“Burning? The car…you mean in Connecticut?” Russ grabbed Sid by the collar, but not necessarily to save him.
Sid seemed to focus for a moment, at least with one eye.
“I pulled you away,” he rasped, grinning. “O.K., Evel Knievel, just keep your eyes and your mouth shut, and I’ll save your sorry ass, you got that?”
With a trembling lip, Russ glared hard at the bloodied face, the grin.
“Why? Why?”
Sid laughed, or coughed.
“She was a witness, Russ. She saw Fest whack Ristocelli…”
“So you killed Sandra?” Russ tightened his grip on Sid’s collar and shook him. “Then why did you save me? Why didn’t you let me die too?”
“Hurry, Russ!” Lloyd begged.
Sid started pushing at the steering wheel, but Russ pushed him back. Sid’s eyes turned to slits as he tried to force his eyes to focus, his delirium waning.
“Fest put the fix on the steering box, I just followed to make sure the job was done, that’s all. I maya killed a lot of people, Russ, but…” Sid smiled, and it was neither a grin nor a sneer. It was just a gentle smile of humility. “But sometimes even I can, y’know, I feel sorry for people.” Sid tried to shrug. “Y’owe me that.”
“Owe you?”
Without warning, the river pushed the car backward. This time it didn’t stop.
If Russ had had the time to make a decision, he might well have let go of Sid’s collar.
The LTD rolled as it went, the driver’s window turning upward. Lloyd steered the boat away from the falling car, and Sid slipped right out of the car into the river.
Even then Russ considered letting Sid go. But he didn’t.
Leaving his Karmann Ghia parked above at the guide rail, Omer Phillips had picked his way down the steep embankment to the river’s edge. For some time, he just stood watch on a rock, opera glasses pointed upstream. Eventually, he folded the glasses away and readied the life preserver.
A discus throw put the preserver out just far enough. Omer tied off his end to a tree stump and let the victim beach himself.
The washing-machine effect of the rapids had scoured the mud from Price’s face, hair, and clothes, but it was clear that a bout in the ring with “The Moose” had taken its toll. Exhausted, bashed, wheezing, and wild-eyed, Price was Wile E. Coyote after a bad day chasing the Road Runner. He lay in the shallows among the rocks, clinging to the rope absently.
“Hello, Mr. Price. Glad to see you could make it.”
The swimming vision of Omer, umbrella on tweed forearm, looked cheerily down.
“You…” Price wheezed, “you took the tape.”
“That’s right. I was trying to help you.”
“Help?” Price rasped.
“See where all this tape business has gotten you?”
Price got a smile going on one side of his face, and he patted the rectangular bulge in his windbreaker.
“It’s not over…yet. I held on to the tape…all the way, rolling underwater, a big…big rock.” Price almost passed out from the thought, but he coughed up some water and shook his brain awake. “I held on to…the tape.”
“Admirable. But I’m afraid the tape is no good to you now.” A glint of sun winked off Omer’s eye and blinded Price. He held a hand over his eyes.
“It’ll dry.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
When Price lowered his hand, he saw Omer holding another tape. Omer addressed the question in Price’s eyes.
“I’ll give you this tape, for that tape.”
Consternation knit Price’s brow.
“You see, Mr. Price, this tape is of your wife and a man dressed as a cow engaged in a sexual liaison. Very entertaining. If you don’t give me your tape, I’ll see to it that certain acquaintances in, shall we say, the lower echelons of the pornography industry release it. In fact, the tape is so entertaining that I shouldn’t wonder that all your fellow troopers might enjoy a copy for their personal libraries.”
Price clearly didn’t understand. Omer knew he wouldn’t, so he handed down a stack of still shots featuring Debbie and the cow.
Price’s pupils shrank to pinholes.
“Dammit, officer, can’t you see the man’s incapacitated? He’s been in a wreck, he has a concussion, contusions, broken bones, and a sprained neck. You heard the nurse. He needs rest.”
Sid kept his eyes shut, feigning sleep, while Lachfurst was in the hallway reading the cops the riot act. There was some minor protestation.
“Your questions can wait until the man’s had a chance to recover his senses, can’t they? So come back tomorrow. He’ll be here. You have my guarantee.”
