Speak Ill of the Living (16 page)

***

“Puke it up, asshole.”

A hand thumped three times between Eddie's shoulder blades.

“Puke it up.”

Eddie coughed violently. He gasped for air, and then coughed so hard he thought he would pop a vein in his head.

The assassin floated next to Eddie. He had one arm under Eddie's ribcage, holding him up. The killer's other hand pounded Eddie's back, ejecting water from Eddie's windpipe. Eddie wheezed. His feet began kicking by instinct and he realized that the man had pulled him up as Eddie was drowning.

“I'm pushing you back under if you need mouth-to-mouth,” the man promised.

Eddie nodded, coughed, gagged, spat, and then agreed in a whisper, “Please do.”

The man held Eddie in silence for a few minutes, until Eddie was able to float on his own. The cold had burrowed deep inside him. There was little time left to get out. He knew that the next time he went under would be the last.

The killer's eyes gleamed in the moonlight. Not eyes Eddie recognized. But not eyes he would ever forget.

“What's your way?” the man asked.

“Huh?”

“Your way! Your way
out of here
.”

“Real simple,” Eddie said. “We climb up back-to-back, feet on opposite walls, until we reach the top.”

The man looked to the top of the well but said nothing.

Eddie guessed his thoughts again. “It'll work—this stone should provide plenty of friction against our feet, and so long as we move in unison, keeping even pressure against each other, the opposing force will allow us to stay elevated.”

The killer seemed to think about the plan for a long while. Then he said suddenly, “I had a rope.”

Eddie rubbed the bruise around his neck. “I remember.”

“It's gone. Must have sunk. Dive down and get it off the bottom.”

Eddie shook a finger at him. “So you can tie yourself to me?” he scolded. “And then kill me when we reach the top? No fucking way.”

The man reared up in the water and came down with finger clamps around Eddie's throat. “Get down there and get my rope!” His eyes raked over Eddie's face. His mouth bent into a mirthless grin.

Eddie croaked, “This…is…your…grave.”

The man's eyes seemed ready to ignite. He roared, heaved Eddie to the middle of the well and then slammed his fist on the water.

Eddie rubbed his sore neck, and then smiled behind his hand.

I'm gonna beat you.

Eddie said, “I'm glad we settled that without anybody getting killed.” He was sarcastic and cheerful sounding. “When we both get to the top, we'll each grab the side of the well closest to us. If you're on your feet quicker than me, you can run around the well and kick me back in.”

The man snorted.

“Yeah—I thought you'd like that part. But if I'm out quicker, I'll kick
you
back in.”

It was a lie, a carefully placed suggestion.

“You don't got it in you,” scoffed the assassin.

“To kill? Maybe not. But I can tell the cops where to look for you. They'll want to see how pretty you are under that mask. I can't wait to hear you
splash
.”

The killer went
grunt, grunt
. “I should have finished you, Bourque. After you got out of the car I should have come back and finished you.”

“Why didn't you?”

“Against my better judgment.” He spun a half-turn around. “Get your back against mine.”

Eddie swam to him and pressed his back against the killer's. Both men placed their feet against the sides of the well and pushed. They rose to the level of the water, lost balance and slipped back in.

The man spit a spray of water. “It's not working!”

“It'll work,” Eddie assured him. “We both need to take a wider stance with our feet. Keep the pressure
even
. You can't try to race me outta here.”

Back to back, they pushed against each other and slowly spidered out of the water, a few inches at a time, and then hovered in air. For balance, they clasped hands. The attacker's fingers were like sausage casings packed with hard clay.

“I'm stepping my left foot,” Eddie announced. “Now you step your right.” Pressed together they climbed, left, right, left. Eddie's thighs heated under the strain. He was aware of the thick muscles overlaying the killer's broad back.

“If not today,” whispered the assassin, “I'll get you someday, Bourque.”

“Left foot,” Eddie answered. “Good, now the right. Keep the pressure.”

“You'll turn the key and I'll be behind the door.”

“How lovely,” Eddie said. He panted from the physical strain of climbing the well. “Now the left foot again—good.”

“When you lie down to sleep—”

“We're more than halfway there.”

“—I'll be under the bed.”

“Bring coffee,” Eddie said. “Keep your stance wide.”

The assassin also breathed heavy from the labor. He said, “Use up all your jokes, because the moment you feel safe, that's when I'll appear.”

They neared the top of the well.

