The Autumn Dead

Chapter 15

The old money built their homes east, on hills that formed a ragged timberline back when the only certain means of transportation other than walking had been the Conestoga wagon. They built east and they built big and they built conservative, brick and stone and wood, hammered and chiseled and curved to imitate the Victorian style. It was through this section of hills she led me, dips steep as roller coasters, peaks from which you could see the electric sprawl of the city beneath. Occasionally a timid deer came to the edge of the road, then disappeared, frightened, back into the pine and hardwood acres posted NO HUNTING. There were gates in the gloom, big iron gates, usually painted black, beyond which lay curving asphalt roads and then the houses themselves. Forty-five minutes had gone by. The temperature had dropped ten degrees, from early spring to late winter. The one thing the Toyota did well, besides rusting, I mean, was kick out heat. I was snug as a baby in the womb. I just didn't know where the hell she was taking me. Two thoughts kept crisscrossing: Was she aware of me and simply driving me around and around or did she just like to go for rides after work, the way I sometimes did?

Then she veered southeast, and we came into the section new money had built, lying below us in grassy foothills. From up here you could see down into their backyards with their inevitable swimming pools and inevitable tennis courts and inevitable sprawling flagstone patios. The style of the houses changed from Victorian to everything from French Provincial to Colonial to Mediterranean. In the night now they seemed to glow with prosperity, gods perched above the moaning masses below. You could hear dogs bark in the darkness and you knew they would not be pretty collies or cute Scotties. They'd be Dobermans or maybe even (this was the fashion this season) pit bulls. These days, with people standing in cheese lines two blocks down from where factories stood unused, these days the gods had damned well better get themselves some protection.

I kept a city block behind her, but even so she pulled off the road so abruptly, I nearly had to put the car into the ditch. I cut the lights. Waited.

She'd cut her own lights. For a time I couldn't pick her out in the starry blackness.

I felt awkward, foolish, trapped. Apparently she'd been on to me all along and was now waiting for me to make my own move. Turn around and go back the other way? Stroll up to her and ask her just who the hell she was and why she'd knocked out my girlfriend and most likely a shrink named Evans?

At first I couldn't tell if my eyes were only playing tricks or if she had actually just done what she'd seemed to.

Left her black Honda and started walking down the road.

I reached up and popped the lid off the dome light and then thumbed out the bulb. I didn't want my car to light up when I eased out of it.

I put one foot down on the road and smelled the chill piney night and then put a second foot down and watched the way rolling cumulus clouds covered the quarter moon. She was ahead of me somewhere, walking. But where? And why?

I went after her, keeping to the side of the road, where even the gods had to put up with empty beer cans and Hershey wrappers and Merit packages soggy with dew.

On my right the pines were solid, broken only occasionally by small clearings of grass, still dead and brown. The left held two homes set very far back, little more than lights glimpsed through the hardwoods. Hearing a car behind me, I turned my head to the left so the driver couldn't see my face. He turned into the opposite drive, a chunky silhouette in a red BMW.

Then I saw her.

She was crawling up the face of two steep iron gates with the acumen of a monkey showing off for Sunday-afternoon visitors. She was so good at it, I just stood and watched her, forgetting for a moment why I was here in the first place. In her black leathers, she was hard to see. Then she dropped down on the other side of the gate, her body making a small sound as it touched the asphalt, and then she vanished.

I walked the rest of the way over to the iron gates. The estate was surrounded by a large stone wall. Schlepping up the gates was probably easier than going over the stone wall. Just behind me was a country-style mailbox. I went over and hauled out my flash and looked to see the name.

I stood there a moment and contemplated what the hell it could mean. Things had come abruptly together here. Yet, at the same time, nothing had come together at all.

The name on the mall box was LARRY PRICE, the same Larry Price who had been my high school classmate, the same Larry Price I'd gotten into a fight with during senior year, and the same Larry Price who had mysteriously been arguing with Karen Lane out in the alley the night she'd died.

Why would the woman in black leathers be coming to see Larry Price?

Another car swept past. I jumped into brush on the side of the intricately patterned iron gates. It hurtled on into the gloom.

I put my hand to the rough surface of stone. In movies,guys are always vaulting over walls like this one-it couldn't have been much higher than seven feet-or shinnying up them with rope ladders. But unfortunately, I had never been able to list vaulting or shinnying among my useful skills.

Hoping for blind luck, I went over to the gate and put my fingers through the bars and tried to see if they might not magically come apart and let me just sort of amble right on in. But there would be no ambling.

There would be only vaulting or shinnying.

So I put my right foot in the gate and proceeded to climb. I just hoped nobody was watching, especially the woman in black leathers. I had this image of her sitting somewhere in the bushes inside the estate laughing her shapely ass off.

It couldn't have taken longer than two or three hours to get over the gate and land-as in crash-landing-on the other side. All the way, between sweating, groaning, and cursing, I kept promising to enroll myself in some sort of mercenary school and learn how to do stuff like this. As a cop, the most strenuous thing I'd ever had to do was chase a car thief two blocks. He had done me the favor of being at Least fifty pounds overweight.

I stood on the other side breathless and soaked, panting and cursing still. And then I looked around at the estate fanning out before me. The asphalt road wound up past steep copses of pines and then wound back again to grounds that displayed a gazebo almost luminescent in the moonlight and a tennis court canvas-covered for the cold months and a small hothouse appearing almost secretive, tucked as it was into a stand of hardwoods.

The house, not as big as you might expect, was a garrison-style Colonial, two-stories, an off-yellow. To the west was a three-stall garage. All the doors were open. There were no cars. I glanced back at the house. Darkness. Stillness. Nobody home.

But she was in there somewhere. My motorcycle rider.

Taking a deep breath, hefting my flashlight as a weapon the way cops do, I started toward the house. If she'd found a way in, I'd find a way in. And then I'd confront her and find out all the things I needed to know, and maybe then I'd stumble onto the suitcase Karen Lane had hired me to find.

I was halfway to the house when she hit me. She got me from behind and she got me clean and I don't think I even had time for one good obscenity before the back of my head seemed to crack open and before I automatically put my hands out to soften my collision with the ground.