comes.”

  “Calculating little thing, isn’t she? That trait come from your side?”

  Meg suddenly looked very sad. “Thank you for all this, Hector. I mean saving us, of course, but I also mean these things, the tree and the lights. And having a friend like Jimmy who’ll go shop for dresses and dolls. God only knows what he’ll come back with.”

  “He’ll find some comely young thing to help him make the right choices. Then he’ll end up spending Christmas Eve with her. Old Jimmy’s never drawn an uncalculated breath.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Meg said. “James doesn’t strike me as a ladies’ man. I think you’re confusing him for yourself.”

  “Perhaps,” I said. “He does run a little more courtly than most do these days.”

  Megan said, “Despite what I said about not ruining our holiday before we have it, this uncertainty is eating at me. What are we to do next? Where do we go? What becomes of Shannon… What becomes of me?”

  Hector looked at the little girl asleep there, smiling at something in her dreams as she clutched harder at her doll. “What about your family back in Missouri, Meg? They still have that farm?”

  “Lost to bill collectors before Daddy was even buried,” Meg said. She limped back to the tree, leaning on her cane, then reached up over her head to adjust the star at the top of the tree. “This look straight?”

  “Perfect,” Hector lied.

  “My mother still lives in the town on a smaller place my brothers help pay for.”

  “Think Vito would remember about your Missouri roots?”

  “Given that the really important stuff is slipping through the cracks of his brain, probably not,” Meg said. “But I don’t want to live in Missouri. I don’t want Shannon to settle there. There’s no there there. Not in that little town.”

  “You remind me of Gertrude Stein with alliterative assertions like that.”

  “Gertrude who?”

  Jesus, but Meg was such a kid in some ways. Those age digs of Jimmy’s were still eating at Hector. But Jimmy was right: the cultural gap between Hector and his younger women just seemed to get deeper and wider with each passing year.

  He wrapped his good arm around Meg’s shoulders, appraising the tree. “I’m not thinking of condemning you to a life in the sticks, darlin’. Just thought it would be a safe place to take stock for a few days. Maybe be a good place to plot better, longer-term strategies. And, frankly, you and Shannon are not going to live legally as mother and daughter in this country. Not for a long time, anyway. The system is stacked against you on that front. I think we’re talking about you two settling in Canada or maybe even down my way. We could set you up in Juarez. You’d still just be a short drive away from me there.”

  She said, “Not ready to move to Mexico to live with us?” Hector checked her expression: it was matter-of-fact. He sensed she meant it. He wasn’t at all sure about any long-term prospects with this one.

  “I might be persuaded to cross the river now and then,” he said. He kissed the soft down on the back of her neck.

  “Changed my mind again,” Meg said. “Don’t think I can think about it anymore tonight.”

  “Me either. It’s Christmas Eve. Wish we had some spiked eggnog. A fireplace, too.”

  Meg looked sad again. “Maybe next year, when our lives aren’t so… well, so bizarre? Not so bloody.”

  “Looks like we’re r
eady to hang the bulbs,” Hector said. “Time to wake this little girl up, don’t you think? Let her help decorate?”

  ***

  Jimmy and Hector were in front of the hotel again, their asses parked on the trunk of the car this time, burning through cigarettes and casing angles.

  “Radio reports are breathless, Hector,” Jimmy said. “Seems some things were leaked to the press, probably by Gibson or one of his minions. They’ve cast poor luckless Katy as some sort of corn-fed Joan of Arc. And Shannon? She’s become some kind of latter-day Lindbergh baby, thanks to the goddamn reporters. The whole world will be keeping an eye peeled for her. I don’t envy those two, or you, the road ahead.”

  Jimmy blew a couple of smoke rings and shook his head. “And all that press attention puts bloody Vito in the unlikely position of simultaneously trying to portray Kate as misguided or insane while putting himself across as a doting husband and father. He’s hired a bounty hunter, Hector. One from down your way. Some lad out of Arizona who is one-half Pima Indian. Redskin paints himself as an über old-school tracker. Part Sam Spade and part Tonto, maybe. Vito’s also hired some offshoot of the Pinkertons to find Meg and Shannon. I mean, now that the assumption is they’re out of Ohio.”

  Hector shook his head. The Buckeye State, bless it, had presciently banned the Pinkertons years ago, rightly reasoning they constituted a threat to democracy. A forward-looking state, Ohio… in some respects, anyway.

  “Well, that’s all wonderful news,” Hector said. “Let’s inventory our enemies: we’ve got corrupt federal agents and honest ones, bent cops, honest cops, potentially every mobster in North America, a bounty hunter, cocksucker private investigators and now every mouth-breathing yokel with a radio, one of those televisions or just some coins for a damned newspaper. Did I miss anyone, buddy?”

  “That homicidal doctor in the Dayton Veterans Administration Center,” Jimmy said.

  “Another reason to get ourselves out of this city,” Hector said. “We’re up against it for certain.”

  Jimmy hesitated, then said, “This ‘we’ thing…? I’m with you, Hector, all the way to hell and back again, you know that. But you and me, Hec, we’re going to have to put some space between us for a time, I think. I’ve used up my vacation and have some casework I need to do before year’s end. I can hook up with you in a few days when the calendar year turns and my allowable time-off freshens. But in the interim, we need to keep distance, I’m afraid. I’m clearly being followed and all my phones are tapped now. Maybe tapped several times over. I shook tonight’s tails, but it’s only a matter of time, no matter how careful I am. Too many resources are being fielded to find you three, and I’ll simply not see that aim achieved through me. For now, I truly think you’re safer without than with me.”