Robert B Parker - Wilderness

by Wilderness(lit)

  They were at the kitchen table in what had become a near nightly ritual. Janet would make sandwiches or a pasta. Newman and Hood would bring home some beer and wine. They would sit at the kitchen table in the summer evenings and talk of stalking Adolph Karl.

  "You can't do this in complete safety, Aaron," Janet said.

  "It's a matter of degree," Newman said. "What Chris said sounds good but it doesn't mean anything."

  "You know it does, Aaron. I've read your books, you understand that."

  "No, I don't. Not this way. It's like you want to take risks."

  "Risks are part of it," Hood said. "If it's worth doing."

  "You act like the risks make it worth doing." Janet said, "What do you think we ought to do, Aaron?"

  "I think we ought to shoot him as quick as we can and get this over." Hood smiled. "We agree, Aaron. I think that too, but you need intelligence. You need to know the enemy before you can make a move, and we haven't gathered enough to figure out how to hit him and get this done with."

  Newman ate a forkful of pasta with a basil-and-oil pesto sauce. He drank some beer.

  "I think you ought to try to get him in the woods," Janet said.

  Hood said, "Woods?"

  Janet nodded. "He's got a summer place up in Fryeburg, Maine. I looked it up on the map. It's southwestern Maine, near the New Hampshire border. According to an article in the Herald American, April 18, 1976..." "She's a scholar," Newman said.

  Janet went on: "He's a real hunter and fisherman and goes to his place in Fryeburg whenever he can." "Do you know the address?" Hood said.

  "I drove up there this morning. It's about two and a half hours, and I looked him up in the phone book."

  "You cut class?" Newman said.

  "Yep."

  "I wished you'd waited. We could have driven up together and maybe had lunch on the way back and had a nice time."

  Janet didn't answer.

  "Maybe that's the end to work from," Hood said. "Maybe we should go up there and wait for him to come." "Fryeburg's awfully small," Janet said. "It would be easy to be noticed."

  Newman opened another beer.

  Hood said, "We could keep watching him here. I assume if he heads up to hunt and fish we could tell. Rods, gun cases, waders, that sort of thing being loaded into the car." Newman said, "I'm going up to bed. You folks work this out and let me know."

  They both watched in silence as he walked out of the kitchen and up the back stairs.

  Janet shook her head.

  "He feels bad," Hood said. "He thinks he didn't react well in the alley today."

  "He worries an awful lot about things like that," Janet said. "And then he waits for me to make him feel better. And I don't know what the hell to do."

  "Nothing to do, I guess. Just let him know you love him. He'll work it through. He's a good man."

  "I know. But he's a complicated man and one with ferocious passions.

  Sometimes I feel..." She shook her head again.

  "How do you feel?"

  "Inadequate to his passions. And that makes me mad. There's a lot of pulling and shoving in our life. And now this. It will be awful for us both if he can't do this."

  "If he can't he'll be dead. Maybe all of us. You can't forget that, Janet."

  "I know."

  "Do you really know? It's easy to forget it sitting here in the kitchen. But we're involved in a very serious undertaking. And if we do it wrong we may be dead." "I don't forget," Janet said. "I also don't forget what happened to me." Her face was bright as she said it.

  "Yeah." Hood smiled briefly. "I guess you don't." He got up and headed for the back door. "I'll come over in the morning when he's feeling better and see if we can work out some kind of plan," he said.

  "Good night, Chris."

  Hood left. Janet cleaned up the kitchen and turned off the lights and went upstairs. In the bathroom she put up her hair and washed off her makeup and put on her night cream.

  When she came into the bedroom he was still awake, lying in bed leaning against a propped pillow, watching the Red Sox game on television with the sound off and listening to the play-by-play on the radio. He didn't say anything as she got into bed and turned off the light on her side.

  "Night," she said.

  "Night." "Are you mad at me?" she said.

  "No."

  "Then why do you sound it?"

  "I'm watching the game."

  "Oh."

  She was quiet.

  "I didn't do well this afternoon," he said.

  "Chris says you just need experience."

  "You ever wonder how that would make me feel?"

  "Being scared, you mean?"

  "Yeah, being scared. You ever think, maybe, "Gee the poor guy must be really down and feeling bad, how can I make him feel better?" You ever have any thoughts like that?"

  "I don't know what I'm supposed to say."

  "Jesus Christ. It's not ' to." Don't you have any instincts, any fucking heart? Can't you see I'm hurting? Don't you have any impulse to help me. To put your arms around me and say

  "I love you. I don't care what you do, I love you'?" "Aaron," she said. And stopped. And took a deep breath. It shook in a slight vibrato as it went in. "Aaron, grow up."

  "What's that mean? Only little kids need love and compassion?"

