Comeback (Gun Pedersen Book 1)

by L. L. Enger

  The first man had recovered the bat and enough of his nerve to belt Gun from behind. The blow was vertical, like those Gun had witnessed through the window. It landed on Gun’s collarbone. He felt the swoosh of air in his right ear just before the pain.

  It was flat and numbing and thick, like being hit from behind by a quiet Kenworth, and the swelling fire of it made Gun feel like he was expanding to fill the room. He locked his knees, fighting blackout, then turned to see what he could do to keep it from happening again.

  The man with the bat was breathing hard. His chest was rumbling as he recovered from the effort of the swing. Gun watched from a cloud as he brought the bat back, sighting in, shifting his feet for balance. He saw the man in stop motion: pant, screw his knuckles down tight on the bat handle, spit red on Rutherford’s dark carpet. Then he swung.

  The action pulled free Gun’s sunken reflexes. His left hand shot up, palm open to protect his head. It was like catching a cannonball. Bat met flesh with a cherry-bomb crack, icing Gun’s entire forearm in a glow of shock. He closed his fingers and found them encircling the bat. It had stopped cold, two inches from his temple. The attempt made him angry, and he squeezed the bat and ripped it away. He grabbed the man’s shoulders and pushed him into a silver-framed print of Guernica, breaking the glass.

  “You’re working for Hedman,” Gun said. “Tell me all of it. Now.”

  The man looked down at his buddy, who was rocking his wrist and sobbing on the floor. He looked sullenly at the walls. Then his eyes went to the dark door of an adjoining room, and at the same moment Gun heard the soft squeal of floorboards. He dropped his hold and spun, saw two guys dressed in jeans and black T-shirts. One was tall and skinny and carried some weapon Gun had seen once in a terrible movie on a coach flight: two smooth sticks joined at the ends by a short chain. The wood was lacquered black, shiny. The other guy was short to medium, empty-handed, and had a high-school mustache on his lip.

  “You jerks took your time getting in here,” said the guy Gun had let go.

  “We been havin’ a look. Rutherford didn’t keep much stuff around, did he?” The tall skinny one looked at Gun and shook his head. He was holding one of the sticks loosely in his right hand so the other stick dangled free, and now he started a slow wrist motion that made the dangler do unhurried circles. “You’re large sonovabitch,” he said.

  Gun pointed at the tall man’s sticks. “I saw one of those in a movie once.”

  “Yeah?” A smile.

  “Bad movie.”

  The guy with the ruined wrist had dragged himself over near the door. “How fast can you kill that bastard?” he said, in a voice not soft enough to hide the sniffles.

  “Pretty fast,” said the guy with the sticks. Gun saw the swinging wood accelerate to a blur, saw a sudden metal gleam in the hand of the short kid, felt his arms yanked back by the guy he’d gone and let go of. His collarbone felt wrong, weak. There were too damn many of them.

  “Nice thing about the nunchuks,” said the stick swinger, “you get them going like hell, you can’t even see what hits you,” but then the front screen door crashed in and Gun could see the nunchuks, could see them perfectly as they came free from the long skinny hand and flew at the ceiling, splitting the plaster. He heard the muffled whup that straightened the tall guy up like a post and the second whup that brought spray from his neck. There were two more people in the room now, holding short black pistols with long black silencers. The short kid was dead on his face, whup, and the boxer with the broken wrist hadn’t even had time to get up off the floor. The guy that had been holding Gun’s arms was out in front now, on his knees.

  “No, don’t, I got to pray,” he was saying to the

  pistols, but one of them came forward to rest between his eyebrows. Gun turned away. Whup.

  In the quiet Gun had his first chance to look at his rescuers. If that’s what they were. They came toward him now, not talking, one wearing a red stocking cap, the other in camouflage fatigues. There was a quick bitter scent of spent shells and copper.

  The man in the stocking cap touched Gun’s elbow and pointed to the kitchen. The other man, Gun realized, the one in camo, he’d seen before. It was the eyes. The right eye. The iris was abnormally small, stranded like a little green island on a large white globe. Now the eye winked at Gun.

  Gun said, “Hi, Rudy.”

