As long as I stayed up against him, I could neutralize his quickness and I could outmuscle him. I rammed him against the wall. My chin was locked over his shoulder, and I hit him in the stomach with both fists. I hurt him. He grunted. He hammered on my back with both fists, but I had a lot of muscle layer to protect back there. Twenty years of working on the lats and the lateral obliques. I got hold of his shirtfront with both hands and pulled him away from the wall and slammed him back up against it. His hand whiplashed back and banged on the wall. It was plasterboard and it broke through. I slammed him again and he sagged. I brought my left fist up over his arms and hit him on the side of the face, at the temple, with the side of my clenched fist. Don’t want to break the knuckles. A kind of pressure was building in me, and I saw everything indistinctly. I slammed him on the wall and then stepped back and hit him left, left, right, in the face.
I could barely see his face now, white and disembodied in front of me. I hit it again. He started to sag, I got hold of his collar with my left hand and pulled him up and hit him with my right. He sagged heavier, and I jammed him against the wall with my left and hammered him with my right. His face was no longer white. It was bloody, and it bobbled limply when I hit him. I could feel my whole self surging up into my fist as I held him and hit him. The rhythm of the punches thundered in my head, and I couldn’t hear anything else. I was vaguely aware of someone pulling at me and I brushed him away with my right hand. Then I could hear voices. I kept punching. Then I could hear Linda Rabb’s voice. The pounding in my head modified a little.
“Stop it, Spenser. Stop it, Spenser. You’re killing him.
Stop it.”
Someone had hold of my arm, and it was Marty Rabb, and Lester’s face was a bloody mess, unconscious in front of me. Maynard was sitting openmouthed on the floor, blood trickling from his nose. It must have been him I brushed away.
“Stop it, stop it, stop it.” Linda Rabb had hold of my left arm and was trying to pry my hand loose from Lester’s shirtfront. I opened the fingers and stepped away, and Lester slid to the floor. Maynard slid over to him without getting up and with a handkerchief began to wipe the blood from Lester’s face. I could see Lester’s chest rising and falling as he breathed. I noticed I was breathing heavy too. Marty and Linda Rabb both stood in front of me, the kid holding Linda’s hand. Tears were running down his cheeks and his eyes were wide with fright, but he was quiet.
“Jesus, Spenser,” Rabb said. “What happened? You were crazy.”
I was sweating now, as if a fever had broken. I shook my head. “A lot of strain,” I said. “We’ve all had a lot of strain.
I’m sorry the kid saw it.”
Maynard had gone to the bathroom and come back with wet towels and was cleaning Lester up and putting a cold compress on his forehead. “Pay attention to what happened, Bucky boy,” I said. “Don’t irritate me.”
Lester moved a little. His lips were swollen and one eye was closed. Maynard kept washing his face with the damp towel.
“It’s okay, Lester,” he said. “It’s okay.”
Lester sat up and pushed the towel away. “Help me up,” he mumbled.
Maynard got up and got Lester on his feet.
“Let’s get out of here,” Lester said.
Maynard started to take him toward the door, his arm around Lester’s back.
“Bucky,” I said, “we agree about the tie? And how we got no further business?”
Maynard nodded. There was no color left in his face, just the slight smear of brown, drying blood on his lip.
“I want to go home, Bucky,” Lester mumbled, and Bucky said, “Yeah, yeah, Lester, we’ll go home.” And out they went.
Linda Rabb sat on the floor with her son and held him against her and put her face in his hair. They rocked back and forth slightly on the floor, and Marty Rabb and I stood awkwardly above them and said nothing at all. Finally I said, “Okay, Marty. I think we’ve done all there is to do.”
He put his hand out. “Thank you, Spenser, I guess. We were in a mess we couldn’t have gotten out of without you. I can’t say quite where we’re at now, but thank you for what you did. Including Lester. I think probably he’s too good at tae kwon dong or whatever it is for me.”
“He might have been too good for me if I hadn’t sucker-punched him first.”
We shook hands. Linda Rabb didn’t look up. I went out the front door. She didn’t say goodbye.
I never saw her again.
CHAPTER THIRTY
AND YOU KEPT HITTING him, Susan Silverman said.
We were sitting in a back booth in The Last Hurrah, looking at the menu and having the first drink of the evening.
Mine was a stein of Harp; hers, a vodka gimlet.
“It all seemed to bubble up inside me and explode. It wasn’t Lester; it was Doerr and Wally Hogg and me and the case and the way things worked out so everyone got hurt some. It all just exploded out of me, and I damn near killed the poor creep.”
“From what you say he probably earned the beating.”
“Yeah, he did. That’s not what bothers me. I’m what bothers me. I’m not supposed to do that.”
“I know, I’ve seen the big red S on your chest.”
“That ain’t all you seen, sweet patooti.”
“I know, but it’s all I remember.”
“Oh,” I said.
She smiled at me, that sunrise of a smile that colored her whole face and seemed to enliven her whole body. “Well, maybe I can remember something else if I think on it.”
“Perhaps a refresher course later on tonight,” I said.
“Perhaps.”
The waiter came and took our order, went away, and returned shortly with another beer for me.
“The irony is,” I said, “that Linda Rabb is married to one of the all-time greats of jockdom, and she’s being helped by me, with the red S on my chest and the gun in my pocket, and she’s the one that saves them. She’s the one, while us two stud ducks are standing around flexing, that does what had to be done. And it hurt and I couldn’t save them and her husband couldn’t save them. She saved herself and her husband.”
“Maynard has stopped the blackmail?”
“Sure, he had to. He had nothing to gain and everything to lose.” I drank some beer. The waiter brought us each a plate of oysters and a bottle of Chablis.
“The papers have been kind to Mrs. Rabb.”
“Yeah, pretty good. There’s been a lot of mail, some of it really ugly, but the club publicity people are handling it and she hasn’t had to read much of it.”
“How about Marty?”
“He went into the stands for some guy out in Minnesota and got a three-day suspension for it. Since then he’s kept his mouth shut, but you can tell it hurts.”
“And you?”
I shrugged. The waiter took away the empty oyster plates and put down two small crocks of crab and lobster stew.
“And you?” she said again.
“I killed two guys, and almost killed another one.”
“Killing those two was what made it possible for Linda Rabb to do what she did.”
“I know.”
“You’ve killed people before.”
“Yeah.”
“They would have killed you.”
“Yeah.”
“Then it had to be, didn’t it?”
“I set them up,” I said. “I got them up there to kill them.”
“Yes, and you walked in on them from the front, two of them to one of you, like a John Wayne movie. How many men do you think would have done that?”
I shook my head.
“Do you think they would have done it? They weren’t doing it. They were trying to ambush you. And if they’d succeeded, would they be agonizing about it now?”
I shook my head again.
“You’d have had to kill them,” Susan said. “Sometime.
Now it’s done. What does it matter how?”