In the next stall, Emma was unable to control the horse, which kicked at her, snorting and rearing up. Charlie grabbed the halter, but then had it wrenched from his hand as the horse rose up again. Emma had taken off her jacket and was trying to put it over the horse’s face, but the horse knocked her aside. Leaning the shotgun against the wall, Charlie again grabbed the halter. He and Emma were both coughing. In the dim light from the fire, he saw Emma throw her coat over the horse’s forehead and he grabbed a sleeve. As he gripped the halter with one hand, he passed the coat sleeve under the horse’s jaw to Emma, who tied the sleeves together. The horse kept trying to break free, but Charlie put all his weight into dragging it back down.
“Lead it out of here!” he shouted. Then he picked up the shotgun and tried to shoulder the horse out of the stall without getting kicked. Emma jumped onto the horse’s back, crouched over and hanging on to the sleeves of her coat, pulling them tight under the horse’s jaw and across its muzzle and forehead. She dug her heels into its ribs and it jumped forward, bolting toward the barn door.
The ceiling and opposite wall were glowing red and the fire was about to break through. Charlie ran to the last stall. The horse kept kicking the wall and snorting. It didn’t seem to notice Charlie as it rose up and spun on its rear hooves. Charlie grabbed at the halter and was thrown back. He stripped off his winter coat, meaning to use it to cover the horse’s eyes. Then he removed his leather belt, looping it over one shoulder and under the opposite arm, and strapped the shotgun to his chest. No way was he going to leave it behind if he could help it. He didn’t think about Paulie Durkin; he only knew he was out there. The stall was hot and full of smoke. He threw his coat over the horse’s forehead, grabbed a sleeve hanging down the other side and pulled it back under the horse’s jaw as he had seen Emma do. Then he pushed open the door to drag the horse into the aisle. Rearing up, it broke his hold and bolted back to the stall. The heat scorched Charlie’s face.
A large rubber bucket was in the corner of the stall. Charlie grabbed it, turned it over and got up on top as he hung on to the horse’s halter and one sleeve of the coat. Again he threw the rest of the coat across the horse’s eyes and this time he was able to catch it underneath, so he held both sleeves with the halter on the near side of the horse. But as he pulled the sleeves tight, the horse lunged forward toward the door. Charlie was half pulled and half jumped onto the horse’s back and he dropped one sleeve. He fell forward with his chin pressed against the horse’s mane and his heels pressed against its belly. Letting go of the halter, he reached under the horse’s neck with his right hand and grabbed the coat sleeve so he gripped a sleeve in each fist. Once free of the stall, the horse kicked and reared up, but Charlie hung on. He yanked the two sleeves crisscrossed under the horse’s jaw and spurred his heels into its ribs. The horse stamped and shook its head, but then bolted toward the front of the barn and the barn doors. The flames were all around them and burning bits of hay fell like candles. Something large crashed down onto the floor behind them.
In seconds, Charlie was out of the barn and into the snow, still clutching the sleeves of his coat as reins and squeezing the horse with his knees and heels. He was sure he’d be thrown off at any moment. The pistol grip of the Benelli dug into his chest. He was hardly aware of Artemis and Emma off to his right, holding on to their horses and trying to calm them, nor did he quite see the flashing light bars on the police vehicles rushing up the drive. Maybe he heard sirens. Each time he raised his head out of the horse’s mane, he slipped a little to one side. The snow blew against his face. In a blur he saw Victor laboring through the snow toward the burning barn, holding onto his hat with one hand and gripping his pistol with the other. Charlie pulled back on the coat sleeves, attempting to make the horse stop, but the horse had no wish to stop.
Then, raising his head, Charlie saw Paulie Durkin on his right, running forward in a crouch. He knew that Artemis was his destination and knew he meant to slash her throat as he had done to the others. Charlie yanked a coat sleeve and the horse swerved to the right, kicking up the snow around them. With his face buried in the horse’s mane, he pulled and banged his heels against the horse’s ribs. Only seconds had passed since horse and rider had rushed from the barn.
Abruptly, Charlie and Paulie were facing each other from a short distance—Charlie galloping in one direction, Paulie running in the other. Charlie had barely begun to process this image when the horse struck Paulie a glancing blow, sideswiping him and throwing him aside. The horse stumbled, nearly falling to its knees, then regained its footing. But this was too much for Charlie. His grip was broken and he was jolted loose. He slipped off the rear of the horse, hitting the ground with his feet, but then was hurled forward. He tried to turn slightly so he wouldn’t hit the ground with the Benelli beneath him.
Although deep, the snow was no cushion. At most, it allowed Charlie to slide forward like a sled. He struggled to catch his breath as he dug the toes of his boots into the ground. He slid to a halt, rolling onto his back.
