Indeed, Hector thought. Good old Jimmy—now he was getting warm.
43
Hector made a slow ramble up to Ohio; Jimmy had flown back home to Cleveland well ahead of the writer.
Of course, Hector made a point of passing through Missouri on the way. He tarried for a few days in Hallie’s bed and her claw-footed tub.
He helped her with some chores around the farm, just trying it out, he told himself. The novelist assured himself he merely wanted to see if this envisioned new life truly agreed with him. It did—so much so it actually scared Hector a little. He decided he could indeed live out his days this way. Working around the farm would put all those muscles back into his arms and legs he’d had in the Keys when he had his own boat, The Devil May Care, and near daily engaged in strenuous sports fishing with Gulf Stream leviathans.
Hallie and Hector made love several times a day. They gradually murdered a few bottles of fine wine he’d brought along. They danced to the radio: swayed to “Raglan Road” and “The Lily of the West.”
Nights, warm and tangled up together in her feather bed, they read books deep into the night before turning out the lights. Hallie read Hector; Hector read the books of peers, rivals and contenders.
They stood in the chilly morning air, sipping coffee and watching Traveller trot and test fences. Hector was growing to love that presumed-to-be-untamable beast.
He figured the biggest danger in his beautiful new life that he was plotting was going to be the ungovernable urge to one day mount that silver stallion. He reckoned it was going to be impossible not to try and ride Traveller up into the high country.
Yes, that was the way it would be. He’d break that horse—just enough to accept one man’s saddle—and they’d go for long treks up into the surrounding hills in the sun and snow, a couple of headstrong mavericks bound together by wanderlust and sheer cussedness.
Eventually, though, Hector couldn’t stall much longer. He had to get down to this last, bloody job.
Hallie, tangled naked and damp around Hector in front of the fire, said, “You’ll really come back to me? Really?”
“Forever,” he said. “Just need to do this one last thing to keep your kin safe,” he said.
“Isn’t there a line in one of your books—forever’s just pretend?”
Hector held up a hand. “I say this only to you, my love. My art imitates my life, never the other way around.”
Solemn, Hallie told Hector she loved him. Hector told Hallie he loved her too. She pulled him closer. They kissed.
Hector thought leaving her soon, even for a short time, was perhaps the hardest thing he’d ever do.
***
Using Hallie’s more carefully drawn map, Hector drove back to civilization a few days later in his Chevy.
He left the farm clear-headed, clear-eyed and intent upon closing out cases with Vito.
He regarded it as his last campaign.
After he done that, it was Hector’s plan to spend a last week or two saying good-bye to the borderlands before heading back to Hallie’s farm.
Call it a kind of bachelor’s La Frontera farewell.
44
Sam Giancana succeeded in exceeding Hector’s expectations.
It really was like Momo had arranged to open all doors to the writer.
When Scartelli’s guards saw Hector approach the grounds of the sprawling northern Ohio mansion, they lowered their guns and opened the iron gates to Vito’s estate.
Then they vanished.
Hector got the same treatment at the front door, imposing thugs simply stepping aside with strange smiles, easing away. They pointed toward stairs and bedrooms before “being gone.”
It was starting to make Hector a little uneasy in terms of how easily it was all going.
Things turned a bit when he reached Vito Scartelli’s bedroom.
It was nearly eleven p.m., and Meg had told Hector that Vito was a go-to-bed-at-seven sort, particularly since the disease had really dug in. It was worse, Meg said, at night.
But this night Vito was burning the midnight oil. And he wasn’t alone.
Scartelli was up playing cards with some stooge who evidently didn’t get Momo’s orders.
The young buck drew down on Hector with bloody intent.
But Hector already had his gun out.
As his finger spasmed a last time, the mortally wounded young thug accidently put a round in his senile boss’s leg.
Hector dragged Vito bleeding and screaming through his grand house, down the steps and out the door to the Chevy.
