by John Dunning
I should’ve taken him then, but the light was gone now and it didn’t come back. Minutes passed and I battled my impatience. Think of the hundred and one stakeouts in a long career: waiting in a blowing snow for fifteen hours and not being bothered by it. I had learned how to wait: I’d learned the virtue of patience—and had unlearned it all in minutes. I saw the bookman’s face pass before me in the dark.
Rigby.
Who else fit the Grayson pattern all up and down the line?
Who did Grayson count on? Who would be this destroyed by a misspelled word? Who would take that failure so personally and torture himself and take up the sword against those who’d tarnish Grayson’s memory?
Who had the skills and the single-mindedness to spend the rest of his days trying to finish Grayson’s book?
He had the greatest hands, Moon had said. He had the finest eye.
Rigby.
That’s what happens when you make gods out of men, I thought.
And now he was here. I felt my hand tremble slightly, uncharacteristically. Chalk it up to the dark: I still couldn’t see him and I strained against the night, trying not to make that big fatal mistake. We were a few feet apart, microorganisms, deadly enemies who would kill each other if we happened to bump while floating through the soupy ether that made up our world.
There wasn’t a sound. The blaring horn had ceased to exist. It can happen that way when it’s constant, no matter how loud it gets.
I was betting my life on a shot in the dark.
Be right with your own god, I thought, and I opened fire.
In the half-second before the gun went off I had a flash of crushing doubt. Too late, I wanted to call it back. Instead I pumped off another one, took his return fire, and the slope erupted in a god-awful battle in the dark. I went down—didn’t remember falling, didn’t know if I’d been shot or had slipped on the wet slope. Something hard had hit my head. I rolled over on my back, only then realizing that my gun was gone and he was still on his feet. There was light now, bobbing above me. I saw his shoes, heard the snap of the gun as the pin fell on an empty chamber, saw the log he’d hit me with clutched in his other hand. He dropped the gun and got up the knife. I tried to roll to my feet but couldn’t quite make it. Got to one knee and fell over, like a woozy fighter down for a nine count. He loomed over me, then something came out of the dark and hit him.
Trish.
It wasn’t much of a fight. The light dropped in the grass and they struggled above it. He knifed her hard in the belly. She grabbed herself, spun away, and, incredibly, spun around and came at him again. He knifed her in the side and this time she went down.
She had bought me a long count, fifteen seconds.
I was up on one knee with the gun in my hand, and I blew his heart out.
58
I carried her to the car and put her down on the seat.
Don’t die, I thought. Please don’t die.
I worked her clothes off…
Gently.
Everything was blood-soaked. The frontal wound was the scary one. The knife had gone in to the hilt, just at the hairline above her crotch. Her navel was a pool of blood, like an eight-ounce can of tomato paste. The cut was raw and ugly. I dabbed at it and tried to push the blood back, but it welled up again like a pot flowing over. I covered it with my hand. The last thing I worried about, now, was infection.
Blood oozed between my fingers and kept coming. She was going to die, right here on this car seat, and there wasn’t a thing on earth I could do to save her.
There wasn’t anything to be done. Even if I could get the hole plugged, she’d be hemorrhaging inside. I was watching her die.
She smiled. Her face had a peaceful, dreamy look.
“Tam-pons,” she said. “Almost that…time of month.”
Tampons. Jesus Christ, tampons.
I got them out of her bag. The package looked small in my hand. It was what it was.
I tore the electrical tape off the steering wheel. There wasn’t enough left to go around her. But I had my belt, my shirt…
I ripped off the shirt and rigged her up the best I could. I cut a hole in my belt so it would fit her tight, and I pulled the shirt up between her legs, tying it to the belt front and back. It would be like a crude chastity belt and would work about as well as that ancient device ever had.
I shoved the tampons in and it took the whole package to stop the flow in the front. The wound on the side had sliced through her flesh, but the entire layer was still hanging there. I laid it back and drew the shirt tighter so it would hold.
A work of art.
A waste of time and we both knew it.
Then I got on the radio. I called nonstop for two hours and had no idea if I was getting through.
I held her hand and told her to be brave. These were just words. Who the hell was I to tell her about bravery?
She slipped into a deep sleep. I was losing her.
Dawn was breaking as the helicopter came over the trees.
Now the medics had it. I had to get away from there: my guts were in turmoil.
I climbed the hill. The cabin rose up suddenly, the lights still blazing. A woman stood in shadow at the window.
Eleanor.
I clumped up the steps and walked in. One look at my face and she knew. She cried and I held her and I looked down the slope with its aura of death and its red lights flashing.
In a while one of the medics came up the hill. “They’re taking her off now,” he said. “She’s awake and she wants to see you.”
I asked him to sit with Eleanor while I climbed back down the slope. Someone had covered Rigby with a blanket and I stepped around him on my way to the copter. I got inside and sat on the floor beside the cot where Trish lay pale as death.
She didn’t say anything, just held my hand a moment. “We gotta get moving,” the medic said, and his eyes met mine and I knew what he meant. It was touch and go.
“You boys ride her easy,” I said. “She’s got a bigger heart than all of us put together.”
