A Catskill Eagle

by Robert B. Parker

  “I think so. How many of us were there?” Another rifle shot from the woods and the flashlight spun and skittered along the ground. “Jesus, they got Gino.”

  “Fan out, God damn it, fan out.”

  I turned and snake-walked across the deck on my stomach and slid open one of the glass doors. Smoke billowed out. I stayed on the floor and slithered along into the house. Close to the floor there was still breathable air. And I had an advantage on everyone else. I knew the house wasn’t on fire.

  There were four bedrooms on the top floor of the lodge, organized in a square around an interior balcony that opened onto a cathedral-ceilinged first-floor space that ran the length of the lodge. I moved as fast as I could on my stomach. My eyes were stinging and watering. It was hard to breathe. There was no one in any of the bedrooms. In the dawn half-light, muddled by the smoke, it was hard to see much more than that. I took a deep breath at floor level after the last bedroom proved empty. Then I stood and went down the stairs into the main room. There was no one there. I went to the fireplace that covered one wall at the far end, and raked the burning logs out onto the floor with a hooked poker. The carpet began to smolder. I was fighting to hold my breath. I moved the length of the room and dropped to the floor and breathed as shallow as I could: There was no one in the main hall. I hadn’t thought there would be, but the disappointment that she wasn’t here felt like something heavy in my chest. The back side of the lodge was set into the hillside so there were no windows on the first-floor back wall. Holding my breath I went back up to the second floor and out a back window. It was barely a five-foot drop into the woods on the hill. Behind me the floor of the lodge had caught and I could see the tips of the flames shimmering against the secondfloor windows.

  The rain was pelting down now. I had shipped to Korea out of Fort Lewis some time back and I remembered how often it rained in Washington. I was moving through the woods in a crouch, circling back toward the road and the place where we’d parked the car. The rain was cold, and without my jacket it soaked through my black turtleneck sweater. Behind me I heard a large huff as the flames burst out of the second-floor windows of the lodge. We hadn’t found Susan yet, but we were certainly annoying the Costigans. Better than nothing.

  CHAPTER 19

  HAWK WAS SITTING IN THE VOLVO WITH THE motor running as I sloshed out of the woods. He’d have the heater on. I got slapped one last time across the face with a wet branch and then the woods relinquished me and I stepped out onto the road about ten feet behind the Volvo.

  When I did about ten guys with guns stepped out with me. From my side, from the other side, in front of the Volvo. One of them was the fat guy with skinny arms who had been working the counter where we’d had breakfast yesterday. He was pointing a double-barreled shotgun at me.

  “Who’s minding the store,” I said.

  “It’s Mr. Costigan’s store,” he said.

  “I imagine so,” I said.

  The Volvo engine suddenly snarled and its tires whined as they spun on the wet pavement. The guys in front of it had time to put one shot through the windshield before they dove out of the way and the Volvo screeched off uphill and around the curve in the road.

  “Son of a bitch,” the counterman said.

  “Greedy,” I said. “You wanted to wait and make sure of us both.”

  “Got you,” the counterman said. He grinned at me over the gun. “Your buddy hauled ass and left you,” he said. “Most niggers’ll skedaddle like that.”

  I shrugged. The Volvo was out of hearing already. The group gathered around me. The gunny who fired at Hawk said, “I mighta winged him, Warren.”

  The counterman nodded. Even when the Volvo had bolted and the shooting had followed he’d never wavered. He’d kept looking straight at me down the long twin barrels of the shotgun. “Bobby, you and Raymond go get the cars. Soon’s I kill this boy we’ll get after the nigger,” he said.

  Everyone was quiet as the two men walked down the highway. I could hear the hiss of the rain and the beat when it landed and the slower syncopated plop of the droplets that fell from the leaves and branches. The counterman stepped closer, so that the shotgun barrels were six inches from my face.

  “I figure both barrels at once will blow most of your head off completely,” he said.

  “Unless you miss,” I said.

  He giggled. “Miss,” he said and giggled some more. “You dumb fucker. How can I miss with a shotgun from six inches.” His shoulders shook with the giggle.