Once Hector got the mob boss in the backseat of the Chevrolet, Hector pressed a rag drenched in chloroform over Vito’s mouth and nose and put him to sleep. Hector then wrapped a tourniquet around Vito’s thigh. It was not the careful job he’d done tending to Meg, but Hector really didn’t care whether or not this gunshot victim lost a leg.
In fact, Hector rather anticipated just that sort of thing ensuing for luckless Vito.
The writer cuffed the mobster’s hands behind his back, then strung a seatbelt between the chains, securing Vito to the backseat.
The mobster was whimpering, pleading for a doctor.
Hector said, “Enjoy the ride. It is indeed going to be your last, you sorry damned fiend.”
Then Hector started driving southwest.
***
The crazy old mobster awakened somewhere around Springfield, Ohio.
Seeing those corporation limit signs once more again put Hector in mind of Brinke Devlin—it was her hometown. He’d dreamed of her the night before: Brinke coming to Hector in his sleep to tell him we was doing the right thing loving Hallie.
Vito snarled, “Do you know how fucking dead you are, even now?”
“Please,” Hector said. “You don’t even know who I am. And have you forgotten you were shot? Are you really that far gone upstairs now?”
Hector surely hoped not. There’d be no satisfaction in what he had planned if Vito wasn’t sufficiently sane to realize what was happening to him and why.
And by whose design.
There was a long pause, then Vito screamed, “Oh my God! I am shot. You did this to me?”
“No, your own bodyguard did that to you,” Hector said. “Your own guys gave you up. It went that way from the top down. By the by, Momo sends his regards. And by the way, my name is Hector Lassiter.”
“Who? Hector what?” The mob kingpin stammered, “Who the hell are you?”
So much for savoring that moment.
But then events so rarely lived up to Hector’s imagination.
Vito said again, “I need a doctor!”
“Happy accident then,” Hector said. “We’re heading to Dayton. I know a guy there who’s eager to see you. He’s a doctor. I mean, sort of. He’s a sawbones after a fashion.”
Hector checked the map again as they drove on.
After a while, Vito snarled, “Lassiter! That’s your name! I know you now. You’re that hump that’s been protecting that whore Megan!”
Now it was perfect.
Hector figured the smile on his face would be a terrible thing to see. So he avoided the rearview mirror and instead checked his watch. Hector calculated that by now the man he was taking Vito Scartelli to see would already have signed himself out of the Dayton Veteran’s Administration Center.
Hector shrugged off a sudden chill and turned the car heater up a little higher.
Looking to distract himself from his own dark thoughts, Hector inadvertently found an appropriate tune on the radio. Pasty Cline softly sang, “I fall to pieces…”
45
Hector spent a week in Mexico, trying to get a line on Shannon and Meg.
He couldn’t find even the thinnest clue to their whereabouts, goddamn it. He couldn’t fine a clue to their whereabouts, thank God. Hector concluded that despite all her worries, Meg had done well covering their tracks. Seemed logical to assume that if Hector couldn’t find them with all his good reasons for doi
ng so, nobody with ill intentions could ferret them out, either.
That search was a last gesture to Meg and Shannon, and a promise kept to Hallie to ensure her daughter and granddaughter’s tracks were indeed well-covered.
Content the Dalton girls had truly lost themselves somewhere down in the relative safety of the Mexican desert or beaches, Hector headed back to the border to begin dismantling his hollow old solo lobo life in order to build a new and better one with Hallie Dalton.
Jimmy was due at Hector’s place in La Mesilla, soon. The cop was coming down to help Hector burn down that empty old existence, to help Hector spend a last few days carousing through Juarez.
They’d mentioned trying to reunite their old crew from that desert war they’d fought to buy Meg and Shannon their time to escape.
That sounded a daft and therefore perfect endeavor to Hector’s ears when Jimmy ventured the prospect over the phone.
It sounded like a hell of a time, a fitting end for Hector’s hell-raising days.
46
Man proposes; God disposes: talk about your plans, and He will laugh.
