Melancholy Baby

26

At five minutes past eleven, I was driving on South Border Road through thick woods in the Middlesex Fells Reservation. The reservation was probably ten miles from downtown Boston, but it felt like the Canadian Rockies driving through it.

I dialed Spike’s cell phone.

When he answered, I said, “I’m in the woods, driving west.”

“Keep coming,” Spike said. “I’m about a half mile in.”

“Where’s your car.”

“I parked up at the dog meadow and walked down.”

“Seen anybody else?”

“Nope.”

“See me yet?”

“Did you hear me shriek with delight?” Spike said.

“No.”

“Then I haven’t seen you.”

“Do you mind if I breathe quietly into the phone,” I said. “So you’ll know I’m alive.”

“Long as you don’t sing,” Spike said.

I drove in silence for another minute or so and then, on the phone, Spike said, “Shriek.” I slowed down.

“Here?” I said.

“Another ten yards,” Spike said. “Couple of big boulders on the right kind of leaning on each other. Park there.”

“Here?”

“Perfect.”

I pulled over to the shoulder of the road and stopped.

“Where are you,” I said.

“Right behind the boulders.”

“I’m going to get out of the car,” I said, “and lean on the fender. If things begin to go badly, you appear in force.”

“Can I do my rebel yell?” Spike said.

“Use your best judgment,” I said.

I closed the cell phone and put it in my purse. I took my gun out of my purse and put it in the right-hand side pocket of my belted camel-hair coat, which I always looked good in. I left my purse on the front seat, adjusted my Oakleys, and got out of the car. I stayed on the driver’s side and leaned on the front fender and waited. It was the middle of November and getting cold. I put my hands in my pockets. The trees had reacted variously to fall. Some had bare branches. Some had a few yellow leaves. Some were still leafy and at least partially green. It must have something to do with the kinds of trees. Nothing moved in the woods. No one drove along the road. Some birds chirped. I tried not to keep looking at my watch. I looked at the boulders. They were tilted against each other and deeply sunk into the side of the hill, just as they were, probably, when the last glacier melted and left them there. A squirrel ran sort of spasmodically across the road, the way squirrels do, and scrambled up a tree on the other side. There was some gray-green moss on the boulders, and the pale remnants of some sort of vine that had tried to colonize the boulders, but failed fatally.

A dark maroon Chevy sedan appeared from the other direction, driving slowly. It stopped opposite my car, and the window rolled down. The driver was wearing little sunglasses with wire frames and blue lenses. He looked at my license plates for a moment and then said to me, “Sunny Randall?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” he said and shut off the motor.

He got out of the driver’s side, wearing a belted trench coat. A husky man in a brown leather jacket got out of the passenger side. As he walked across the street, I could see the crude lettering in blue ink along the knuckles of each hand. I couldn’t read what it said.

The two men stopped in front of me. The guy with the tattoos had shoulder-length black hair that didn’t look very clean. The man with the shades looked like his haircut had cost three hundred dollars. His teeth had been worked on. They gleamed like a new sink.

“Cute shades,” I said.

“You know where Sarah Markham is?” the man with the sunglasses said.

“Absolutely,” I said.

“Where?”

“None of your business,” I said.

“She hire you to investigate her parents?”

“She did.”

“You know she’s been told to call off the investigation?”

“I do.”

The man with the tattoos was standing very close to me, looking dead-eyed at me.

“But she didn’t,” Mr. Shades said.

“No,” I said. “She didn’t.”

“She paying you a lot of money?”

“Not so much,” I said.

“Worth getting hurt for?”

“Who is going to hurt me?” I said.

Shades pointed with his chin.

“He is,” he said.

I suddenly stepped away from them into the middle of the road and took out my gun.

“Hey,” Shades said. “What’s with the piece?”

“Alone in the woods with two strange men?” I said. “What’s a girl to do?”

“I got no problem with guns,” Mr. Tattoos said.

“You might,” I said.

“You really got the balls to shoot us?” Shades said.

“Balls, no,” I said. “Shoot, yes.”

“So now what,” Shades said.

“I’ll tell you one thing what,” Tattoos said. “No twat is chasing me off.”

I pointed the gun straight at him, holding it in both hands. Behind him, Spike had come out from behind his boulder and was moving softly down the short slope. Spike was both agile and quiet for somebody his size.

“I believe that was an antifeminist remark,” I said. “Though dated.”

“Fuck you, lady,” Tattoos said.

“Lady is unacceptably incorrect,” I said. “It dehumanizes women.”

“Never mind the crap,” Shades said. “You want something?”

“I want to know who hired you to chase me away.”

Shades laughed.

“Whaddya gonna do, shoot us if we don’t tell?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Spike said from behind them.

Both men whirled around when he spoke. He was behind my car, leaning his thick forearms on the roof.

“Who the fuck are you?” Shades said.

Spike smiled.

“I am, by popular vote,” Spike said, “the world’s toughest queer.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Shades said.

Spike smiled.

“Turn around,” I said, “and put your hands on the roof of the car.”

“Like hell,” Shades said.

Spike walked around the car and took a left handful of Shades’s slick hair. Spike never seemed to be moving fast, exactly, but things happened very quickly. He slammed Shades’s head against the roof of the car. Shades grunted and sagged. Spike held him up with his left hand and patted him down. I kept the gun on Tattoos. Spike took a little .22 semiautomatic out of Shades’s side pocket.

“Cute,” Spike said.

He put the gun in his hip pocket and let go. Shades sagged but didn’t go down, steadying himself on the car. His forehead was already starting to swell. Spike looked at Tattoos.

“On the car?” Spike said.

“You’re pretty tough, got somebody holding a fucking gun on me.”

“And a twat, at that,” Spike said.

“Hey,” I said.

Spike jerked his head toward the car. Tattoos put his hands on the roof and Spike patted him down.

“No gun,” Spike said, and stepped back.

Tattoos wasn’t very smart. He’d seen Spike handle Mr. Shades. He must have noticed that Spike was much bigger than he was. Maybe he thought it was fat. Or maybe he had some outdated theories about sissy-boys. Whatever prompted him, he put his face into Spike’s and spoke.

“She didn’t have a piece on me...” Tattoos said.

“Sunny,” Spike said to me. “Put the gun away.”

I put it in my bag, though I cheated a little. I left the bag open and I rested my hand on the edge of it about an inch from the gun’s butt.

“You really a fag?” Tattoos said.

“Yep.”

“I never met a fag could fight.”

“What do the tattoos read,” Spike said. “Jail punk?”

Tattoos tried to knee Spike in the crotch. Spike turned his hip and the knee caught him harmlessly on it. Tattoos followed with a quick left hook that Spike brushed away with his forearm. He took a handful of Tattoos’s shirt in his left hand. Put his right into Tattoos’s crotch and swung him up in the air and brought him down hard, on his back, on the trunk of the car. He stepped away and Tattoos slid groggily off the trunk and onto the ground. He stayed there for a moment, then got to his feet unsteadily.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“So who hired you to scare off Sarah Markham,” I said.

Timing is everything.