“Sneaky Pete!…” he sang to himself. “I’m Sneaky Pete!”
As he pedaled along, singing it, hearing it, it occurred to Pete that music was the only thing he missed about having no property. A good stereo. His blues and jazz albums. He’d had an amazing collection. But the music was still up there inside his head. All he had to do was listen hard.
“Sneaky Pete!…”
Now he’d made it to the foot of her driveway, the compound where the old bitch and her people lived. He climbed off and filled his baskets some more, taking her bottles and cans just like he took anybody else’s. He showed no prejudice. Although he did pause to spit on her mailbox.
This was a ritual he performed every Wednesday.
As Pete continued up 156 on his appointed rounds, pedaling along the shoulder, he could feel the rhythm of his song… Butn-dee-dutn… and count it… Two-three-four… because music was about numbers, too, wasn’t it? As he neared a stretch of wild brush and woodland, he heard a car come up behind, its headlights illuminating him and everything before him in foggy darkness. But the car did not pass him. Just stayed right there behind him, its engine making a throaty burble in the country quiet. Something about the way it sounded struck Pete as oddly familiar, but he didn’t turn around to check it out. Just pulled over at the next driveway, climbed off and started to pick through more empties.
Until suddenly he heard car doors open and swift footsteps coming toward him. Now he started to turn around but before he could move he got whacked on the back of his head by something incredibly hard. The blow staggered him. As he fell to his knees, dazed, blinking in the headlight beams, he felt another crack to his head. Now there were hands. Many hands lifting him up into the air, sweeping him into the woods beyond the roadside brush. Footsteps crashed through the brambles and dead leaves. Two of them. There were two. He could hear them whisper urgently to each other, but could not make out their words. And now they’d dumped him onto the slushy mud of the forest floor and they were cracking him on the head again. He threw his hands up over his head and let out a feeble yowl of pain as he felt another blow and another and then he did not feel anything.
He could hear them running away. Hear one of them crash and fall in the brush, get back up and keep running.
As he lay there, face down in the mud, Pete felt unbelievably huge. As huge as the planet itself. He swore that he could feel the curvature of the earth under his chest. And he could hear a wounded animal moaning softly somewhere far away in the woods. Then he realized with sudden clarity that the moans were coming out of him. There was a rackety, jangling noise nearby. They were doing something to his bike and trailers. Now there were footsteps and they jumped back in their car and went roaring off into the darkness, leaving him behind.
But he was not alone. King and Champion Jack were still there with him.
“I’m Sneaky Pete!”
The blues stayed with him, the beat pounding in his ears. Dee-dum… Bum-dee-dum. Though it was going slower now. And slo-o-o-ower… Dee… Dum-m-m-m…
“I’m Sneaky Pete!”
Until he wasn’t anybody anymore.
THIRTY-SIX HOURS EARLIER
CHAPTER 1
“Mitch, are you sure you want to discard that trey of diamonds?”
“Quite sure, Rut.” Mitch helped himself to another slice of sausage and mushroom pizza. He was seated across from Rut at the round oak dining table that pretty much filled the old geezer’s cozy parlor. “Why are you asking?”
“You discarded the trey of clubs not one minute ago,” Rut replied. “It so happens I snatched it up. A card player who wants to hold on to some of his hard-earned money might surmise that I’m collecting treys, and by discarding another one he’d be giving me a little thing we call… Gin.” Rut fanned his cards out on the table, cackling with delight. “Let’s see what you’ve got, pigeon.”
Mitch had bupkes-for the fifth hand in a row.
“That’s two dollars and sixty-three cents you owe me,” Rut declared, computing the total on the pad at his elbow. “It’s a good thing you excel at your profession, my pudgy young friend. Because you are one rotten card player.”
“Shut up and deal,” grumbled Mitch Berger, lead film critic for the most prestigious, and therefore lowest paying, of the three New York City daily newspapers. Mitch’s job called for him to spend part of his time in the city. But lately he’d been spending more and more of it in Dorset, the historic Connecticut Gold Coast village that was situated at the mouth of the Connecticut River almost exactly halfway between New York and Boston. His life was here now.
“Sorry, Mitch, you said what?” Rut turned up his hearing aids. He was pretty much deaf without them.
“I said, ‘Shut up and deal,’” Mitch replied, quoting that most famous of lines from The Apartment, his favorite Billy Wilder movie.
“It’ll be a pleasure,” Rut said, shuffling the cards with hands that were surprisingly deft and quick. Rutherford Peck invariably whipped Mitch at Gin Rummy. He was a more serious card player. Either that or he cheated. Mitch wouldn’t put it past the sly old coot. “Care for another stout to wash down that there slice?”
“I wouldn’t say no.”
Rut got slowly to his feet and waddled into the kitchen to fetch two more bottles of his delicious homebrewed stout. Rut was a stocky, potato-nosed widower in his late seventies with tufty white hair, rosy red cheeks and eyes that were blue and impish behind his thick black-framed glasses. He smelled strongly of BenGay, Vicks VapoRub and mothballs, a locally popular blend of scents that Mitch had come to think of as Eau de Dorset. Rut had served as Dorset’s postmaster for some thirtyseven years. Had lived in this upended shoebox of a farmhouse his whole life. It was an old tenant farmer’s cottage on Maple Lane, a narrow deadend that cut in between two of the grandest colonial mansions to be found in the Dorset Street Historic District. His place was falling into weedy disrepair, like a lot of houses owned by old people. But the parlor was homey.
Mitch had gotten to know him through Sheila Enman, one of the housebound Dorset elders who he’d started marketing for over the winter. Sheila had wondered if Mitch might pick up a few things for Rut, too. “My pleasure,” Mitch had assured her, especially when the retired postmaster insisted on rewarding him with bottles of his homebrewed stout. Soon, Mitch took to hanging around to drink that stout with him and catch up on village gossip. Absolutely nothing went on that Rut Peck didn’t know about. When Rut’s Monday night regular died a few weeks back, Mitch was promoted to a fullfledged Friend of Rut.
The Friends of Rut were a rich and varied cross section of local notables. Among the old man’s roster of designated nightly visitors were Dorset’s starchy first selectman, Bob Paffin, and Eric Vickers, an organic farmer who was the son of Poochie Vickers, Dorset’s most renowned WASP aristocrat. There was Milo Kershaw, a grizzled swamp Yankee who’d spent several years behind bars. And there was Mitch, a thirtytwoyearold Jewish product of the streets of New York City. Every Monday he let Rut beat his ass at Gin Rummy.
Not that he had the power to stop him. The old geezer could play cards.
Rut returned from the kitchen with two bottles of stout. He set them down on the table, wheezing slightly, and fed his wood stove with more logs. It was a cold, damp March night. Soon it would be St. Patrick’s Day, which was Mitch’s least favorite holiday of the year. Not because he hated parades or corned beef and cabbage, but because of something very personal and sorrowful.