This particular trouble started in a bar, as too often was the case, one of those places where there are never any happy endings to be found.
Bad news? No, the worst news. A nightmarish revelation; one bad decision equating to years of ensuing grief.
It all started with a different kind of nasty truth: the first in a series, that day, as it happened.
Jimmy, a little drunk, hesitated and said, “Something I never told you, Hec, because, well, what purpose would it serve back then? Guess now it’s academic so far as Megan goes. And maybe knowing will help you see how you’re making the right choice. The right choice in settling down with darling Hallie, I mean.”
Hector put his glass down and leaned back in his chair, studying his friend’s face. “What the hell are you talking about, Jimmy?”
The Irishman wet his lips, then took the plunge. He said, raw voiced, “That day in Dayton, when the bullets started flying so fierce and wild and with such terrible results? Well, hard as it may be to believe, Hec, I mean with so much iron being deployed…”
“I’m not following you on this one, Jim,” Hector said. “Not at all. Give me more. Say it straight. One true sentence.”
Jimmy frowned and shifted his butt on the stool. “Well, Hector, amidst all those guns being fired wildly on that city street, even for all that, there were only three pieces firing forty-five caliber shells.”
Jimmy paused and stared into his glass. “So far as the forty-fives go, there was your old Colt, my usual gat, and that gun you gave to Megan Dalton.”
Jimmy paused again, then said, his voice as raw as Hector had ever heard it, “I know where my bullets went, Hector.”
“Okay.” Hector swallowed hard, resisting his intuition. He said, “Where are you going with this, Jim?”
Jimmy said, “When they dug the slugs out of Katy’s face they learned she was killed by three shots—all of them forty-five caliber slugs.”
Hector wet his lips. Jimmy said, “I don’t like it, Hec, but for an instant there, I thought maybe you shot that sorry bitch Kate. God forgive me, the thought did occur to me, but just for an instant.”
Hector felt the muscles in his jaw tighten. He said, “So what changed your mind on all that wrong thinkin’, buddy?”
Jimmy sighed. “I found the slugs you dug out of Meg and yourself in your shirt pocket while the doctor was treating you. One of them was from a forty-five. Doc figured from the relative sizes of your wounds that that was the one from Meg’s leg.”
“He guessed right,” Hector said. “And…?”
“And while the ‘doctor’ was treating Meg—you were unconscious by then—he pointed to Meg’s dress and showed me the powder burns on the fabric there. The crazy bastard giggled and told me how it was obviously a self-inflicted wound. He said it took him back to the Great War and all the self-inflicted leg and foot wounds he saw there as a medic.” Jimmy hesitated and made a sour face. “Cocksucker laughed the whole time he was telling me Meg shot herself in the leg. You know, for cover.”
Hector went cold all over, saw spots. So it was like that. Hell’s belles. Meg had had the ice to do the job on Katy herself and then to put one in her own leg to cover her tracks. Some tough young thing, darling young Megan. More mettle there than Hector ever sensed.
Hector supposed on the spot he had to chalk it up to maternal instinct. He kidded himself that made it if not okay, at least a bit more understandable. Katy didn’t love that pretty little child, after all.
Hell, even that bounty hunter had commented on the strength and durability of a mother and her child’s sacred bond. Hector had seen how deep such ties ran when Hallie was prepared to die to protect Meg and Shannon.
Sure: motherly love—that’s what it had been about.
Love gone sideways and bloody, sure. But love in the end.
Jimmy said, “I’m sorry, Hector. It was selfish to share that, but I just couldn’t carry it alone anymore.”
The writer took a deep breath, let it out and said, “Jimmy, we need to drink a sea of booze this round, old friend.”
Sighing, Jimmy said, “Aye, Hector. That we surely do.” He freshened their glasses from the bottle they’d ordered. “And that we surely will.”
The two of them did that for a time. Drank hard and in near silence.
