A Catskill Eagle

by Robert B. Parker

  “Ah, Kurtz,” I said.

  Jerry swiveled slowly and stared at me. He saw, the gun before he saw who held it and he recognized the gun before he recognized me. But he did recognize me. The stages of surprise and slow recognition played on his face.

  Grace said, “Oh my God, Jerry…”

  Russell had an odd tight grin. His face looked shiny. He didn’t move or speak. Jerry stared at me. “Jerry,” Grace said, “Jerry, for heaven’s sake do something. What’s he want, Jerry?”

  Jerry stared at me for a moment then turned his head and looked at Russell.

  “You let him in,” Jerry said.

  Russell grinned at him. “Not me, Pop,” he said.

  “You Jew-loving little bastard,” Jerry said.

  “Jerry,” Grace said.

  Jerry kept looking at Russell.

  “You sick Jew-loving little bastard,” he said. His voice quivered slightly.

  Grace said, “Jerry,” again, louder.

  Costigan looked back at me. “Fuck it,” he said, “get it done.”

  I shot him. A hole appeared in his forehead and the impact spun his swivel chair half around. He fell sideways and lolled out of the chair draped over one of the black leather arms. Neither Russell nor Grace moved. I stepped around the desk and shot Jerry again, behind the ear, to be sure. Then I turned toward his widow and orphan.

  Russell still had the fixed shiny grin. His arms were still folded across his chest, he still leaned against the wall. In the acrid silence I could hear his breathing, shallow and fast. There seemed to be spots of color on his cheekbones. Grace’s face was squinched up like a withered apple, a trace of saliva was at one corner of her mouth, and her entire posture seemed to have bunched up like a fist.

  “Don’t you touch me,” she said. Her voice had a raspy sound to it. “Don’t you dare touch me. Don’t you dare come near me,” she said.

  “We’ll go out together,” I said. “We three. If I get out you get out. Otherwise you’re dead.”

  “You better not touch me,” Grace said.

  Russell said, “No. I’m not going.” His voice was tinny.

  “I shot him,” I said, “I’ll shoot her. We’re going out together.”

  Russell shook his head. “You’re on your own now, Superman.”

  “Rusty,” Grace rasped. Her voice was electric. “You do what he says.”

  “Like hell, Ma,” Russell said. “He won’t shoot me.”

  “And your mother, do you care about your mother,” she said.

  The spots of color on Russell’s cheeks deepened and enlarged as if a fever had begun to spread. “Ma,” he said.

  She clapped her hands together once, sharply. “Rusty Costigan, you listen to me. You still belong to me. And now that Dad’s dead, you’re all I have. You do what he says. Don’t you let him hurt me.”

  The rasp in her voice came and went, replaced at odd moments by a lisping little girl sound full of lateral L’s and infancy. Russell’s breathing was even shallower. His face was fully flushed now.

  “Move it,” I said.

  Grace stood and took Russell’s arm, and turned him toward the door.

  “I know you want to sit in that chair,” I said to Russell. “But unless we walk right out of this mine without any sweat,” I said, “I promise to kill you both.”

  “You just don’t touch me,” Grace said. She had her hand firmly clamped on to her son’s upper arm. “You just behave,” she said.

  The secretary was still sprawled on the desk in the outer office. I slid the .357 back in under my arm as we went into the corridor.

  “So much as look funny at this guard,” I said, “and everybody’s dead.”

  Grace squeezed her hand on her son’s arm and pushed her shoulder against him.

  “We’ll go straight to my room,” she “There’s a way out that way.”

  As we approached the guard I said to Russell, “You catch the Cubs on cable? How ‘bout that Sandberg?”

  Grace said to the guard, “How is your family, Ralph?”

  He smiled and nodded, “Fine, Mrs. Costigan.”

  “That’s nice,” Grace said.

  I nodded as if Russell had spoken. “Still, I think it’s probably Bobby Dernier that makes them go, you know?”

  Out of earshot, down the tunnel, Grace said, “You saw what your father did, your father died for me, died to keep this man from hurting me. Now it’s up to you. You do exactly what this man says. You do it just like your father would. You do what I say.”

  “Just like my father would,” Russell said.

  We both knew that wasn’t why his father died. When we came to the second guard we went through the same rigamarole. This time Russell said yes he had seen the Cubs on cable.

  Then we were in her apartment. I took my gun out.

