StoneDust

by Justin Scott

  “Then everybody got mangled in the recession. But we survived. Sure, some people disappeared, but we brought in Rick and Georgia and they’re full of life. And you came home. It’s getting good again, except for poor Reg. Christ, I don’t know. It makes you feel old, sometimes. But we’ve survived. And we’ve got new things cooking. And if you’ll sell that turkey over on Mine Hill Road, life’ll be good. Is that too much to ask?”

  “Suppose not.”

  “Ben, do you believe I didn’t screw Rick Bowland?”

  “If you say so.”

  “Would you care if I did?”

  “I’d figure it was none of my business…Although I would wonder if you did it in the upstairs guest room.”

  “I never went upstairs. Would it make you more or less inclined to sleep with me if I screwed Rick?”

  “None of your business.”

  ***

  I went home. No messages. I telephoned Ramos’s Bar. The bartender recognized my voice and passed the phone when I asked, “May I speak with the president, please?”

  Before I could ask about Spider, she said, “The troopers tapped this phone, again.”

  I hung up before they could trace me.

  My basil hadn’t recovered, so I boiled some mushroom tortellini, drenched it in oil and garlic, and ate it. The night had turned hot. A dense mugginess had arrived from the south, shoving out the cool, dry air the Canadian high had blessed us with.

  The porch was thick. I gathered my lists and retreated to my library. Deep in the oldest part of the house, the stone chimney exudes a coolness on the worst day. I spread out on the reading table and crossed off Bill and Sherry.

  I was down to Duane and Michelle and Ted and Susan as my only suspects who’d been with Reg in the kitchen. I felt I was closing in. Except for one problem. Motive.

  Pondering that imponderable, I turned again to Reg’s telephone bill and studied it closely. Twice I dialed numbers that intrigued me. Neither was answered by the dinner date who’d stood him up at Brassée.

  The library was the quietest room in the house, insulated from the street sounds. I thought I heard a door. I listened. A board creaked in the hall.

  “In here, Spider.”

  Chapter 28

  “Mind your step,” I cautioned, indicating the warped saddle where he might trip and break his neck just when I needed him.

  Spider was the size I remembered from our last meeting, wide and square. He looked a little shorter now that he wasn’t standing over me kicking. But the .44 Ruger Redhawk he had tucked against his hip probably made him feel taller. I recognized the gun because Reg and Duane had bought them for their elk hunts—a powerful, big-bore “stopper” in the event they blundered into an angry grizzly. “Five shots for the bear,” Reg used to say. “The sixth for me.”

  “I see you got my message.”

  “You crazy, man?” I remembered his voice too, the quick- burst delivery in the melting-pot accent of a Brooklyn street corner.

  “Who killed Little John?”

  “You.”

  “Get off it. Why the hell would I send word for you if I killed your buddy?”

  “Tryin’ to kill me too.”

  “Spider, you’re holding the gun.”

  “Believe I’m holdin’ the gun.”

  “If you’re here for revenge, you got the wrong guy. I’m as confused as you are. What do you say we trade notes?”

  “Say what?”

  “I want to know who shot him. That’s why I sent for you.”

  “Why?”

  “Was it a gang thing?”

  “No way.”

  “What do you mean, ‘No way’?—Come in, come in. Sit down. Take the wing chair.”

  Puzzlement clouded Spider’s face. He rubbed a knuckle on his tears tattoo.

  I pointed. “That’s a wing chair.”

  He eased into it, the gun tracking me like a radar-guided cannon.

  “What do you mean, ‘No way’? The Popes would have banged him first chance they got.”

  “Popes wouldn’ta got so close. ’Sides, Popes woulda pulled a drive-by. Little John bought a head shot.” (Exactly the point I had argued with Sergeant Bender.)

  “Someone he trusted?”

  “Only guy he trusted was me. And I didn’t do it.”

  “Why would he trust me? Think, Spider. Who else did he trust?”

  Spider thought long and hard. Slowly, like a rainy dawn, his face brightened. “Shit!”

  “What?”

  “The rich bitch,” he said with sudden conviction.