  "I love you. But if you feel bad about yourself and how you acted I can't fix that. You have to fix that."

  "While I'm fixing it, it might help to know you're caring about me."

  "Aaron, I've lived with you for twenty-three years. Doesn't that suggest I care about you?"

  "Sure, you care about me, but not like I care about you. You don't look forward to coming home and seeing me. You don't get a thrill when I walk through the door. You don't get a thrill from touching me."

  "And don't you resent it," Janet said. "Don't you take every opportunity to make me feel guilty that I don't feel like you do. Is there only one way to love? Does everyone have to love the way you do or be not loving?"

  "How can you love someone and not feel as I do?" he said.

  "One can. One does. The trouble with you is that you're over-invested. You dwell on me too much. Every encounter. Every event. Every exchange of words or ideas is charged as if it were a moment of high passion."

  "True. I care only about you. I care only for your approval or disapproval. I have achieved an autonomy in my life that only you violate. Only you and the girls, and the girls are growing and going away. Now it's all turned on you. And you're turning out. You're doing committee work and loving it in there in your asshole department with all the asshole academics pretending to care about Chaucer and Andrew Marvell when all they really want is tenure and promotion."

  "Aaron..."

  "I know it's hard. I know you feel the pressure. I try and change. I try and love you less." His voice thickened. "But think what I lose if I love you less. The central meaning of my life. At forty-six I have to change it?" "Goddamn," she said.

  He turned his face away from her.

  "We have long periods where it's fine," she said. "What happened?"

  He shrugged. His back turned.

  "It's Karl," she said. "This thing with Karl is eating us both."

  He was silent.

  "What is it, about Karl?"

  "What do you mean, what is it? The so nova bitch has two goons violate my home and leave my wife tied up nude for me to find. What the hell do you think it is?"

  "It's not anger," she said. "You're scared."

  "Of course I'm scared. We're trying to kill a professional thug with bodyguards. Only a fool wouldn't be scared." "No," she said. "That's true, but that's not it. You're scared you'll fail. That you won't be able to act like a man should, you would say, when someone has manhandled his wife and, your phrase, '' his home."

  He didn't say anything.

  "That's not an unreasonable feeling," she said.

  He was silent and motionless, his back to her. The ball game conti
nued.

  "I don't blame you for feeling that way."

  "Will you, please, for once in your life, just, please, shut the fuck up."

  CHAPTER 16.

  "Nice house," Steiger said.

  Angie, in a sleeveless lime-green linen dress, tucked her legs under her on the seat of the rented Plymouth and looked at Aaron Newman's two-hundred-year-old house.

  "It looks old," she said.

  Steiger nodded. "Let's cruise around back," he said. "See what it looks like."

  Angie nodded. Steiger put the Plymouth in drive and went around the block. They parked on the street behind Newman's house.

  "What town is this?" Angie said.

  "Smithfield," Steiger said.

  "We ever settle down, I'd like to live like this," Angie said. Her hands were folded in her lap. Steiger's right hand covered both of hers. Neither seemed aware of touching. It was a gesture so fundamental and one that had been made so often that it was unconscious.

  "Yeah," Steiger said. "I wonder if he's got an alarm system. Lot of these houses do. Tied into the police."

  "Any way you can tell?"

  Steiger smiled at her. "I could break in at night and see if the cops come." She shook her head. "No good," she said.

  "True. I'll see about hitting him outside. If it's no good, I'll go in during the day and do it."

  "Anyone else there?"

  "Wife, I'm told. She works during the day. We'll come out tomorrow and take a look. Then, depending what I see, I'll figure the best time to hit him."

  "I hope you don't have to kill the wife too."

  Steiger shrugged. "Don't see why I'd need to, I do it right."

  "I wonder if they love each other like we do," Angie said.

  "Most people don't," Steiger said.

  "I know," she said.

  Steiger slipped the car into drive and pulled away from the curb. He drove around the block and parked two houses up from Newman's. Steiger reached over and took a road map out of the glove compartment and spread it open on Angie's lap.

  "Anyone comes along, they'll think we're lost."

  Angie nodded. "You're not going to do anything today, are you?"

  "With you here? Have I ever?"

  "No. I know. You wouldn't. It was a dumb question."

  "Not dumb. You were worried. You had a right to ask. You're never dumb."

  A red and white Ford Bronco came down the driveway of Newman's home and turned right onto Main Street. Steiger started the Plymouth.

  "That him?" Angie said.

  "Yes. In the passenger seat." He drove down Main Street behind the Bronco. When it turned up onto Route 128 he followed.

  At the wheel of the Bronco, Hood said to Newman, "We may as well be watching Karl's place while we figure this out." The Bronco went over a small bump in the road and the long guns, wrapped in a blanket, rattled on the floor behind the back seat.

