“You having any more headaches, Dad?” Dave asked as they walked behind their cart.
“From when that guy bonked me?” Lester asked. “No. That only lasted a couple of days. I’m good now. I can’t deny that I’m happier running interviews for a while, though. I tried jogging this morning and could still feel where he hit me.” He tapped his head, now sporting a recruit’s high-and-tight haircut to balance out the tonsorial damage left behind by the ER nurses. “Good thing it’s not a vital organ, huh?”
He poked his son in the shoulder, grabbed a loaf of bread as they walked by the bakery section, and tossed it to Dave like an underhanded football. Dave snatched it out of the air and diverted it into the cart as they laughed.
“Ice cream?” Lester asked as they neared the end of the aisle.
“Cherry Garcia,” Dave answered without pause.
They rounded the corner and aimed for a row of glass-fronted freezers when a young man appeared out of the end of an adjacent aisle, carrying a six-pack of beer.
Lester took no particular notice of him, until he saw him freeze in midstep and stare, as if caught in a searchlight at night. Instinctively, Les also stopped, reaching out to grab Dave by the back of his shirt.
Dave twisted, smiling, to ask what was up, while the young man dropped the six-pack on the floor with a dull thud and took off running in the opposite direction.
That did it. Lester, having not recognized the man’s face, definitely remembered his awkward running style. This was the guy who’d smacked him on the head.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, “it’s him,” and took off in pursuit.
Dave didn’t hesitate. He followed his father, abandoning their groceries as they all headed for the broad bank of doors beyond the checkout counters.
“POLICE,” Lester called out. “Stop.”
Lester glanced over his shoulder. “Stay back, Dave. I want you safe. Phone 911. Officer in pursuit.”
Dave dropped out of his father’s peripheral vision while staying in the chase and pulling out his cell to make the call.
One by one, they dodged and weaved through the thin crowd, bursting out into the parking lot like successive coins shot from a slot machine.
The supermarket was located on the edge of downtown Springfield, in a shopping plaza built on a small peninsula, bounded on three sides by the Black River. A major roadway capped it across the top. Aside from an access drive to the road, far from the store’s entrance, there was a single narrow pedestrian bridge spanning the water between the plaza and an old mill site.
This is where the runner headed.
Lester knew this part of town from driving around in search of a parking place. Dave, on the other hand, had hung out here as a kid every Saturday night with friends. He knew it as he did his own living room. Instinctively, therefore, with no word to his father, he split off at an angle, using his youth, his long legs, and the lay of the land to best advantage, and went to cut off their prey from reaching the footbridge.
Their target saw him coming-as did Lester, whose caution shifted to pride at the sight-and veered off toward an awkward juncture at the edge of the plaza, where the river, the road’s embankment, and a row of tangled trees all met up in an ignored and jumbled eyesore behind another building.
“Stop where you are,” Les repeated, now panting with exertion. “Police.”
Of course the other man didn’t stop, and, judging the underbrush near the trees to be impenetrable, he plunged down the embankment through a tangle of storm rubbish and mud, toward the water.
“Damn,” Lester swore under his breath as he and David followed suit.
Fortunately, they were spared anything beyond wet and muddy feet, as the guy before them slid on the loose talus of river rocks and went sprawling into a filthy mixture of water, mud, and urban trash that swirled lazily in a small eddy. Without comment, Lester and David each took hold of a leg and dragged their prize back to dry land, where-finally defeated-he just lay on the ground, looking up at them.
Expressing himself via gesture only-still gasping for air-Les reached out, smiling broadly, and slapped his son on the back.
* * *
“At the grocery store?” Joe asked, incredulous.
“It happens,” Lester told him. “It’s not that big a state. His name is Travis Reynolds. I ran his criminal record. Typical stuff-nothing over the top. He’s a bad boy heading for worse. I have him locked up at the Springfield PD right now. Thought you might like talking with him.”
Joe was back home in Brattleboro and checked his watch instinctively, not that he had anywhere else to go, or anything else to do just then. “You think he’ll play?” he asked.
“I think he might with you,” Les told him truthfully. “If you were introduced as the big boss holding a deal in his hand. I’ve let him know that we could lock him up for a very long time on what he did to me. He has no clue I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup if you paid me.”
“Sold,” Joe said. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”
* * *
Springfield was less than forty miles north of Brattleboro, one among a scattering of industrial-era towns lining the shores of the Connecticut River-all once reliant and dependent on the water as a power source and a conduit to urban centers like Hartford and beyond, and now largely left to their own wits, surviving in a very post-industrial world.
As if reflecting this downturn, Joe’s journey was thin on traffic and shrouded in darkness, in contrast to similar trips that he’d taken into Massachusetts and beyond, where signs of commerce and manufacturing burned late into the night. It was Vermont’s particular burden to be the envy of its powerhouse neighbors-whose residents flocked to relax in its pastoral spaces-while it aspired to acquire at least a fragment of their capitalist musculature.
A burden that had been thrown even more into contrast by its beauty being devastated by Irene.
Springfield itself, however, had suffered little. A community founded on the force of its river, which carved through the heart of downtown, it had long ago harnessed, dammed, and confined the water’s force between fortified embankments-and thus escaped most of the storm’s rage this time. As Joe pulled into the police department’s parking lot, the town looked much as it always had.
This was more than Joe could say for Lester Spinney, who greeted him in the lobby looking like a slime-fouled clam digger from the knees down. Behind him, Joe also noticed the poster telling of Carolyn’s having gone missing, prominently displayed on the public bulletin board.
“I take it he ran,” Joe suggested.
“You take it right,” Lester confirmed, gesturing toward an inner door. “This way.”
They located Travis Reynolds in a small windowless room, sitting on a steel chair at a bolted-down table, with one wrist handcuffed to a large ring mounted in concrete beside him. His entire body looked like Lester’s shoes.
“Hey, Travis,” Joe said cheerfully, entering the room alone and shutting the door with a theatrical clang.
“I’m Joe Gunther, second-in-command of the VBI,” he said as he sat opposite the encrusted young man and began methodically laying out a pad, pencil, and a voice recorder. “Heard you’ve had better days, is that right?”
Travis made to ignore him until, startlingly, Joe half rose from his seat, leaned into his face, and shouted from inches away, “Is that right?”
Travis pulled back, his eyes round. “What the fuck, man?”
Joe followed, resting his hands on the tabletop to loom over him. He kept his voice loud. “What the fuck? Is that what you just asked me, Travis? What the fuck? Really? Is that what you’re offering? Answer me.”
Travis was pressed against his chair back, his chin tucked in, his cuffed hand pulling on the ring. His voice was plaintive and whiny. “Are you crazy? What do you want?”