  “What rich bitch?”

  “She shot Little John. It weren’t you and it weren’t the Popes, the rich bitch did him.”

  “Who?”

  “Little John’s woman.”

  “What’s her name?”

  Spider shrugged.

  This was a woman I wanted to meet. “Listen, Spider, so you don’t waste the trip, maybe I can slip you a couple of bucks to fill me in on the rich bitch.”

  Spider got a crafty look in his eyes that I didn’t particularly like. Street guys are like hungry lions. If they can’t catch a wildebeest, woe to the wart hog they stumble upon.

  “Gimme the watch.”

  “Watch?” I echoed blankly.

  “Hell with your coupla bucks, gimme the watch.”

  “What watch?”

  He waved the Ruger. “Other night you said you had a fifteen-thousand-dollar watch.”

  “Come on, I’m not giving you my watch.”

  “I’m takin’ your watch.” He jumped up. “Let’s go, man. Where is it?”

  “I was trying to distract you. There was no watch.”

  Spider cocked the revolver. “There better be a watch.”

  “Okay. There’s a watch. In the attic. You want me to run up and get it?”

  He backed through the door, beckoning with the gun. I obeyed and led him down the hall to the front of the house and up the stairs. I showed him the narrow door next to the guest bathroom that opened on the attic stairs, opened it on his orders, turned on the light, and headed up into the heat trapped under the roof.

  Spider trailed. Once he got too close and I could have kicked his gun hand. But I might have missed. We stood on the dusty boards. I pointed to a long row of zippered clothes-storage bags hanging from a pipe nailed across the rafters.

  “In there, in a suit.”

  The attic contained things my grandparents had no use for, like wooden golf clubs and tennis racquets, and relics of my own past, mothballed in the unlikely event a change in career ever coincided with a return to ’Eighties fashion. In the even more unlikely event the military ever needed me again, I still had my uniforms.

  I reached for the Wall Street bag.

  “Hold it!” He slammed the heavy gun hard against my shoulder. It hurt a lot. He raised it high, threatening to hit me again, savoring the power it gave him. At that point we both realized that when he found the watch, he would celebrate a successful evening by pistol-whipping bone fragments out of my skull.

  I’d made a mistake luring him here in the first place. Out of his world too long, I’d forgotten that their biggest high was the thrill of total control. Ultimately my watch would be a souvenir of that wonderful time he’d killed a guy in his attic. Until he fenced it.

  Eyes and gun on me, Spider felt for the zipper and unzipped the bag.

  “Dark blue suit,” I said. “Right-hand pocket.”

  Spider fumbled around. He had to look away to see blue. I got one of my hands out of sight and worked open the uniform bag and felt inside.

  “I don’t see no watch. What are—Wait. Wait. What do we have here?” He drew it out by the strap and raised it lovingly to the light. “Whoa.” He held it to his ear.

  “Move it around, it’s self-winding. Yeah, that’s right, just shake it a little.”

  Spider spun the watch. When he saw the second hand moving
, he actually smiled, a smile that faded when he heard the slaaaannnt of steel.

  He whirled, still holding the watch, swinging the big Ruger to bear. What he saw made him laugh. I had whipped my dress saber from its scabbard and had assumed a guard posture that must have looked very silly to a man with a gun.

  As I’ve mentioned, had the small-arms instructors had their way, I’d never have graduated Annapolis. Fortunately, the fencing master put in a kind word. Not that I was his star pupil—I never would have made the team if mono hadn’t felled several upperclassmen—but he was proud of the jump lunge we’d developed to compensate for my abysmal defense. My teammates had dubbed it the hari kari parry, as it was often as deadly to me as to my opponent, but it sure covered ground.

  Spider was still laughing when I skewered his wrist.

  He wanted to pull the trigger. But his fingers were opening even as he fought to keep the heavy gun from falling. It thunked to the floor at the same instant he felt the pain. He screamed, yanked his arm. Blood flew. The blade emerged, red.

  Yelling, he stumbled around, holding his wrist, reaching for the gun.

  I advanced, pointing the tip at his eye. He backed away.

