by Wilderness
“You all right?” Hood said.
“Sure,” Newman said. “Sure.”
11
“So how do you get him?” Janet Newman said.
They sat in the Newmans’ kitchen with beer and wine and sandwiches.
“We wait,” Hood said, “and watch. We’ll see the chance. Killing him’s easy. Getting away with it is the hard part.”
“Janet, you wouldn’t believe what it was like to walk in there on them,” Newman said. “The guys that tied you up, one was huge and kind of slick-looking?”
“Yes, and the other had thick lips and a long face. We already went through this.”
“That was them,” Newman said. He drank some beer. “The same ones, and Karl, sitting right there. The same man I saw kill that woman. And I walked right in on them and got away with it.”
“But you didn’t kill them,” Janet Newman said.
There was silence for a moment. Then Hood said, “It would have been suicide, Janet. We agreed before we went in there that Aaron wouldn’t do anything but look and get the layout.”
Newman opened another can of beer and drank some.
“Bullshit,” Newman said. “When I went in Chris said don’t be afraid to use the gun. I don’t need anyone alibiing to my wife for me, Chris.”
Hood shrugged and looked out the big picture window at the back lawn.
“So why didn’t you?” Janet Newman said.
“Because I was scared shit,” Newman said, “that’s why. I was in a fucking trance I was so scared.”
“Well, when won’t you be scared? How will you do the job if you’re in a trance?”
“Janet,” Hood said. “There were two other men in there. Three men with five shots is too much. He did the right thing.”
“Shut the fuck up, Chris,” Newman said. Hood looked at Newman a moment and something stirred in his eyes again. The muscles at his jaw-hinge tightened for a moment and relaxed. “She can think what she wants,” Newman said.
“What the hell is wrong with that question,” Janet said. “I am simply looking for information. I am not thinking anything. You got in. You had a gun. You didn’t shoot Karl. What’s wrong with asking why you didn’t?”
“If you don’t know, I’m not sure I could tell you,” Newman said.
“You tell me it was too dangerous, I understand that. I don’t want you to get killed. I don’t want you to take crazy risks. But how will I know if you don’t tell me?”
“Maybe you better do it yourself,” Newman said. He took two cans of beer from the refrigerator and handed one to Hood. Hood put it down on the table in front of him unopened. He sipped from the first can he’d taken. Newman snapped the ring tab off the can and threw it hard at the kitchen sink. It missed and skidded along the counter. “Maybe you better get you a gun and get out and have a go at it. Maybe that will be harder than quarterbacking from your fucking armchair.”
The flint edge came into her voice, the one that scared him. “Maybe,” she said, “maybe I should be involved. Maybe if I’d been there with a gun this would be over now. Chris, can you teach me to shoot?”
“Either one of us can,” Hood said.
Newman sat silently looking at the beer can in his hands. His hands were big and muscular and brown. They were callused. He was a skillful man and could do carpentry and mason work and wiring. He had restored most of the old house they lived in.
“Well,” Janet said. “I think you should.”
Newman got up from the table and walked out of the kitchen, through the dining room, out of the house through the side porch.
He stood in the dark in his driveway under the spread of the three-hundred-year-old maple that shaded their bedroom during the day. His eyes stung again with tears and his face was wet. Different, he thought. In the dark your own land looks different and feels different. He walked down the driveway and onto the main street. Smithfield was small and had a New England common with a meetinghouse. At night when there were no cars Newman could imagine being back two hundred years when his house was built and Jefferson was president and the Revolution was but recently past. Am I right? Or is it booze. Why are there always a few beers involved when I get mad at her? Does the beer distort what I hear, or does it break down inhibitions and allow me to say what I’m too careful to say when I’m stone sober? What did I say? Actually I didn’t say anything. What the fuck am I mad at? How could she treat me that way? How could she be so fucking insensitive?
He walked past the small village shopping center. His face was still wet with tears. The lights were on in the shopping center, though the stores were closed. It would be embarrassing to be seen walking about crying. He prided himself on the goodness of his marriage and the loving relationship. He would admit no problems. He crossed the street, out of the light, and sat on the small curving stone wall that enclosed the old cemetery. What fucking difference does it make? We’ll all be in the ground in forty years or so. At dinner with a body of politic worms. All there is is her. He dropped his head and felt sorrow saturate him. It’s her disapproval. I cannot take any hint of disapproval from her. I want too much. She has to provide the complete meaning in my life. Moths fluttered in the arc of the streetlight. I’ve got to separate at least a little. Like a kid going to kindergarten. It’s part of growing up. Like the girls going to college. I’ve got to make her less central. A fluffy gray cat with a white saddle walked silently past, jumped the fence into the cemetery, and disappeared among the stones. For crissake, I’m doing this for her and she’s bitching about it. A ten-year-old Chevrolet Impala sedan turned the corner at the common. There were teenage children in the front and back. One of them yelled something at Newman. He couldn’t make out what it was. “How about I kill you, kid,” he murmured. “Teach you some manners.”