  Rudy nodded and almost smiled. He led Gun through the kitchen and opened the door for him. A van was backed up to the steps. Gun climbed in and took the chair Rudy offered, a padded office chair bolted to the middle of the floor. Rudy and stocking cap stashed their guns in compartments under the carpeting of the van’s floor and sat on benches along the windowless sides.

  “Tell me, Gun, how is it everybody remembers my face?”

  “A gift and a curse, I bet.” Gun nodded at Rudy’s right eye.

  “How you been? Your hair turned white since I seen you last, what, twenty years back now.”

  “After the series,” Gun said. He remembered his confusion that day, answering the door and finding this man standing there, unmatched eyeballs and a comedian’s grin. “So tell me. What’s Friedrich’s stake in all this? Must be a big one, you folks seem serious.”

  “It’s Freddy now, part of the makeover. But he’ll want to discuss it with you himself.”

  “So we’re on our way to see him.”

  Rudy nodded.

  “Don’t tell me we’re going to Nevada.”

  “No. Not even leaving town. Freddy’s got a temporary office here. I think you might like it too.” Rudy looked toward the front and called to the driver, “Almost there?”

  The driver answered with a hard right turn. Gun felt the van strain against a steep incline, then level off and slow to a stop.

  “Here we are,” said Rudy. He reached into his chest pocket and said, “You’ll need this.” Before Gun was aware of what Rudy had thrust into his hand, the van’s double doors flew open and before them, hulking beneath the city’s skyline like a buffalo in a field of dazzling stars, was the hump-backed Metrodome. Gun looked at the ticket in his hand.

  “In the mood for a game?” Rudy asked.

  “I never did like warehouse ball,” Gun answered.

  “Let’s go in, anyway.”

  26

  The wide cement corridor had T-shirt booths and TV monitors and too many decibels of crowd noise. Rudy stopped at a food stand, bought three brats and handed one to Gun. “That way,” he shouted, pointing.

  Passing a gate, Gun had his first glimpse of the field. It didn’t look like a ballfield so much as an illustrator’s rendition of one. The perspective was all wrong. Everything was too green, too distant, too small. The players were little plastic men on a shampooed rug.

  Rudy knocked on a gray door in the corridor. It opened and Gun was looking at Friedrich Cheeseman, who put out his hand. Gun wasn’t ready to take it. Not yet.

  “A pleasure, again,” Cheeseman said. Behind him was a clear Plexiglas wall, and beyond that the playing field.

  “I hope so.”

  Cheeseman ushered Gun inside and dismissed

  Rudy with a wave of his manicured hand. His face was lined and leathery and round as an old-fashioned catcher’s mitt, but now as he smiled, it turned oval with happiness. He hadn’t changed much over the years—maybe put on a few more pounds—but something was different. Gun couldn’t tell what.

  “But it is a pleasure. Please, sit down.” Cheeseman gave Gun a stuffed chair next to a table loaded with cold cuts, crackers, vegetables, and fruit. “Nice view, don’t you think?” he asked, sitting down.

  Gun nodded and took a bite of his bratwurst. Below, Kent Hrbek hit a sharp single to left, scoring Puckett from third.

  “What about these guys!” Cheeseman cried, tilting his head toward the playing field. His manner was easy. Gun might have been an old friend Cheeseman watched games with every week.

  “Good bats,” Gun said.

  “Damn right. A littl
e help in the right places and they could contend. I think I might buy them.”

  “Pitching’ll cost you some.”

  Cheeseman smiled. “I’ve dealt in arms before.” He laughed, then turned back to the game and swore as Bush struck out to end the inning.

  “Friedrich, what’s going on?”

  “Freddy. Call me Freddy.”

  “Part of the makeover.”

  “I’ve come a long way, Gun.” Cheeseman sighed, pouting a little. “I’m respectable. I’m clean. I don’t even throw shadows anymore, you know? Me twenty years ago, me now. Two different men. Nobody’s got anything on me. No embarrassing friends anymore.” He winked. “Except a few in prison.”

  “I don’t care about all that.”

  “I know, but you do need to know what I’ve become. It’s important that you trust me. You see,

  there was Friedrich, and now there’s Freddy. Freddy’s on the up and up.”

  “And before—the man I met was Friedrich?”

  “Friedrich turning.”

  “All right.”

