Chapter 19

My door was open. Hawk was sitting tipped back in one of my client chairs studying Lila in the design office across the hall. She was looking particularly Lila-esque today in a puffy-sleeved, ankle-length, black dress and a Chicago White Sox baseball hat. I was at my desk making a list of the people I had talked to about Ellis Alves. After each name I wrote a brief synopsis of what I had learned from them. It wasn’t that I couldn’t remember. It was that I was confused, and when I get confused I make lists. It doesn’t usually solve my confusion, but it sometimes consolidates it.

“Lila know you’re looking at her?” I said.

“Un huh.”

“She looking right back?”

“Un huh.”

“This could be the start of something big,” I said.

“Be big,” Hawk said. “Won’t be often.”

“Chatting with Lila in the morning might be wearing,” I said.

“I let you know.”

I was starting back through my list to see which ones I wanted to follow up when some guys came in without knocking and barred Hawk’s view of Lila by closing the door behind them. I knew this would annoy Hawk, and it did. But unless you knew him like I did, you wouldn’t notice. It was mostly the way his head cocked when he looked at them.

There were four of them. All chosen apparently for heft more than beauty. Two of them, who might have been related, slid to either side of the closed door and stood against the wall and looked at Hawk. The other two walked past Hawk and stood in front of my desk and looked at me. Symmetry.

“You Spenser?”

The speaker was wearing a watch cap and a pea coat. The coat, which hung open, was too long, as all his jackets would be. He was built like a beer keg.

“I am he,” I said.

I saw Hawk smile as he stood without apparent effort and went without any hurry to the olive green office supply cabinet next to the coat rack. The two guys that might have been related watched him carefully.

“You’re working on the Ellis Alves case,” he said.

“Day and night,” I said.

“I was told to make this plain to you,” Beer Keg said. “You leave that case alone from here on.”

Hawk opened the supply cabinet and took a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun off the top shelf and cocked both barrels. The guys by the door watched him closely as he did it, but by the time they reacted the shotgun was cocked and pointed. The sound of the hammers going back made the other two guys turn and look.

“Ten gauge,” Hawk said. “Ain’t even fair at close range.”

Hawk leaned against the wall with the shotgun in his right hand laid idly across the crook of his left arm. He smiled at them. They looked at me. While they had been looking at Hawk I had taken the occasion to take my Smith and Wesson .357 out of the side drawer of my desk. As they looked I cocked it, and keeping it in my right hand, let it rest on the desktop. I smiled at them.

“You should have been prepared,” I said. “For the off chance that we wouldn’t be paralyzed by fear.”

Beer Keg was a stand-up guy.

“Today was just a warning anyway,” he said.

“Might be our day to shoot you in the nose, though.”

Beer Keg waded right past that.

“Guy say we was just supposed to rough you up today.”

“What guy?” I said.

Beer Keg shook his head. His partner was wearing a black and red Mackinaw. Mackinaw’s head was shaved above the ears with long hair on top. He was taller than Beer Keg, so his coat fit better.

“Nobody you know,” he said.

I raised the Smith and Wesson and sighted at Mackinaw’s forehead.

“I might know him,” I said.

“I don’t think you’ll do it,” Mackinaw said and turned and walked to the door. I saw Hawk glance at me. I shook my head. Mackinaw opened the door and walked out and left it open behind him. The other three, frozen for a moment waiting for me to shoot, suddenly burst into action when I didn’t and jostled each other going out the door.

“Bad luck,” Hawk said. “You picked the wrong one to bluff.”

“I know,” I said.

Hawk walked back to the chair and sat where he could see Lila again. He put the shotgun, still cocked, in his lap. I got out of my chair with the gun still in my hand and walked to my window. In maybe a minute I saw all four of them gathered on the corner of Berkeley and Providence Street, which ran between Arlington and Berkeley behind my building. In another moment a maroon Chevy station wagon drove down Providence Street and stopped. They got in. The wagon pulled out onto Berkeley and headed toward the river. It had Massachusetts plates. I turned from the window and wrote the number on my desk calendar.

“You’d shot him dead, the others would have told you everything they knew and more.”

“I know.”

“Lucky you got me around,” Hawk said, “to keep them from inducting you into the Girl Scouts.”

“It’s the physical,” I said. “I always have trouble with the physical.”

“You Irish, ain’t you?”

“Sure and I am, bucko.”

“So you don’t have a lot of trouble with the physical,” Hawk said.

“Just enough.”

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