Russell Costigan picked me up in a Jensen-Healey convertible with the top down. He had on a silver racing jacket and backless pigskin driving gloves and Porsche sunglasses. His longish hair was disarranged by the wind and I could see that he was balding. I was pleased.
“You pumped up?” he said. I didn’t say anything.
“You wonder why I’m doing this?” he said.
“No.”
He grinned. The, grin was wolfish, like a carnivore curling back its lips. “The hell you don’t,” he said.
We were heading north out of Boise, but on a different road. It was a little late in the year for a convertible and the air was cold. I sat and looked at Costigan, feeling tightness in the muscles along my spine and across my shoulders. Costigan glanced at me as he drove. He looked back at the road and then glanced again and then back at the road. He nodded his head slowly.
“Yeah,” he said, “I know. I know the feeling. You want to kill me. But you don’t. You hate my ass, but there’s this connection. Right? There’s this special connection.”
I nodded without speaking.
Russell drove with one hand on the wheel and one arm resting on the door. But there was nothing relaxed about him. He was all sharp edge and strung wire.
“Think you could kill me?” he said. He glanced at me, shifting his eyes more than his head. “You think you could?”
“Anybody can kill anybody,” I said.
He nodded to himself. “What’s she say about me,” he said.
I didn’t answer. He shook his head. “You’re right,” he said. “Question was out of line.” He shook his head again. “Bush,” he said. He tapped the door where his arm rested with his fingertips, as if he were listening to music I couldn’t hear.
We were quiet for maybe ten minutes until Russell pulled the Healey, too fast, into a left turn, tires squealing, and onto a dirt road that headed west through the grasslands. We followed that, too fast, so that the Healey bumped and rocked like a jackass, for nearly a mile. Behind a low hill, Russell slowed up, braked, and parked.
“We walk a ways,” he said.
He got out and started around the hill. I followed him. It was late afternoon, and the sun low in my face as we rounded the hill told me that we were heading west. There were small blue flowers on the grassland. Hills rolled away to the west, getting slightly higher in the distance as they mounted toward the Rockies. Russell was wearing lizard-skin cowboy boots, and the high heels made him pitch slightly side to side as he walked. They also made him about my height.
We went down the modest slope of the hill we’d parked behind, and up the modest slope of the next hill. At the top we looked down into a somewhat deeper valley. The valley wall across was scarred with rock outcroppings, and there was some scrub growth in among the rocks. We went down into that valley and maybe five yards up the opposite slope.
Russell paused by a jut of ledge and took a pack of Lucky Strikes from his shirt and lit one with a butane lighter, not the cheap disposable kind, but one in gold and pigskin. Or maybe that was the kind of disposable lighter people in Russell’s tax bracket bought. He dragged a big lungful of smoke in and let it out slowly in a thin stream through puffed lips. The smell of cigarette smoke was strong in the empty landscape.
“How’d you know I wouldn’t have ten guys waiting with guns,” Russell said.
“I didn’t.”
“You must have thought of that,” Russell said.
“She said you wouldn’t.”
“And if she was wrong?”
“Maybe ten of your friends get hurt,” I said.
Russell grinned his wolfish grin again. “When my old man built this place,” he said, “he didn’t trust anybody. The place is impregnable, but he didn’t take chances. He had a private escape route built.”
He took another deep suck on the cigarette. It was a short one, no filter. He held the smoke in for a long moment and let it dribble out as he talked.
“Family only. Nobody else. Just me and the old lady and him.”
He dropped the cigarette onto the ground and rubbed it out with the toe of his right boot. “And I’m going to show it to you,” he said.
“And?”
“And then stand around and see what happens,” he said.
“Fun?” I said.
“Fun,” he said. “Help me move this rock.” We leaned our weight against a narrow piece of rock that jutted up out of the grass. It gave grudgingly, then easily, and a big outcropping behind us moved forward away from the valley wall. Russell grinned and bowed toward me and made a flourishing gesture like a maitre d‘ ushering in a baron. There was a dark opening behind the ledge. “Voila,” Russell said.