Footsteps shuffled off down the hall. Lachfurst came in and stood over Sid for a while. Whether he was staring at Sid or reading a magazine, Sid hadn’t a clue. But a nurse came in, rolled Sid on his side, and jabbed something up his rectum. Talk about a pro. His eyes bulged, but he didn’t make a peep.
“Nurse, are the results of the scan in yet? How’s the man’s brain?” Lachfurst zipped up his jacket.
She tapped a finger on Sid’s hip as she awaited the result of the thermometer.
“You’ll have to talk to the doctor about that, but I think it turned out he’s O.K.”
“Capital. I’ll go locate the doc.”
The nurse extracted the thermometer and left.
Sid lay still, listening to footsteps and whispers in the hall. When he finally figured the coast was clear, he opened one eye.
Jenny stood next to his bed, grinning.
“How ya doin’, flyboy?”
He cleared his throat and spoke in a hoarse whisper.
“Just for your, you know, future reference and whatnot, the train comes from Pennsylvania, not from New York.”
“Sorry ’bout that.” Jenny winced. “Tell ya what. Let’s just call it even, O.K.? Ya don’t owe me anything.”
Sid shook his head as best he could. He wore a neck brace and had numerous small sutures on his bruised forehead and nose. The gray at his temples seemed more so.
“No dice. You owe me, Trout Lady. Dinner.”
“Great.” Jenny produced a pizza box, pulled a slice out, and offered him a bite.
“This isn’t exactly what I had in mind.” Sid chomped at the pie.
“Don’t forget, I maya got my boat back, and I maya fished out my motor, but, Sid, this hasn’t exactly been a shad fest for me neither.” Jenny took a bite of the slice and pulled a beer from her bomber jacket.
“Hey, I’m the one laid up in a hospital. Been layin’ here for hours fakin’ sleep. Didn’t wanna talk to the cops until I had what the story was. What’d you guys tell ’em?”
“Just that some guy stole my boat, and that we came up with this kinda harebrained idea to drive onto the tracks and lasso the rascal.” Jenny poured some beer into a sipping cup. “Never did find the guy. He maya drowned. But how about ya tell me the real story, Sid. What was all this crap about?” She put the straw up to Sid’s lips.
Sid’s slurping was interrupted by a gentle knock at the door. A tweeded man with an umbrella edged into the room.
“I do apologize for the intrusion, Mr. Bifulco, really.” Omer approached, hat in hand. “I just thought you might want this.” He held aloft a ziplock bag containing a badly melted SUPER*PROCAM tape. He set it next to the flowers on the table.
“After today’s trials and adventures, I thought this would surely set your mind at ease.” Omer beamed at the couple. “I took the liberty of heating it to the point of destruction.”
Sid squinted, at the tape first, then the stranger.
“Do I, uh, know you?”
“I don’t think so. How are things with Mr. Smonig? Well, I hope? Friendly? I’d heard he’d had an accident. Some faulty steering. But I trust he is steered clear of trouble now? I hope so. I think you’ve both had enough of that, as it were.”
Sid ran a tongue along his teeth, still squinting.
�
�Yeah, well, Smonig’s just great, and I think you could say he’s got all his steering problems worked out. Nothing to worry about there.”
“Ahem, fellahs, don’t mind me, but what the hell are ya talking about?” Jenny had about as much intrigue as she could take. Her arms were folded and her foot was tapping.
Omer doffed his crusher, tipped it to the lady, and bowed out.
“Sid, who was that character? I think I’ve been just a little too damned easy on your privacy, that’s what. Ya tell me right now, Sid: What is all this shit about? Either that or you’re gonna owe me. And boy, do I mean owe me.” Jenny rubbed her palms together greedily.
Sid eyed the ziplock with the tape in it.
“It was all about that.”
“Is that what you guys were after? What was on that tape?” Jenny poked it with a finger.
Sid cocked an eye at Jenny and fleetingly reflected as to how Fest had had nothing to do with putting the jinx on Sandra’s steering box.
“I think it’s what they call, uh…” He snapped his fingers. “Pathetic Justice.”