Paulie Durkin ran toward him with a large knife held out to one side. Charlie tried to yank the shotgun free from the belt that held it to his chest, but the front sight caught on the fabric of his pants. Clutching the pistol grip, he pulled harder and the shotgun broke free. Then, in his panic, he couldn’t find the safety button on the trigger guard. Paulie was less than ten feet away.
Charlie pressed the safety button and pulled the trigger, aiming low. The discharge was muffled by the storm: a loud cough. Paulie screamed and fell, but his momentum still carried him toward Charlie. Scrambling, Charlie lurched through the heavy snow to get out of the way, but he wasn’t fast enough. Paulie landed on Charlie’s shoulder on top of the shotgun. He was still screaming. In his right hand, he held his hunting knife, but he no longer had any interest in Charlie. Trying to pull free his right arm, Charlie pushed Paulie away with his left. Paulie was flailing and grabbing at his leg. Charlie gave one more yank and tumbled back. He scrambled to his feet. The shot had struck Paulie’s left shin and foot from a few feet away and maybe just a rag of a foot remained. Paulie flailed and bellowed, clutching at the space where his foot had been as the snow turned red around him.
Now a dozen flashlights were bobbing across the snow-covered field, and in seconds Charlie saw the eager faces of the deputies. It seemed like a horse race to see who would reach him first. He swayed painfully, impressed by the range of his discomfort from the cold and the burns, the palms of his hands and his chest from hitting the ground and sliding, and other places too numerous to count. I’m a display in the museum of serious hurt, he thought.
But now the lead sheriff’s deputy began shouting: “Drop your weapon, scumbag, drop your weapon!”
Charlie looked down at the Benelli, still gripped in his hand, and released it, watched it fall into the snow and disappear. He already missed it. Looking up, he was startled to see that the lead deputy was airborne and he was the target. But he didn’t have the chance to consider the strangeness of it when the deputy crashed into him and they flew backward, hit the snow and slid all in a tangle.
“I think you’re making a mistake,” Charlie whispered into the deputy’s ear.
Epilogue
Victor stretched out a finger and thumb and delicately plucked a blueberry from the surface of a blueberry muffin and studied it thoughtfully. “I really thought I’d gone nuts, Charlie, or been flung into an alternative universe where nothing nice was ever going to happen again. There you were hollering with fire all around you, bombing outta that barn on a black horse, glued to the top like a ten-cent stamp on a ten-pound package.”
Charlie nodded and glanced out the window at the small mountain of snow pushed to the edge of the parking lot. The sky was blue with fluffy clouds. It was about two p.m. three days later, and only a few other people were in the diner. “Charlie, you can barely walk,” Janey had told him an hour earlier. He’d only gotten out of the
hospital the previous evening. But he was tired of lying in bed.
Charlie had already heard a version of Victor’s story from Artemis and Emma: how he had come galloping out of the burning barn and ridden the horse smack into Paulie Durkin, which wasn’t quite true. Even Hutchins had a part of the story, and Undersheriff Maroni, and probably Paulie as well. It had come to bore him. It had been an accident; the whole thing had been an accident. He’d been lucky, that’s all. And in none of these versions had anyone said how much he must hurt. Janey did, when she visited him in the hospital, but she hadn’t seen him come roaring out of the barn; she’d only imagined it, though she could see the bandage on his shoulder from a burn, and the bruises, a tapestry of multicolored bruises, as well as some broken bits: collarbone, left arm and three ribs. About an hour earlier, before leaving home, Charlie had taken another Percocet, but so far it only made him feel as if he were at the bottom of a deep well.
Paulie Durkin had been in another room of the hospital, which was enough for Charlie to ask for his shotgun back. But Hutchins had assured him that Paulie was handcuffed to the bed and, in any case, his left foot was gone, and part of his ankle with it. Still, Paulie’s presence had been enough for Charlie to want to escape from the hospital as soon as possible, despite the warnings of his doctors.
Victor chortled some more. “If it hadn’t been for the fire, I’d of thought you were a circus act. I wish I’d had a camera.”
“Maybe I could do the whole thing again so you could film it.”
“Nah, the barn’s burned down and we’d have to find another. Besides, Artemis wouldn’t let us borrow her horses.”
Charlie again stared at the mountain of snow at the edge of the parking lot. For a moment he imagined it was all the snow he’d slogged through at Artemis’s come back to visit him. But maybe that was the Percocet. He shook his head, trying to clear it of disagreeable images.
“I still don’t see how you knew Paulie and Richie were the same guy,” said Victor, picking another blueberry out of his muffin.
“I didn’t, but when I saw Richie’s Honda Civic it started me thinking. I’d seen a similar car parked near the Tea Kettle. It was a lucky guess, that’s all.”
Victor grinned, as if he knew all about Charlie’s lucky guesses. “What happened to Artemis’s other stable hand? What was his name?”
“Stanley. Paulie had tied him to his bed in the dressage barn. He’d nothing against him and didn’t want to hurt him.”
“Nah,” said Victor, “I bet he was just saving him as a snack for later.”