  “Come on, Warren,” one of the gunnies said.

  “Shoot him and let’s get after the nigger. Mr. Costigan’s gonna be pissed.”

  Warren nodded. “Okay, stand away less you want to get blood and brains all over you.”

  Then the smile vanished and his eyes narrowed slightly. He took in a slow breath, and while he was taking it in, his head jerked, a round red hole appeared in the middle of his forehead, and a gunshot sounded from the woods to the right. Warren staggered back a step and the shotgun sagged and then fell from his hands and he keeled over backward. Everything froze in that posture and I turned and plunged back into the woods. The rifle shots continued fast, at about the rate it would take to lever a shell into the chamber of a .34-.30 rifle.

  I headed for the place the shots were coming from, my gun out now, forcing through the wet woods as hard as I could go. Running in a crouch, with my left forearm bent in front of me to keep from being blinded by a branch. Gunfire from the road cut leaves and branches around me as I ran, but most of it seemed aimed at where the rifle fire came from.

  In front of me, Hawk said, “Spenser,” and I saw him standing behind a tree in a small clearing, feeding shells into the magazine of a Winchester. The gunfire from the road was nearly continuous. I scuttled on all fours across the clearing and behind Hawk’s tree. A bullet thudded into it at eye level.

  “Dumb to shoot so high,” Hawk said.

  The clearing was maybe thirty feet higher than the road, and below me I could see three bodies sprawled in the angular repose of death. The rest of the gunnies were crouched off the shoulder of the road opposite, firing toward us.

  “Road does almost a hairpin,” Hawk said. “Car’s about ten yards that way.” He jerked his head behind us. “With the motor running.”

  “Let’s get out of here before they bring the cars up,” I said.

  Hawk nodded. There was a cut under one eye, and blood ran in a neat trickle down his cheek, diffused pink by the rain before it dripped onto his shirt. He fired six shots down at the enemy as fast as he could work the lever on the Winchester. Then he dropped it behind the tree and we ran for the Volvo. They returned fire, but you tend to shoot high uphill and in five strides we were on the down side of the hill and the bullets hummed and whined harmlessly above us. We half slid, half scrambled the last ten yards as the muddy hill turned into a steep slick banking and then we were sprawling into the road beside the Volvo and, soaking and smeared with mud, we were in the Volvo and spinning rubber away from the hill with me driving. Fifty yards up the road, I jammed the car into a screeching U-turn and headed back down toward the bad guys with the accelerator pressed to the floor. We roared by them and the two cars, which had just pulled up, heading in the other direction and were around the next curve with only three more shots at the car. One shot went through the back window, the other two missed.

  I kept the accelerator hard down and drove a lot too fast for the wet curving road. The first crossroad I came to I turned right and at the next I turned left and, at a third I turned right again. There was no one behind us. I slowed to sixty.

  I looked at Hawk. He had a wad of cloth pressed against the cut on his cheek.

  “Glass?” I said.

  “Yeah, when the dude shot through the windshield.”

  “Counterman worked for Costigan,” I said.

  “Sort of a forward observer,” Hawk said.

  I nodded. “And they covered the way out once they knew we’d gone in. So
just in case the ambush didn’t work at the lodge…”

  “Thorough bastards,” Hawk said.

  “Be good to remember it,” I said. “There’s Band-Aids in the glove compartment.”

  CHAPTER 20

  WE WERE HEADING NORTH ON 410.

  “Anything in the house?” Hawk said.

  I shook my head.

  “We knew there wouldn’t be,” Hawk said.

  “Yeah.”

  Hawk reached the road atlas from the backseat and opened it in his lap. “We can pick up a major highway in Seattle and head east,” I said.

  “Shit,” Hawk said.

  “We knew she wouldn’t be there,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  Hawk was dripping on the road map. The rain came steady and the windshield wipers beat their metronomic half-circle swipes.

  Hawk had removed his jacket and thrown it on the backseat floor. But his shirt was wet and his jeans, like mine, were soaked through.

