Saratoga Payback

by Stephen Dobyns

  “I’m just listening to you jaw.”

  “Then let’s do it.” The driver and Hank got down on their bellies and began to crawl. It had rained in the afternoon and the ground was wet. “Aw, fuck,” said the driver. When Hank began to crawl under the fence, the creature in the bag started whining again. Hank slapped it so it yelped.

  “Not so hard,” said the third man.

  “You a dog lover? Just make sure you’re here when we get back.”

  By the time the two men had crawled under the electric fence and stood up, they were only dim shadows to the man by the truck. He wanted to give them more advice, tell them to walk carefully and not talk, but the occasion for that was past. In the right-hand slash pocket of his jacket, he felt a small pistol and closed his fingers around it. The pistol didn’t make him less nervous, but it changed the nature of his nervousness. Instead of worrying about getting shot, he worried about shooting someone else. Well, they’d deserve it, coming to mess with them at three thirty in the morning. They’d get a bullet in the gut and it’d be their own fault.

  The two men inside the fence set off across the field at a slow lope, slightly crouched to keep closer to the ground. They’d spent half an hour studying the field in daylight and knew the relative position of the dozen trees and a few bushes. It was just over half a mile to the barn—“a straight shot,” the other man had told them. They stayed quiet as they waited for the Rottweiler’s single bark. The driver wanted to ask whether both dogs would bark once or if just one would bark for the two of them, but he knew Hank disliked him and he didn’t want to do anything else to make Hank think he was a dope. Guys like Hank annoyed him, guys secure in their toughness who talked down to everyone else. What he wanted was to smack Hank in the head with a brick, but if he messed up, Hank would follow him to the ends of the earth. He’d heard about stuff Hank had done, both in prison and out. If he smacked Hank with a brick, he had to make sure he wouldn’t get back on his feet.

  Hank stayed ahead, gripping the bag with the bitch. He used to run some years after he first got out of prison and the jog through the field brought it back. He tried to recall the name of the woman he’d lived with in those days—Carol or Karen. Anyway, they’d had a fight after she’d shrunk three of his best shirts in the wash. In fact, she was lucky he hadn’t slapped her instead of making her pay for the shirts, but the upshot was she had moved out and he’d stopped running.

  Hank heard the driver clomping behind him like a fuckin’ Clydesdale. Ahead, he could see the barn, a dark shadow against the horizon. The split-level ranch was about fifty yards beyond. God knew where the Rottweilers were. Just lurking. With any luck the dogs wouldn’t hear them till they got close.

  As it turned out, they heard the bark when they were twenty yards from the barn: one deep bark and then silence. It had come from up ahead, but who knew how the dogs were trained. Maybe they were circling behind them even now. The driver felt his knees getting watery. He was sorry he hadn’t brought a gun no matter what he’d been told, but he had a hunting knife under his coat. No way was he going to let a dog drag him down.

  Hank untied the top of the bag but held it shut with his hand. An outside light by the house cast a faint glow. The security light above the barn door would go on when they got closer. Hank made his way toward the side of the barn, meaning to approach the door at the last minute.

  “Fuck, there they are!” said the driver.

  “Shut up,” said Hank. He’d seen them to his left—two big dogs running across the grass about ten feet from each other. They didn’t even growl; they just ran. The driver ducked behind Hank, who was holding up the bag and turning it over. Then the bitch tumbled out, a mutt combination of beagle, collie and maybe ten other breeds. Hank gave it a kick to get it moving. The bitch yelped, took one look at the Rottweilers and raced off across the field. The Rottweilers slowed as if uncertain. Then one of the dogs turned after the bitch and disappeared.

  “Jesus,” said the driver, “it’s all about pussy.”

  “Watch out,” said Hank. Maybe the second dog was a faggot after all, or maybe he was some kind of celibate Rottweiler, because he didn’t swerve from his path. Hank raised his left arm wrapped in the burlap bags, but when the dog hit, he was knocked back against the wall of the barn. He started to fall, dragged down by the dog’s jaws. His pistol, however, was already in his right hand and he smashed the butt against the dog’s head. But even after being knocked unconscious, the dog kept hanging on and the driver had to pry apart the dog’s jaw to free Hank’s arm.

