Hugger Mugger

FIFTY-SIX

I WAS RESTLESS the rest of the day. I cleaned both my guns-the short-barreled.38 I usually carried, and the Browning nine-millimeter I had for high-volume backup. I reloaded both guns, and thumbed cartridges into an extra clip for the nine. I tried on the vest. Sapp and I were more or less the same size, so the vest fit. I did some push-ups. I stood in the motel doorway and looked up at the sky, which by midafternoon had begun to darken. I turned on the television set and found The Weather Channel. After about fifteen minutes of learning far more than I ever cared to know about a low-pressure area in the Texas panhandle, I heard them prophesying rain in Georgia. I did some more push-ups. I called Susan and, using a flawless southern accent, left a sexually explicit message on her answering machine. I took a walk. After the walk I went to the motel coffee shop and had a ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of milk. It started to rain. I stood in the doorway of my room and watched it for a while. It was a nice rain, steady but not too aggressive. Falling straight. The weather cooled. I took a nap.

When I woke up the afternoon had begun to turn into evening and the rain was unyielding. I took a shower and put on clean clothes and checked both guns again. The meeting on Route 20 could be a feint, of course, and they in fact intended to buzz me as I walked to my car to drive out there. Probably not. It was probably too clever for Delroy. But probably is not the same as certainly. If they intended to do that, how soon would they show up? Probably about ten-thirty. I thought about another sandwich, but I wasn't hungry. I had coffee instead. I didn't want to be sleepy later on. Then I went back to my room and strapped on both guns. The Browning I wore behind my right hipbone. The.38 I wore butt forward in front of my left hipbone. I put the extra clip in my hip pocket and a handful of.38 special ammunition in my pants pocket. Then, carrying the vest over my arm, I walked to my car and got in and pulled out of the parking lot. Nobody followed me. It was about nine o'clock-too early.

I drove out Route 20 to the designated spot. Maybe a mile before I got there there was a rest stop where a few cars and a lot of trailer trucks were parked. If I had been planning this, I'd have had a car with a car phone waiting, and as I approached I would have had the tail car that had followed me from the motel call, and when I went by, the second would pull out and follow me, and when I stopped, the two cars would park in front and behind at an angle, blocking me. They'd have to be a lot more alert now, since I had left too early, and they had apparently not counted on that. Maybe it would throw them and they'd call it off. I didn't want that. At the next exit I turned around and headed back to Lamarr. I couldn't risk confusing them so much that they didn't make their try at me. They'd been stupid enough to announce this one. The next time they might not. I called Susan on my car phone.

When she answered I said, "Spenser, Mobil Unit South."

"Oh good," she said. "Someone claiming to be one of your body parts left me a disgusting message in a fake southern accent on my answering machine this afternoon, while I was healing people."

"Which body part?" I said.

"You know perfectly well which body part," she said.

"Did you hate the message?" I said.

"No."

We talked the rest of the way back to the motel. Pearl was fine. I thought I might come home soon. The weather was lovely in Boston. It was raining here. I missed her. She missed me. We loved each other. I said goodbye as I pulled back into the motel parking lot. After I hung up I felt completed, the way I always did after talking to her, like a plant that had been watered.

It was ten-thirty. There was a car in the lot that hadn't been there when I'd left. A maroon Dodge, with a spotlight on the driver's side. This meant nothing. Cars come and go all the time in a motel parking lot. Still, there it was. I stayed in my car with the motor running, and the wipers going so I could see. I parked away from other cars with my nose pointing at the highway so that I couldn't be boxed in and shot in my car. I decided it was better than driving aimlessly up and down Route 20. I took out the nine, racked the slide back and pumped a round into the chamber, let the hammer down gently, and laid it in my lap. Nothing happened. At eleven I thought maybe driving aimlessly up and down Route 20 was better. At eleven-thirty, I slipped into the vest, tightened the straps, shrugged into a light windbreaker, wheeled my car out of the parking lot in a leisurely manner, and drove toward the highway entrance with the nine still in my lap. As I went up the ramp, I saw the maroon Dodge come out of the lot and follow along in the same direction. The drive wasn't aimless anymore. We had begun.

The headlights made the wet highway shimmer. The moon was hidden. There were no streetlights. The weather was not a plus. A bright night would have been better. But it was a business in which you didn't always get to choose.

At seven minutes to midnight I pulled over onto the shoulder of the road near the designated spot. My tire, the marker for Tedy Sapp, was still where I'd thrown it, shiny in the rain. As I parked, a car passed me and pulled in at an angle in front of me. The maroon Dodge that had tailed me out pulled in behind. They were thinking right along with me. What little protection the car offered was outweighed by my immobility. I turned off the headlights and shut off the engine. I took the nine out of my lap and held it in my hand, close to my side. Then I got out, and closed the car door, and stood in the steady rain on the highway side of my car.

The headlights from the maroon Dodge brightened my part of the scene. The car ahead of me had shut off his lights. No one got out of either car. Except for the sound the rain made and the sound of the windshield wipers on the maroon Dodge, there was silence. Then there was some sound from the woods beyond the shoulder; then Jon Delroy and two other guys came out of the darkness and into enough of the headlight so I could see them. Delroy stayed where he was. The other two guys fanned out on either side of him. Both had shotguns. One wore a yellow rain jacket, the other was coatless, with an Atlanta Braves hat jammed down over his ears. There were no Security South uniforms visible.

"Spenser," Delroy said.

"Delroy."

As we spoke the driver of the Dodge got out to my right, and the driver of the car in front got out to my left. Observing peripherally, I was pleased that they didn't have shotguns.

"You wouldn't leave it alone," Delroy said.

"It's why I get the big bucks," I said.

"Was it you broke into the office in Atlanta?"

I smiled at him. I was trying for enigmatic, but it was raining hard and there were five guys with guns, so I may not have succeeded.

Delroy shrugged.

"Doesn't matter," he said. "Walk over here."

"So you can tell me who killed Walter Clive?"

"You know who killed Walter Clive," Delroy said. "Walk over here."

"Nope."

Delroy shrugged again. He seemed perfectly at ease. Every inch the commander.

"Die where you want to," Delroy said.

He pointed at the two men on my side of the car with the index finger of each hand and nodded once. Immediately there was a loud gunshot, but it came from the dark woods behind Delroy. The gunman to my right spun half around and his handgun clattered into the middle of the highway. I dropped to a squat against the side of my car and, leaning against it, shot the gunman to my left in the middle of the mass. He doubled up and fell on his side, crying in pain. I heard his gun skitter into the passing lane. I slid up the side of the car and brought my handgun down on top of the roof. The two men with shotguns were turning toward the gunshot when the gun fired from the woods again and one of them went down, staggered backwards against the Dodge by the force of the bullet. The other one, the guy in the Atlanta Braves hat, threw the shotgun away and started running west along the highway shoulder. Delroy seemed frozen. He hadn't even gotten his gun up. I went around the car and took it from his apparently paralyzed hand. He offered no resistance. Behind me the guy I'd shot kept crying in pain. I hated the sound. But there was nothing I could do about it, and it was better than me crying in pain. Tedy Sapp came out of the woods wearing a long black slicker and a black cowboy hat, and carrying an M1 rifle. I looked at the rifle.

"An oldie but goodie," I said.

"Like me," Sapp said.