I met the second medic coming down the hill. I stood on the bluff and watched the copter rise slowly over the woods. In the distance I could see police cars coming.
I went into the cabin to look for Eleanor, but she was gone.
59
I was sitting in the precinct room on the perp’s side of the table when I finally met Quintana. He came into the room with a steaming cup in his hand, sat across from me, and doled out the evil eye.
“You dumb fuck,” he said after a while.
The coffee was for me. I drank it black, same as he did.
They interrogated me for two hours. His partner, Stan Mallory, brought in some Danish and we went till noon. Twice during the questioning Quintana let me phone the hospital, where nothing had changed.
At twelve-fifteen he said, “Let’s get out of here.”
He seemed to be talking to me, so I followed him out to the parking lot, where he shuffled me to the shotgun side of a late-model Ford.
“This is supposed to be my day off,” he said as he drove the wet streets.
I waited a moment, and when he didn’t follow his thought, I said, “There aren’t any days off, Quintana. Don’t you know that yet?”
He knew it. He was just about my age and going through the same brand of burnout that had made my last year on the job so restless.
“I hear you were a good cop,” he said.
“I was okay.”
“A damn good cop. That’s what they all say. I made some calls.”
“I put a few assholes away.”
“I hate to see a cop take a fall. Especially a good cop.”
He was up on the freeway now, heading north. But he dropped off on the John Street ramp. We drove past the Times building, where the clock on the Fairview side said quarter to three.
“We need to talk to Eleanor,” he said.
“You’ll never find her. She could be anywhere by now.”
; “You remember where you left her car?”
“I think so.”
“Show me.”
We went north, and after a bit of double-tracking I found it. He opened the door and looked under the seat and took out the Raven she had left there.
“What do you think, maybe she took this out to compare it with the other one?” he said.
“I think that’s part of it. And some of it’s just what she said. She just loved having them.”
He touched the book with his fingertips. “Isn’t that a lovely goddamn thing.”
“Rigby was no slouch. They say Grayson was good, but there ain’t no flies on this.”
We drove back downtown. A voice came through his radio, telling us Miss Aandahl was out of surgery. Her condition was guarded.
“I got a guy at the hospital keeping tabs,” Quintana said. “We’ll know what he knows as soon as he knows it. If I were you, I’d get some sleep. Where’ve you been holed up?”
I looked at him deadpan. “At the Hilton.”
“You son of a bitch,” he said with a dry laugh.
Surprisingly, I did sleep. Six hard hours after a hard shower.
I came awake to a pounding on the door. It was Quintana.
“I didn’t say die, Janeway, I said sleep. Get your ass dressed.”
I asked what he’d heard from the hospital.
“She’s been upgraded to serious. No visitors for at least three days, and she won’t be climbing Mount Rainier for a while after that. But it’s starting to look like she’ll live to fight another day.”
He took me to dinner in a seafood place on the waterfront. It was superb. He paid with a card.
We didn’t talk about the case. We talked about him and me, two pretty good cops. He was going through burnout, all right, it was written all over him. At thirty-eight he was having serious second thoughts about decisions he had made in his twenties. He had been a boxer, a pretzel baker, a welder, a bodyguard, a bartender, and, finally, at twenty-three, cop. He was solidly Roman Catholic, a believer but unfortunately a sinner. In his youth he had studied for the priesthood, but he had repeatedly failed the test of celibacy. A guy could go crazy trying to do a job like that. Now, after spending a few hours with me, he was charmed by something he’d never given a moment’s thought. Quintana was the world’s next killer bookscout.
“This stuff is just goddamn fascinating,” he said.
“My world and welcome to it.” I didn’t know if he’d make the literary connection, so I helped him along. “That’s a line from Thurber.”
“I know what it’s from. You think I’m some wetback just crawled over the border? Walter Mitty’s from that book.”
“Good man.”
He had a leg up on the game already.
I asked if he had a first name.
“Shane,” he said, daring me not to like it.
But I couldn’t play it straight. “Shane Quintana ?”
“I see you come from the part of Anglo-town where all brown babies gotta be named Jose.”
“Shane Quintana.”
“I was named after Alan Ladd. Kids today don’t even know who the hell Alan Ladd was.” He deepened the Chicano in his voice and said, “Ey, man, Shane was one tough hombre, eh? He knock Jack Palance’s dick down in the mud and stomp his gringo ass.”
“I think it was the other way around. And Shane was a gringo too.”
“Don’t fuck with Shane, Janeway. I can still put you in jail.”
“That’s your big challenge in the book world, Quintana. Shane . Find that baby and it gets you almost two grand.”
We went to a place he knew and shot pool. Neither of us would ever break a sweat on Minnesota Fats but we took a heavy toll on each other. He had a beeper on his belt but nobody called him. I could assume Trish was alive and holding her own.
Late that night we ended up back downtown in the precinct room. Mallory was still there, two-fingering some paperwork through an old typewriter.
We sat and talked. Eventually Mallory asked the big question.
“So what’re you gonna do?”
About me, he meant.