Herding back over Little Hound Mountain, the day’s gaggle of clouds migrated to an orange sun. Stragglers, low dense puffs of mist, descended on the Delaware, flocks roosting for the evening, alighting on Hellbender Eddy. Cool air riding riffles streamed into the bay, swirling the diaphanous vapor. Twilight arcs penetrated from above. Wet bark, stone, and evergreen scents beckoned from the embankment.
Pink Creek steadily sirened a silky solo. Spring peepers piccoloed from a stand of buckbean, and black crickets celloed from the confines of a stump. A lone pickerel frog trumpeted from a submerged clump of leaves. Wraiths of mist waltzed slowly by.
Like a tiny red firefly, the ember of Phennel Rowe’s Virginia Slims glowed in the shadows. She sat on a boulder, one hand propped on the handle of her shovel. A bucket of writhing lampers was at her side. Though Reverend Jim had spent the late afternoon overseeing her excavations in Pink Creek, he had disappeared as soon as the sun dipped over the hill.
Phennel smoked only on occasion, and a good harvest of lampers was one such occasion. It had developed into a fine spring evening, and as she shared a quiet moment with the darkening woods and listened to night settle in, she spied something coming through the mist in the river.
Downy petticoats of vapor rolled to either side of Russ as he paddled his boat gently into the Eddy.
Dusk deepened, the warm shadow of the woods absorbing the twilight. Though images of the ghostly cotillion and Pink Creek’s ripple had lost definition, fading hues radiated in contrast, and the world in the Eddy was all-moving, a waterscape rendered in pixilated expressionist strokes.
There was no dimpling, tailing, or rising, and there was no reason that the trout would necessarily still be there, much less feeding. It had been years since Russ had fished Pink Creek. But when he awoke that afternoon from a deep sleep, he somehow knew a trout was waiting for him there. Russ watched in the flickering light as his fly line looped out behind. His wrist brought his forearm down, line and leader pulled the fly forward. Cartwheeling gently, the fly came upright and sat high on a riffle, right where it belonged, a dark speck on a distant mirror.
And just as though it had been rehearsed, the shiny speckled snout rose on cue. A delicate hushed rise took the fly. Tail and dorsal porpoised. The trout took its meal down.
The rod raised deliberately brought the line taut, and after a moment of realization, the trout drove toward the creek. Peepers and crickets ceased playing, and Pink Creek seemed to rush along to the drumbeats of blood in Russ’s ears.
Racing in circles, the fish ran up into the creek mouth, fly line chopping fog swirls in two.
Suddenly the fish stopped, and in that instant, full night descended.
Russ didn’t know what had happened at first. Maybe the trout wrapped the line around a log, or snagged it under a rock. But it started moving again and the action was different, a sleepy, side-to-side motion that came toward him from the creek. This was a different fish. The trout was gone, and Russ was attached to something heavy, something deep, something with a big head. It came right along toward the boat. Russ dropped the anchor with the flip of a switch. Nervous hands ransacked one of the boat’s cubbyholes for a flashlight that wasn’t there.
At first, as Russ coaxed the fish up and saw the silhouette, he thought it was a giant bullhead catfish. Driving the net into the water, he scooped, groping in the dark to get it all in the mesh pocket.
A tremendous splash divulged a gaping mouth from which his original trout sprang and slapped him in the jaw. Two feet kicked wildly in the air, and a long, flat tail reached out and smacked Russ in the forehead, knocking him back.
Lying on the wet carpet in the bottom of his boat, he wiped the water and slime from his face, eyed the empty net beside him. The trout flopped and shuddered somewhere at the other end of the boat. He realized that his trout had been swallowed up by a hellbender.
Russ barked a laugh of disbelief, hauled himself up to the gunnel, and stared at the growing ring of dark ripples where the hellbender had vanished. Yes, yes, there were two feet, and that unmistakable wrinkled tail that had slapped the side of his head. A hellbender. He’d really seen one. He couldn’t wait to tell…
Staring up at holes parting in the mists, at the stars above, Russ suddenly realized that the weight of his burden was gone. Was it that he’d killed the guy who killed his wife and that justice had been done? Was that what had really mattered all along anyway? Wasn’t most of the lingering pain associated with being the survivor of the accident, and not knowing why?
