“What for?”
“I'd much more enjoy taking advantage of you sober.”
She slumped down in her seat. I thought she fell asleep again, but she was watching the side mirror. “Wonder who's following us?”
Their lights were higher than a car, lower than a truck. “I was thinking your husband.”
“Buddy's out with the boys.” That could range from poaching deer to delivering sidearms to customers too busy to linger for an instant background check. Although, to be fair, Buddy was often legitimately employed as an offshore oilrig roustabout, working months on and months off. One thing for sure, Gwen's husband hadn't been caught up in the White Birch fracas back in Frenchtown. Jervises did not waste their energy on police-attracting activities that didn't put food on the table or cash in the mattress.
It was slow going to her trailer, with the Olds scraping the crowns of the dark, dirt roads. Halfway there, she said, “Still following.”
“Probably looking for a place to pull over and make out.”
“I wonder if they're after you or me?”
“Who would have the balls to follow you into the Jervis woods?”
“So I guess they're after you.”
“Or lost. ”
“Maybe you better stay the night, just to be on the safe side.”
Tempting. Very. Although a prime example of polar opposites would be “safe side” and Buddy Jervis concluding his night's business early. “When's Buddy heading back to the Gulf?”
“He promised me he'd stay home a while.” She glanced at me and the dashboard lights glinted green in her eyes. “It's gotten so I miss the son of a bitch. I like having him around. We're getting old, Ben.”
“You're not old. Neither am I. Neither is Buddy. Well I guess he is, actually. What is he, fifteen years older than you?”
“They're turning off.”
“I see.”
“I'll lend you a sawed off. In case they're waiting for you.”
Wouldn't that would make Trooper Moody's night if he pulled me over back in Newbury with an illegal weapon in my car? Still, I was debating Gwen's offer when I saw in my mirrors red tail and white backup lights where the headlights had disappeared. Brake lights flashed and off. Then tail lights disappeared as whoever had been behind us turned around and pulled away in the direction from which we had come. “Thanks. I'll be fine.”
A half mile on, her trailer came in view, one of a dozen whose lights speckled the woods. I pulled up beside the wooden steps, kissed her good night longer than Buddy would have liked, and helped her climb the steps. “Wait a second,” she said. I heard her rummaging in the dark. She returned with a shotgun that had been hack-sawed down to sixteen inches of barrel and pistol stock.
“Safety's on. Stick it under your seat.” She was holding it in a dishrag. I stretched my sweater cuff over my fingers, kissed her cheek and said, “Thanks.”
Her door shut behind her, I waved in the general direction of the other trailers, nipping clan gossip in the bud, and drove away. Surrounded by cousins, nephews, uncles, and aunts, Gwen would sleep as safe as a general in the Green Zone.
I drove for a half mile and lowered the windows to see better as I neared the point where the car behind me had turned around. Apparently it had kept going. Nonetheless, I drove with my high beams high and watched carefully at every indent in the road where someone could be waiting. I was not surprised to make it to the River End still intact.
The bar was closed, the parking lot empty. Even Jennifer's bulldozer was gone.
I kept going. Then, after another mile or so of curving dark road, I topped a little rise which sent my headlights farther than normal. In the distance I saw the gleam of a car. It didn't seem to be moving. Closer, I saw it had stopped in the middle of the road, blocking it. I drew within a hundred yards and slowed, liking the situation less and less. I couldn't see the marker plate or tell what it was, except it looked like one of the smaller kinds of SUV.
I checked my mirrors, half-expecting a vehicle to come up behind me. Nothing. Or at least nothing with lights on. I stopped the car. Part of me wanted to pick up the gun under my seat. Part of me did not because once it filled my hand up went the potential for a misunderstanding turning deadly.
I shut the engine, doused my lights, and listened for someone coming up on foot or leaping from the woods. It was near silent, too early in the year for bugs to sing. I heard a barred owl bark. Then all I heard was the ticking of my engine cooling down. My eyes adjusted to the dark. But there was still nothing to see except the car ahead, the empty road behind, and the trees to my left and right.
I felt for the switch to deactivate the interior lights when I opened the door.
Suddenly the vehicle sprang to life. Headlights on, engine roaring, it raced away. I cranked the Olds and floored it. A couple making out would receive my apologies for interrupting, but I wanted to know who the hell was in that vehicle.