  “That’s one mean dog. They don’t get dogs like that from the puppy store.”

  “Shut up,” hissed Hank. “If anyone comes out of that house, he’ll get shot.”

  The security light came on when Hank reached the front of the barn, illuminating the driveway and yard between the barn and house. He slid open the door, then made his way to the third stall on his right. There was a clumping and snort or two from the stalls as the horses registered the intrusion. Hank removed a halter, strap and mask from his backpack as the driver opened the door to the stall. The horse stood back against the wall, pawing at the hay on the floor—a tall, black stallion with a white diamond shape on his forehead and three white stockings. The driver took out a small light, focusing it on the horse, as Hank attached the mask and bridle. Then he hooked on the strap. “Let’s go. And look out for the dog.”

  The horse noisily clomped across the floor as Hank gripped the strap, holding it near the horse’s jaw so he wouldn’t rear up. Once outside, Hank pulled the horse away from the security light. There was a light on in the house that hadn’t been there before. Hank broke into a run across the dark field, pulling the horse. He heard the driver bumbling along behind him. From the distance came the sound of barking—the Rottweiler getting acquainted with the bitch. When they were halfway across the field, Hank pulled his phone from his coat pocket. “We’re almost there. Start cutting.”

  The third man had cut the chain-link fence and was just cutting the electric wire when Hank and the driver arrived with the horse. They pulled apart the sides of the fence so the horse could get through. The third man kept saying, “Hurry, hurry,” as if he had forgotten every other word he’d ever learned.

  The ramp was down on the trailer. Hank led the stallion inside and attached it to three swivel tie-rings that folded flat against the padded walls. Then he shoved the ramp back in place and locked the doors. When he got to the truck, it had begun to move.

  “Not so fast, not so fast,” said the man in back.

  The driver hardly slowed, but it was enough to let Hank inside. The door slammed shut. All he wanted was to get away. Until the horse was delivered, he wouldn’t get a fucking cent.

  “I said not so fast. You want to hurt the horse?”

  “Okay, okay,” said the driver without slowing down. The dirt road was a dark blur against the darker blur of night.

  Hank stared across the field to the house and barn. “There’s more lights on.”

  “For shit’s sake,” said the man in back.

  The truck surged forward. The road was bumpy, but it turned left onto a paved road after a quarter of a mile.

  “I see headlights,” said Hank. “There’s one vehicle, no two, coming down the driveway.”

  “Jesus,” said the man in back. “Hit the lights. No more fuckin’ dawdling!”

  Two

  Charlie still wore his slippers, though over the past few hours, pebbles and leaf-bits had collected between his toes and under his instep. He leaned with his back against a tree. A maple, he thought, and most of its leaves had fallen. In fact, over the weekend, he had raked them. He wore a down jacket over his pajama top, but the wind blew through his pajama pants as if he were naked. At the moment, however, the cold was not among his complaints. Instead, he was thinking with some surprise that it was his maple. The tree belonged to him. Even w
hen he modified this thought to say that actually it was Janey’s tree, he would again emend it to say, no, it was also his. Without any deferential emphasis, Janey had said when they married that what was hers was his. It had been a casual remark meant to make him feel comfortable, to stop him worrying about breaking a dish or sitting down too heavily on a fragile chair left to her by a favorite aunt. Charlie had now lived in the house for two years—he still thought of it as Janey’s house—and before that there’d been two years of commuting from his house on the lake.

  But at last it had begun to sink in—it was his tree, his fragile chair, his house: a narrow, three-story Victorian a mile west of downtown. Even though he’d never had trouble thinking that his small house on the lake also belonged to Janey, the reverse had been hard to grasp. Now it clicked: his tree and, in consequence, his grass under his slippers and his pebbles and leaf-bits irritating his instep. With Charlie’s first marriage, which had ended some twenty years before he had known of Janey’s existence and when he’d still been a sergeant in the Saratoga police department, his wife had never made any secret about claiming most of the objects in their house. They belonged to Marge, and when they divorced she took them and took the house as well. She would grow angry if Charlie sat in her Kennedy rocker, used her good china, accidentally stole her pillow at night or didn’t wipe his feet before walking on her grandmother’s Turkey carpet. It was her property, her stuff, and she had a drawer full of guarantees, titles, certificates and testimonials to prove it.

