The Distance Beacons

by Richard Bowker

  I didn't want to shoot him, although I felt capable of it to save Gwen. Santoro and Grimes were at least smart enough to figure out that rats don't make that much noise. But doing anything else meant I had to get closer.

  I moved down a stair. It creaked. I froze. I hoped Freddy's magazine was interesting. He shifted and kept reading.

  I tried another stair, then another. Creak. The magazine dropped into Freddy's lap. I got out my gun, ready to shoot. Freddy's head fell to one side, and he started to snore. The poor guy was making it easy on me. I descended the final few stairs, then crossed the remainder of the distance that separated us. I turned the gun around and whacked him on top of his bald head. He twitched a bit, and I cursed silently. I had simply roused him instead of knocking him out. But then he slumped still farther down into his chair, and I took a deep breath. I had won the first round.

  He was wearing a shoulder holster; I lifted his arm and took the gun out of it. Then I picked up his lantern and hurried over to the door he had been guarding. The key was in the lock. I turned the key and opened the door.

  It looked like a workshop of some kind. There were long tables surrounded by stools, and lots of cupboards and shelves.

  But where was—?

  In a corner of the room, I made out a human shape on the floor, covered by a sheet. "Gwen!" I whispered.

  She didn't respond, and my heart stopped. Was she—I couldn't bring myself to think it. Besides, why would they be guarding her if she was—

  She turned over on the floor and started to snore. Softer than Freddy, but audible nevertheless.

  I went across the room and shook her. "Hey, Gwen!" I whispered. "Wake up! I've rescued you, goddamit!"

  She opened her eyes and gazed up at me groggily. "Walter?"

  "Yes, it's me. You're not dreaming. Are you okay?"

  She thought for a moment. "I guess so. They put me in here, I dunno, a long time ago, and after a while I figured they weren't going to kill me or anything, and there was nothing else to do, so—" Her gaze got a little less groggy. "You look terrible, Walter," she said.

  "Yeah, well." I wanted to mention how I'd been tortured and shot and chased and all of that while she was having a nap, but I decided to let it pass for the moment.

  Meanwhile Gwen was becoming more and more alert. "The guard," she said.

  "I knocked him out. We've gotta tie him up and gag him before he comes to. You suppose there's any rope in here?"

  Gwen got up, and we searched through the workshop. We found some cord wrapped around a canvas, and we ripped up Gwen's sheet for a gag. Within a few minutes, Freddy was bound and gagged in the room where Gwen had been relaxing all afternoon.

  We stayed with him for the moment; we had some talking to do, and we didn't want to make any noise. But there was one more thing to be done before talking: a long hug was required under the circumstances. We did what was required.

  "I knew you'd rescue me," Gwen whispered finally.

  "Then you knew a lot more than I did."

  "You're the best private eye I've ever met."

  "And you're the best reporter. How'd you find out about the museum, anyway?"

  She shrugged. "A guy was walking along Huntington Avenue last night, and he saw a light, and he thought for sure it was the mummies' ghosts. So he came to the Globe, and I was the one who talked to him. I wasn't really sure it had anything to do with the president, but I figured it was worth checking out."

  "Good thinking."

  "I wish you'd been with me, though. I'm no private eye. I barely got inside before they captured me."

  "Well, I was busy, I guess. Did you see the president?"

  Gwen shook her head. "What exactly is going on? I don't even know what time it is. Are you alone?"

  "Yup." Now was the time to rehash my exciting day for her. I did so briefly.

  Gwen was appropriately impressed and distressed. "Oh, I'm so sorry, Walter. But you know, that Bolton idea was completely—"

  "Yeah, yeah. You're right. Stretch was right. It was stupid. But I didn't hear anyone coming up with the real perpetrators." And I recounted my discovery, moments before, of who the real perpetrators were. "How do you like that?" I said. "All my clever theories turn out to be hogwash, and this other theory about O'Malley, the one I make up on the spur of the moment to escape from jail—that turns out to be the right one. How do you figure it?"

  "Maybe your made-up theory was more, I don't know, instinctive."

