“It’s only a couple of hours,” I said. “I’ll owe you.”
“That’s important,” Tony Marcus said. “What the hell can you do to pay off a debt to me?”
“Don’t be picky,” I said.
Tony gave a deep, soft laugh.
“Can’t send you Junior and Ty-Bop,” he said. “They doing something with me.”
“I don’t want to know,” I said.
“No, you don’t,” Tony said. “Send you a guy named Leonard.”
“Is he any good?”
“ ’Course he good,” Tony said. “Nobody work for me ain’t good.”
“Does he like dogs?”
“Leonard don’t much like anything,” Tony said. “One reason he good.”
“But he’ll be courteous to both.”
“The dog and the white girl? Yes.”
“I need him now,” I said.
“Here he come,” Tony said. “You still wired with the Burkes?”
“No.”
“What about Richie?”
“He got married.”
There was silence on the line for a moment.
Then Tony said, “Oh, well. Can’t hurt to have Phil Randall’s daughter owe me something.”
“My father’s retired,” I said.
“You trying to talk me out of this,” Tony said.
“No. I need the help.”
“He be ringing your doorbell in about five more minutes,” Tony said.
25
Leonard was very black, with good cheekbones. He had on a pinstripe suit and a white shirt with a pin collar and a white silk tie. His head was shaved. He wore a moustache and goatee, and he smelled of very good cologne.
I had already explained Leonard to Sarah. She looked sort of titillated when I introduced them. Rosie came over and smelled his ankle. Leonard looked down at Rosie with no expression at all. Then he went over to the breakfast table and sat.
“Coffee?” he said.
“Fresh pot,” I said. “Sarah will pour you some.”
He nodded. Sarah got the coffee. I crouched down to kiss Rosie goodbye. Then I stood and got my bag, and checked. Car keys? Gun? Cell phone? Oakleys?
“Nobody in or out,” I said to Leonard. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
“What if you’re not,” Sarah said.
“Leonard will stay with you until I am.”
“But, I mean, what if something happens?” she said.
I scribbled Phil Randall and a phone number on the blackboard.
“My father,” I said. “He used to be a cop. He’ll know what to do.”
Leonard was drinking coffee out of one of my big, white diner-style mugs. He held the mug softly in both hands.
“Do you have a gun?” Sarah said to him.
Looking at her over the rim of the mug, Leonard nodded.
“Don’t answer my phone,” I said.
I smiled at Rosie and said, “Bye-bye,” and went out the front door and down the steps to my car.
26
At five minutes past eleven, I was driving on South Border Road through thick woods in the Middlesex Fells Reservation. The reservation was probably ten miles from downtown Boston, but it felt like the Canadian Rockies driving through it.
I dialed Spike’s cell phone.
When he answered, I said, “I’m in the woods, driving west.”
“Keep coming,” Spike said. “I’m about a half mile in.”
“Where’s your car.”
“I parked up at the dog meadow and walked down.”
“Seen anybody else?”
“Nope.”
“See me yet?”
“Did you hear me shriek with delight?” Spike said.
“No.”
“Then I haven’t seen you.”
“Do you mind if I breathe quietly into the phone,” I said. “So you’ll know I’m alive.”
“Long as you don’t sing,” Spike said.
I drove in silence for another minute or so and then, on the phone, Spike said, “Shriek.” I slowed down.
“Here?” I said.
“Another ten yards,” Spike said. “Couple of big boulders on the right kind of leaning on each other. Park there.”
“Here?”
“Perfect.”
I pulled over to the shoulder of the road and stopped.
“Where are you,” I said.
“Right behind the boulders.”
“I’m going to get out of the car,” I said, “and lean on the fender. If things begin to go badly, you appear in force.”
“Can I do my rebel yell?” Spike said.
“Use your best judgment,” I said.
I closed the cell phone and put it in my purse. I took my gun out of my purse and put it in the right-hand side pocket of my belted camel-hair coat, which I always looked good in. I left my purse on the front seat, adjusted my Oakleys, and got out of the car. I stayed on the driver’s side and leaned on the front fender and waited. It was the middle of November and getting cold. I put my hands in my pockets. The trees had reacted variously to fall. Some had bare branches. Some had a few yellow leaves. Some were still leafy and at least partially green. It must have something to do with the kinds of trees. Nothing moved in the woods. No one drove along the road. Some birds chirped. I tried not to keep looking at my watch. I looked at the boulders. They were tilted against each other and deeply sunk into the side of the hill, just as they were, probably, when the last glacier melted and left them there. A squirrel ran sort of spasmodically across the road, the way squirrels do, and scrambled up a tree on the other side. There was some gray-green moss on the boulders, and the pale remnants of some sort of vine that had tried to colonize the boulders, but failed fatally.
A dark maroon Chevy sedan appeared from the other direction, driving slowly. It stopped opposite my car, and the window rolled down. The driver was wearing little sunglasses with wire frames and blue lenses. He looked at my license plates for a moment and then said to me, “Sunny Randall?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” he said and shut off the motor.
He got out of the driver’s side, wearing a belted trench coat. A husky man in a brown leather jacket got out of the passenger side. As he walked across the street, I could see the crude lettering in blue ink along the knuckles of each hand. I couldn’t read what it said.
The two men stopped in front of me. The guy with the tattoos had shoulder-length black hair that didn’t look very clean. The man with the shades looked like his haircut had cost three hundred dollars. His teeth had been worked on. They gleamed like a new sink.
“Cute shades,” I said.
“You know where Sarah Markham is?” the man with the sunglasses said.
“Absolutely,” I said.
“Where?”
“None of your business,” I said.
“She hire you to investigate her parents?”
“She did.”
“You know she’s been told to call off the investigation?”
“I do.”
The man with the tattoos was standing very close to me, looking dead-eyed at me.
“But she didn’t,” Mr. Shades said.
“No,” I said. “She didn’t.”
“She paying you a lot of money?”
“Not so much,” I said.
“Worth getting hurt for?”
“Who is going to hurt me?” I said.
Shades pointed with his chin.
“He is,” he said.
I suddenly stepped away from them into the middle of the road and took out my gun.
“Hey,” Shades said. “What’s with the piece?”
“Alone in the woods with two strange men?” I said. “What’s a girl to do?”
“I got no problem with guns,” Mr. Tattoos said.
“You might,” I said.
“You really got the balls to shoot us?” Shades said.
“Balls, no,” I said. “Shoot, yes.”
“So now what,” Shades said.
“I’ll tell you one thing what,” Tattoos said. “No twat is chasing me off.”