  Janey had none of that and in consequence—it was Charlie’s tree, Charlie’s grass. Just her three daughters weren’t his, although Emma, the youngest and the only one still at home, could be Charlie’s as much as he wished in terms of sharing responsibility, escorting her to movies and helping her study for her SAT exams. Never having had children of his own, Charlie found it odd but pleasurable.

  What caused Charlie’s gush of possession and ownership at five o’clock on an October morning was the finger hoisted five inches from his face, not pointed at him but upward, as if its owner wasn’t just inflicting his own condemnation, but the Almighty’s. The finger belonged to Lieutenant Frank Hutchins—Hutch to his friends, a select group from which Charlie was excluded. Near them, four sheriff’s department crime scene investigators were examining the sidewalk and grass lit by high-power lights and marked off by yellow tape with black lettering telling the general populace they must not cross. Mickey Martin’s body had been removed and most of the twenty or so bystanders had gone home. The two patrolmen assigned to keep back the remainder were nodding off on their feet. The tape cut across Charlie’s sidewalk, which would force Janey and Emma to use the back door when they left the house later in the morning. This, too, contributed to Charlie’s growing sense of indignation, although, in his own time as a policeman, he had spread yellow tape far and wide.

  Charlie’s feelings about the upraised finger, which had led him to think, My tree, my grass, now led him to the further thought that Hutch and his cronies were tramping on Charlie’s grass and making free with his property in the same way that Mickey Martin had made free with his property by getting his throat cut on the front walk. This in turn led to the third stage of Charlie’s proprietary thinking: He had had about enough.

  Pushing himself away from the tree, Charlie said, “Take your damn finger out of my face.”

  Now it was Hutchins’s turn to be surprised. “Watch it, Bradshaw.” He was tall and lean with a hawk-like aspect that was for him a major source of pride. His dark hair was cut in a Harvard Clip, just long enough to be brushed to one side. Charlie knew this because he’d heard men joking about it in the Y locker room.

  “Why? Are you going to take away my license?” And so Charlie arrived at the fourth and last of his liberating realizations: The police chief, Ron Novak, with the help of the district attorney, had already taken away his private investigator’s license, along with his permit to carry a gun. Consequently, Charlie no longer had to worry about losing them. His license was gone, meaning he was now a plain citizen. He had rights.

  “Also,” said Charlie, “if you don’t have any more questions, I’m going back inside. I’m cold and I have to pee. I’ve already told you twenty times that I don’t know what Mickey Martin was doing on my sidewalk.”

  But this was what Hutch had trouble believing: that Mickey could have been coming to Charlie’s house without Charlie knowing what he wanted. Charlie must have known and, accordingly, more pressure must be exerted. In addition, the lieutenant made no secret of the fact that he considered Charlie a liar, as if Hutch had long since bought Mickey’s obnoxious fabrications concerning Charlie’s general sleaziness.

  Charlie understood that another obstacle was their age difference—Hutch was thirty years younger. The Vietnam War had ended while Hutch was still watching Captain Kangaroo. And there was the chafe and grind of different life experience. Hutch had spent a dozen years in the FBI before arriving in Saratoga. As he probably told himself ten times a day, he was a professional. What Hutch didn’t know about fingerprints would fit into a thimble. He was computer savvy and used words like “network,” “interface” and “microprocess” as verbs, as well as having absorbed such military and cop jargon as “pacify” and “terminate,” “perps” and “grabs.” In the police department that Charlie had left years before, no one called anyone a perp. In Hutch’s eyes, Charlie was a cop hobbyist, an amateur. These were opinions shared by Chief Novak, even though Charlie had at times embarrassed them by solving cases they had been unable to solve. So, after Charlie had overreached himself one time too many by actions that Novak found inappropriate to cop hobbyists, Charlie had lost his license and his right to carry a gun, an old .38 that had mostly stayed in his office safe. When Charlie first heard a Saratoga patrolman refer to his Glock, he had thought it was a musical instrument, perhaps derived from “glockenspiel,” and so the sentence “I popped ’im twice with my Glock” had had a certain musical charm.