“We'll need to reach for the rim at the same moment,” Eddie said, “or we'll both fall back in. I'll reach for the right, you reach for the left and we'll maintain the opposing force to the last instant. No sudden moves until we have a grip on the wall.”

“Got it.”

“And then I'll run around and kick you back down,” Eddie reminded him.

The killer chortled.

The men slowly unclasped their hands.

Eddie reached his right arm for the top of the stone rim. He barely had a hand on it when the killer lunged for the opposite wall. Eddie had anticipated the double-cross and he slapped his hand accurately on the rim as his body swung into the wall. Hanging by one hand, his cheek against the stone, Eddie heard the killer clambering up the opposite side of the well. Eddie reached his other hand up, found a solid grip and heaved himself in an overhand pull-up. In adrenaline frenzy, Eddie wormed the bottom of his ribcage over the lip of the well, smacked his right elbow down for leverage and swung his left leg over the lip. He rolled over the stone ring, popped up and looked for the killer.

The man was still struggling to climb up. Eddie ran around the well toward him.

The killer spotted him, growled and rolled awkwardly over the lip. He scurried away from the well on all fours, so Eddie could not kick him back down. But Eddie never had any intention of taking that chance. He had planted the suggestion simply to buy a few seconds' head start.

Eddie exploded in a sprint down the driveway.

“Chicken shit bastard!” the attacker screamed.

Eddie heard footsteps pounding behind him. He careened into the woods. Small branches, invisible in the night, scratched his face and bare chest. Eddie ran with abandon among the trees, leaping stones and downed branches, plowing over maple saplings. He listened to the crashing footsteps behind him, falling ever more distant as Eddie pulled away. Ducking limbs, dashing around tree trunks—it seemed more like slalom skiing than running. Eddie settled into what runners called a groove, the place where speed met efficiency. He felt like he could run for hours.

The footsteps behind him disappeared. The man had lost him, or had given up.

Eddie ran through the woods, lost, growing ever further from The Late Chuckie's rat bike, but generally heading in a straight line by keeping the moon over his left shoulder. He guessed he had bushwhacked about two miles when he came to a small rise covered with evergreens, on which he stopped to listen.

Nothing.

He had gotten away. Eddie had beaten the assassin and he was giddy.

The man's words repeated in Eddie's memory.

The moment you feel safe, that's when I'll appear.

Eddie stared into the forest.

Not tonight. Tonight I am alive.

He walked through the woods, listening to the sounds of an unseen race between the forest's hunters and their small prey. He learned not to jump at the sound of rustling leaves. His wet pants and shoes began to dry. He had walked an hour, maybe more, when he came to a road—dark, winding, poorly paved. He walked it for about half a mile, and then dived into the brush when headlights approached. He hid as the car cruised past him. What would the assassin be driving? Eddie couldn't say. He could trust no cars until morning.

Staying a few paces inside the woods, he followed the unlit road until the first grays of dawn, when fatigue clubbed him like a mugger and Eddie burrowed, near delirious, under dry leaves and pine needles for just a moment's rest, and thudded into a bottomless sleep.

Chapter 21

He woke to thundering drums. An electric guitar shrieked; Eddie recognized the riff—an old Ozzy tune. Then he heard tires on the pavement nearby, and a car blew past his hiding spot in the woods, taking the music with it down the road.

The sun was high overhead and the air summer-steamy.

Oh no, I slept all morning.

Eddie tried to sit up. Waves of dull pain in his back and neck pushed him back down. He rotated his jaw against a painful stiffness; his fingers explored the swelling under his chin, the left side of his neck, and the back of his head beneath hair matted with tacky blood glue. His hands were scratched and rubbed rough. Eddie swept the blanket of leaves from his chest and gasped. Two dozen scratches decorated his torso. He looked like he had been whipped with a hickory switch. He rolled on his side with a groan, gripped a white oak sapling and hauled himself up.

His pants and shoes were caked with crumbly dried mud. He took a few unsteady steps toward the road, patting himself to inventory his body parts. Everything was still where it was supposed to be. No bones broken. His throat ached, it hurt to swallow and he was sluggish from dehydration and caffeine withdrawal. He felt like a zombie who had misplaced its human soul during an extended tequila bender.

He stumbled onto the road, a country street too narrow to deserve the single yellow line painted down the middle. There were no houses, no sidewalks or utility poles. Just trees. Eddie had no clue where he was. He turned left down the road in the direction the passing car had been heading, on the theory that if people were driving that way, it must lead
somewhere
.