I walked to the opening. Russell said, “Spenser.”
I turned and looked at him.
“I’ve loved her since I’ve been with her,” he said. “And I still love her.”
“That’s the special connection,” I said. “I do too.”
Then I went into the dark tunnel and heard the hydraulic sound of the ledge closing behind me.
CHAPTER 52
IT WAS DARKER WHERE I WAS THAN INSIDE OF A dragon, and achingly silent. Where the hell is Reddy Kilowatt when you really need him. I would have traded some of my armament for a flashlight, but there seemed no interest in the trade so I began to feel along the walls, easing one foot ahead of the other carefully, the way you do going down strange stairs in the dark. If I had much distance to cover, at this pace, I’d have plenty of time to plan my strategy. So far the ploy I had devised had me feeling my way along in the dark until something happened. Then I’d react to what happened. It wasn’t a hell of a plan, but it had the advantage of being familiar. Life its own self… I thought.
I moved along, one sliding foot at a time, carefully. I kept waiting for my eyes to get used to the dark. But of course they didn’t. They don’t in total dark. They adjust to dimness but black is black is black. I reached out with my left hand. I couldn’t touch the other wall. I reached up. I could touch the ceiling. I ran my hand along the ceiling and down the wall. I felt no corner. The tunnel was probably a tube. The walls felt like corrugated steel. Probably seven feet around. The floor was flat. I squatted and touched it. Probably concrete. Poured in the tubes after they’d been laid, and leveled, enough to make a flat footing. I straightened up and felt along farther. Nothing was certain. Without sight to confirm what I felt I wasn’t sure of my sense of touch. I paused again and listened. Only my breathing. I sniffed. No scent. The temperature was neutral, neither hot nor cold. There was neither dampness nor a sense of dry. I moved on, sliding one foot at a time out ahead of me, feeling for the possibility that a cavern measureless to man might open beneath me and I would plummet down to a sunless sea. Probably not many sunless seas in Idaho, probably not even that many caverns measureless to man. If this were in fact the family escape hatch there was no reason to doubt its safety. I continued to inch along. I couldn’t guarantee that it was the family escape hatch. But if it wasn’t what the hell was it. It was obviously built. It was not, obviously, a mine shaft. It seemed to have no function beyond running from the inside to the outside. Or, vice versa. My foot hit the edge of a drop. I stopped, pulled back. Stairs? Bottomless pit? I guessed stairs. I dropped on my stomach and inched forward. A guy paranoid enough to build this underground fortress, and then a private escape hatch, was paranoid enough to booby trap it coming in. I dropped my hands over the edge and felt. A stair. I reached farther. Another stair. I stood and felt along the wall and stepped one step down. There was a railing. I hung on to it. A railing. Life was good. I held the railing with both hands and took another step. And another. Joy is relative. Right now the railing was better than sex and almost as good as love. I went a third step and a fourth. And each time there was a stair. I relaxed a little. I let go of the railing with my left hand and held it only with my right and went down the stairs carefully, bumping my heel against each riser as I stepped, feeling each stair as I went down,
holding firmly to the railing with my right hand, but descending upright, like a man, or at least like a primate, resisting the temptation to descend backward, hands and feet. There were thirty stairs down and the floor leveled. I went forward, still feeling, but moving with new confidence. There was still no sense data but feel. I was moving encapsulated in myself and wrapped in the dark neutral stillness. Un-oriented. The world of light and sound and smell and color was above and behind. The world where Susan was seemed last year’s world, and distant. This was the world now. I moved through it like some of those cave creatures who live blind in the earth’s innards. Following the endless tube down and forward and down again and forward again deeper and deeper into the belly of the beast. Would I have to cross a river? Would there be a dog with several heads? Was I getting goofy? I thought about Susan, about her odd stillness and her deep interiority and her steadiness and pain. I thought about her strength and how good she looked with her clothes off, and the intellect and compassion in her face. I thought about forever and how we were forever. Forever. In my black, silent, senseless progress forever was like a clear beacon and I thought about it again. Forever. It was a fact. The fact. Susan and I were forever. What that meant, what it implied, what it required, were a way down the road yet, but the fact existed, changeless as eternity. We’d get down that road just as soon as I killed a guy at the bottom of the world. And got back up. More stairs. Down slowly. Hand on the railing, feeling with my foot, tapping the riser with my heel. Silent as a salamander, breathing softly, ammunition taped to my belly. Level off again. Slide along the wall. My eyes wide, searching, sightless. The habits of a lifetime. Useless in the absoluteness of the dark. Forever. I smelled hair spray.
