I answered her sharply. “He was a fraud,” I said. “He didn’t have the answer to anything.”
She shook her head, stopped, and turned back toward the hill. It was not only the place where they’d executed him, but also the place where we’d first made love, an irony I’d found delicious as they’d led him to the execution site, his eyes wandering and disoriented, as if he’d never expected anything so terrible to happen to him, as if he were like his real father, wealthy and irresponsible, beyond the fate of ordinary men.
A wave of malicious bitterness swept over me. “He got what he deserved,” I blurted out.
She seemed hardly to hear me, her eyes still fixed on the hill, as if the secret of his fate were written on its rocky slope. “No one told me it would be like this,” she said. “That I would lose him in this way.”
I grasped her arm and tugged her on down the hill. “A mother is never prepared for what happens to her child,” I said. “You just have to accept it, that’s all.”
She nodded slowly, perhaps accepting it, then walked on down the hill with me. Once at home, she lay down on her bed. From the adjoining room, I could hear her weeping softly, but I had no more words for her, so I simply left her to her grief.
Night had begun to fall, but the storm that had swept through earlier that day had passed, leaving a clear blue twilight in its wake. I walked to the window and looked out. Far away, I could see the hill where he’d been brought low at last. It struck me that even in the last moments of his life, he’d tried to get at me just one more time. In my mind I could see him glaring down at me, goading me in exactly the way he had before I’d kicked him out of the house, emphasizing the word Father when he’d finally spoken to me. He’d known very well that this was the last time he’d ever talk to me. That’s why he’d made such a production of it, staring right into my eyes, lifting his voice over the noise of the mob so that everybody would be sure to hear him. He’d been determined to demonstrate his defiance, his bitterness, the depth of his loathing for me. Even so, he’d been clever enough to pretend that it was the mob he cared about. But I knew that his whole purpose had been to humiliate me one last time by addressing me directly. “Father,” he’d said in that hateful tone of his, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Jeffery Deaver
Wrong lime, Wrong Place
from The Best of the Best
He saw the car five miles down the road, lights swinging left and right as the driver went through the Harrier Pass switchbacks.
Pretty fast for this road, he thought. And found his damp right hand resting on the butt of his revolver.
“Mobile One.” The woman’s voice clattered from the loudspeaker on top of the Dodge. “Hey, Hal. You there, Hal?”
He reached inside the squad car and snagged the microphone from the dash.
“Go ahead, Hazel.”
“Cold out there?”
It was only mid-September but the weather in the Green Mountains could claim lives as early as October, and the wet air tonight was raw as torn metal.
“’Course it’s cold. Where’s Billy?”
“On Seventeen. ’Bout, lessee, five miles from the interstate. Stopped a drunk and’s got him in the car ’cause what else is he gonna do with him? Right? But no sign of the perps.”
She said the last word as if she’d been waiting a long time to drop it into a sentence and Runyer guessed this might’ve been the case. Pequot County had plenty of drunks and disorderlies, a few sickos, and, because of the school, cut-ups galore. But real honest-to-God perpetrators... well, Hal Runyer hadn’t had many of them.
“Anything more on the job?” he asked.
“What job?”
“The heist,” he said, irritated. “The stickup. The robb-er-y?”
“Oh, yeah. S’why I called. We got a call from Captain Jarrett. At Troop G. Known him ten years and he still calls himself Captain Jarrett. Anyway, he says the FBI’s taking over. Should we be feeling bad about that?”
“No, Hazel. We should be feeling good about that.” Runyer watched the lights grow closer. The car was moving damn fast. On the shoulder a time or two but not drunk careless. More urgent careless. He reached inside and flicked on the light bar. “Listen. Where’s Rudy? He at Irvine, like I told him?”
“Gaithersberg Road and Fifteen. That where you told him?”
“Close enough. When’re the feds coming up?”
“Dunno. I can—”
“S’okay. I gotta go, Hazel. Here’s a car needs checking.”
“Roger, Sheriff.” And added a snappy “Over and out.” Which Hazel always looked forward to ending transmissions with.
“Yeah, yeah, out.”
The wind blew hard and Runyer shivered. Around him were empty shacks and rusting cultivators and the black spikes of a billion trees. This was still supposedly leaf season but the weather’d been mean the past two weeks, and instead of going to vibrant reds and golds the leaves had suddenly turned sick yellow and leapt off the trees. They now lay on the ground like a ragged sou’wester covering the body of a drowned fisherman.
He watched the car lights growing closer through the dank mist, his hand kneading his revolver.
It’d been the biggest robbery in the history of Pequot County.
That evening, just before closing, a Secure Courier truck had pulled up to the back door of the Minuteman Bank & Trust in downtown Andover.
Witnesses said the whole thing couldn’t have taken more than ten seconds. The driver and his first assistant opened the truck’s door, and the robbers “were just there,” Frank Metger, the bank’s security guard, said. “I dunno where they were hiding.”
He’d gone for his Smith & Wesson but a third robber stepped out of the shadows on the concrete retaining wall behind the strip mall and let loose one shot with his pistol, one of those huge ones with a telescopic sight on it, like the boys were always admiring down at Baxter’s Guns but never buying. “Ka-poweee! Hit ’bout an inch from my head,” Frank said. “And I went down fast. I’m not the least ashamed to say it. Not that I couldn’ta taken him, I had the old Smittie out and cocked.”
The perps jumped into two cars and sped off in opposite directions, taking with them three-quarters of a million dollars.
Not long after which the phone rang in Hal Runyer’s split-level. Lisa Lee handed him the cordless, interrupting some important business with his son. Runyer listened to his deputy and realized that the radio-controlled Piper Cub, laid out like a surgical patient in front of them, would have to remain wingless for the rest of the evening, at least.
Now lights like dying suns appeared behind the trees and the approaching car sped through the last curve before the roadblock. The surprised driver skidded the silver Lexus, exhaust simmering, to a stop ten feet from the cruiser.
Two men inside, their eyes following Runyer’s with curiosity. The driver seemed amused. They were young. Lean. Buzz cuts under worn baseball caps. Runyer got a faint whiff of beer and thought: Students.
“Hey, Officer,” the driver said cheerfully. “Roadblock, huh? Just like the movies.”
“That’s right. How you fellas doing tonight?”
“Well, truth is we’re not finding as many young lovelies as we’d hoped but ’side from that we’re doing fine.”
“Good, Runyer said and glanced across the seat. “You doing fine, too?”
“Yessir,” the passenger said. “Top-notch. You bet.”