  “What you do that for?” he screamed.

  “A kick in the head. Busted-up face. And torn ear. You got a problem with that?”

  “A sword?” he moaned. Next he would complain, “No fair.”

  I picked up his gun, made sure I at least looked like I knew how to shoot it, and backed away. “Okay, Spider. Who shot Little John?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Spider. I count six shots in this thing. I’ll use six to kill you.”

  He looked up with contempt. “You don’t have the balls.”

  I raked him with a Leavenworth Look. It lacked impact. He had me. There was no way I could shoot him unless he threatened me and he knew it. I felt like an honest cop faced with a career criminal flaunting his civil rights. What are you going to do but book him and see him in court?

  As he looked to steal another advantage, his eye lighted on my watch, which lay on the floor where he’d dropped it when I cut him. He raised a dirty Adidas high, dared me to shoot, and stomped down hard. The point he was attempting to make about my inability to shoot him was valid—the survival genie didn’t really care what time it was. But why Spider assumed I wouldn’t use the saber was beyond me.

  “Ahhh!” He fell backward, hit the floor with a crash that shook the house, and grabbed his calf. I retrieved my watch. The little moon face flashed a grateful smile.

  “On your belly, Spider. Roll over.” I waved the gun and prodded him with the blade. “Hands behind your back. Close your eyes. Close ’em.” I grabbed a wire coathanger, untwisted it, and knelt with a knee in the small of his back. It wasn’t easy wrapping his wrists while holding the gun, but I managed.

  “On your feet.”

  He stood up, a trifle less cocky, favoring his wounded leg. Two cuts in quick succession had left him white-faced. And the wire was an unpleasant touch.

  “Down the stairs. Slowly. When you reach the hall keep moving.”

  “Where we going?”

  “For a ride.”

  “Where?”

  “Where’d you park your car, Spider?”

  “Up yours, man.”

  I accepted that as a reminder that a skewered wrist and a punctured calf weren’t enough to take a Waterbury Latin Knight out of action. “I ask because if it’s on the street, the state trooper’ll check it out.”

  “The lot by that Yankee thing.”

  “Good move.”

  “That’s where we parked last time.”

  “Excellent. Okay, let’s get something straight. If you try anything I will shoot you. It’s my town. All I have to say is that a Waterbury lowlife broke into my house again. They’ll give me a civic award. Capish?”

  He capished enough to shut up.

  I wrapped a wad of paper towels around his wrist.

  I was worried about Alison and her mother, but the lights were out in the barn. I walked him to the Olds, standing close with the gun in his side. I put him in the passenger seat, got in, backed out of the drive, and headed north on Main and up Route 7. The night closed in around the car and the trees swallowed the headlights.

  ***

  “Where the hell we going?”

  “The woods.”

  “What?”

  “Deep woods.”

  I drove slowly for miles and turned off on Crabtree. Spider looked back at the last house lights, fading behind us. The road turned to dirt. I slowed down, switched off the AC, and opened the windows. The air felt like warm water, and sounded like katydids and crickets had declared war on each other. Spider didn’t like it. He looked as unhappy as a Newbury kid like Pete Stock in a Waterbury alley.

  “How far we going?” Spider peered intently into the dim tunnel of light the headlights projected.

  The headlights picked up an intersection. I stopped, hesitated, then turned onto a rutted track that had been a lumber road. The Olds bucked, scraping its bottom.

  “We’re going to get stuck out here,” Spider warned me.

  “Not me,” I said, the gun in my left hand, across my lap, pointed at him. I assumed that by now he had worked his wrists loose. The road forked. I chose one at random, followed it for a mile, and stopped.

  “What’s this?”

  Huge moths circled in the headlights. I shut the engine, pocketed the key.

  “Hey.”

  The lights-on warning went Bong, bong, bong.

  I shut the lights. Dark descended like a blanket.

  “Hey!”

  I stepped quickly from the car. Spider turned to me, eyes big in the courtesy light until I shut the door.

  “Where you goin’?”