  “Back here,” Grace said. “In the back of my closet. Don’t look, I haven’t had a chance to pick up today.”

  There was a way to light the tunnel from the inside, and Russell knew it. What had seemed like a Dante-esque descent in the darkness became a few hundred yards of banal corridor in the fluorescent brightness. Outside on the grassy hillside under the high stars the journey underground seemed an eternity that happened long ago.

  Grace said, “There, we did just what you said.” She held Russell’s arm. “Rusty and I helped you escape.”

  I nodded. I was looking at Russell. He looked back, the stiffness in his face clear in the bright harvest moon. He stared back at me. Our eyes held. He seemed to be waiting. I did too. Neither of us knew quite what we were waiting for.

  “You have to let us go,” Grace said. “You said that if we helped you you wouldn’t hurt me. That’s what you said.”

  Russell and I looked at each other some more. I could smell the grass as the minimal night wind moved over it.

  “That’s what you said,” Grace said. “Rusty. He said that.”

  “Go ahead, Ma,” Russell said without moving his eyes. “He won’t stop you.”

  “Alone?” she said. “Out here? In the dark? I can’t go alone. You have to take me.”

  The smell of the grass was released by the dew that had gathered on it while I was underground. It was the smell of spring mornings when I was small. I nodded slowly.

  “Good-bye,” I said and turned and walked away.

  “Spenser,” Russell said.

  I turned. He had a gun, a short automatic.

  Grace said, “Rusty, you put that down.”

  I still held my own gun. We stood ten feet apart. “What would she say if you killed me?” Russell said.

  Grace said, “Rusty.”

  “I won’t kill you,” I said.

  “She make you promise?” Russell said.

  “I promised,” I said.

  “Stop it,” Grace said. “You stop it right now. Rusty?”

  “I didn’t,” he said.

  I put the .357 back under my arm. “She needs both of us alive, so she can make the choice,” I said. “Unless she can choose she’s lost.”

  Grace clapped her hands sharply, the way you do at a puppy. “Russell Costigan,” she said. Russell held the gun in front of him at arm’s length and aimed over the barrel at me. Grace stood about five feet away, rocking slightly with her hands clutched over the back of her head. Russell moved the gun back and forth in a small arc.

  “She chose already,” he said, moving his head very slightly to continue to sight over the moving gun barrel. “She told me in Mill River that she was going back to you.”

  The gun was a Beretta, nine millimeter.

  “She said she loved me, but she loved you more,” Russell said. The tinniness was gone from his voice. “She said the shrink had helped her, and that you had changed some.”

  Peripherally I could see Grace stop rocking and stand motionless with her hands still on her head. “I couldn’t let her leave,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “I got some of my old man’s people and had them watc
h her,” he said.

  “Your father was opposed,” Grace said. She dropped her hands. “He wanted to let you work this out yourself. But I said, Jerry, he’s our son. If you love me you’ll do it.”‘

  The gun moved still in its small arc.

  “They didn’t really prevent her,” he said. “But she was so fucked up…”

  “Rusty.”

  “… that she couldn’t oppose me alone. So she called the black guy. And we had a tap on the phone.” Russell shrugged. “And it got out of hand.”

  “Hawk’s sort of quick,” I said. Russell nodded.

  “I wanted to get her away from you, and I wanted to get her away from the shrink.”

  “She needs the shrink,” I said.

  Russell nodded again. “I know,” he said. “She needs you too.”

  The gun stopped moving and held motionless on me. “I love her,” he said. “As much as you do.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And she’s destroyed you,” Grace said. “She took you for all she could get and then wants to go back to this man who killed my Jerry.”

  “If I kill you she’ll never forgive me,” he said.

  “This man killed my Jerry,” Grace said. “You don’t have to be forgiven.”

  “But I’ve lost her anyway,” Russell said, looking at me over the gun.

  “There are plenty of girls, Rusty,” Grace said. “A boy with your looks and money. Come on.” He turned his head toward his mother slowly, and the gun followed, arm still outstretched, until it pointed at her. Grace opened her mouth and no sound came out. No one moved for maybe ten seconds. Then Russell dropped his arm to his side and walked away into the dark with the gun hanging at his side. Grace and I watched him silently for a moment and then Grace rushed after him.

  “Rusty,” she shrieked. “Wait for your mother.”

  I walked back to town and got to the hotel at sunrise.