  "But my instincts still tell me it's wrong. Or I just want it to be wrong. It's so damn banal. O'Malley wants to take over Boston, so he kidnaps the president to get rid of the Feds. He keeps her here because he's afraid the Feds will suspect him and start searching in Charlestown. So O'Malley's thugs were the ones who beat me up outside our house. Big deal."

  "But how did they know you were on the case?" Gwen wondered. "And what about the sandals? What about the empty file?"

  I threw up my hands. "I dunno. This is real life, I guess. It's messy. Or I'm just stupid, and I can't tie up all the loose ends."

  "Anyway," she said, "we should figure out what to do."

  "Why don't we just leave? You're safe, and that's all that matters. Let some other folks risk their lives saving the president."

  "But that won't exactly improve your position with the Feds, will it?" Gwen pointed out. "There's no way you can clear yourself now unless you hand over the president. That lucky guess or whatever it was about O'Malley clinches the case against you, if they ever do figure this out."

  "Shoot," I said. I had forgotten about that.

  "Besides," she said, "I still want my scoop."

  "You already have a scoop."

  "I want a bigger one."

  I sighed. She'd had a nap. That obviously could do wonders for your ambition. "I'm tired," I said. "I'm hungry. I hurt all over. And what's more, I'm in a bad mood. Can't we just go home?"

  Gwen stared at me for a moment, and then smiled. "All right," she said. "Give me those two guns you've got. And wish me luck."

  I stared back at her. "You'd never do it on your own," I said. "You're incompetent. You said so yourself."

  "Sure. But this is important. Let me have the guns."

  She held her hands out to me.

  Well, I thought, private eyes finish their cases, even if they're in a bad mood. And sometimes private eyes do have sidekicks. I gave Gwen one of the guns. I kept the other. "Now what?" I asked her.

  "I don't know," she replied. "You're the private eye."

  Chapter 20

  I tried to think. The first thing to do, I supposed, was to figure out our odds. "How many people did you see when you were captured?" I asked Gwen.

  "Just one—no, two. That guy who was guarding me, and someone else. I don't remember what he looked like."

  No help. O'Malley could have had an army here—although the fewer who were involved the better, from O'Malley's point of view. Less chance of someone becoming an informer. And Santoro and Grimes hadn't sounded as if they had a lot of company. Was O'Malley himself here? Could be. But he was probably back in Charlestown, monitoring the situation. He had to have some way of finding out if the Feds were meeting his demands, and it wouldn't be a good idea to have too much traffic going in and out of the museum.

  So, there were at least two people left to deal with—but probably not many more. I supposed we could handle that. Of course, if they were willing to shoot the president as soon as they found out they were being attacked, we'd be out of luck. But I doubted they'd do that. O'Malley was a businessman, and President Kramer was his merchandise. He would make sure his employees didn't destroy the merchandise.

  "All right," I said. "I think they're upstairs. Let's stay together and go slow. And we get rid of the light when we think we're getting close."

  Gwen nodded her understanding.

  I picked up the lantern and took one last look at Freddy. He was still unconscious. We left the room, locking it behind us, and headed off.

/>   I noticed as we went upstairs that we were in a newer part of the museum: glass-roofed, and decorated in whites and grays. I could hear the rain tapping on the roof, and the distant howl of the wind. It was turning into a good night for ghosts. We reached the first floor, then took the staircase up another flight. We paused at the top. We couldn't see any lights, but we could make out the murmuring of voices, in spite of the wind and rain. It was impossible to tell where the voices were corning from, however. I picked a direction, and we continued.

  Eventually we saw a glow off to our right. I immediately doused the lantern and set it down on the floor. It would just get in the way now. I grabbed Gwen's hand and, with guns drawn, we walked toward the glow.

  Our hands were slippery with sweat before long. I strained to hear, to see, to be ready for the battle that might start at any moment. There were no voices anymore (suddenly I wondered if I had ever heard them) and the glow was no brighter. I was so tired of darkness. I was so tired. Gwen bumped into something, and I could hear the sharp intake of her breath as she stifled the urge to cry out. I squeezed her hand. She squeezed back.

