Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (27 page)

Susan looked up from her trout. “That’s your master strategy?” she said. “Poke around and see what happens?”

“It’s all anyone can do,” I said. “The thing about us is when we start poking around we are hard as hell to discourage.”

She put her hand briefly on my forearm. “You are that,” she said.

We had some dessert, and some coffee, and some pear brandy, and after dinner Susan and I took a walk around downtown Boise. We stopped to look in the window of a bookstore on Main Street. Across the street a western-wear store showed a collection of high-heeled boots, and big-brimmed hats, and long-skirted canvas dusters. Just down from the hotel a storefront restaurant advertised steak, eggs, and fresh biscuits. There was a pawnshop
where everyone seemed to have pawned a shotgun or a hunting knife. Everything was closed and there was around the small city a dark starlit sense of space running off in all directions under a high disinterested sky.

“Not like Boston,” Susan said.

“No,” I said.

“I’ve never been in the West before,” she said. “Have you?”

“In a sense,” I said. “I was born here.”

“In Boise?”

“No, next state, Laramie, Wyoming.”

“I never knew that,” Susan said.

“My father and my two uncles and I moved east when I was small.”

“Your mother died when you were small,” Susan said.

“No,” I said. “She died … actually she died before I was born.”

Susan looked at me in the light from the street-lamp. She raised her eyebrows.

“She was in an accident,” I said, “when she was nine months pregnant. She died in the emergency room and the e/r doctor took me by cesarean section.”

“So in some sense you never had a mother,” Susan said.

“You were posthumous.”

“Un huh. Not of woman born.”

“What kind of accident,” Susan said.

“I don’t know. My father never spoke of it. Neither did my uncles.”

“Not your father’s brothers, as I recall.”

“No,” I said, “my mother’s. It’s how my father met her. The three of them had a little carpentry business.”

“And your father never remarried.”

“No. He and my two uncles brought me up.”

“Is he alive still?”

“No.”

“Your uncles?”

“No.”

“You never talk about them.”

“I’m interested in what’s going to happen tomorrow,” I said.

“But what’s going to happen tomorrow grows out of what happened yesterday,” Susan said.

“Maybe,” I said, “but I can’t control what happened yesterday.” Leo had looked amazed when the bullet hit him.

“But you can change what yesterday did to you,” Susan said.

“Yes,” I said, “I guess you can.”

We were back at the hotel. I held the door for her. We went in and walked up to the room.

Hawk was lying shirtless on the bed, reading the
local paper. When we came in he put it on his chest and smiled at us.

“Guile paying off already,” he said. “Russell called up and say he can get you into the mine.”

“He is a very complicated person,” Susan said. “He may be doing it for me because he thinks I want it. Or because I’ll be grateful and be with him again, or for the same reasons he might have had to get us out here in the first place.”

“To get me killed,” I said.

“Or his father. Or both.”

“Or kill me himself,” I said.

Susan looked at her hands folded in her lap. “Maybe … no. I won’t believe that. He’s dangerous. He’s violent. Never with me. But … he wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t.”

“We’ll see,” I said.

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

“Time to go,” I said.

She nodded, her head still against my chest. Then she stepped away.

Hawk handed me the .357 in a shoulder holster and helped me as I slipped into the harness. I hiked up the right leg of my jeans and Hawk taped a sheathed hunting knife to my calf. I shook the pants leg down over it. I was wearing gray Nike running shoes, and a black T-shirt. I put the black
and gray Windbreaker top to a jogging suit on over the T-shirt and shoulder holster. I put the government blackjack in my right hip pocket. The jacket had a zippered pocket across the front and I put a handful of shells in and zipped it up. I turned and walked three steps toward the other side of the hotel room. The shells jingled like change in the pocket. I shook my head and Hawk said, “No,” at the same time. I took the shells out, and Hawk went to the bathroom and returned with adhesive tape. I pulled up the jacket and T-shirt and Hawk taped a dozen .357 shells across my stomach. I dropped the T-shirt over the ammo, letting it hang out over my belt so I could get at the shells quicker. I walked across the room again. Quiet.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll see you here afterwards.”

“I wish you weren’t alone,” Susan said.

“Me too,” I said. “But it’s his rules.”

Susan nodded. I looked at Hawk.

“You got to kill him,” Hawk said, “kill him. Don’t die ’cause you think you promised her.”

I nodded.

“She don’t want that,” Hawk said.

I nodded.

“Do you?” Hawk said to Susan.

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “God, no, I … no. No promises. You do what you must do to come back.” She was sitting on the bed, her hands rubbing both temples. “I want you to come back.”

I took in a big drag of air through my nose. I put my hands on either side of her face and tilted it up and kissed her gently on the mouth. She put her hands on top of mine for a moment and held her mouth against me. Then we stopped kissing and I straightened up and stepped away. Her look followed me, but she didn’t speak. I looked at Hawk. He nodded once, a short nod. I opened the door and went out.

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 maître d’ ushering in a baron. There was a dark opening behind the ledge.

“Voilà,” 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.

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.