Insects began to swarm about him. Doesn’t take the bastards long, he thought. The ways of the Lord are often dark but never pleasant. He slapped at a mosquito. What will I say to her when I go back. Or in the morning. The silence will be awful or the formal courtesy without warmth. I won’t apologize, goddamn it, I’m right. She should have been supporting me. She should have been saying, “Oh heavens, don’t get hurt, sweetheart. If anything happened to you I’d die,” that’s it. That’s what it is. She’s so fucking businesslike and practical. So controlled. Why can’t she just now and again be girly-girly for crissake. He shook his head as the bugs settled on him. He got up from the wall and walked across the street toward the library. Just like sex, the bastard. “Here”—in his mind he mimicked her in a high voice—“here, you lie still and I’ll take hold of you here, and rub you there, and—no no, don’t touch—and then I’ll do this and that and now we’re ready I’ll put it in.” Fuck her.
He walked back to his house. Chris was gone. The kitchen was picked up. He went up to bed. She was lying on her side with her back to him watching television on the bedside table with a private listening plug in her ear so that there was no way to know if she were awake. She often slept that way, all night with the television going.
He got into bed beside her without touching and lay on his back in the cool silent room. He stifled real crying that came up on him. He stifled it hard by putting the pillow over his face. But he hoped as well “Don’t cry, I love you” and pull away the pillow and lean over to him and put her arm around him and say “Don’t cry, I love you and pull away the pillow and kiss him, and say “I’m sorry I hurt you. You’re everything I ever wanted.” But she didn’t. He could not remember that she had ever done such a thing, and he wondered why he thought she might, each time. Twenty-three years you’d think I’d learn something. Know what I could expect and what I couldn’t. Jesus Christ, what a jerk I am.
With an angry effort of will he stopped crying and lay silent and full of pity in the dark room staring at the ceiling, his hands folded on his stomach. His eyes wide open in the dark.
12
From the window of the room on the ninth floor of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in
Cambridge, a man named Steiger looked out at the Charles River and across it at the buildings of Boston University and beyond them at red-brick Back Bay.
Behind him a blond woman with dark eyes lay naked on the bed reading a guide to Boston. Steiger turned to look at her.
“Angie,” he said, “if you’re going to bleach your hair why don’t you do it all over?”
“You know the truth,” she said. “Nobody else gets to look.”
“Just me,” he said.
She smiled. “Just you.”
“You want something sent up?” he said.
She shook her head.
“Wine, beer, some hors d’oeuvres?”
“No. Just let me lie here and cool off.”
There was a knock at the door. Steiger walked across and opened it. A man handed him a package wrapped in brown paper. Steiger took it silently and closed the door. He came back into the room with the package.
“What’s that?” the blond woman said.
“It’s a piece,” Steiger said. “I don’t carry one on airplanes, so they said they’d furnish me one when I got here.”
He unwrapped the brown paper. Inside was a shoe-box with Florsheim printed on it. He opened the box and took out a handgun wrapped in a blue terrycloth hand towel. He unwrapped the hand towel. The gun was a Ruger Blackhawk in a hip holster. In the shoe-box was a box of Remington ammunition, .44 caliber.
Steiger took the gun from the holster, checked that it was empty, tried the action, examined the firing pin and the barrel, spun the cylinder, and nodded once to himself. He put the gun back in the holster, put the holster and gun back in the shoebox, and put the shoebox on the closet shelf.
“Who are you going to use that on?” the blond woman said.
“Guy named Newman,” Steiger said. “Aaron Newman. He’s a writer.”
“What did he do?”
Steiger took off his shirt and hung it carefully on a hanger in the closet. There were two suits in the closet and three pairs of slacks and two sports jackets. Each was hung precisely. Each had space around it.
“He saw something he shouldn’t have and they’re afraid he might testify.”
“You supposed to kill him or just tell him to keep his mouth shut?”
Steiger stepped out of his slacks and hung them over a hanger. He smoothed the crease with his thumb and forefinger. “They already told him to keep his mouth shut,” Steiger said. “But now the man is getting worried. He thinks the cops are following him, and he figures maybe he better close any doors he left open before. I guess if he takes a fall on this it will be a big one.”
“So you’re going to kill whatsisface?”
“Newman,” Steiger said. “Yes.”
“How long will it take?”
“A week maybe. I like to look everything over before I move. You come into a town and try to whack the guy out first thing, you’re not likely to get ahead. I been doing this a long time now and I don’t even have an armed assault bust. You know why?”
“Because you’re careful,” she said.
“And I have never been in the joint since the year I met you. You know why?”
“Because you’re careful,” she said.
“Right with Eversharp,” he said. “Besides, I do it too quick, we don’t get to see Boston and have our tab picked up in this hotel. No point rushing things,” he said.
He went into the shower. The blond woman read her travel guide. He came out in ten minutes, his body smooth and shiny from the shower, drying his hair with a towel. She looked at him.
“You’re really something,” she said. “Forty years old and you haven’t got two ounces of fat on your body. What did you weigh when I met you?”
“One-eighty.”
“What’d you weigh now?”
Steiger smiled. “One-eighty and two ounces.”
