A String of Beads

by Thomas Perry

  Mattie said, “Safer than home. A bunch of men came to get me.”

  “Came to get you?”

  “Bad men. Jane thinks they’ve gotten tired of waiting for you to come home, so they decided to grab me and see if they could get you to come back.”

  Jimmy looked at Jane, his eyes troubled.

  Jane said, “They were in three cars—one lookout car with two men to control the street, one SUV to block the driveway, and another SUV to take her away. Six men rushed the house with guns drawn. The only thing to do was get her out of there. I should have done it before. Your mother is the most obvious way to get to you.”

  “I can’t believe this,” said Jimmy. “Two months ago I had no enemies, and my mother was as safe as anybody could be, surrounded by a couple hundred families, nearly all relatives—brothers and sisters, practically.”

  Jane stepped to the refrigerator, opened it, and then closed it again. “You two can catch each other up on things,” she said. “I’m going out to stock up on groceries. When I come back I’ll make us some dinner and tell you what I’ve learned so far.”

  She saw Jimmy’s keys on the kitchen counter, took them, and put the Passat’s keys in their place, then went out the front door. She drove back out on Route 120, filled Jimmy’s Chevrolet Malibu with gas, then stopped at the Co-op. She bought lots of fresh meat, fish, vegetables, and fruit, and then filled her cart the rest of the way with a hoard of canned and frozen food so Jimmy and Mattie would not have to go out for a while.

  When she returned she could see that mother and son had been talking. As she and Mattie worked together to make a dinner of chicken and vegetables and corn soup, Mattie seemed to be studying her whenever she wasn’t looking. Finally, while they were setting the table, Jane said, “So Jimmy told you about me.”

  “Yes,” said Mattie. “Why didn’t you? I can keep a secret.”

  “I don’t have only one secret.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Jane said, “Over the years I’ve taken a lot of people out of lives that had gotten too dangerous. Who every one of those people used to be, who he is now, and where he lives, are all secrets. I may have made those secrets, but they don’t belong to me. Because I know them, I have a responsibility to keep myself from getting discovered and caught.” She held Mattie with her strange blue eyes. “Otherwise, there won’t be any more.”

  “Any more what? People like Jimmy?”

  She nodded. “If my own secret gets out, I’ll be useless to those people—the ones yet to come, the ones who may already be trying to find the way to me. There will be people who are running for their lives and need a door out of the world. The door won’t be there anymore.”

  Mattie said, “He told me the clan mothers knew. I’d cut my throat before I told anyone else.”

  “So would they,” said Jane. “Let’s hope nobody has to.”

  They served the food, sat at the table, and ate together. When they had finished they said, “Nia:wen,” and Mattie and Jimmy stood to begin clearing the table.

  “Sit,” said Jane. “I’ve learned some things, and you should know them too.”

  They resumed their places, and Jane began to talk. She told them about Chelsea Schnell and the small house where Nick Bauermeister had been shot, about Bauermeister’s burglary kit and his cache of jewelry inside the salt sacks. She told them about Chelsea’s relationship with her dead boyfriend’s boss, Daniel Crane. She told them about the witness who said he’d sold Jimmy the murder weapon and his sudden show of wealth. Finally she told them she had retained Allison the lawyer and her partner Karen Alvarez. When she had finished, she smiled. “Dah-ne-hoh.” It was what Seneca storytellers said at the end of a story, and it meant “I have spoken.”

  Mattie and Jimmy looked at her, then at each other, and then at Jane again. “Isn’t all that enough to get me off?” said Jimmy.

  “Allison didn’t say it was,” Jane said. “And she’s the expert. A lot of people whose cases had what any sensible person would call reasonable doubt are sitting in prisons.”