  On the mound the Twins’ pitcher pumped and fired. The pitch smoked into the dirt right at the ankles of the left-handed hitter, who backed away and glared.

  “You’re right about the pitching, Gun,” said Freddy.

  “I’m ready to hear what you’ve got to say.”

  “But you haven’t even thanked me yet. My driver phoned and said you had your hands full over in that poor guy’s house.”

  Gun waited. Freddy wasn’t a man to be rushed, you could tell by the serene set of his eyes, the way they held to things like a pair of strong hands.

  The two of them sat silently through the rest of the sixth inning, then Freddy stood from his padded chair and stepped right up to the Plexiglas, pressed his hands to it and bowed his head for a few seconds. His shoulders were rigid. Then he turned and crossed himself, let his arms drop to his sides, leaned back against the glass.

  “Gun, I had nothing to do with the ugliness, at least not directly. Gospel truth.” His eyes and mouth were steady. “Let me start from the beginning, straighten things out for you.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “You’re familiar with my import business.”

  “Your treasures from the heart of darkness.” Gun remembered the outlet in Detroit where he’d gone trying to return Cheeseman’s check. “Banana plants, stuffed cheetahs, I seem to recall a gorilla.”

  Freddy smiled. “I did some bigger things too. An

  elephant once in a while. You may have seen one of them.”

  “That’s how you met Lyle Hedman.”

  “Yes, my casino in Reno. We got to talking one time, oh, ten, eleven years ago now. He’s one of those guys with idealized notions about everything. You know the type. And he came on to me all chummy, full of too many movies about,” he smiled, “the family. Asking all sorts of questions, pretending my life is a dark secret that I’m gonna share with him one of these days. So I humor him. I mean, the man’s gonna drop a load into the wheel tonight, I wanna keep him happy. Then it turns out he’s into Africa, so I’m able to milk him coming and going. That elephant, for instance. I get five hundred percent markup on it and send Lyle home happy as a worm in a shitpile.

  “So Lyle, anyway, he keeps coming back every January. It’s the games, sure, but more than that. For him it’s a chance to rub shoulders with a gangster. Maybe he’ll get invited to an initiation, or maybe I’ll want him for a blood brother. Maybe we’ll burn each other with live cigars.” Freddy shook his head and laughed. “Then last year he had a proposition for me. A good one too. He had drawings, market research, seventy percent of the money already lined up. I can see it’s a sunny idea, this Loon Country, so I tell him I’ll put up twenty-five percent, contingent on the political go-ahead. It’s just my word, no papers, nothing. He trusted me. We smoked Havanas and I nicked my finger on a diamond lapel pin, dropped blood into a burning candle. Gave the poor bastard a thrill. You should have heard my wife Margie howl after Lyle left that night.”

  Freddy indulged himself with another chuckle and turned to see what the crowd was humming about. A collision at home plate had left two men sprawling, the baseball trickling away toward first base. The runner pressed himself to extended push-up position and stood. The catcher rolled over, sat up, and threw his glove in disgust. “God, that Gaetti’s a bull,” Freddy said. “I don’t care if he is born-again, the man can play.”

  “What do you know about my daughter?”

  Freddy put up a hand, his eyes still on the field. “You’re getting ahead of me,” he said, then turned. “Look, Lyle Hedman is a foolish, impressionable ass. What went wrong is this. His imagination got the better of him. I took a trip north to see his—your lake, Gun. This was a month ago now. I saw that swampy land he’d bought and I told him I didn’t like it. Told him I don’t throw my money away for fun, like those little insects that buzz out to Reno once a year. I said if he didn’t find a suitable place for fantasyland, I was going to be very upset. To put it simply, I played the role he’d cast me into, and I played it hard.” Cheeseman took a breath and fogged the Plexiglas blowing it out. “It backfired. Didn’t think the little man had the testosterone to swim into the deep water.”

  “Don’t know if that’s what it took,” Gun said. “He was probably crapping his pants, wondering what you might be planning for him.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll tell you—what he did took me by surprise. Setting up your county commissioner with that poor fella you were checking up on this afternoon. I’m still not sure how he did it. Don’t know who the runner was. My man picked up the trail at a gay bar, traced Rutherford back here to the city via that rundown resort on Tornado Lake. When I heard about the suicide, I put a watch on Rutherford’s house, figuring Lyle might get nervous, try to take him out. I don’t need any messiness in my life right now, Gun. It’s taken me fifteen, twenty years to squeeze myself into this respectable life, and I don’t want a dumbass like Hedman screwing it up. And he won’t. Nobody’s gonna know I ever had anything to do with his project. There’s no legal connection. His word against mine.”