He made lists as he walked of everything he needed to do when he found civilization. First, he had to find a phone, to call Detective Orr. She needed to work out the jurisdictional issues and get to the old Whistle farm immediately.

Second, Eddie needed two liters of Columbian Supremo in an I.V. drip. Stat!

A big gray Buick swayed lazily around the corner, toward Eddie. He squinted at the driver—a woman, black hair in a short bob, no ski mask—and then waved both hands at the car. The car slowed a moment, drew closer, then suddenly roared off with a squeal, the driver staring Eddie down with an open-mouthed grimace.

What's her problem?

He walked some more.

Third on Eddie's list, go home and feed General VonKatz. The General was not accustomed to being left alone overnight, nor did the cat appreciate missing a meal. Eddie imagined the General would be expressing his unhappiness with claws today, maybe converting Eddie's suit trousers into Bermuda shorts.

Fourth, Eddie had to fix that goddam deadbolt on his front door so it couldn't be opened by MasterCard or Visa. He believed what the assassin had told him; Mr. Ski Mask would be back.

Three other cars passed Eddie over the next hour. Nobody would stop. He sat in the middle of the road, on a long straightaway, determined to force the next driver to help him, or run him down.

Time passed. The sun beat on Eddie. He sweated as he sat there.

I had to wander into the least traveled road in Massachusetts.

Another car finally approached.

Good holy heaven, a police cruiser!

Finally, some better luck!

Eddie struggled to his feet. The police car said “Nashua” on the side—that's in New Hampshire. Eddie had crossed the state line during the night. No matter—he waved the cruiser down. The car pulled over. A broad-shouldered cop climbed out slowly, with a hand over his gun.

“Easy, pal,” he said in a gentle voice, the tone you'd use to approach a strange dog.

“Really need a telephone!” Eddie blurted. “I was digging this farmhouse basement and I found a skull and a bunch of bones from that old robbery and then this asshole in a ski mask who tried to kill me last week showed up and I spent half the night in a well and the other half in the woods…”

“Whoa!” the officer said. He signaled for a time-out. “You need to get in the back of the cruiser, and we're going to start this story over from the beginning.”

Keeping an eye on Eddie, he unsnapped his holster guard.

As Eddie climbed in the back seat, he saw his likeness in the rear view mirror and shrieked, “Jesus and his barber!”

Who was that bare-chested, unshaven, wide-eyed mountain man in the mirror? The one wearing dust and dried blood like pancake makeup and rouge? Eddie scratched black-rimmed fingernails on a scab over his cheekbone. A purple bruise circled his throat. Fortunately his injuries were not as bad as they looked, or he'd have died three times.

“Do you have a towel, or something?” Eddie asked, as the officer slipped into the front seat.

“At the locker room at the station.” He slipped the gearshift to “drive.” The cruiser made a three-point turn and sped off.

Eddie picked bits of forest off his scalp. “And I could use a comb—I got enough dried twig in my hair to weave a sparrow's nest.”

“Yessir, at the station.”

“Maybe some coffee, too?”

“We got all kinds.”

Is he making fun of me?

“Just call Lowell Police,” Eddie said. “Tell Detective Lucy Orr that Eddie Bourque got mixed up in it again.” He leaned back and closed his eyes. “She'll know what you mean.”

***

Detective Orr let Eddie do the talking during the ride from downtown Nashua to the Whistle farm in an unmarked Lowell police sedan.

Eddie explained as patiently as he could, but it drove him near insane that she kept to the twenty-five miles per hour speed limit. Weren't they in a rush to get to the farmhouse to investigate the shallow grave Eddie had uncovered?

“The perimeter of the farm is secure,” Orr promised him. “Tell me the rest of the story.”

Was she slowing down? Eddie took a deep breath. He looked human again in a borrowed blue police recreation league t-shirt, sweat pants and canvas sneakers. His pants and shoes were on the seat in a plastic bag. Ten minutes in the men's room had improved his face and hair, and three mugs of Arabica had overhauled his disposition. The two EMTs that had evaluated Eddie at the station had concluded that he was not seriously hurt, though after hearing snippets of his crazy story they had wondered aloud if he was a danger to himself.

Eddie explained to Orr: “So I had the skull in my hand for, like, two seconds when the son-of-a-bitch in the ski mask jumped me. He must have been waiting in the shadows until I found something incriminating.”

“And the two of you got trapped in a grave?”

“No, a
well
…that comes later.”

“And why were you digging in the first place?”

