“I just told you-I can’t! You know I can’t!”
“All I know is you have two choices,” Mitch Berger said to her in a low, grim voice. “You can say yes or you can say no. Which is it going to be, Lieutenant?”
CHAPTER 19
MITCH KNEW THE STORM was going to be a genuinely nasty one when he got a good look at those gray clouds as he drove back over the causeway in his pickup.
They were converging upon each other from opposite ends of the sky like two big, hulking fighters in a ring. Mitch had never seen cloud formations do that before in his entire life. Thunder rumbled ominously in the distance. The air was heavy and charged with electricity. The wind was gusting. And the surf was so angry that cold salt spray was carrying right up and over the causeway.
He found Clemmie burrowed under his bed covers with her ears pinned back. Cats did not like wind. Or thunder. Cats were not stupid.
Mitch immediately closed all of his windows and filled every pot and pail he owned with water from the tap. He poured oil in his hurricane lamp and put fresh batteries in his flashlight, fetched two big armloads of firewood from the woodpile in the barn, brought his garden chairs inside. It was, he felt, very important for him to behave as if nothing were out of the ordinary.
Even though everything was. Mitch Berger was not an old hand at derring-do. At least, not when he himself was playing a featured role in the adventure. And had no idea how it would play out. Or if he would prove to be its hero or its victim. In truth, he was petrified. But he had not wanted the lieutenant to know this.
It was very important that she not know this.
By now the sky was turning black and fat raindrops were beginning to fall. Thunder shook the entire island. Lightning crackled. And then, with sudden ferocity, the heavens opened up and hail stones the size of pea gravel began pelting his roof.
The electricity went out with a pop right after that, plunging him into the dark of night even though it was only late afternoon.
The phone went out, too.
The hail quickly turned into a hard, driving rain. Mitch made a fire against the damp and curled up in his living room chair to read Manny Farber by the light of his hurricane lamp. He could not concentrate. The words were nothing more than meaningless squiggles on the page. He flung the book aside, lit a burner and made coffee. He drank a cup. He listened to the storm rage outside, the wind gusting so hard that Mitch wondered if it would tear the roof right off of his house. He heard a tree come down somewhere very close by. It was a frightening sound-like someone ripping a piece of canvas cloth-followed a second later by a heavy thud that shook the ground the way a wrecking ball did when it slammed into the side of a brick building. He thought about seeking safety down below in his crawl space, but decided he’d rather be blown all the way to Oz than go back down in that horrible place.
He waited. Inevitably, he got hungry. He heated up the remains of a batch of American chop suey and ate it right out of the pot with a serving spoon. Eight o‘clock came, nine o’clock came. The rain came, harder and harder. So hard that it began to stream in under the front door, sparkling and golden in the lantern light. He fetched a mop to soak it up. Then he realized it was leaking in around his living room windows as well. He put a couple of old bath towels down under them to contain it and knelt there with the lantern, checking the floorboards for moisture. It didn’t appear to be streaming any farther into the room. Not yet anyway. Satisfied, Mitch stood back up and let out a sudden and wholly involuntary gasp of shock.
He was face to face with them.
Three figures clad in foul-weather gear stood right there on the other side of the window in the pouring rain, staring in at him. Their features were slightly distorted by the beads of water on the glass, but Mitch had no trouble making out who they were.
It was Bud Havenhurst, Red Peck and Jamie Devers who stood out there. He had not heard their footsteps on the gravel path. Not with all of that rain and wind.
Briefly, Mitch felt as if he’d been bolted to the floor. Here is what he was thinking: My God, it actually worked. He hadn’t expected it to. Not really. Sure, it had worked in that Joan Crawford movie. But that was not real life. And he really did know the difference, whether the lieutenant believed him or not. This was real life-staring at him through the window. And Mitch’s first reaction was total panic. He was not sure if he could actually pull this off. He was smart enough, but did he have the nerve?
He honestly didn’t know. But after that first jolt of shock had passed, an inner resolve did begin to kick in. Determination coursed through his veins. He felt steady. He felt strong. It wasn’t on the level of, say, Popeye after the sailor man had gulped down a can of spinach. But he’d take it. Mitch took a deep breath, strode to the door and flung it open, holding it against the wind with all of his weight.
“Hey, boy!” Bud called to him from out of the stormy darkness.
“Hey back at you!” Mitch exclaimed, a big smile on his face. “Don’t you guys know enough to come in out of the rain?”
“May we?” pleaded Jamie. “It’s really wet out here.”
“Of course.” Mitch stepped aside to let them in.
“We were just checking up on Dolly’s tree,” Red Peck said stolidly as the three of them came tromping inside in their rain boots, the water pouring from them. All three wore shiny yellow rubberized jackets and pants. Bud was clutching a long black Mag-Lite flashlight. “It was that old oak out by the driveway,” Red added, shrugging off his rain hood. His hair underneath was plastered flat but dry.
“I heard it come down,” Mitch said, his heart racing. “Sounded pretty bad.”
“One big limb broke off,” Bud said. “But she was lucky-it landed in the driveway instead of on the house. We’ll have to take a chain saw to it in the morning, assuming it ever stops raining.”
“That’s a mighty bold assumption, pilgrim,” Jamie cracked with an impish twinkle in his eye. “We saw your lantern light, Mitch. Just wanted to make sure you were okay. See if you needed anything.”
So they were going to play games. Fine.
“I’m hanging in,” he said, shoving the door shut. “Nice of you to check, though. Can I offer you a scotch for your trouble?”
“You can,” said Jamie, rubbing his hands together with eager anticipation.
The other two nodded in agreement.
Mitch fetched four glasses from the kitchen, struggling to keep his calm. He’d positioned his bottle of single malt on a bookcase over by his desk. This gave him an opportunity to do what he had to do-flick on his microcassette recorder-while he was busy pouring. Then he brought them their drinks, the scotch glowing like honey in the lamplight.
Bud and Jamie had removed their slickers and stood over by the fire in their rubberized overalls, looking very much like commercial fishermen unwinding after a long day out on the Sound.
Red had unbuttoned his own slicker to reveal the Browning twelve-gauge that he’d been concealing underneath it. He did not raise the shotgun at Mitch. He held it like a safety-conscious hunter would hold it, with the barrel pointed down at the floor.
“What are you planning to shoot with that, Red?” Mitch asked as he handed him his glass.
“Mitch, that all depends on you,” Red responded in a quiet voice.
His three visitors stood there in ominous silence now, gazing cold-eyed at Mitch as the wind howled and the rain tore at his little house. They were no longer the Fab Five. They were the Three Amigos-an aging child star who dealt in antiques, an attorney who dealt in estates and a short-legged airline pilot who had never shot anything more predatory than Bambi. Tuck Weems and Tal Bliss had been the trigger men. With them out of the picture, these three were on unfamiliar turf. And quaking in their boots.
Or so Mitch desperately hoped and prayed.