"Goddammit, Ted!" he gasped.
Ted threw his gun down as though it were suddenly hot.
"Okay," I said. "Face down in the road, hands behind your head. Now!" I pushed Otis down. Ted scrambled to flatten himself.
I picked up Ted's gun, a smaller, older version of the Ruger 9-mm I'd taken off Otis. I went over both men for anything else of interest. I found their wallets, leafed through them. Local boys, Otis and Ted, nothing more than what they looked like. I took my wallet, my quarters, and my keys back from Ted and then stepped over to my car.
"All right," I said. "Get up."
They climbed to their feet. Otis was white, holding his wrist close to his chest. Ted just looked sullen, as though his picnic had been spoiled by rain.
"You broke my wrist, motherfucker," Otis growled.
"No," I said. "If I had, it would hurt. Let's go."
"Where to?"
"You tell me. It's your party."
He narrowed his eyes. "I don't get it. If you was coming anyhow, what was all this for?"
"Oh, a lot of reasons. One, I like to be the guy with the guns. Two, I want Grice to know I'm coming because I'm curious, not because he sent some penny-ante punks after me." Otis ground his teeth when I said that, but he didn't speak. "And three, nobody drives this car but me."
"How did you know it was Frank wanted you?"
"I didn't. But this seems like his style. Heavy-handed and amateur. Let's go."
They got into the black truck, started it up. I slid behind the wheel of my car, turned the key, and watched Ted slam the truck forward and back until it faced downhill.
I lit a cigarette, dragged on it deeply. The truck rolled down the hill and I followed. When we came out of the pines we turned right, driving farther up into the hills away from town. The late afternoon sun was lost behind a flat lid of clouds. Geese in a V-formation sliced across the sky, heading north.
I hadn't made those guys in the Park View, hadn't spotted them tailing me. I squashed the cigarette butt against the ashtray, slammed the ashtray shut. Ted sped up, bouncing over the rough road. There was no chance of my losing him but I sped up too, hugging his tail more closely than I needed to. Maybe it would piss him off.
There was a time when I kept a bottle of bourbon in the glove compartment, but it wasn't there now, so I lit another cigarette and followed the truck into the fading afternoon.
A pale-green house, dark-green trim, peeling paint. Shutters slanting or missing altogether. Unpainted two-by-tens on concrete blocks stepping up to a sagging, rail-less porch. Tattered screen doors; dark, uncurtained windows, staring blind.
The Chevy turned into a swampy field to the left of the house, bounced to a stop. I pulled partway off the road, parked so a car could pass me but not park me in easily.
Not a lot of people had ever tried living up here, deep in the woods near the top of the ridge, and most of the ones who had had given up and gone away. There was nothing here, except small streams and blackberry thickets and pale snowdrops already showing through a carpet of maple leaves. By next week, wild crocuses, lavender and gold; then lilies in stands of sunrise colors on the stream banks. But you couldn't farm this land, and the streams weren't really good for fishing.
I'd driven through here a few times over the years. I'd driven just about every road in the county at one time or another. Sometimes there would be a tired woman hanging clothes out on a line, or a man with his head and arms under the hood of one of the junked cars that sprouted like mushrooms. But mostly there were just empty frame houses and a few desolate trailers, their aluminum doors flapping in the wind.
The Chevy truck sat silent on the grass. I got out of my car, crossed behind it, keeping the car and then the truck between me and the house. Otis's gun was in my hand. I opened the Chevy's driver-side door. "Okay, come on out."
Ted climbed down, his eyes on the gun. He moved a little away from me, chewing on his lip. "Anyone in the house?" I asked. He shook his head, looked into the truck at Otis.
"This way," I told Otis. He slid across the seat and under the wheel, dropped to the spongy ground beside me. "What happens now?" I asked.
His left hand still cradled his right wrist. He scowled. "I'm supposed to call Frank when we get here."
"This his place?"
"He don't live here. But he owns it."
"Where does he live?"
"Cobleskill."
"Why come all the way out here?"
He didn't answer, just kept scowling.
"Yeah," I said. "Stupid question."
We went around the truck and up the plank steps. There was no movement, no noise except for the sounds we made. Otis fumbled with a key but he couldn't work the lock left-handed; Ted had to do it, in the end.
The failing afternoon light didn't reach inside. Otis flipped a switch and a floor lamp came on in the front room, to our left. There was a tattered couch against the far wall; two brown chairs, upholstery split, white stuffing hanging out; some side tables; peeling, faded wallpaper. A doorless doorway in the back led to a kitchen with a linoleum floor, cabinets on the wall. Straight ahead of us was a small hallway. An uncarpeted wooden staircase ran along the right side of the hallway, leading up into darkness.
The whole place was still and deserted and smelled of mildew and stale cooking grease. It was colder than it was outside, in the way a damp, closed place can be.
"Sit down," I said to Ted. I gestured with the gun at one of the brown chairs. "If you get up I'll shoot you. It's not a problem for me. Understand?" He nodded and sat quickly, hands gripping the soft arms of the chair. I turned to Otis. "Okay. We're here. Call Frank."
He crossed the room to a table that stood under the one lit lamp. There was a black phone there. Otis lifted the receiver with his left hand and, holding it, dialed. He put the receiver to his left ear and I put the gun to his right one, repeating in my head the number he'd dialed.
There was silence in the shadowy room, then Otis spoke. "Yeah. It's me. Gimme Frank." He waited. I gently wrapped my fingers around his swollen right wrist. He tensed and looked at me. I raised an eyebrow and nodded. "Yeah, Frank," he said back into the phone, licked his lips. "No, it's good. We're here." Pause. "Yeah." Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. "Yeah, okay. No problem." He replaced the receiver slowly. I let go of his wrist, took the gun from his head.
"What the fuck was that for?" He drew his wrist to his chest.
"Sorry," I said. "You strike me as a guy too stupid to be sneaky when he's really scared. You did fine, Otis." I stepped back a little, included Ted in the wave of the gun.
Let’s go.
Ted stood up fast. Otis said, "Go where?"
There was a door in the wall under the staircase. I backed over to it, watching the two men who stood in the yellow lamplight. I threw the bolt and the door creaked open. A gust of mud-scented air rolled into the hallway. "Downstairs," I said.
Ted and Otis filed past me. I bolted the door behind them, then went quickly out the front. There was a double- doored cellar hatch on the side of the house by the truck. It was held shut by a large bolt. I found a piece of warped two-by-four from a rotting pile of construction lumber on the porch and, as insurance, wedged it through the doors' iron handles.
I went back inside, looked at my watch. Five-thirty. It would take Grice at least half an hour to get up here from Cobleskill. I switched on another light in the living room, picked up the phone. I dialed the number at Antonelli's.
It rang a long time in the emptiness.
If the cops were still there they would have answered, because all over the world that was what cops did.
If they were gone Tony should have answered. Under the circumstances another man might have closed the bar for the rest of the day, or the rest of the week. But as much as the big house across the road, the bar was where Tony lived. And unlike the house, in the bar he wasn't alone.
I pressed the cut-off button, got another dial tone, called the state troopers.