Sid said he’d felt sorry for him, but Russ doubted that motivation. Sid obviously had the sense to give Russ the only acceptable reason: compassion. Was it compassion that made Russ hold on to Sid’s shirtfront and not let go?
Russ couldn’t come up with a reason for saving Sid, so how could he expect Sid to have a reason for saving Russ? Perhaps, Russ thought, there was no percentage in trying to assign significance to everything that happens to you.
Russ stared down at the dark water where the huge salamander had vanished, seeing his rippled silhouette haloed in stars against the night sky.
He had dwelled all afternoon on his new understanding of Sandra’s predicament. Russ understood now that Sandra had witnessed a mob hit and had never told him, never told anyone—and yet was killed anyway. Why had she never told him? He guessed the same reason he wouldn’t have told her. To protect her.
And sort of in honor of that, or perhaps to share something with Sandra, he decided never to tell anyone about the hellbender.
He smiled, looked up at the stars, and considered what Phennel would say about all this.
“Hallelujah,” he said aloud.
“Amen,” echoed back from the woods.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BRIAN M. WIPRUD is a New York City author and outdoor writer for fly-fishing magazines. He won the 2002 Lefty Award for Most Humorous Crime Novel, was a 2003 Barry Award Nominee for Best Paperback Original, had a 2004 Independent Mystery Booksellers Association Bestseller, and a 2005 Seattle Times Bestseller. Information on his tours and appearances can be found at his website www.wiprud.com.
Also by Brian M. Wiprud
PIPSQUEAK
STUFFED
CROOKED
If you enjoyed
SLEEP WITH THE FISHES
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the newest crime caper from
“sublime comic genius”
BRIAN M. WIPRUD
Read on for an exclusive
sneak peek at
his next mystery
coming from Dell Books
in Summer 2007.
Pick up your copy at your favorite bookseller.
Driving into Chicago at five o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon is like entering a circle in hell—possibly one sandwiched between the Pit of a Hundred Thousand Root Canals and the Fiery Baths of Microwaved Cheese. Yes, it was a crisp blue June day,
and there the Lincoln and I were stuck in the Canyon of Interminable Cross Merges. New York is no treat at that time of day, either, but it’s merely a stroll through bunny-soft purgatory by comparison, believe you me.
I’d meant to slip in just before rush hour, but construction on the interstate in Gary, Indiana, had held me up on my way from visiting my mom in Ann Arbor. Well, at least I could be grateful I wasn’t in Gary anymore.
My course was set to see a bear. A Chicago Bear, to be precise. Sprunty G. Fulmore was a running back in the midst of a gazillion dollar contract with the venerable ursine NFL franchise. He could also afford to be a big-game trophy hunter in the off-season. It’s an expensive undertaking to bag Africa’s big five: lion, elephant, rhino, leopard, and hippo. It requires special permits, top guides at top lodges, prep and export fees, and a whole gamut of red tape that only the rich can untangle with a few snips from cash’s giant green scissors. But the expenses don’t stop there—it’s also none too cheap to have an elephant’s head mounted. And of course you have to have the kind of palatial abode with space enough to hang one of those suckers and not make it look like it’s crashing through the wall.
But the inventory of Mr. Fulmore’s trophies, which I carried in my briefcase, included a lot more than those five animals. He had an appallingly large collection of dead stuff—culled from five continents—for a man in his early thirties.
Yes, Garth Carson carrying a briefcase. My taxidermy rental days weren’t behind me, just to the side—I no longer spent my time working the angles to drum up business since it interfered with my new job appraising taxidermy collections for Wilberforce/ Peete, a specialty insurance company that caters to the rich and famous’ taste for collecting. How did I land this peachy gig? For once my brother Nicholas had brought sunshine to my life rather than forbidding black clouds. He’s an insurance investigator, and had given me some connections. Before the insurance work, I’d been more or less just holding my own, my nose pressed against the glass ceiling. I’d no idea insurance companies needed people with my expertise. Or how well they paid. Because of this surge in profits, Angie and I now owned our apartment. At forty-six, my midlife-crisis days were well behind me. Every time I looked at that briefcase, a big smile spread across my face.
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