  “Well sure, but—”

  “The victim was a burglar, but that doesn’t mean it was okay to kill him. His girlfriend is having an affair with his boss. That doesn’t prove that she or he wanted him dead, and certainly not that either of them killed him. If it came out, they would probably say they were comforting each other for their mutual loss. And it might be true. The witness who says he sold you the rifle has come up with money for new things, but nobody has demanded to know where he got it, and he seems to be a convincing liar. I wouldn’t want to go to court with that. Do you?”

  “I guess not,” said Jimmy.

  “Of course not,” Mattie said to him.

  Jane said quietly, “And we still don’t know who these other people are who are so interested in getting rid of you. Until we know, I don’t think you can turn yourself in.”

  Mattie said, “So what do we do now?”

  Jane shrugged. “Jimmy has learned a lot about how to keep from being noticed. For the moment, the one who goes out and shops, or shows a face to the world, has to be you. And you shouldn’t do it very often.”

  “Is that enough?” said Mattie. “Just sit here and hide?”

  “For the moment. Keep to yourselves, live quietly, and let Jimmy stay out of sight most of the time. You’ve got gas in the car, a pantry full of food, and some money for when it runs out. Tomorrow I’m going to pay the rent that comes due next week, and the utility bills.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back to where the murder happened,” Jane said. “It’s the only place I can find anything out.” She got up and carried some dishes to the sink, and the others joined her. In a few minutes, they had loaded and started the dishwasher, and they could hear the water rushing into it. She reached into her pocket and pulled out one of the small leather pouches. “Ellen Dickerson sent you this.” She handed Jimmy the pouch.

  He looked inside, then poured a little tobacco out into his hand and looked at it, and then returned it to the pouch. “That was nice of her. Maybe we should burn some before you go.”

  “She gave me some too,” Jane said. “I put a little on my tires before I left her house.”

  “You really did that?” said Jimmy.

  Jane said, “It didn’t hurt to remind myself that we have friends and relatives, and they’re in this too.”

  “And maybe friends who aren’t people?”

  Jane shrugged. “I’ll take the help.”

  The next morning when Mattie got up, she walked quietly and carefully from the spare room into the living room to keep from waking Jane. She looked at the couch and saw that the blanket was neatly folded and the pillow was on top of it. She looked at the spot where Jane had left the keys to the Passat. They were gone, replaced by the keys to the Chevrolet Malibu.

  19

  Jane reached Western New York in the dark. It had been a seven-hour drive, but she had stopped for meals and breaks, and then had taken time to sleep for two hours at a rest stop. The urgency she had been feeling since the night the ancient woman had come to her in her dream seemed to burn in her until she had worn herself out. Now she was feeling stronger.

  There was a hotel on Niagara Falls Boulevard that she had driven past many times and felt curious about, so she checked in and got a room on the third floor. She ordered a late dinner from room service, showered, and changed into dark-colored clothes and running shoes.

  Her mind kept returning to Walter Slawicky. When she had stared into his windows and watched him, he struck her as a person who had decayed along with the old house where he lived. He looked slovenly, even physically dirty. He had clearly been spending money lately, and that might mean he had done a service for someone. All she really knew was that he was a l
iar. He had not sold Jimmy Sanders a rifle and ammunition.

  Jane decided to see what else she could learn about him. She drove east to his house in Caledonia, parked on the next street parallel to Iroquois Street, and walked up the sidewalk intending to turn at the corner toward his street. When she reached the cross street she saw a car she had seen before. It was parked on the right side, facing Slawicky’s street, no more than a hundred and fifty feet from Slawicky’s house, but far enough from the corner so it could not be seen from Slawicky’s. As she came up on the parked car she peered in the side windows.

  It was a plain-wrap police car, the one she had seen Sergeant Isaac Lloyd park the first time she’d been to Slawicky’s. She could see the police radio under the dashboard, the Remington 870 shotgun upright in the rack, the police flashers on the shelf at the back window. If Isaac Lloyd was here, she was going to miss tonight’s chance to find out more about the witness. She stopped and prepared to go back the way she’d come.