  The glow seemed to get brighter finally, and we groped our way toward it along the wall of a long gallery. We came to the end of the gallery, and I signaled Gwen to stop. The light was clearly stronger. I saw a rotunda with a high painted ceiling, a small circular wall in the center, and other galleries branching off from it. The light was strongest to our left now. So we turned left, following the light—

  —and I almost fell over Pete Santoro.

  He was sitting in a metal folding chair and leaning back against the outer wall of the rotunda. He seemed to be half-asleep. His half-closed eyes gazed at me, but I don't think he saw me. I think he saw the bandages on my arm—a mummy, for sure. I think he saw his worst nightmare coming after him in the flesh.

  He screamed. The noise echoed in the rotunda, making it sound twice as loud. Santoro scrambled off in the direction of the light. I caught a glimpse of some Egyptian-looking statues. I dived after him. Gwen had a better idea. She shot him in the back.

  The noise was deafening. I looked back at her, my heart pounding. She had come damn close to hitting me. Her eyes were wide, and fixed on the man she had just shot. He crawled a foot or two, and then stopped. Blood started leaking out from beneath him. Gwen stood motionless, her gun still aimed at Santoro. "Get down, Gwen," I said. "They're gonna be—"

  There was a gunshot from behind the statues. Gwen flopped onto the floor. I couldn't tell whether or not she had been hit, because then the light disappeared, and we were in darkness yet again.

  "Gwen!" I whispered urgently, but another shot let me know it wasn't a good idea to talk. I crawled to the inner wall of the rotunda, and followed it around until I was out of the line of fire.

  I lay there as my eyes became accustomed once again to the darkness. I was a wreck. Had I screamed when Santoro screamed? Private eyes don't scream. They do what Gwen had done. They shoot the bastard.

  Didn't matter. I had more pressing issues to consider. Like Gwen's safety. And how to fight a gun battle in the pitch black.

  Something wet plopped on my head, and I started. There were two more plops before I figured it out. The roof was leaking. I heard a plop down below me, and I realized that the rotunda was open to the first floor, and the wall I was leaning against kept your casual museum-goer from plunging to his death.

  I heard movement in the rotunda. Was it Gwen—or Eddie Grimes? There was another gunshot. What was going on? I risked peering over the edge of the wall, but I couldn't make out anything. Grimes could have been inches away from me, for all I knew.

  There was a thud and a muffled curse. It sounded like a man—Eddie Grimes, then. Maybe he had stumbled over Santoro's body. So he was coming this way. I picked up a chunk of plaster from the floor next to me, and I flung it into the darkness. It hit against a wall, and immediately there were two answering shots—aimed, I assumed, at the wall. That was encouraging. I couldn't make out anything in the brief flashes, but one of the shots could have come from Gwen.

  And Eddie Grimes was probably one confused thug. I tensed myself and inched forward. If he was still coming this way, he wouldn't be expecting anyone crouched to his left, ready to spring.

  Another step, and I could see his outline in the darkness. I raised my gun—and decided not to shoot. I couldn't be absolutely sure of who it was, and I didn't want to make a mistake. I paused for a moment to summon up my energy. Water plopped onto my head. The figure in the darkness breathed quick, frightened breaths.

  I leaped forward.

  I came in low to keep him from having a chance to use his gun on me. My head hit him on the knee and knocked him backwards. He fired wildly into the air. I felt his leg to make sure it was a he and not Gwen. The leg was definitely male, so I tried to shoot him, but he lashed out with his arm and knocked the gun from my hand as I fired. That meant I had to jump across his body and pin his right arm to the floor to keep him from shooting me.

  Grimes pulled at my hair with his left hand as he tried to loosen my grip on his arm. I howled with pain but didn't budge. Instead I banged his arm on the floor until he too let go of his gun.

  And then we were just two bodies rolling around in the dark, like energetic lovers. I didn't feel like a lover, though. Grimes was hurting me in the few remaining spots on my body that hadn't already been hurt. Help me, Gwen! my mind screamed. But how could Gwen figure out who to help?