  Hutch raised the offending finger a little higher. “Look, Bradshaw, we can either talk here or I can take you downtown.”

  “There’s nothing I can tell you that I haven’t told you twenty times.”

  “Perhaps I’d like to hear it again.”

  “No,” said Charlie. “I have a lawyer and I know my lawyer would like me to go inside. He would tell me I should pee. I’m sixty-seven; I have an elderly bladder.”

  Hutch seemed ill at ease at the mention of a bodily function, as if he himself never had to pee, as if he had patrolmen to do it for him. “You know what would happen if the DA found out that you were working as a private investigator without a license?”

  For Charlie this was a version of the threat he had heard for over twenty years. “You mean he’d cancel my trip to Disneyland?”

  Hutchins blinked several times, but before he could answer, Charlie turned and walked to the house: his house, sort of. Through the glass of the front door, he saw Janey sipping a cup of coffee and looking worried. Charlie half expected the lieutenant to call him back with a further threat, but no threat came. He passed through his front door, shutting it and locking it behind him, and then he gave Janey a hug.

  But at six thirty, when Charlie had already been back in bed with his eyes shut for thirty minutes, sleep seemed as far away as it had been when talking to Hutch. Why had Mickey Martin come to see him? What had he wanted? Why had he been killed and who had killed him? Turning over on his back, Charlie stared at the ceiling now smudged with the gray blur of dawn. His questions made him again realize that he’d be unable to discover the answers on his own. He couldn’t nose around and gather information about an ongoing police investigation. He would have to read about it, like everyone else, in The Saratogian, a mediocre source of information even in the best of times. This galled him. His right to act on his curiosity had been restricted. But surely, he told himself, the police will find the murderer even before I wake up
, or at latest by the end of the day. That’s just simple statistics. And so Charlie turned over for the thirtieth time and stuck his head under his pillow.

  But each time he felt poised on the cusp of sleep, another question popped into his head. When had he last seen Mickey Martin? Had it been on the street or in the YMCA? Had it been at a restaurant? Then he remembered. He and Janey had been having dinner at Lillian’s on Broadway. It had been in the spring, late March or early April, a rainy weeknight with the restaurant nearly empty. Mickey had been having dinner with a young woman across the room and was berating her for having done something stupid to a car, like driving without releasing the hand brake. Then, as his voice got louder, he had begun to berate her for having no fucking taste in clothes, for dressing, as Mickey had said, like a nun. The woman had short black hair and was in her late twenties, probably fifteen years younger than Mickey. She wore a gray silk blouse that Charlie thought looked very pretty on her, and a black skirt with vertical gray lines. These he had assumed were the offending articles of clothing.

  “Do you think they’re married?” Janey had asked.

  Charlie didn’t think so. He’d never heard of Mickey being married and it seemed unlikely that any woman would have him, though, as he had learned long ago, a person’s faults had little connection with his or her sexual success.

  “And that fuckin’ rabbit-fur jacket,” Mickey had continued. “It leaves a trail of fur wherever you go. It’s got bald spots. How could you be so dumb to buy a fur coat from a jerk on the street?”

  Waiters glanced grimly at one another; customers hurried to finish their food.

  “Make him stop, Charlie,” Janey had said.

  “I can’t just go up and—”

  “If you don’t, I will.”

  So Charlie had crossed the room to Mickey’s table, feeling foolish.

  Mickey caught sight of him. “Hey, Charlie, what’re you doing in a dump like this? Everything’s overcooked.” Then he nodded toward his companion. “Though I bet Lizzie’d eat anything stuck in front of her.”