  “So where were your boys when my head was getting busted?” Gun asked.

  “Lunch break,” Freddy said, laughing. Then his face went cold. “Hell, a month ago when I was up to see Lyle I didn’t even know you had property on the lake. Hedman never said anything. First I heard about it was my man telling me Hedman snatched your girl.”

  “Do you know where they’ve got her?”

  “I don’t. But you can be sure Lyle’s got nothing good in mind for her. He’s gone this far, and now he’s got to go all the way. He didn’t realize that when he started. The little fish never do.” Cheeseman turned toward the game again. It was the eighth inning and Berenguer was trying to hold on to a one-run lead, throwing bullets, enough of them off target to keep the Detroit hitters away from the plate and swinging with cautious respect.

  “You can’t tell me anything more about Mazy?” Cheeseman shook his head. “Wish I could.”

  “I want to believe you,” said Gun. “Don’t know if I

  should.”

  “We’re ex-big-leaguers, Gun. That’s how I see it, both of us. And to me there’s a brotherliness about that. I respect you a hell of a lot and I don’t want to see you—and certainly not your daughter—get jerked around.” It occurred to Gun that the gray of Freddy’s eyes was different this time. Before, when they had met in the sixties, his eyes had been the color and dull sheen of nickel, hard, protective, unchanging. They seemed to have brightened and deepened into a softer grayish-blue. It was like the difference between the false sky of the Metrodome and the sky outside. Maybe the man was simply wearing tinted contacts, but Gun found himself convinced that Freddy Cheeseman was speaking the truth.

  “. . . so I asked myself,” Freddy was saying, “What would I want if I were in your shoes, if Mazy were my daughter—and the answer was easy. I’d want to take care of it myself. I’d
want the man, and I’d want the man’s kid, and I wouldn’t want anyone else in my goddamn way.”

  “Which means you’re out of it. You don’t want anything more to do with Hedman.”

  Freddy smiled.

  “But say, you did tell him good-bye, didn’t you? He had a pretty sore face last time I saw him.”

  “I heard about the blackmail stuff and had my boys pay him a visit and deliver a message. Then I heard about your girl, and I broke things off. He’s all yours now.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t be kind to the man,” said Freddy, and he turned back to the game.

  27

  Gun awoke feeling dirt-dried from sleeping in his clothes. He was lying on top of the dark wool quilt that was his bedspread, with a bolt of ripe yellow sun batting him in the face. He opened his eyes and sought the clock without turning his head. Six forty-five. He’d had two hours sleep after the drive up from Minneapolis, It would have to be enough.

  Sitting up, Gun felt his collarbone begin to beat like a bass drum where the bat had connected, and he reached for the wall to steady himself. His left hand was stiff as a plaster cast. When the throbbing eased off he stood slowly and stripped to his shorts. The shoulder looked bad, with a black bruise starting at the base of his neck and swelling in a proud arc to where the arm attached. Gun faced the mirror and forced the arm to move. It hurt, but he didn’t feel the screaming pain or internal scraping that meant a broken bone. He made the arm rotate, a small circle, then a large one, and diagnosed a crack. The hand he paid less attention to. It was his glove hand, still tough from two decades of catching hard-hit and hard-thrown baseballs. Nothing had ever hurt his hand for long. He closed it into a fist, and the pain shot his memory back a few hours.

  Rudy had dropped him off, and he’d approached Rutherford’s house with caution, his only idea being to reach the truck and head north before anyone decided to pay Rutherford a visit. It was dark but a bright amber streetlight showed him the house, undisturbed, the front door hanging aslant. Apparently no one had gotten suspicious. It seemed strange, a planned murder and four more spontaneous ones, carried out in the middle of a simple, mundane neighborhood. People all around, Gun thought, and not one of them aware of five dead bodies hardening in a living room right here in a house they’d all walked past a thousand times.