  Then it occurred to her that leaving might be a mistake. This could be an opportunity to learn what the state police were doing. She crouched and put her ear to the car window to see if she could hear anything, but the police radio was turned off.

  She walked to Iroquois Street, then trotted across it to Slawicky’s next-door neighbor’s house on the right. She kept going until she reached the side of the house, and then moved more slowly beside the clapboards to the back, went low, and leaned out enough to look across the backyard into Slawicky’s.

  Slawicky had made another new purchase. Parked on the lawn behind his garage was a motor home. It had the round-cornered silhouette of the newer RVs, but it was one of the small models that looked like a little bus. Jane ran her eyes along its contours, and then focused and stared. What her eyes had at first accepted as a deeper shadow began to move and assume a recognizable shape. It was a man on his hands and knees, crawling along the ground beside the vehicle, looking under it. As she watched, the man made it to the space just behind the front wheels, fiddled with something in his jacket pocket, and then reached under. He turned on a flashlight.

  Jane stared at the cone-shaped area lit by the beam. What had aroused his curiosity was a spot underneath the parked motor home. It didn’t look green like the rest of the lawn. It seemed to be a patch of bare earth about four feet on a side. It had some light brown substance sprinkled over it—mulch, maybe, with white specks of chemical fertilizer that were picked up by the beam of the flashlight.

  As the flashlight played over the patch, its glow illuminated the bottom of the vehicle, the grass, and the face of Sergeant Isaac Lloyd. Then the light went off, and Jane pulled her head back. Ike would get up now and move to something else. She didn’t dare put her head out again for fear of being seen, but she listened hard, ready to run if she heard him coming in her direction.

  She heard nothing at first. It worried her because she knew he was good at moving quietly.

  When she heard footsteps they were louder than they should have been, and they seemed to be coming from the wrong spot. Her ears placed them at the far side of Slawicky’s yard, by the hedge. They sped up, breaking into a run—two or three men at once. She heard a harsh, popping sound, then two more. Somebody was firing a gun with a silencer.

  She looked out from behind the neighbor’s house and saw three men firing at Ike Lloyd. She saw Lloyd sheltering at the back of the motor home, and saw him reach into his jacket for a gun. He aimed, then fired at one of his assailants, but missed. The shooter made it to the house while the others spread out. The pop of the next silenced pistol came from a different angle, and Lloyd spun and went down. He was hit. He rose to a sitting position and clutched his thigh with his left hand, but he leaned close to the big vehicle and raised his gun arm again.

  Jane had no weapon, nothing she could use to help him. She pivoted and sprinted along the side of the neighbor’s house and across Iroquois Street. In a few more seconds she was beside the plain black police car. She took out her pocketknife without opening it, gripped the handle with the rounded brass end protruding below her fist, and hammered the side window. It shattered, throwing little glittering cubes of broken glass onto the driver’s seat. She grasped the inner door handle, swung it open, tugged the shotgun up and out of its rack, pumped it once, and ran with it.

  As she dashed across the street she saw a flash of sparks spew from the muzzle of a silencer, and stopped. She raised the shotgun to her shoulder and fired. The report of the shotgun was like a thunderclap, and the kick rocked her back. She ducked low and ran the rest of the way across the street, pumped the shotgun again and moved across the front of the neighbor’s yard to the porch of Slawicky’s house. She went to her belly and searched for her next target.

  She could see that the man she had just shot was lying on his back, face to the sky, with his arms apart. In the dark she couldn’t see him very well, but she could detect no movement from him. The police load was usually number four buckshot, but she had been no more than forty feet away. He was probably severely wounded, or even dead. She couldn’t see the other two men, so she rose to a crouch and ran around to the back of Slawicky’s house.

  Jane leaned out from the corner of the house in time to see the other two men begin to move. One of them ran toward the front of the motor home, and the other toward the back. Jane aimed and fired at the one heading for the front, and he dived face forward, lay on his belly, and slithered backward to withdraw. The other man changed his course to get behind the motor home.