Hair spray?
I smelled hair spray. My time in the labyrinth had sharpened my senses. I smelled the chemical banana smell of hair spray and then I realized that the darkness was no longer absolute. That I couldn’t quite see anything but looking was less hopeless. Then there was light. I saw a thin pinstripe of light at floor level. I inched to it. No hurry. Don’t gain anything by being sudden at the end. There was no moat. No monsters, not at least on my side of the door. I reached it and touched it. The line from beneath it seemed all one would ever need, after my time in the tunnel. I ran my hand slowly over the surface. It was smooth and metallic. Like a fire door. With a knob. I pressed my ear against the door and listened. I could hear a quiet hum, the kind a refrigerator makes, or a dishwasher on dry cycle. Maybe also a sound of voice or music, too faint, but there was something besides the quiet hum. I touched the .357 in its shoulder holster and changed my mind and left it there, under my arm, inside my jacket. No one expected an intruder. If I went in quietly they might not notice. Or they might. In which case I could then take out the gun. I took hold of the knob and turned it. The door opened and I stepped through the looking glass.
CHAPTER 53
I WAS IN A CLOTHES CLOSET. THE DOOR WHEN I stepped through it was a full-length mirror on the other side. I felt along the edge and found the latch and felt along the jamb where the door fitted and found the release. I closed the door and it fit smoothly against the wall and looked simply like a full-length mirror. The smell of hair spray was stronger. I tried the catch and the door released smoothly. I shut it again. If I had to go out that way hurriedly I needed to know how the door opened. I tried it again. It worked. I closed it again and moved toward the front of the closet. It was a big one, a deep walk-in with women’s clothes hanging along both sides. It was the clothes that gave off the scent of hair spray. The front of the closet was a louvered door. I listened through it. The hum was still there. The sound I’d heard below the hum was a television set. I listened for movement, breathing, sound. The television was tuned to a game show. But the sounds of a game show are not human sounds.
There was no movement outside the closet. I opened the door. I was in a bedroom. A woman’s bedroom, obviously. There were two twin beds in there. One was neatly made, in fact immaculately made. Hospital corners, bounce a quarter on the taut gray blanket. The other was unmade, a huge aqua-colored puff was turned back in a sloppy triangle, aqua flowered sheets were rumpled and a pillow with an aqua slip was rumpled and stained with mascara and lipstick. A stiffly ribbed girdle complete with garters was draped over the foot of the bed and a pair of stockings, not panty hose, but stockings that went with garters, was bunched on the floor. The floor was carpeted in lavender. Nice, I thought. Nice with the aqua. There was a heavy mahogany bureau with curving drawers. The top was covered with makeup and perfume bottles and big rollers and several prescription drug containers, the amber kind with the childproof caps that only strong men can open. There was a television set on a stand next to the bureau, but it was silent. The game show came from the next room. Above the bureau was a mahogany-framed mirror and on walls to either side of the beds were portraits of big-eyed children. On the left wall a door opened into a bathroom. There was no one in the bathroom. I stepped to the bathroom door. It was ajar. Two nightgowns, one pink, one yellow, hung from a hook on the back of the door.