  CHAPTER 54

  IT WAS SUNDAY AFTERNOON AND SNOWING gently in Boston. there was an applewood fire going in the fireplace, and bread baking in the oven, and my apartment smelled like Plimoth Plantation. On television the Redskins were pasting the Giants. I stood at the front window and looked down at Marlborough Street as the snow began to accumulate. A brown and white taxicab pulled in off Arlington Street and parked and Susan got out and paid the driver and walked toward the front door carrying a lavender garment bag and a dark blue suitcase. I buzzed her in and in a minute she was at my door. I opened it and took her suitcase and put it on the floor behind the couch. She put the garment bag carefully over the back of the couch and turned and smiled at me.

  “This is the way my grandmother’s house was supposed to smell,” she said.

  “But it didn’t,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “It smelled mostly of mothballs.”

  “So I don’t remind you of your grandmother,” I said.

  Susan came and put her arms around me and put her head against my chest.

  “You don’t remind me of anyone,” she said. “I’ve never met anyone even a little like you.”

  I held her lightly against me. “How’s your mental health?” I said.

  “I’m all right,” she said. “Nobody’s a hundred percent. But I’m in the high nineties.”

  “You through seeing Dr. Hilliard?”

  “Yes, at least for now. Maybe forever.”

  “And we don’t have to get the children off the streets?” I said.

  She shook her head against my chest. “I may get occasionally restless,” she said, “during the time of full moon, but I don’t think I’m a danger to anyone.”

  “Russell?” I said.

  “I saw him once, right after Boise. He came to my condo in Mill River and we said good-bye. And he left, and I haven’t seen him or heard from him.”

  “He going to run the family business?” I said.

  “I hope not,” Susan said.

  “Maybe he’ll go back to his wife,” I said. “He has before.”

  “I hope he does. I hope he doesn’t destroy himself. His life has been…” She shook her head again. “I don’t want to talk about that relationship anymore.”

  “Okay,” I said. “How about this one? How are we doing?”

  “We are doing very well,” she said. She raised her face and I kissed her. When we stopped kissing she said, with her face still very close to mine, “Are you okay? Is anyone going to arrest you?”

  “Not for Mill River,” I said. Our lips brushed lightly as we spoke. “Ives actually fixed it.” Behind me on the television Dick Stockton described John Riggins running twenty yards for a score.

  Susan kissed me again. It was not a sisterly kiss.

  “I have flown six hours,” she murmured with her mouth against mine. “I need to take a bath, fluff up my body a little.”

  “Un huh.”

  “And then maybe we might make love,” she murmured.

  “Un huh.”

  “And drink champagne.”

  “Un huh.”

  “And make love again.”

  “I take it we are together again,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Forever?” I said.

  “Yes,” Susan said. “Forever.”

  “Go run your bath,” I said.

  CHAPTER 55

  IT WAS EVENING AND THE SNOW HAD STOPPED. The bread was cooling on a rack in the kitchen and my fire continued to warm the apartment. Susan and I lay naked in bed together drinking Domaine Chandon Blanc de Noirs from narrow fluted glasses and holding hands.

  “How did you know I’d have champagne handy?” I said.

  “You would be prepared,” she said.

  The bedroom door was open to the living room. I held the champagne glass away from me and looked at the pink amber tone of it in the diffuse light of the fire.

  “Hawk sent us a case of this stuff,” I said. “It’s good, isn’t it.”

  “Lovely,” Susan said. “You have some new scars.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “New physical scars,” Susan said. “Here.” She traced the healed bullet wounds in my chest.

  “A young woman shot me,” I said, “last year.”

  “And you never told me?”

  “No need,” I said.

  “Was it bad?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Almost killed me.”

  Susan put her head against my shoulder. Her glass was empty. I reached the champagne bottle from the floor beside the bed and poured more. It had to be done carefully and a little at a time to keep it from bubbling over. Susan watched.

  “It’s like us,” she said.

  “The champagne?”

  “You have to pour it so carefully. It’s like our lovemaking. Careful, gentle, delicate, being careful not to spill over.”

  I nodded. “It’s sort of like the first time.”

  “It is the first time,” Susan said. “These two people, the people we are now, have never made love before.”

  “But will again,” I said.

  Susan smiled. “Practice makes perfect,” she said.

  We drank.

  “Or nearly perfect,” I said.

  “Hell,” Susan said, “we’re that now.”