Charlie began to say that Paulie would have saved Emma as well, but he didn’t know that as a fact. “Anyway, we’re lucky the sheriff’s cars showed up when they did.”
Victor grew indignant. “Luck had nothing to do with it. I called them.”
“Give me a break. You said your phone was out of battery.”
“It was, but I heard this phone buzzing. It was Franklin’s radio—you know, the dead deputy. So I crawled out of the bushes and tracked it down. It was hooked to his belt and I answered it. Guy on the other end was pissed when he realized I wasn’t Franklin. He figured I’d stolen the radio and said he’d slap my ass in jail.”
Victor paused to sip his coffee. Then he gave a little affectionate wave to the Queen of Softness perched on her stool behind the cash register.
“And?” asked Charlie impatiently.
“Oh, yeah.” Victor shook his head. “I said Franklin had been murdered, that his throat was cut. So they came barreling over to Artemis’s farm. Didn’t even thank me for letting them know.”
Charlie wondered why he’d never thought of the radio himself. “What a shame,” he said. He poured a little more sugar in his coffee and stirred it with his finger. The coffee was tepid, but he didn’t care.
“What I call a shame is how you were hardly mentioned by the newspaper. All it says is you were one of the guys that Paulie meant to kill. That’s pretty hard considering what you did. They should’ve given you a medal.”
Chief Novak had convinced Charlie that he had to stay out of the “limelight,” as Novak called it. If he did, he’d get his pistol license back. If he didn’t, he could be charged with interfering with a police investigation, disobeying police orders, firing a questionable shotgun (short barrel, collapsible stock) and assaulting a sheriff’s deputy: the man who had jumped on Charlie at the end had twisted his ankle. Novak also suggested that Charlie could get an accessory charge for not warning the police about the involvement of Milo Rutkowski, while Milo was alive.
“Even if you beat these charges, Charlie, you’d be paying a fortune in lawyer’s fees,” Novak had told him. “It’d put a dent in your pocketbook.”
Charlie had been sitting on the far side of Novak’s desk silently hating him. On the other hand, he’d no interest in seeing his name in lights. It would require too much handshaking and fake smiling, too much phony gratitude.
No, if there was a star, it was Hutchins. The Saratogian had described how he’d been first on the scene when Mickey was murdered, that he’d doggedly continued the investigation when others had given up, that he’d discovered the link between Mickey and Paulie’s father, and then had helped the sheriff’s department and the state police in tracking Paulie down, even though Paulie was a ranger and knew a hundred ways how to kill a person.
“It makes me want to vomit,” said Victor. He put two fingers into his mouth to show how it might be done.
“The people I care about know. Others, too. It’s not as if it never happened.”
Victor leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but Emma and I worked up a great story for the high school paper coming out tomorrow. Pictures and the whole nine yards. The cops won’t just have egg on their face, they’ll have the whole fucking chicken. No-Neck Novak’ll bust a gut.”
There goes my pistol license, thought Charlie.
“And The Saratogian will be all over this. I bet they give you a ticker-tape parade.”
But Charlie and Janey had other plans. While in the hospital, he’d told her about Gene and Mary Lou McCarthy’s second motel, the Tea Kettle, Too, down in Saint Petersburg. It sounded worth a visit. They could rent a car, and after coming back from the beach, they could go for a splash in the motel pool before cocktail hour. Then they might toss a couple of T-bones on the charcoal grill. Emma could come down for a long weekend and even bring Bruiser.
So Janey had gotten busy buying tickets. They’d leave in a week and Emma could stay with Artemis. To heck with Victor’s ticker-tape parade. Charlie could lie on a warm chaise longue under a beach umbrella, listen to the breaking waves and rest his bones.
About the Author
STEPHEN DOBYNS has published twenty-three novels, a book of short stories, fourteen books of poems and two books of essays on poetry. Saratoga Payback is the eleventh mystery featuring Charlie Bradshaw, a sometime private investigator in Saratoga Springs, New York. Dobyns’s previous novel, Is Fat Bob Dead Yet?, was published in 2015 by Blue Rider Press. His most recent book of poetry is The Day’s Last Light Reddens the Leaves of the Copper Beech (BOA Editions Ltd, 2016). Palgrave Macmillan released his second book of essays on poetry, Next Word, Better Word, in 2011. Two of his novels and two of his short stories were made into films. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, three fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and numerous prizes for his poetry and fiction. He spent two years as a reporter for the Detroit News, from 1969 to 1971. Between 1995 and 2008, he published about thirty feature stories in the San Diego Reader. Dobyns has taught for many years in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Warren Wilson College. He has also taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Emerson College, Syracuse University, Boston University, the University of Iowa and half a dozen other colleges and universities. He was born in New Jersey in 1941. He has three children and lives in Westerly,
Rhode Island.
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
* * *
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.
Saratoga Payback Page 30