“I don’t listen to music.”
“That’s fully unbelievable.”
“It’s too... fast.”
“There’s slow ones, too. Slow stuff is old people’s music. I like it when it makes me all amped and crazy. You know, gets you through the day.” Lucinda sighed. She looked around, suddenly bored. Her eyes were quick, and they seemed to be looking for something specific. “Do you have a car?”
She’s looking for car keys, he thought, of course. He hesitated. “Yes.”
“What kind?”
“Porsche.”
Lucinda came back to life. “Get out of here!”
“But it’s in the shop.”
“Yeah, right.”
“It’s blue,” he said.
She looked at him, askance but hopeful. “Maybe we can drive around in it when it’s fixed.”
Joseph was suddenly clear of head now — no ringing, no interference. His plan was crystalizing. “Sure. But there’s some trouble with the mechanics. I’ve got to get my lawyer involved.”
“You got a lawyer?”
“On retainer.”
“The only retainer I had was when I was thirteen, but it hurt my gums.” She laughed at her own joke. Her smile was dazzling. “So, you really got your own lawyer?”
Joseph, for the first time in his life, was discovering what it was to impress. It seemed to come to him like a revelation from heaven. He’d always gotten by before by being the boy, the wonder-struck youth, the innocent. How well that had worked in Hardin County. It’s out by the swamp, Lucy. I swear. I couldn’t believe it, either...
He wondered whether this was his first taste of adulthood. “And I need to write him a letter on good paper, with a good word processor. It’s got to look important, because he is.”
“Well, like write it then, and we’ll go for a ride. I got lots of friends you’d like.”
“My computer’s in the shop also.”
Lucinda laughed, more of a snicker maybe. “Everything you have is broke. I suppose your lawyer’s in the hospital, too?”
“Can I use this one?” Joseph looked at the shrouded boxes on the desk before him.
“Fine with me,” she said. “Grandma bought that for me for college. A little like, early. I’m not ready for college.”
“I’m not familiar with this model.”
“Even a nerd can run one. It’s totally easy.”
“Will you show me how?”
“So you can write your lawyer about the Porsche?”
“Yes.”
She looked at him, torn between trust and her somewhat dim view of the stuff guys try to pull on you sometimes. Then she stood and offered him a coquettish smile, peeping out from behind that wall of hair again. “First, Joe, you got to take the covers off.”
Chapter 19
Just after midnight, Jim was poring over the department file on Phil Kearns when the phone rang.
“Jim Weir?”
“Yes.”
“This is NBPD Dispatch. Brian Dennison wants to see you immediately. He’s at Three-forty Leeward. It is urgent.”
“I’m on my way.”
Jim pulled on his boots, grabbed a windbreaker to cut the night chill, and got down the stairs as quietly as he could.
He choked the old Ford and let her idle high for a minute. Leeward, he thought, the industrial zone of Newport, home of Cheverton Sewer & Septic. Goins? Why would Dennison call if they’d gotten Goins? Maybe Dale Blodgett and Duty Free were off on another mystery cruise.
The peninsula traffic was light at this hour. The houses squatted together closely in the fog and each streetlamp wore a damp halo. Up the boulevard, over the bridge, past the hospital, then across Superior and into the poorly lit blocks of body shops and boat yards. Leeward was one block south of Cheverton. Jim turned left, steered around a gaping pothole, and followed a chain-link fence topped with concertina wire to a gate held open by an old truck tire. The numbers 340 were painted in Day-Glo silver along the top curve of the rubber. He cranked the wheel and bounced in.
While dust settled down in the beam of his headlights, Jim considered the stucco building, one of dozens of 1950s houses now converted for commercial use. The porch light was on, aswirl with moths. The sign below it read DAVIS MARINE INDUSTRIES. The front room was dark, but a steady light issued from the back and the pale yellow of a window stood out on the south wall. A late-model Jaguar sat in front — Dennison’s unreliable import, thought Weir — and beside it a white van.
He stepped out, pocketed the keys and crunched across the gravel, and went up a couple of steps and rang the buzzer by the front door.
A man’s voice issued from inside. “Weir?”
“Yeah.”
“Door’s open. Come on back.”
The living room/lobby was cool and dark. Jim walked toward the hallway and the light. He could make out the shapes of an old table and some folding chairs, a sofa, a couple of file cabinets in one corner. At the end of the hallway, a door was cracked open and the light from within sprayed out calmly against the opposite wall.
Jim pushed through the door, stepped inside, and was just about to bring up his arms in defense when the baseball bat, swung by the figure on his right, slammed into his stomach and sent him down on one knee.
Shapes around him: ski masks, gloves, dark clothing. A surge of adrenaline brought him up and he caught the man with the bat square on the jaw with a hooking left. Movement to his right, squaring to meet the onrush, driving his right fist straight into a masked nose that cracked and flattened and sent the man down. It hit him sooner than he thought it would, a heavy blow to his lower ribs, a blow that sent the breath gasping out of him and a bright red luminescence burning in his eyes. Then another to his stomach, followed by a weighted shove — two men at least, he thought — from behind, hurling him forward in a tripping run that ended abruptly when he hit the wall. He spun away and caught a chin with his elbow, but the movement left him open and he saw it coming before he could do anything about it, the short side-chopping swing of the bat again as it thwumped into his stomach. He hit the floor hard, landing on his hands and knees. For an oddly peaceful moment, Weir believed that he could simply stay here like this — immovable, safe. The kick he knew was coming lifted one side of him up and crumpled an elbow. He rolled onto his back, looking up through his own hands held before his face.
Six, he thought, wanted to count, but couldn’t concentrate. No words. No Dennison. No one built like Dennison. Heavy breathings, a sense of purpose. A burning down in the ribs, the rise of nausea, dizziness. Looking straight up now, he saw the hangman’s noose fixed to a beam exposed by a hole in the ceiling.
“Having fun, Weir?”
He grunted as they descended on him and he tried to struggle up, but his legs were too slow to move him, and one well-placed foot on his chest pressed him back to the floor. Then the strangest sensation, of being swept up feet first, his head dangling and his legs above him. Grunting, a curse, then a sudden jolt and Weir was swaying back and forth, gently as a limb in a breeze. When he looked up he saw his boots, cinched into the noose. When he looked to his side, he saw a belt buckle, a stomach, a pair of gloved hands on hips, the walls rotating dizzyingly — not just left to right but up and down, too. When he strained his neck up, he could see the masks, which was to see nothing at all. A gag was jammed into his mouth. He felt the knot being tied behind his skull.
One of them nodded. Two others stepped forward and Jim saw the lopping shears, the ones with the long, long handles and the short curved blades that can take off a limb the size of a man’s wrist without great effort.
In that moment, Jim Weir knew the greatest fear of his life. It settled over him like a box with thick walls, a cold, contained finality with which there was no argument, no negotiation.