It had to be Jerry and Grace Costigan’s bedroom. But except for the scrupulously made bed there was no sign of Jerry. Unless I read it wrong and Jerry was sleeping on the aqua sheets in the unmade bed. And wearing a corset and stockings. I edged my head around the door and looked into the next room. It was empty. The television was tuned loudly to a soap opera. If a soap opera plays in an empty room, does it make a sound? I moved across the room full of wing chairs and overstuffed couches and out through the far door and left the slow-phrased agony of the soap behind me. The room I entered was the living room, leather furniture, Oriental rugs, brass, walnut, and, like all the subterranean rooms, low-domed. To the right an archway into the dining room, to the left a solid metal door. I went for the metal door and was out in a domed, bright corridor. It probably looked just like the dark one I’d felt my way through to get here, except it was lit. Ahead the tunnel widened enough for a desk to be set up. On the desk was a telephone and a looseleaf notebook in a blue leather binder. Behind the desk, facing away from me, was a big dark-haired guy in a white short-sleeved shirt with a shoulder holster on. The family receptionist. As I walked toward him he turned and stared at me.
“I came in last night,” I said. “With Russell.” The gun in the shoulder holster was a Browning .45 automatic.
“Nobody told me,” the guard said.
I shrugged. “You know Russell,” I said.
The guard made a small half laugh and nodded. “Everybody does,” he said.
I grinned. “Jerry wants to see me,” I said. “Which way?”
“Probably in the office,” the guard said. “Second door, down the tunnel, speak to the guard.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Place is a real maze, isn’t it.”
“First visit?”
“Yeah.”
“Takes a while,” the guard said. “You’ll get used to it.”
I made a friendly salute, put my hands in my hip pockets so he wouldn’t see the blackjack sticking out, and sauntered on down the tunnel. Periodically there were the blank steel doors cut into the steel tube. I opened the second one, into another tunnel, and headed on down. Out of sight of the guard I tucked the blackjack into my belt, under the T-shirt, and zipped the jacket halfway up so the bulge wouldn’t show.
The corridor was long and straight with a dwindling perspective. There were doors punctuating it too. As I walked along, looking like a friendly visitor, I figured that the layout must be a series of chambers connected by tunnels. Always the low hum of the life-support machinery made a quiet white sound, which probably no one heard once they’d been in here a day or so. Ahead was a crossway where two tunnels intersected. In the widened area was another guard. He had on a work shirt and cords. His gun was a big Colt magnum in a western-style holster.
“I’m staying with Russell,” I said. “And Jerry wants me to come to the office.”
“Yes, sir,” the guard said. “You k
now the way?”
“No, Russell and I just came in last night. I haven’t got a clue.”
The guard smiled. “It’s confusing at first,” he said. “Jerry’s down this tunnel. Third door on the right.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“No problem,” the guard said.
Three doors down, about a hundred yards, walking casually maybe a minute. I wasn’t getting enough oxygen. I was having trouble swallowing. Probably because there was no saliva to swallow. My mouth tasted like an old penny. Do or die. Do and die. Don’t and die. Swell options. I flexed my hands. Above ground Susan.
I clamped my jaw a little tighter. The muscles ached. I came to the third door and opened it and walked in. There was a woman. A middle-aged secretary at a desk. Christ, she was my age. Blue framed harlequin-shaped glasses hung on a gold chain around her neck. She looked friendly and firm, like someone in a coffee commercial.
She said, “May I help you?”
I said, “Yes, is Jerry in?”
“His family is with him,” she said warmly. “Perhaps you can wait.”
“Sure,” I said. “Actually he wanted me to show you something.”
I walked to the desk and held my clenched left fist out in front of me, low near the desk top. “Watch,” I said, “when I open my hand.”
She smiled and looked down. I took the sap out from under my shirt with my right hand and hit her low on the back of her head. She sprawled forward onto the desk and was still. I put the sap in my back pocket and took out my gun and went past her to the inner office door and opened it and stepped in. Jerry was there at his desk with his feet up smoking a thin good-looking cigar. Grace sat in a leather chair near the wall and Russell leaned on the same wall next to her, his arms folded.
A Catskill Eagle Page 22