“We can’t let something like that happen with Hudson Heights. Don’t you see? Don’t you have any feel for what this place means
to the people around here? Especially the ones who put their money behind their belief in it?” Kyle’s voice had begun to take
on the fervor of a crusader.
“What it means is they made a bad investment,” Baxter said flatly. “It wasn’t faith they were financing in the first place,
it was real estate. And for financial, not spiritual, profit. Most of your investors should remember their Bible well enough
to know you’re advised not to build castles in the sand. They might even know better than to build them on hazardous-waste
dumps. What do you think?”
“This is not all my father’s fault.”
“Hell, no, but it was his bad choice that got things going. And it’s your trying to make it work that’s left two people dead
already.”
“Three, I believe, and there’ll soon be two more.”
“What for, Kyle? You’re long past being able to make this go away. You kill Val and me, there’ll be more people on your tail
tomorrow or the next day.”
“But if I decide to be a nice guy and give you a ride back to town, you’ll both promise to forget the whole thing?” With a
decisive click he stopped the golf cart. It looked to me like he’d brought it plenty close enough for his purposes.
Thurman halted just behind him. “Kyle, wait. He’s right, you know. Maybe about Val sending the fax to her lawyer, or there’ll
be something else. That person who was firing at us up on the plateau could have gone for help. You think you got him, but
we didn’t find a body. We can’t just keep killing everyone who finds out.”
Kyle turned halfway around, rifle leveled and pointing toward a position a few feet in front of his cohort. “This isn’t the
time to crap out on me. If you hadn’t nosed through all those old papers, we wouldn’t be looking at a problem now.”
“That is true, in a way. If we hadn’t paved over, heaped on fresh dirt, kept chemically cleansing, they’d have shut us down
before we even got going. I told your father he should find another centerpiece for the tract. But he had to have that one—only
the highest height would do. The irony is, Val,” he seemed to be directing everything he said toward me, intent that I believe
him, whether or not anybody else might, “I’m convinced we still have a valid project here. The plants have posed the only
real difficulty so far, and if we need to we can force their replacement with something tougher. No questions asked, at least
out loud. That’s why Clete gave the contract to the Etlingers, for control.”
“He’d have been better off exercising it sooner.”
“Perhaps. I think I have that area shored up, though.”
“And then maybe you’ll get a little breather before the effects of that witches’ brew under the parking lot surface somewhere
else.”
“The drainage system should take care of things. Who really cares what ends up in the quarry pond? It’s inaccessible and well
away from any aquifer. If those woods around it die off, so what? I still firmly believe Hudson Heights is worth-while—not
just for the investors, for the whole area. It’s a way to keep it rural, to maintain a way of life that I, for one, consider
worth preserving.”
“Was it worth killing an old friend?” Baxter wanted to know.
The passion drained from Thurman’s voice. “I have no regrets about Ryan Jessup. When you go into business as a blackmailer,
you’re taking an obvious risk.” He paused, stood a little straighter. “Holding Mariah down while Kyle dropped that hair dryer
into her spa was the most terrible thing I have ever done. It’s just … we weren’t expecting her to interfere. There was no
time.”
“Was dropping that hair dryer the most terrible thing you’ve ever done, Kyle?” I asked softly. “Mariah had been awfully damn
good to you and Chad.”
“Mariah had been cheerfully screwing my sister’s husband and intended to keep right on. That’s really not okay, you know?
Or I guess you didn’t. She also got a kick out of encouraging my son in directions she knew I didn’t approve. Mariah thought
of me as ‘poor Kyle’: couldn’t keep his wife, couldn’t stand up to his father. Couldn’t stand up to her, either, naturally.
I was damn tired of being patronized.”
I had to remind myself very hard that going unarmed for a person pointing a gun at you was terminally stupid. The way Thurman
stiffened I could see he was offended, too. “Mariah was hardly—” he began indignantly.
Kyle’s voice was harsh. “Chill out, for crissake.” Decisively, he swung around to face us.
Thurman’s motion as he raised the pistol seemed almost languid. There was nothing gentle, though, about the sound it made
as he fired. If Kyle hadn’t suddenly spun into it, I think the damage would have been peripheral—his shoulder or arm. The
way the rifle flew out of his hands as he toppled forward and off his cart to lie, screaming, on the fairway, we all knew
it was a lot worse than that.