Quintana shrugged. “Talk to the chief. I dunno, Stan, I don’t see where we’ve got much evidence for a case against this man.”
Mallory gave him a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding look.
“We’ll see what the chief says tomorrow,” Quintana said.
In a little while Mallory left. Quintana said, “If I get you out of this shit, it’ll be a miracle. The Lady of Fatima couldn’t do it.”
I followed him into an adjacent room. He sat at a table with some video equipment. “I talked to Mrs. Rigby today. You interested?”
“Sure I am.”
He popped a cassette into a machine and Crystal’s haggard face came up on a screen. “Most of this’s routine. Stuff you already know. The kicker’s at the end.”
He hit a fast button and looked in his notebook for the counter number where he wanted to stop it. “Her problem was, they never had any money,” he said. “They owned the property they lived on, they’d bought it years ago before prices went out of sight. And she had a piece of land in Georgia that she’d inherited. I guess that’s gone now. She’d given it to Eleanor and they put it up for the bail.”
The machine whirred.
“Rigby wasn’t interested in anything that generated their day-to-day income. He was always doing his Raven thing. But she loved him. So he sat out in that shop and made his books, and they just kept getting better and better. After a while she thought they were better than Grayson’s. One day Rigby went down to Tacoma to look at some equipment in a printshop liquidation, and Crystal brought Moon over to see the books. Moon couldn’t believe his eyes. He thought Grayson had come back to life, better than ever.
“The temptation to sell one was always with her after that. She started hearing what people were paying—all that money changing hands out there and they had none of it. If she could just sell one, for enough dough. She could hide the money and dribble it into their account and they wouldn’t be so damn hard up all the time. Rigby didn’t seem to notice things like that. As long as there was food on the table and a roof over their heads, he didn’t spend a lot of time fretting. He didn’t care much about the books either. He’d finish one and toss it back in that room and never look at it again. Sometimes he talked about destroying them, but he never did because Eleanor loved them and he couldn’t stand to hurt her. But all of them knew—Crystal, Moon, Eleanor—they all knew that if he ever made one that satisfied him, the others were all history.
“The temptation killed her. But she was afraid, scared to death. If Rigby ever found out…well, he’d never forgive her, would he?”
“If she was lucky.”
“Yeah, except she didn’t think of it that way. She’d be betraying Grayson in his eyes and that scared her silly. It came to a head about seven years ago. They had a string of money problems all at once and she started making some calls. Eventually she got fun-neled to Murdock, who was then the leading Grayson dealer in the country. The rest of it’s pretty much like Scofield told it to you. When he had that coughing attack, that’s what scared her off. It dawned on her what an old man she was dealing with. If Scofield should die and the book get out…well, that would make news, wouldn’t it?”
“It would in the book world.”
“And there was a chance Rigby would hear about it and go look and see the book was missing from that back room.”
“Eleanor might even tell him. She’d read it in AB , a new Grayson book found, and tear it out and show it to him.”
He stopped the tape, ran it back slightly to the spot he wanted, and leaned back in his chair. “That’s when Pruitt came into it. When he lost his job with Scofield, it was all downhill from there. He thought if he could find this woman in red, he could do two things—get back at Scofield and put himself on easy street. But he figured wrong. He thought it had to be one of Grayson’s old girlfriends, and for most
of a year he chased down that road, trying to track ‘em all down.“
“What a job.”
“That’s what he found out. This Nola Jean—he worked on her for months and came to the same dead end everybody else came to. He went out and interviewed the Rigbys one time, even went to Taos, tracked down her sister, tried to talk to her. None of it panned out. Finally he ran out of leads and had to give it up. But he never stopped thinking about it.
“In the last five years, Pruitt really descended to his natural level in the order of man. He was a cheap hood, dreaming of glory. Then Eleanor got busted in New Mexico. That was the catalyst, that’s what started this new wave of stuff. There was a little article in one of the Seattle papers, not much, just police-blotter stuff. There wasn’t any what they call byline on the story, it was just a long paragraph, Seattle woman arrested in Taos heist and murder attempt, but your friend Aandahl says she wrote it. Pruitt saw it. Suddenly Grayson was back on the front burner again. The Rigby girl had broken into the Jeffords woman’s house. What could that mean? Maybe Jeffords had been Scofield’s woman in red. The only thing Pruitt knew for sure at that point was that Jeffords had had something the Rigbys wanted, and he had a pretty fair idea what that thing was. He called Slater and sent him to New Mexico to watch Rigby. Then Pruitt went to North Bend to confront Crystal, but she wouldn’t admit anything. He harrassed her for a day or two, but that didn’t get him anywhere. So he flew down to New Mexico and turned up the heat on Eleanor. He stalked her, called her at night with threats. He’d call at midnight and hum that song. Anything to rattle her, to get her to give up the book.”
“This was when she was out on bail.”
“Yeah, there was a period of about a week there when Pruitt and Slater were hard on her case. She didn’t have the book then but she knew where it was. Charlie Jeffords had told her, it was Nola’s book. So she went back and took it and made her run. The funny thing is, she might not’ve done any of that if the Jeffords woman had just talked to her.”