  I said nothing, just leaned against a tree and let my eyes adjust. Soon I could see him huddled in the front seat, craning his head to see out.

  “Hey!” he called. The tree and I were one.

  Bugs warred. An owl barked. Something screamed an astonished last breath.

  “Where’d you go?”

  I slipped quietly behind the car and alongside his window.

  “Talk to me, Spider. Who’s the rich bitch?”

  Chapter 29

  “Mother! I thought you split.”

  “I’m going to split. With my car. I’m going to leave you here, Spider. All night.”

  “Oh, yeah. You do that, man. Somebody’ll come along.”

  “Anyone who comes along this road, you don’t want to meet. Or any thing.”

  “What do ya mean?”

  “Bears.”

  “Shit man, you’re joking.”

  “Going to talk to me?”

  “Up yours.”

  I opened the door.

  “Hey, come on.”

  “Out!”

  “Hey, man. Just, like—what you wanna know?”

  “Who’s the rich bitch?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You said the rich bitch shot Little John. Who is she?”

  “I don’t know, man.”

  “Get out!”

  “No. No, I never met her. Little John kept her to hisself.”

  “You never saw her face?”

  “Never saw her anything, man.”

  “Never heard her name?”

  “He never said it.”

  “You’re going to have to do better, Spider. Or I’m out of here. Start at the beginning: How did Little John know her?”

  “I don’t know. He kept her for hisself.”

  “You already said that.”

  “Truth, man. He had a great thing going. Sex for dope. She’d do anything he wanted for it.”

  “I thought you said she was rich.”

  “Kicks, man. She had money. She had it all her way. Made him wear a condom? Believe that? Little John wearing a condom. He said he’d shoot me if I
told.”

  “But he told you.”

  “We hung together. He only told me once. He was high.”

  “He must have told you more than that when he was high. Was she good-looking?”

  “A real piece.”

  “What color hair?”

  “Little John don’t say.”

  “But really beautiful?”

  “A piece, man. Drove a big Benz.”

  “Mercedes Benz?” That I hadn’t expected. Michelle had her Audi, Susan a dying Colt, and Janey had something Japanese. Maybe Greg Riggs, Esquire, drove a Mercedes. “What color?”

  “I don’t know. Jesus, who cares?”

  “Your ride home cares.”

  “Ask me something I know,” he blustered back unconvincingly. He had freed his hands, but only to hunch over, gripping his wounded calf, which seemed to trouble him more than his wrist. “Come on, man. Let’s get outta here.”

  “What kind of dope did she buy?”

  “Coke. H. Whatever he had.”

  “Did she buy a lot?”

  “Hey, Little John wasn’t heavy duty, if you know what I mean.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He sold whatever shit he could get his hands on. We ran a bunch of little dealers. No big deal. Assholes smokin’ up their own stuff, gettin’ arrested, gettin’ shot for steppin’ on it too hard. When you’re only two guys, you don’t have enough muscle to build a clientele. We’d take a street and the Popes would kick our ass. You can’t sell dope on the run, you know. You gotta have turf you own. You know?”

  “Tough business.”

  “Toughest. One time we took over a house? Got four or five families holdin’ and sellin’ for us? Popes torched it. We open up across the street, cops blew us off.”

  “So the rich bitch was a pretty good deal? Nice, steady customer?”

  “Yeah, but Little John’s givin’ it to her. I say, ‘Little John, you want free sex, hit the crackheads.’ John goes, ‘It ain’t the same, man.’”

  I treated Spider to some hard-won wisdom. “You know what they say: If you want to go partners, you better pick a partner who has the same goals as you.”

  “Righteous, man. Righteous. You both gotta want the same thing. One day we score pure H. This shit would fly you to the moon. I go, ‘We’re in, Little John. Step on this ten times and we’re still selling the best dope in the neighborhood.’ John goes, ‘Yes.’ He says he’ll cut it. Sends me out to round up our best salesmen. I get back, and instead of two hundred hits, he’s only got a hundred. I go, ‘You didn’t step on it enough. There’s only a hundred.’ John goes, ‘I stepped it plenty.’ You know what he did?”