I froze in place. Baxter scrambled to his feet and headed toward the fallen man with enough vigor for me to conclude that
his body still had just the two extra holes in it. He appeared to be clutching something in his good hand. “He moved! I didn’t
mean …” Thurman bowed his head, raised it, finally. “But there was no point in it going on, or any other way I could have
stopped him. See if there’s something we can do for him. And then I suppose we’ll have to get on up to the plateau.”
I followed Baxter toward the fallen man, whose screams were fading to less and less frequent moans. Kneeling, Baxter probed
gently. “Can you sit up?” he asked.
All Kyle seemed able to move was his head, and that only with terrible effort. Baxter stood. “We’ll need to get paramedics
down here. Is there anything in either cart we can cover him with?”
Thurman searched, shook his head, shrugged out of his jacket. “Here.”
“Let’s get moving. Val, can you drive one of these things?”
“Hop in. Or do you want to ride with Thurman?”
“You’ll do. Thurman, I’d be happier holding that pistol. If you’ll just start on ahead.”
Thurman stared at the weapon briefly before handing it over. “It’s not as if I have anywhere else to go.”
G
od knows why not getting killed when you were pretty much expecting to should be a letdown, but no sooner did I sit in that
cart and start it up than I was shivering with cold, arms so heavy it was a fight to keep my hands on the steering wheel.
Even in the meager light, Baxter, slumped beside me, looked alarmingly pale. Blood had soaked through the makeshift sock-bandage
in one area. Neither of us found anything to talk about.
Things picked up just after we had circuited the ninth green and turned on to the path to the tunnel and clubhouse. All of
a sudden somebody not too far ahead of us shot off a gun, the report the more jarring for being out of sequence. We thought
we were done with that.
Thurman stopped; I followed suit. “What the hell!” I exclaimed.
“Calvin?” Baxter shouted.
“Yo.”
“Everything’s under control. Come on out.”
A shape separated itself from the trees ahead to our left and ambled in our direction. “Are you guys okay?” Calvin asked doubtfully
once he could see us better.
“We’re fine. Hop in the first cart, there, with Thurman.”
We continued on, along a series of gentle rises and less gentle dips. Coming up from the last of the dips we spotted a set
of lights just emerging from the tunnel. Once again our mini-parade came to an abrupt halt. Up ahead, I could see Calvin’s
gun out and ready. Thurman’s pistol in his left hand, Baxter clambered awkwardly out of my cart to stand facing the oncoming
vehicle.
Even before it slowed to a stop I recognized the occupants: Clete and Matt. Dressed up, no weapons showing. Clete’s reciprocal
recognition came on with a roar. “Don’t you point those goddamn guns at me—you’re trespassing on my property! Thurman, what
the hell’s going on here?” He almost stumbled, dismounting, and his approach to on the cart where Thurman and Calvin sat was
unsteady.
“Your son’s been shot, Clete.” Baxter said quickly, cutting off any attempted answer. “We’re on our way to call for help.”
Clete changed course toward him, again shambling. “You shot Kyle?”
“No. We can talk about it later. Right now we need to get transport for him.”
Clete looked around, as if he tried hard enough he could bring his fallen son into view. “Where is he?”
“Back on the fairway to the ninth hole. About a hundred feet from the green.”
Almost toppling over in his abrupt turn the big man headed back to his cart. “Let’s go get him, Matt.”
Baxter stepped forward to block the way. “That’s not a good idea. It looks like a spinal injury. Let the rescue squad handle
it. Meantime, I’m collecting weapons, if you’ve brought any.”
Matt reached behind him in the cart and handed out a rifle. “The call said trouble. This was in my trunk from rabbit hunting,
so I brought it along.”
“Clete?”
“No, and you’d better not try to search me. Get the hell out of our way. We’re wasting time.”
Matt ignored him. “Baxter, I was on the rescue squad for years, and I’ve done stretcher transport dozens of times. Back inside
there’s a vehicle fitted out like a mini-ambulance, for emergencies on the course. No way can you get a full-size ambulance
down through here. If time is important, we’d better fetch our rig now, get Kyle on board and back to the clubhouse.”
“I did some stretcher transport down in North Carolina,” I said reluctantly. “Want me to come along?”