  Grimes broke away from me finally. I caught up with him by the inner wall. We were standing now, each trying to push the other over the edge. I didn't have any strength left, and soon my head was dangling out over the emptiness, and it seemed like just a matter of time before Grimes sent me tumbling down into the puddle on the first floor.

  Your gonna die too.

  Not yet, not yet. I found a reserve of energy somewhere, out of my anger or fear or will to live, and I decided I very much did not want to take that tumble.

  So I maneuvered my leg between his legs, and I kneed Grimes where he very much did not want to be kneed.

  He let out a low "Oof" and his grip on me loosened for just a moment. But that was time enough for me to switch positions with him and give a shove, and suddenly he wasn't next to me anymore. There was a scream and a thud and a little splash, and then there was just the plop, plop, plop of the water dripping from the roof.

  I collapsed against the wall and stared down into the darkness. I felt dizzy, nauseated. For a moment I thought I might lose my balance and follow Grimes. For half a moment I thought maybe I should follow Grimes: who was I to take someone's life? He was a jerk and a bicycle thief, but he was human. I hated death. To be on the safe side, I stepped away from the wall.

  And I felt a gun pressing into my back.

  "Don't move," Gwen said. Her voice was trembling.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. "I wouldn't dream of moving," I replied.

  "Oh Walter, thank God."

  I turned, and we embraced. Her whole body was trembling. "It's all right," I said. But there was no time to comfort each other. "I think we'd better go find the—"

  I didn't have a chance to finish the sentence. My words disappeared in a beam of light that was suddenly aimed at us. I raised an arm to shield myself, but the light was too strong after so much darkness, and I had to shut my eyes against it.

  "Move apart," a voice said from beyond the light. "Drop your weapons."

  I knew that voice, but it was not at all the one I expected.

  Chapter 21

  We obeyed. Gwen's weapon fell with a clunk near Santoro's body. I didn't have a weapon to drop, so I just raised my hands. Meanwhile my eyes started adjusting to the light, and behind it I could make out the figure that went with the voice. The fringe of white hair. The icy blue eyes. The gray-green uniform.

  How had General Cowens managed to get here? He really had found something when he searched through Gwen's things, I decided. But where were his troops? And why
hadn't he stopped the gun battle? I was puzzled. And, of course, frightened.

  Cowens was holding a large flashlight in one hand, a gun in the other.

  "I just came to rescue my friend here," I explained. "You know—the meddling reporter Gwendolyn Phillips? Those two that we killed—they're the ones who did the kidnapping. There's another one downstairs. We locked him up. Interrogate him if you want. You can get the truth out of him."

  Cowens didn't respond at first. Finally he said, "I've been too lenient with you all along, haven't I, Sands?"

  And I thought: Why is he alone? And why had he come out of the same statue-filled room from which Grimes had appeared?

  And why had he resisted my participation in the case every step of the way? Why had he tried to pin the blame on me, even when it didn't make the slightest bit of sense to do so? Why had he agreed so easily to let me take Fenneman on that wild-goose chase to Charlestown?

  "You're the one behind this," I whispered.

  "Don't be ridiculous, Sands," Cowens said. "You're the guilty one."

  "You wrote the threats from TSAR," I went on, as things clicked into place. "You started the file on TSAR to distract Bolton, not the other way around. And you had the kidnappers wear sandals to distract me. We played into your hands all along."

  "Every soldier in New England is looking for you, Sands. You proved your guilt by escaping from us. It's a pity such a talented young man turned out so badly."

  "So arrest me."

  "I'm afraid you may be much too dangerous to arrest."

  Then why didn't he shoot me? I realized that he wasn't quite sure what to do. Had I told anyone I was coming here? If he didn't kill us, could he manage to bluff his way out? I didn't seem impossible. "Why am I dangerous?" I asked. "Who' going to believe what I say about any of this? Even if people didn't think I was guilty, I'm the guy with the theory du jour after all."

  "People believe the strangest things," Cowens observed.