“Two ounces in twenty-two years. You’re beautiful.”
Steiger plugged a maroon hair dryer into the outlet over the bedside table and sat on the bed to dry his hair.
“Twenty-two years?” He took a Lucky Strike from a package on the table and put it in his mouth and lit it from a silver Zippo. “Jesus Christ, you were a baby. Ain’t that something, twenty-two years.”
“I was fourteen,” she said. She ran her hand along his thigh. “But not now.”
He put one hand on top of hers. “Your book tell you what we’re looking at out our window?” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “What’s out there.”
“Take a look,” he said.
She got up and walked to the window. He looked at her naked back as she walked. She was tanned all over. She looked out of the window at the river and at Boston University beyond it.
“It’s a school,” she said. “Some college, I imagine.” She opened the book and looked at it. “It’s Boston University, I think.”
He shut off the hair dryer and came and stood beside her. Her head did not reach his shoulders. She leaned her head against him. Below on the river a cabin cruiser headed slowly down the river toward the dam and the harbor. Behind it a wide and symmetrical V spread out over the surface of the river.
“I wonder what it would have been like to have gone to college,” she said. “You’d have played football and I’d have been a cheerleader. And we’d have learned stuff and could talk about books and …” She shrugged.
Steiger held the burning cigarette in his mouth and let the smoke drift up past his dark narrow face.
“We don’t need no fucking college, kid,” he said. “We got all we need.”
“We got each other,” she said.
He put his arm around her. “That’s all we need, kid. We don’t need any fucking other thing else.”
“I know,” she said. She put her arm around him and they stood looking down at the river as the powerboat moved out of sight and the wave V’d out and disappeared against the shoreline. “I know.”
13
“What we need is a sniper gun with a scope,” Hood said to Newman. “We got firepower, but it’s short-range stuff and we’re having trouble getting close.”
“You got anything?” Newman said.
Hood shook his head. They had followed Karl to his furniture store again and were sitting in the Bronco parked up the street, eating hamburgers and drinking coffee.
“You’ll have to pick one up,” Hood said. “There’s a good gun shop in Watertown.”
“What should I get?”
“Tell them you want something like a Springfield 1903A4. If you can get one, get it. If they don’t have one, get something comparable. Tell them you want it for competition, and be sure it’s got a scope. Any .30/06-type rifle with a scope will do. Remington, Savage, whatever.”
“Okay, I’ll go down tomorrow.”
“You have an ID card?” Hood asked.
“Yes, I got one when I bought that shotgun I keep.”
“That’s all you need,” Hood said.
They finished the hamburgers. In the back of the Bronco a big fly with a green tail buzzed at the rear window, bumping it again and again.
“Let’s look at the alley,” Hood said.
“What’s down there?”
“How will we know if we don’t look?” Hood said. “You have to know everything, Aaron. The layout of everything, where everyone’s deployed, all the options.”
Newman nodded. “Okay,” he said.
They got out of the car and strolled down toward the alley that ran between the furniture store and a restaurant.
“There’s got to be some reason for an alley,” Hood said. “There must be a door or a ventilator, or windows or something. Otherwise they’d just butt the buildings up together.” His eyes moved back and forth across the mouth of the alley. He was moving on the balls of his feet and his fingers drummed very gently but steadily against his thighs.
God, doesn’t he love this, Newman thought.
There were three rats in the alley; one was on the ground and two were i
n the trash barrel that sat outside the back door to the restaurant. The three rats scuttled away as Newman and Hood came down from the street. Besides the trash barrel there was nothing else in the alley. Opposite the restaurant door was an unmarked fire door with metal facing painted beige. Against the back wall of the alley there was an empty wine bottle leaning, and what might have been human feces in the corner.
Hood reached the blank door into the furniture store. He put one hand quietly on the knob and turned. The door didn’t open.
“Locked,” Hood said.
Newman felt relief move through him along the nerve tracks. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get out of this alley.”
Hood was looking up at the alley walls. “Wait a minute now,” he said. “We haven’t looked at everything. Maybe a window, a ledge, you don’t know. You have to check everything out.”
“Why, Chris?” Newman said, “Why do you have to …” Newman saw a darkness between him and the alley mouth. He looked at it. It was the enormous man from Karl’s office. He stood perhaps three feet inside the alley, blocking it.
Newman said, “Chris.”
Hood, his back turned to the man, looked over his shoulder. He said softly, “Yeah, I see. Don’t touch your gun.”
The enormous man said nothing. He moved slowly down the alley toward them.
Hood slid the P-38 out of his shoulder holster. He was halfway behind Newman and the gesture was screened from the big man. Holding the gun at his side and behind his thigh, he turned. The big man kept coming.
Newman felt weak. He knew he wasn’t. He could bench-press more than two hundred pounds. He knew he was big and strong. But he felt the strength go out of him. His legs and arms felt limp, the muscles flaccid. He was tired. He faced toward the big man, his hands feeling awkward and out of place. Should he put them up like a prizefighter? Hold them waist high and half closed, ready for anything?
The man was upon them. “What are you doing here?” he said.