  “What route we looking for?” Hawk said.

  “Ninety,” I said. “Runs east all the way to Boston.”

  “We going home?”

  “I don’t know where we’re going.”

  “Might make sense to get dry, maybe get breakfast, sorta regroup.”

  “Soon,” I said. “Don’t want to show up too close to the lodge looking like a couple of guys spent the night in the woods.”

  “We get the other side of Seattle,” Hawk said, “we stop and change in the car.”

  I nodded. The wipers wiped. The wheels turned. The rain didn’t let up. In the parking lot of a Holiday Inn off Route 90 in Issaquah we got our extra clothes out of the trunk and changed awkwardly in the car, putting the wet clothes in a sodden heap in the trunk. Then we headed east again across the Cascade Mountains, through the unvarying rain.

  “Costigan has more money than Yoko Ono,” I said. “He and Susan could be anywhere in the world.”

  Hawk nodded.

  “We haven’t got a clue,” I said. Hawk nodded again.

  “If she tried to reach us she couldn’t,” I said. “She doesn’t know where we are either.” Hawk nodded.

  “We need help,” I said. “We need to get someplace where if she has a chance to reach us she can. We have to find a way to know what we’re doing. We should go home.”

  “Long ride,” Hawk said.

  “Spokane,” I said. “There’s an airport in Spokane. We’ll fly out of there. We’ll use Leo’s credit card and when we get to Boston we’ll hole up and get organized.”

  “You ever been to the Spokane airport?” Hawk said.

  “Yeah.”

  “They got food there?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Good. I ain’t had anything since breakfast yesterday except that goddamned. weasel food you bought.”

  “Weasels don’t eat granola,” I said. “Weasels are carnivores.”

  “So am I,” Hawk said. “And I don’t want to eat no more fucking seeds and dates.”

  “Nuts too,” I said. “Hazel nuts.”

  “Let Hazel worry ‘bout them,” Hawk said. “I’m getting me a mess of good boondock airport food.”

  “Probably get a meal on the plane too,” I said.

  “Lawzy me,” Hawk said, “I done died and gone to heaven.”

  “But,” I said, “you know what it’s like trying to get off the West Coast after noontime?”

  “No harm we stop by and ask,” Hawk said. “Maybe pick up some grub. I yearning for some stuff ain’t good for me, you know. Something with a lotta cholesterol, maybe too much salt. Some additives.”

  “Can always get that at an airport,” I said.

  “Good to be able to count on things,” Hawk said.

  When we got to Spokane Airport we bought four hamburgers and two coffees and ate them and sat all night in the Volvo. In the morning we went and washed up in the airport and had some more coffee and were first in line to board United Airlines 338 to Boston via Chicago.

  At six forty-nine that evening we stumbled off the plane at Logan Airport full of booze and airline food and feeling like the last day of Pompeü.

  “My car’s parked in the Central Garage,” I said.

  “And you think the cops ain’t spotted it?”

  “Yes,” I said, “and I also think that you can trust what the President says on television.”

  We took the shuttle bus to the airport subway station and took the subway into Park Street Station.

  “Got a friend,” Hawk said, “lives on Chestnut Street, on the flat of the Hill, near the river. She be glad to put us up.”

  We walked across the Common in the pleasant fall evening. Ahead of us a middle-aged man walked, holding hands with a middle-aged woman. She wore a plaid skirt and a tweed jacket with the collar turned up and a long maroon scarf hanging loose around her neck. We went through the little archway at the Charles and Beacon streets corner of the Common and walked along Charles to Chestnut. Halfway down the flat of Chestnut Street, with Beacon Hill rising in a dignified jumble behind us, we stopped and Hawk rang the bell at a glass door framed in white. There was no answer.

  “She a stewardess,” Hawk said. “She travel a lot.‘

  “Cabin attendant,” I said. “Have you no sensitivity to minority nomenclature, you dumb jigaboo?”