  Newman nodded. "Might as well," he said.

  "I think Janet's right," Hood said. "The more I think of it, the more I like it. If we can get him isolated up in the woods, we'll have him off his turf and on mine. We'll have no cops to worry about, nobody to see us. We can lay up somewhere and pick him off with the Springfield."

  "Why don't we go up there and wait, then?" Newman said. "The more we hang around Karl and his house and his business, the more risk we run of blowing this." The lines that ran from the corners of his nostrils to the edges of his mouth were deep. His eyes looked heavy-lidded.

  "I think you're probably right," Hood said. "Let's give it this day to make sure nothing new develops. Then we can go up country and begin to set up."

  "Sure."

  "I figure," Hood said, "we can rent some kind of cabin or something up there. We'll do it in my name, just in case Karl's keeping an eye on real estate transactions or something."

  "Why would he do that?" Newman said.

  "Can't tell. These guys are funny sometimes. Might want to keep track of his neighbors-can't be sure. Besides, someone might recognize your name-you're sort of famous, you know-and talk about it in front of Karl or one of his men." "Yeah," Newman said, "you're probably right."

  "I am," Hood said.

  "But maybe you better use a false name too. I mean, if we do hit him up there we'd want to leave promptly, wouldn't we, and not be connected with the area in any way."

  "Good," Hood said, "good idea. I wasn't thinking. We'll do it that way. I'll take care of that." He exited Route 128 for Route 95 North.

  "In fact," Hood said, "why not do it now? Why not drive up there now and take a look around and maybe set up a cabin or something?"

  "Better than sitting around waiting for Karl to spot us. Or the giant," Newman said. "He knows our faces. He'll remember us next time."

  Steiger turned off onto Route 95 behind them. "If they keep going straight for very long I'm going to drop them," he said to Angie. "I don't feel like driving to New Hampshire, or Maine, or wherever the fuck they're going."

  Angie leaned her head against his arm. "Okay by me, I'm getting hungry anyway."

  "We'll keep an eye out for someplace," Steiger said. "If they just keep driving we'll stop for lunch. I'm not going to hit him today anyway." Angle smiled.

  At Portsmouth Circle the Bronco headed northeast on Route 16. Steiger swung off of the highway and followed a sign that said

  "Portsmouth Downtown." "Look in your guidebook, Angie," he said. "See what's a good place to eat in this town."

  CHAPTER 17.

  "Did you know that Chris prowls around our yard at night?" Janet said.

  Newman shook his head. "What do you mean prowls around?" he said.

  "I got up about four in the morning a couple of days ago and looked out the bathroom window and he was standing under that big white pine tree in the back, with a rifle. And I thought, "What the hell is he doing?"

  And so last night I was up till about two doing some stuff for the affirmative action task force and I thought, "By God, I'm going to check." So I turned out the lights and went and looked out all the windows and he was there. He was out front, in the bushes between us and the Erasers."

  They were lying together in bed. Newman was reading the book review section of last Sunday's New York Times. Janet was watching the Johnny Carson show. Her hair was in rollers, a blue kerchief was tied around it. She had on pajama bottoms and an old white shirt of Newman's. There was cream on her face.

  "That figures," Newman said.

  "Is he guarding us?"

  "Yeah, partly. But he's playing too."

  "Playing?"

  "Cops and robbers. Cowboys and Indians. The Lions and the Packers.

  Rangers and gooks. I think this is a kind of game for him. It's the most fun he's had since he got cut by the Lions."

  "What could be fun about standing around in the dark all by yourself all night. When does he sleep?" "He told me once that he only slept three or four hours a day. Always been that way, he said. And it is fun to be a guard. Or at least it's fun for a little while and if you're a certain kind of guy. Think of the high points in his life." "Football and Korea," Janet said.

  "Combat, in a sense."

  "Yes. He does karate too, doesn't he?"

  "Black belt."

  "Formalized combat."

  "And since he was cut by the Lions, how have things been going for him?"

  "Not good," Janet said. She had turned the sound down on the remote control mechanism by her bed. On the screen Robert Goulet sang soundlessly. "He hasn't been very successful or made very much money.

  His marriage didn't work. I don't know how the new place is doing, do you?" "He doesn't talk about it," Newman said.

  "So you're saying," Janet said, "that this situation came along and gave him a chance to do something he's good at, and to feel good about himself." She had turned on her left side, facing Newman, and rested her head on her propped left elbow.

  "A chance, as the jargon would have it, to maximize his potential. I mean, for cris sake
he's the Michelangelo of machismo and for twenty years there's been little call for it from the society he moves in."

  "So he can stand out there with his rifle, the silent protector.