It was immediately obvious that I would never catch them. I had the speed, but not the clearance. The Olds was too low slung for the ruts and high crown of a dirt road. The red lights ahead dwindled and soon had disappeared. Just as well. Probably just a couple, or scared kids smoking dope. Still, I watched carefully until the dirt road finally returned me to the smooth macadam of a hilly, winding road which would connect me to Route 7 and home to Newbury.
It was past midnight. The road was empty. The speed limit was 45. I held to 50, with just enough beer on my breath not to want to be pulled over for speeding. I passed the occasional farmhouse, dark or with a single light on, but the land was mostly overgrown fields and dense woods. Where the tree canopy didn't cover the road I caught glimpses of stars in a black, moonless sky and once, where it opened by a farm field, a bright swath of Milky Way meandering south like a river.
I was back under the trees, entering a sharp curve, when I was stunned by a loud explosion and a dazzling flashâsearing, stark and penetrating as a million bolts of lightning. I saw the trees leap before my eyes, bright as icicles. Blinded, I stomped the brakes. The car screeched into a skid. I tried to steer away from the trees I could not see.
Not a tree died, thanks to a stone wall, which the Olds mounted at a terrible angle.
The impact threw me hard against the five-point competition seat belt that Pink had salvaged from a race car he had cracked up. Air bags would have been nice, too, but the Olds pre-dated them. I banged my head on the steering wheel, but the belt kept me inside the car as it rolled over and over and over shedding doors and windshield and sliding a ways on its roof. When metal finally stopped shrieking, the stink of spilled gasoline roused me to pop the belt and crawl out a jagged hole. I rolled away, scrambling for distance between me and an explosion, tried to stand, stumbled a few steps, and slowly collapsed in the road as if my body was saying, Enough, already, we're just going to lie down right here and have a little nap.
I heard a bell. Not a bell. A dragging clanking metallic noise. Like I was dragging old Marley's chains, I thought. Except it wasn't Christmas and I wasn't dead. I was alive and suddenly so sharp and aware I could hear another sound, some rustling in the woods, the snap of a branch. Then the bell started, again, resonating, clank, clank, clank.
I opened my eyes. I could see, for which I was deeply grateful. I could see my car, or what was left of it, wheels in the air. One of its headlights was still burning, pointed straight at me. The bell sounded near my ear. I raised my cheek from the cool road and read by the light of the headlampâin capital letters, six inches from my faceâthe words,
COMBINED TACTICAL SYSTEMS FLASH-BANG
7290.
Before I could register their meaning, they started moving. And as they moved, the bells started up again. The words were printed on a metal container the size and shape of a large beer can. But it wasn't a beer can because it was perforated with numerous holes. It moved past my face.
I reached outâvaguely aware that my limbs still workedâand grabbed it.
It had a string attached to an eye bolt. A string which I traced across the road and into the woods. Someone in the woods was pulling the other end of the string. And it occurred to me that the string was a lanyard for retrieving this metal can. Considering the light that had blinded me, the explosion, and the words FLASH-BANG, it dawned on me that my automobile accident was no accident. I had been blinded by a flash grenadeâlike the cops used to disorient criminals to keep them from shooting back when they raided their hideout. Cousin Sherman had mentioned them at the White Birch while asking Wide Greg about a purveyor of illegal weapons named Angel. Latino dude from Waterbury.
Right now I needed an angel. I looked at my car, wondering if I could get to the shotgun fast enough to get the drop on the son of a bitch tugging the string. I gathered my legs, but before I could rise, I was blinded, again, by bright headlights. A car had come along. The FLASH-BANG got away, clanged across the road, and disappeared into the woods.
Several million red, white, and blue lights started flashing, all at once.
I felt a painful nudge in my ribs and looked up to see Newbury's resident Connecticut State Police Trooper Oliver Moody gazing down at me with an expression more curious than sympathetic. “You okay?”
“I think so.”
“License and registration.”
“Ollie! Somebody just tried to kill me with a flash grenade.”
Trooper Moody crouched down and shined his Maglite in my face.
“You smell like you've been drinking.”
“I had a beer. Before somebody tried to kill me with a flash grenade. If you move quick, you can catch him in those woods, over there.”
“How many beers?”
“Breathalyze me for crissake. If you don't believe me.”
He didn't believe me. He did breathalyze me, after calling an ambulance. When I passed, he wrote me a ticket for making a restricted turn.
