There weren’t any favorable ends when it came to men with guns. Not in the Muir Woods. Not anywhere. Jimmy Gaines, when he wanted, would simply walk over and pop them, one after the other, straight in the head as they sat, tied together in a place that stank of moss and rotting vegetation. A jerk of the trigger was all it took. He’d been thinking of Jimmy a lot in the hour or so since Tom Black had appeared from behind the sequoias, like a lost forest creature in search of salvation. Jimmy Gaines taking them to bars where they didn’t really feel comfortable. Jimmy Gaines swinging hard and viciously at a stranger who’d said the wrong thing, thought the wrong thought, looked the wrong way.
Like the idiots they were, he and Hank had walked straight up to him at Lukatmi based on that single sighting of Gaines with Tom Black weeks before, when they had, now Frank thought of it, seemed the very best of friends. That was the trouble with the Marina. It was a community, a little village full of smart, engaged, occasionally difficult people, all living on top of one another. It was hard to keep secrets. Jimmy Gaines, a solitary bachelor who quietly declined to go to some of the bars the other guys did after duty, had never really kept his. People were simply too polite — too uninterested, frankly — to mention it. So when a secret became big, became important, a man just passed it by like all the others. Familiarity didn’t breed contempt. It bred a quiet, polite ignorance, a glance away at an awkward, embarrassing moment, a cough in the fist, then, after a suitable pause, a quick smile while glancing at the ground and formulating a rapid change of subject.
All of which led them to the Muir Woods while a line from an old movie kept running and running and running round his head like some loose carnivore circling the big, dark forest of his imagination.
I don’t like it … knowing I have to die.
Hank’s elbow nudged him in the ribs. He felt his brother’s bristly cheek rub up against his.
“How are you doing?”
“Never felt better.”
“This is my fault. Sorry.”
“No need to apologise. We are jointly responsible for our own stupidity.”
Hank cleared his throat. “May I remind you I am the junior here?”
Frank so wished he could look his brother full in the face at that moment. “By seven minutes, if you recall,” he pointed out, thinking it was a long time since they’d had this conversation. Maybe five decades or so.
“Seven minutes, seven years. It doesn’t matter. It still makes me younger. Still makes you the old one. The serious one. The one who does things the way you do ’cause you think that’s what’s expected.”
They never argued. If there was cause for complaint, they simply fell into silence and waited till the cloud lifted. It had worked this way for almost sixty years, since they learned to speak.
“So what?” Frank asked.
“So we’re clever and stupid in different ways. Normally, I’d say you were the cleverer and me the stupider. But this isn’t normal, is it?”
Tom Black and Jimmy Gaines were on the phone again. Frank was glad of that. They weren’t taking any notice of the two old men they’d tied up next to a redwood tree.
“I am inclined to concur,” he said. “Your point being?”
Hank shuffled round a little. They could just about catch the corner of each other’s eye.
“The point being,” Hank went on, “whether this is a left-brain or right-brain situation. Whether it’s one best handled by me.” The nudge in the ribs again. “Or by you. And you think it’s you. Because you’re like that. No offence, brother. You are. That’s fine.”
“Hank,” Frank said very calmly, “this could be difficult. We might have a lot of talking to do. Talking’s something best left to me. We’ve always worked that way.”
“There you are wrong, brother.” There was anger and determination in that lone, bright eye. “This is not about talking at all. Did they look remotely interested when you offered to call Teresa? Well, did they?”
Frank thought about that. He’d been a little scared when Jimmy Gaines had demanded the Italian pathologist’s number. He just wanted to give the man anything he could if it kept that big old gun out of their faces.
Jimmy Gaines and Tom Black never asked them to do a damned thing once they had Frank’s address book.
“No. They didn’t.”
“Another thing,” Hank added. “I can hear better than you these days. They weren’t talking about Teresa. They kept using that cop’s name, the one whose number she gave us. Costa. Seemed like Black knew who he was already.”
“That’s good.”
“No, it isn’t. That Italian cop doesn’t know us from Adam.”
Frank felt scared again. Very.
“Listen to me, Frank. I don’t know who they’ve called already but pretty soon they’re going to call the Costa guy. Then Tom’s going to go to see him and cut some kind of a deal. You know the routine. You read it a million times in all that stupid pulp fiction of yours: ‘I didn’t know what was going on, Officer. I just got scared and ran away. I got your number sometime. You seemed a nice, gullible guy.’ ” He took a deep, wheezy breath. “Whatever. And then …”
Hank’s single eye peered at him. Frank marvelled at the fact he’d learned more new stuff about his twin brother this last week than at any time in the last twenty years.
“Then it’s just Jimmy Gaines and us,” Frank replied. “And us knowing that was all a pile of crap, and that he was in there with them, too, which Costa won’t get told because Jimmy Gaines doesn’t want to go to jail, not for anybody.”
“You old guys,” Hank muttered with some sly amusement. “You get there in the end. Just listen to your little brother and do what he says.”
“OK,” Frank said, and was amazed how odd the concession sounded.
“Good. They’re working out their story. Their plan. Pretty soon Tom Black’s going to make that final call, then he’s going to get out of here. After that, Jimmy Gaines is going to walk over, say a brief apology, and blow our brains out.” He sighed. “Or so he’d like to think.”
Frank Boynton watched his brother’s lone eye wink the way it did when they were children.
“Good thing the stupid, head-in-the-clouds kid brother had the gumption to bring a knife, huh?” Hank asked lightly.
After that, Frank didn’t say a word. He stayed still and silent, hustling up a little closer to his brother so that the two men locked in conversation by the trees didn’t get suspicious about what Hank was doing with his hands.
A little while later they heard Tom Black make one more call, and the name Costa came into that. It didn’t last long. Then he left without once looking back.
Jimmy Gaines stayed by the big redwood and lit a cigarette. He smoked it slowly.
At least he seemed a little reluctant. Frank Boynton gave him that.
7
Vertigo lasted just over two hours. They watched in silence, Costa upright, Maggie reclining, her head on his shoulder, hair brushing against his cheek, sweet and soft and full of memories of another. They had nothing to say, nothing to share except the same sense of fearful wonder watching what was taking place on the screen, a fairy tale for adults imagined long before they were born.