“Lucy—I told you, I thought it was the basement where the kidnappers had taken the photographs of Roger Lime.”

She sighed. “And
you
did the digging?”

Eddie held up his hands. “Wanna see the blisters?”

“Can't you give a better description of this perpetrator than ‘ski mask'? ”

“It was dark.”

“You were with him half the night,” she said. “You must have noticed something else about him.”

“This was attempted murder, not a fender bender,” Eddie said, sharply. “We didn't exchange driver's licenses.” They drove in silence a minute. “You don't believe me, do you?”

“It's quite a story, Ed.”

Eddie turned his body toward her.
Ouch!
“Look at me—I didn't beat myself purple.”

“Nobody doubts you were in a fight last night.”

“Then what's the problem?”

“Finish the story,” she told him.

Eddie did, describing his fight with the killer, his escape and how he had wandered the woods into New Hampshire.

The police radio cackled; it was unintelligible to Eddie, but Orr seemed to understand. She took the microphone, mumbled some codes into it, adding: “He's with me now. Ten minutes.”

She looked straight ahead and said to Eddie, “There's nothing illegal about a person defending himself.”

Eddie shrugged. “Of course not.”

“Just so long as they tell the truth about it.”

“I'm telling the
truth
,” Eddie cried. He stopped, enforced calm on himself and began again. “I know it's a cracked-up story, but that's exactly how it happened.”

***

Police cars from Lowell, Nashua, Dunstable, and the Massachusetts state police were parked haphazardly along the country road outside the old Whistle farmhouse. A uniformed officer on traffic patrol waved Orr's car through. She parked beside the boulders blocking the driveway. Police had roped off the end of the driveway with yellow barrier tape.

Orr got out without a word and explained briefly who she was to a statie at the tape. He nodded and looked Eddie over.

Eddie got out with his bag of dirty clothes. “I parked over here yesterday,” he said. “There—there's my bike.”

The Late Chuckie's rat bike was where Eddie had left it. The police had penned it in with yellow tape. Eddie ducked under the tape and flipped open a saddlebag. The contents were a mess, the bag had obviously been searched. He didn't like the police going through his stuff, but he couldn't blame them; he had forgotten to mention that he had arrived on the bike. He stuffed the bag of clothing inside.

“I didn't know you had a motorcycle license,” Orr said.

“Yeah, right…um…” Eddie pointed. “The well is down the driveway—let's take a look at it.” He led her to it. In the daylight, the well was not a frightening liquid grave; it was a source of clear and harmless water.

“I found the digging tools over there, in the barn,” Eddie said. He led Orr to the main house, warning her, “Watch the porch, the boards are rotten.”

“You certainly know this place,” she said.

“I
told
you that I was here most of the day yesterday.”

Police were walking through the house, photographing stuff and making notes.

Eddie waved Orr along. “The basement door is in the kitchen. The stairs are narrow, but they're sturdier than they look.” He stood aside to let two detectives in suits come up from the basement. They stared at Eddie's neck bruises as if they were gills.

“Looks worse than they feel,” Eddie assured them. He led Orr down the stairs into a basement crowded with portable lights and cops. Flashbulbs were going off. Police were mumbling to each other. An officer dusted for fingerprints on the red lantern Eddie had used the night before.

A man called out, “Detective Orr?”

Eddie recognized the voice—Brill, the cop who had leaked his scoop about Dr. Crane's hanging. He mumbled to Orr, “Not that asshole again.”

She shushed him.

“What does that guy have against reporters?”

“I said
shush!
”

Brill said, “The body's around the corner, there.”

Orr looked to Eddie and then followed Brill.

“I told you,” Eddie said, trailing behind them. “That's where I found the bones.” Eddie walked around the corner and looked into the hole.

What he saw was not possible.

Somebody had dug the hole deeper, nearly waist-deep, and had piled the dirt nearby.

In the hole was the battered body of a man, lying face-up—not bones, a dead
body
, and it was wearing a ski mask.

“Choked to death,” Brill said.

“Uh-huh,” said Orr.

“I'm done here,” said a police photographer.

“Take the mask off,” Brill ordered.

A uniformed cop reached into the hole and peeled away the mask.

The body's skin was waxy and purpling. There were rope burns around the neck. The eyes were closed, the face relaxed, and blood had trickled from one nostril. The body in the hole was so far removed from the reality Eddie had expected, he pointed into the grave without thinking and shouted: “Holy shit! That's Jimmy Whistle!”