I was about to turn back to my car when, from behind me, I heard a noise on the gravel and a familiar voice said: "Bad weather for birds. You should be curled up in your coop." The voice was accompanied by the cocking of a hammer on a pistol.
I slowly raised my hands from my coat and turned to see Mifflin, Tony Celli's harelipped enforcer, smiling crookedly at me. He held a Ruger Speed Six in his hand, the rounded butt gripped hard in his stubby fist.
"It's like déjà vu all over again," I said. "I'll have to park someplace else in the future."
"I think your parking problem is about to be solved. Permanently. How's your head feel?" The smile was still fixed in place.
"Pretty good. Hope I didn't hurt your foot too badly."
"I get the soles made special to absorb impact. I didn't feel a thing." He was close to me, maybe only six or seven feet away. I didn't know where he had come from; maybe he had been waiting in the shadows behind One India all along, or had followed me to the meeting place, although I couldn't figure out how he might have known about it. Behind me, the rain made cracking noises as it hit the water.
Mifflin nodded in the direction of the lot. "See you got your Mustang fixed."
"Accidents will happen. That's why I have insurance."
"You should have saved your money, spent it on dames. You ain't gonna need a car no more, unless they have demolition derbies in hell."
He raised the gun and his finger tightened on the trigger. "Bet your insurance doesn't cover you for this."
"Bet it does," I said, as Louis appeared from behind the red office building, his dark hand gripping Mifflin's gun arm tightly as I moved quickly to my left. Louis's right hand pressed the barrel of a SIG into the soft jowl of the would-be assassin.
"Gently," said Louis. "Wouldn't want that thing to go off and scare somebody, make them loose off a shot into someone else's fat jaw."
Mifflin carefully removed his finger from within the guard and slowly eased the hammer down. Angel joined Louis and took the Ruger from the gunman's hand.
"Hi, gorgeous," he said, pointing it at Mifflin's head. "That's a big gun for a little guy."
Mifflin said nothing as Louis eased the SIG away from his mouth and slipped it into the side pocket of his dark overcoat, his hand still gripping the gunman's arm. Louis made a sudden, swift movement and there was a hard, sharp crack as he broke Mifflin's right arm at the elbow, then struck the smaller man's head twice against the side of the building. The gunman folded to the ground. Angel disappeared and returned a minute later driving the Mercury. He flipped the trunk and Louis dumped Mifflin's prone form inside. Then we followed the car as Angel drove to the end of the Island parking lot, close by a gap in the fencing that led to the edge of the dock. When we had stopped, Louis took Mifflin's body from the trunk, dragged him to the edge, and threw him into the sea. There was a loud splash as he hit the water, the noise quickly drowned by the steady sound of the rain.
Louis would have regarded me as weak, I think, if I had said it, but I regretted the death of Mifflin. Certainly, the fact that he had been about to kill me indicated that Tony Celli felt my limited usefulness was now at an end. If we had let him live, he would have come back and tried again, probably with more guns to back him up. But the finality of that soft splash made me weary.
"His car's parked a block away," said Angel. "We found this on the floor." In his hand was a mobile VHF three-channel receiver, maybe five inches wide and an inch and a half in width, designed to draw power from the car battery. If there was a receiver, then there had to be a transmitter.
"They bugged the house," I said. "Probably while I was in Celli's room. I should have known, when they didn't kill me."
Angel shrugged, and tossed the receiver into the sea. "If he was here, then his friends are already on their way to the complex," he said. To my left, Fore Street wound north, parallel to the harbor, and I could see the silhouettes of the Portland Company buildings in the distance.
"We'll follow the railway line, come in from the harbor side," I said. I drew my gun and clicked off the safety, but Louis tapped me on the shoulder as I did so and withdrew a Colt Government Model.380 from his right coat pocket. From his inside pocket, he produced and fitted a suppressor. "You use your Smith & Wesson and anything goes down, they can trace it back to you," he said. "Use this, and we can dump it later. Plus, it'll be a whole lot quieter." Not surprisingly, Louis knew his guns: semiautomatics chambered for subsonic ammunition are about the only pistols that function effectively with a suppressor. If the Hertz people knew the kind of luggage Louis was keeping in their car, they'd have suffered a collective seizure.
Louis handed his SIG to Angel, took a matching.380 from his left pocket and once again fitted a suppressor. His actions should have alerted me to what would happen later-not even Louis just "happened" to be carrying a pair of silenced weapons-but I was too concerned about Billy Purdue to give it much thought.
Louis and I walked down the line, Angel behind us. Rust-red railroad tracks lay in forgotten piles beside ties that were pitted and knotted, the wood almost black in places. Beyond the storage yards, where old wrecking balls lay side by side and concrete supports bled rust from their innards, wooden pilings moved in the tide like the remains of a primeval forest.
The Portland Company complex stood across from the marina, its entrance marked by the Sandy River Railroad car used to carry the tourists, its red guard's car and green carriages now standing silent. The complex had served the railroads once, when the Portland Company had built engines and steam locomotives, but it closed in the seventies and the buildings had now been redeveloped as a business park. Inside the yard, an old black steel tractor with a restored chimney stood at the entrance to the Narrow Gauge Railroad Museum. The building, like all those in the complex, was redbrick, and three stories at its highest point, with a machine tool company housed in a similar, though larger, structure behind it, the two connected by a closed walkway. To the left of the museum was a long building that housed some kind of yacht service, I seemed to remember, and a second, similar building used by a fiberglass company.
At the southern end of the yard was another, three-story building, the windows on the ground floor boarded up, the windows on the other levels obscured by wire screens, where Billy Purdue had said he was hiding. There was no doorway on the harbor side but the northern end had a wooden, shedlike structure that housed the main door. A roadway wound past the doorway and sloped upward to the visitor entrance to the complex on Fore Street. The whole place appeared deserted and the rain fell hard and unforgiving upon it. The drops sounded like stones beating on the roof of the museum, where a side door stood open. Silently, I indicated it and Louis, Angel and I made our way into the building.
Inside, beneath a vaulted ceiling, deserted railroad cars stood in rows: green Wicasset and Quebec cars, green and red Sandy River cars from Franklin County, a green-and-yellow Bridgton and Saco, and, to our right, an old Railbus with an REO Speedwagon chassis from the Sandy River line.
Beside the Railbus, a body lay curled, its long dark coat gathered around it like a shroud. I turned it over, steeling myself for the sight of Billy Purdue. It was not him. Instead, the contorted features of Berendt, Mifflin's square-headed sidekick, stared back at me, a dark, ragged exit wound in his forehead. I could smell singed hair. On the floor of the museum, blood and dust congealed.
Louis's shadow fell across me. "You think Billy Purdue did this?"
I swallowed, and the sound was huge in my ears. I shook my head and he nodded silently to himself.