But yonder came Hector’s ultimate undoing, breezed right through those swinging doors with a flashing smile, raven hair and perfumed skin.
Like Hallie said, the course of a life can too often turn on a single bad decision. The reason Hector resisted notions of God and master plans. Take one wrong turn and your life can go down a dark, damned path. Hector knew that as well as anyone… maybe even better than most.
A group of young Latina women drifted into the cantina, pretty, spirited and all of them slightly drunk: dewy, vivacious and ripe low-hanging fruit.
Their “crew” from the battle outside Juarez started pairing off with some of the young women, one or two at a time.
Jimmy and Hector stayed at their table the longest, but then Jimmy, too, got led off by a pretty young husky Latina named Inez.
That left one beauty at the bar, all alone.
She was the prettiest of the lot by far, black eyes and long black hair that nearly reached her fetching tailbone. The young woman had a pretty smile and her skin was the color of whisky. She had the kind of matinee looks that intimidated, kept all the others at bay. She’d been making eyes at Hector for a time.
There was far more than possibility perched there on that yonder barstool, Hector figured.
Sorry tomcat urges: even sincere love for another woman can’t quite tamp those down in a man.
A sorry admission, sure, but there it was: men simply aren’t strong in that way.
So for safety’s sake, Hector wandered to a quieter part of the cantina. He found himself a phone.
***
It took a while and a few operators to get himself connected to Hallie’s phone.
Hector savored the moment, waiting to hear his true love’s voice. He wanted to share some loving talk with Hallie to firm his resolve to walk out of that damned cantina alone.
A man answered the phone. He was pretty shaken up.
Soon enough, he wasn’t alone in that state.
***
It was the stallion that was to blame—Traveller.
Evidently Hallie was doing something in the stable when the horse lashed out with a too-powerful hoof.
The blow caught a kneeling Hallie in the temple.
It was impossible to tell how long she’d been there on the floor of the stall with that big pale horse standing over her, Hallie’s son, Rayburn, said.
She was alive when her son arrived to check on her after too much radio silence.
Hallie had survived the bumpy, long ride along that twisted maze of country roads and across twenty miles of frozen-over freeway
to the hospital, he said.
Rayburn said Hallie had lingered in a coma for two days.
Hallie had passed away in her dreams, they reckoned. She just never came to.
There were surely worse ways to go. Hector had imagined or inflicted upon others most all of those other ways. He’d done that on the page and, sometimes, even in person.
The family was presently massed at Hallie’s place for the expected post-funeral gathering.
Hector was too late even for that wrenching ritual.
They talked a bit more—an awkward, choked-voice exchange filled with pregnant pauses.
Hector at last hung up, shaking, standing at the edge of a void that called all too seductively. He’d stared down that hole once before almost exactly twenty-five years ago—stared it down in every sense. But he’d been a younger man, then. Literally half his present age.
Swallowing hard, Hector wandered back to the cantina. He found his stool and ordered another drink.
That Mexican beauty was staring at him again. Now her flirtatious glances seemed mixed with flickers of concern.
Hector needed to get away from himself, fast. He desperately needed to run from the barking, harrying black dogs of his own mind before they maybe brought him down for all day.
There are distractions and there are distractions: that black-eyed Latina beauty looked like the latter.
She was everything Hector wanted in a woman just then and not a thing he needed.
But, after all, it was just for a night, sí? Just long enough to get him through these first few, hard hours of adjusting to a darker, still-meaner world with no Hallie Dalton living in it.
Time to adjust to the loss of this beautiful new settled life Hector had almost had within his grasp.
Hector took a deep drink of tequila; savored the familiar burn. A line from “Carrickfergus” ambushed him:
But the sea is wide and I can’t swim over
And neither have I the wings to fly…
Raw-voiced, Hector called out to that pretty young Mexican woman. He called over, “Darlin’, why don’t you join me? I’ll buy you dinner if you’re simpatico.”
The Running Kind: A Hector Lassiter novel Page 25