  Hawk grinned and rang the bell again. No answer. Beside the door was a small evergreen in a large pot. Hawk reached in among the dense lower branches and came out with a small plastic case. Hawk took a key from the case and opened the door.

  “Second floor,” Hawk said.

  We went up some stairs along the left wall. The stairs were walnut, the walls were raised panels painted white. The balcony was white too with elaborate turned risers: At the top Hawk took another key from the case and opened the apartment door. There was a living room that ran at right angles to the door and looked out onto Chestnut Street. Off the left wall was a kitchenette and beside it a door that opened into the bedroom. The living room walls were white. There was a pink couch, a gray Art Deco streamlined coffee table, two wing chairs, one pink, one gray. The brick fireplace had been painted white, and a Japanese fan served to screen the firebox. The fan was pink with a gray pattern.

  “Au courant,” I said.

  “Yeah. Yvonne trendy,” Hawk said.

  “She got a shower?” I said.

  Hawk nodded and walked to the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator.

  “She got ‘bout fifteen bottles of Steinlager beer, too, honey.”

  “Lawzy me,” I said. “I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

  “Done died,” Hawk said. “Ah done died and gone to heaven. Haven’t you ever watched any Mantan Moreland movies?”

  “Give me a beer,” I said. “I’ll drink it in the shower.”

  CHAPTER 21

  AT EIGHT FIFTEEN THE NEXT MORNING HAWK and I were eating fried egg sandwiches on whole wheat toast and drinking pot-brewed coffee in Yvonne’s sun-splashed living room.

  “No way to know what Susan knows,” I said. “She will assume I got her letter and came out to California. After that she may not know anything.”

  “She’ll know you won’t stop looking for her,” Hawk said.

  We were both naked, our clothes churning through Yvonne’s washer-dryer. A double treat for Yvonne if she came home suddenly.

  “Okay,” I said. “So she won’t expect me to be at home or at the office.”

  Hawk nodded.

  “So she’d try Paul,” I said.

  “She figure you’ll stay in touch with him.”

  “Yes. It’s a good time to call him. He’ll be asleep for sure. Once he’s up you can never get him.” I called Sarah Lawrence and got the switchboard and asked for Paul’s dorm. After eight rings a kid answered. I asked for Paul. The kid went away and I could hear him holler in the background. Then he came back and said, “He’s asleep.”

  “Wake him up,” I said. “It’s very important.”

  The kid said, “Ok
ay,” in a tone that implied nothing could be so important as to wake Paul Giacomin up at eight twenty-five in-the morning. There was more hollering and a long pause and then Paul said, “Hello,” in a voice thick with-sleep.

  I said, “Do you know who this is?”

  He said, “My God, yes.”

  I said, “Okay. Is it safe to talk?”

  “Sure. What’s happening?”

  “A lot. But first, have you heard from Susan?”

  “No. But Lieutenant Quirk wants you to call him.”

  “Quirk?”

  “Yes. He called me up and left a message I should call him, so I did and he says if I hear from you that you should call him.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m with Hawk at… what’s the street address?”

  Hawk told me and I relayed it to Paul. I also read him the number off the phone. “You and you alone are to know where I am. You understand. Except Susan, and her, only directly. No one calling for her, or anything. You understand?”

  “Sure. What’s going on?”

  I told him, as briefly as I could.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said when I was through.

  “That will wake you up in the morning, won’t it?”

  “Clears up the old sinuses,” he said. “Want me to come home?”

  “No,” I said. “There’s not enough room here as it is and if Yvonne shows… No, you stay put.”

  “You’ll get her back,” Paul said.

  “Yes,” I said. “We will.”

  “Kid’s okay?” Hawk said when I hung up.

  “Yes.” I said. “Quirk wants me to call him.”

  Hawk raised his eyebrows. “God damn,” he said. “Give you a chance to surrender?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “I doubt it too. But one thing about Quirk. He won’t cross your ass. He ask you to call him, he won’t have a trace on the line.”

  “I know.”

  The dryer clunked to a stop in the kitchenette and I went and got my clothes out and put them on still warm from the machine. Hawk dressed too.