“That bitch does not get anywhere near my son!”
“Clete, it’s spinal, you want two sober people who know what they’re doing,” Matt said firmly.
To my surprise Clete, after a wild glance around and a particularly baleful glare at me, got meekly back in the cart. He sat
slumped and silent, or at least too soft-voiced for me to hear, as we drove the rest of the way to the underground cart garage.
When we were inside Baxter directed, “Calvin, you go with Matt and Val. I can handle things here.”
Matt looked both saddened and amused. “There’s no need for an armed guard, Baxter. Want me to guarantee that in writing? Val,
behind that wall is the pro shop. Duck over there and get into something dry while I bring our chariot around.”
I patted Baxter’s unhurt shoulder. “I’ll be fine. You get into something dry too—soon. And let the rescue squad look at that
shoulder.”
“Yes, Mom,” he modified it.
That was quite a vehicle: think subminivan and reduce even farther. It was sleek, it moved, and it was loaded. “There’s some
medicinal-purposes brandy in back,” Matt said once we were under way. “You look like you could use a shot.”
“Here I’d been thinking what a classy figure I must cut in these pricey sky-blue sweats with their big white HH. That’s twice
in three days somebody’s tried to push brandy on me.”
“Yeah, but then there’s tomorrow.”
We rode for a little while in silence. “So you and Clete got an SOS?”
Matt shrugged. “Clete took it. All he said was trouble out here. He was too drunk by then to drive himself, and his mouth
was starting to run. I halfway thought Kate or somebody staged the whole thing to get him away from the wake.” A careful,
safe answer. Plausible. True? Hell, I was not officially in the interrogation business. Let Baxter chase it if he wanted.
“We’ve got a real mess, huh?” he went on, when he saw I was going to leave it at that.
“You do.”
And as we approached where Kyle was lying “It was Thurman who shot him?”
“Right.”
“He looked like a zombie, sitting in the cart back there. The minute he signed on with Clete, Thurman was out of his league.
But shit, I guess it had to end somehow.”
“The choices were not extensive.”
Kyle lay as we’d left him; I couldn’t see that he’d moved at all. He was maybe semiconscious as we carefully stabilized him
and got him onto the stretcher, it was hard to tell. He didn’t say anything, though once his eyes seemed to fix on me, seemed
to want … I couldn’t begin to guess what. Was there anything left Kyle could possibly want?
Back at the country club, Calvin was waiting downstairs to tell us the rescue squad had not yet arrived. We thought it best
to leave Kyle as he was and let them handle the second transfer. Clete, who’d been sitting in one of the carts, somehow squeezed
his bulk into our vehicle next to his son. He began talking to him, softly.
“Let’s you and me go upstairs,” I said to Calvin, steering. “I could use something hot in my stomach.”
“No problem, I made plenty of coffee.”
“Wonderful.” He didn’t even notice I didn’t mean it.
In decent light Calvin looked pretty beat up: dried blood all down the right side of his head, jagged tears and outright holes
in his jeans. He’d been grazed, he wasn’t sure when. Baxter had concluded it must have happened during the first barrage of
firing, since his memory of the ensuing interval was so fragmented. Though vivid about our jumping off the parking-lot wall,
he couldn’t put together an order of events. When, through still-blurred vision, he saw Kyle and Thurman racing toward the
forsythia hedge, he’d opted for finding a new hidey-hole over a one-on-two shootout. They hadn’t looked for him long or hard,
and they seemed to be arguing as they turned away, heading toward the clubhouse.
After that, he said, things got vague again. When his mind sharpened once more he was on the course trying to locate a golf
cart by its sound. From the scratches and rips in his jeans it looked like he hadn’t taken the easy way down. Finally, from
an overlook, he spotted what turned out to be Thurman’s cart a long way off. Trying to get over there, he took a couple of
wrong turns and had to backtrack. Thus he was heading out the path from the tunnel when our two carts turned into it, coming
toward him. Sensibly, he’d taken cover.
Baxter had revived himself into command mode. He’d set up headquarters in the lounge and changed into more sedate sweats than
I’d found. Frank and two other cops who were beginning to look sort of familiar had arrived. Their only charge was sitting
by himself at one of the small tables, eyes downcast. I had to wonder why I couldn’t get anywhere close to hating the man.