  Jane braced the shotgun’s barrel against the clapboards at the corner of the house in case the others appeared again, took out her cell phone, and dialed 911.

  “Town of Caledonia. What’s your emergency?”

  “A state police officer has been shot. He’s in the backyard of the house at ninety-six ninety-two Iroquois Street, and there are two men shooting at him. Another is lying in the yard.”

  “Give me your name, please.”

  “Get cops and an ambulance here now.”

  “Officers are on the way. Your name—”

  Jane turned off the phone and waited there, where she could keep the two healthy shooters from getting near Ike Lloyd. After a minute or two, she heard lots of rustling sounds as the men moved across the yard and back toward the street. She advanced to the rear wall of the garage, closer to the wounded man.

  She called, “Sergeant Lloyd.” After a pause, she said, “Ike.”

  “Who are you?”

  “The lady who borrowed your shotgun. They’re clearing off. I called nine one one and they said cops are on the way. Can you hold out until they get here?”

  “I think so.”

  “Use your belt as a tourniquet. I’ll leave your shotgun in your car.”

  “Wait,” he called. “Don’t move. Do not leave the scene. We’re going to need—”

  Jane turned and ran along the side of the house. She was across the road and at the black police car in ten seconds. She wiped the shotgun off with her sleeve and set it on the floor of the backseat, and then ran again. She was in the Passat and driving toward the west with her window open when she heard the sirens approach. She pulled over, turned off her lights, and ducked down while their lights appeared and flashed past. Then she sat up, turned on her lights, and drove.

  When she reached her hotel in Rochester she went to her room and showered, then picked up her clothes. She was sure a short-barreled twelve gauge shotgun must leave plenty of burned powder on the shooter, so she put all of her clothes in the bathtub, scrubbed them with soap, and rinsed them off with the shower, then soaked them in the tub and hung them up to dry before she went to sleep.

  Her sleep was dark and dreamless, and she awoke in the late afternoon feeling alert. She went to a Laundromat, washed, dried, and folded her clothes, stopped in a restaurant for an early dinner, and then tu
rned on the television set in her room at six to see the local news.

  After the station’s logo she saw the word BREAKING. A girl who looked barely out of high school was sitting in as a newsreader with the veteran anchor, Don Hennick, who must have been nearly eighty. She introduced herself as Kimberly Wachtman and said, “We have live, breaking news at this hour.” Don Hennick said, “A state police officer has been shot in Caledonia. An accident in Cheektowaga holds up a train, and the Bisons win three in a row. We’ll be back in sixty seconds.”

  There was a commercial for a supermarket chain in which a husband, who appeared to have been stunned by high voltage, walked in an endless aisle unable to find what he wanted, only to be saved by his wife, and then a commercial during which a pair of loathsome fast-talking car salesmen tried to talk an innocent young couple into buying an inferior car until they escaped to a neighboring lot, where the really good cars were sold by a handsome man. Next there was a series of rapid-fire pitches for five of the network’s new shows.

  The news returned with “live breaking news!” Kimberly said, “A state police officer has been shot. We go live to Brenda Sturridge at the scene in Caledonia.”

  Brenda Sturridge was a familiar face to Jane, a forty-five-year-old blonde holding a microphone on the sidewalk in front of Walter Slawicky’s house. Behind her, police officers and technicians were moving around, ducking under the yellow crime scene tape to go back and forth to their vehicles. “Yes, Kimberly and Don, I’m at the house now. Caledonia police have not yet finished their investigation, but they’ve told me that a state police officer was in the yard of the house behind me on the ninety-two hundred block of Iroquois Street. They say he was watching the house of a witness in an ongoing investigation when he was ambushed by gunmen, shot, and wounded. The police will not elaborate further on the case, but said the officer was able to administer first aid to himself, which may have saved his life. They refuse to speculate on the motives for the shooting, but the investigation continues. Brenda Sturridge, Western New York News. Back to you, Don and Kimberly.”