I convinced the Newbury volunteer ambulance crew that all I needed was some Band-Aids for a cut on my left palm I got crawling out of the car, some ice for a bump on the forehead, and a ride home. Sally Butler, the crew chief, kept shining her flashlight in my eyes. I demonstrated that my arms and legs were working. I didn't even limp. Sally finally decided that I was relatively undamaged. We agreed I would be sore in the morning.
But before Ollie allowed them to drive me home, he motioned me over to the Chevalley wrecker he had radioed to pick up the pieces. My cousins Albert and Dennis had hoisted the remains onto its flat bed and were standing by, curious as hogs on a truffle hunt. Ollie shined his light through the hole where the driver's door had been.
“What's this?”
“What's what?”
“That. Under the driver's seat.”
“Looks like a sawed-off shotgun,” chorused my cousins.
Ollie said, “You two get in the cab and sit there 'til I tell you otherwise.”
Albert and Dennis lumbered away. Ollie asked me, “What's a sawed-off shotgun doing in your car?”
“It's not mine.”
“Yeah? How did it get there?”
“Probably some crazy biker at the White Birch stashed it when you guys raided the joint.”
“Better not have your prints on it.”
At last, a reason to smile. “I would be surprised.”
***
Next morning, Sunday morning, while I was waiting in my office for Alison's father to pay a call, nursing a headache and numerous body aches, and wondering who had done that to me last night, Pink telephoned to report mournfully, “She's a goner, Ben. Frame's bent. Motor came right off the mounts, tore up the tranny something awful.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Sorry, man.”
“I just bought new tires.”
“Yeah, I see they came in yesterday. ”
“What would it cost to fix it?”
“She'd never be the same, Ben.”
A big shadow filled the door and knocked on the glass. I stifled the groan it took to remove my feet from my desk and called, “It's open. Come in.”
But it wasn't Alison's father. It was Trooper Moody. Six foot five from boots to hat, he looked way too large to be indoors. “Got a minute?” he asked in a tone that suggested he would get a warrant if I didn't.
“Sure. Sit down.”
He filled the clients' couch. “I checked out the site in the daylight. Found indications someone had been in the woods by the road.”
“Find the flash grenade?”
“Nope. But I saw where the lanyard mighta got hung up in a spice bush. Looked like the guy broke some branches yanking it loose.”
“Now that I'm a believable crime victim will you take back that ticket for making a restricted turn?” It was sitting on my desk, folded into a paper airplane. I sailed it in his direction. Ollie snatched it from the air without once removing his eyes from my face.
“Any idea who did it?” he asked.
“If I did I'd give you his phone number.”
“You been poking around trying to poke holes in the Kimball case. So I'm wondering who you pissed off.”
“Why not wonder who the killer is who thinks I'm getting close to proving Jeff Kimball didn't do it?”
“Because I arrested Kimball sitting on the bulldozer that squashed Billy Tiller.”
“I'm questioning the order they got there.”
Ollie emitted a blast-furnace sigh of disbelief. “Ben. I was there. The kid thought fast and made up a story about coming on the scene after it happened. But I caught him red-handed.”
“All I'm asking is, what if he didn't make it up? What if he's telling the truth?”
“Let me ask you something. Something you should have asked yourself when Roth hired you. Would you have climbed onto a bulldozer that was sitting on top of Billy Tiller?”
“No.”
“Why not?” Ollie asked triumphantly. “That's what the kid did.”
“There's a crucial difference between me and the kid.”
“Yeah, he's a murderer, you're not.”
“That's not the difference I'm talking about.”
“What is?”
“I don't know how to run a bulldozer.”
For some reason, Ollie looked even more triumphant.
“Besides,” I said, “Jeff Kimball is not a murderer.”
“Sure about that?”
I did not answer right away. Instead, I reviewed once more in my mind all the reasons I was sure that Jeff was innocent. His habit of turning the machine left. My belief that Billy's killer had arrived with him in his truck. True, I would have been happier if Evil Engineer Edwards hadn't admitted saving his marriage by shooting Billy last year, effectively eliminating a mysterious shooter as a suspect this year. Countering that was a powerful gut feeling that Jeff could not crush the life out of a fellow human being. And, of course, Jeff was not, by far, the only citizen of Newbury with reason to hate Billy Tiller. Besides, whoever exploded a flash grenade in my face last night thought I was getting too close for comfort. Someone in the River End Bar. Or hiding in the woods, watching my car.
“I'm absolutely positive Jeff Kimball is not a murderer.”
My declaration ignited the biggest grin I had ever seen on Ollie's face. “Then how come,” he asked, “Jeff Kimball just confessed?”