Her response was to reach back across the seat and squeeze my thigh; the gendeness and affection in her touch were belied by the anger in her voice. "Harry Peal never hurt a soul in his whole life. I can't believe some bastard killed him. I told you there was a death squad in Cairn, Mongo."
"In this case, I think the murderer is Elysius Culhane's good buddy Jay Acton."
She grunted softly. "So your brother told me-but it wasn't that cold-blooded, preening son-of-a-bitch who ran you off the road."
"Right."
"Acton may be the mastermind; Pm still convinced there's a death squad operating here."
"You could be right."
The figure of Garth suddenly loomed out of the darkness, appearing outside the windows on the passenger's side. He opened the door, slid onto the front seat beside Mary, quickly closed the door. "Sorry I took so long," he said tersely as he looked back over the seat to inspect me. "The guard wanted to chat with me after I left the room." He paused, turned to Mary, extended his hand. "It's nice to meet you, Miss Tree. You are one gutsy lady. Thank you for helping us get out of there."
Mary pushed Garth's hand away, leaned across the seat, and kissed him on the lips. "Miss Tree-who never wants you to call her that again, since, as I told Mongo, it makes me sound like a character in a nursery rhyme-thinks that it's she who should be thanking you, since it's also her life you're undoubtedly saving. It's nice to meet you too, Garth Frederickson."
Under any other circumstances I would have half expected my brother to faint dead away after being kissed on the lips by Mary Tree, but now he was tightly focused on the matter at hand, all business. "Let's get out of here," he said curtly.
I sat up as Mary turned on the engine and, still leaving her lights off, eased forward out of the alley into a parking lot by the emergency room entrance, then proceeded to the street. Garth motioned for me to lie down again, which I did, and he ducked out of sight.
"Drive around awhile, Mary," he continued, his voice muffled by the seat between us. "We want to make sure we're not being followed."
"Right," Mary replied, and made a left turn. She switched on her lights, drove a block, and made another left turn, then started up a hill. I saw her shift her head to look down at Garth and heard a sharp intake of breath. "Garth, is that a gun?" she asked tightly.
"It most certainly is."
"Garth, do you really think it's necessary to-?"
"Mary, listen to me," Garth said in a firm voice that had a touch of coldness in it. "I know you're a pacifist. For the life of me, I've never understood how a person who lives on this planet could be a pacifist, but that's neither here nor there. I suppose it's a perfectly workable philosophy, just as long as some soldier in an opposing army doesn't have you lined up in his sights. Right now it looks like there are people who mean to see us dead; unfortunately they're not pacifists. I don't intend to cooperate. If I so much as get a glimpse of this Gregory Trex or Jay Acton or anybody else who means to harm you or my brother, I am going to put a bullet through that man's brain. I'm telling you this up front, just so there'll be no misunderstanding on your part if we meet up with any of these men. If the idea of killing or the sight of blood offends you, look away. I will kill them. Clear?"
Garth had never had any problems in making himself understood; there was no need for Mary to reply, and she didn't. However, judging from the stiff angle at which she held her head, she was now considerably more tense as she continued to drive through Cairn's night streets, occasionally going around a block, and once even abruptly making a U-turn and reversing direction. After one right turn she accelerated. The car kept going in a straight line, and I guessed that we were up on 9W. Not knowing how much Garth had told her over the phone, I used the time to fill Mary in on the details of what I'd learned at the meeting with Harry Peal, the fruits of my preliminary computer search, what had happened at the police station later Sunday afternoon, and the subsequent ambush. She listened without interrupting, an occasional, sibilant hiss her only show of emotion.
"How does it look, Mary?" Garth asked quietly when I finished.
I watched as she craned her neck to again glance in the rearview mirror. "I think we're in the clear," she replied evenly.
"All right," Garth said, "let's head for your place." He sat up, looked back at me. "How's the head holding up, brother?"
I sat up, groaned. "Don't ask."
Mary turned around and headed back toward Cairn. Ten minutes later we were at the Community of Conciliation mansion. Just before she pulled into the long driveway, Mary turned off her lights. As we approached the looming, gabled structure she pulled off the gravel drive, drove on the lawn around to the back of the mansion, then turned off the engine. The digital display on the dashboard clock read 4:08. To the right, sixty or seventy yards down the sloping lawn, the Hudson gleamed silver in the moonlight.
Mary got out, then motioned for us to do the same. We stepped out onto the lawn, and with Garth supporting me with a large, strong hand under my left armpit, we followed her the short distance from the car to the mansion. She opened a screen door, which led into a pantry area off a huge kitchen. To our left, barely visible in the moonlight that spilled in through the doorway, was a cobweb-covered door that creaked on its hinges as she opened it. Placing our hands on the wall to our right to guide us in the darkness, we started up a narrow, winding flight of stairs that, judging from the thick curtains of cobwebs that brushed across my face and clung to my flesh, hadn't been used since sometime around the Revolutionary War. After two flights of this I was beginning to feel nauseous and dizzy, but I concentrated on taking deep, measured breaths and placing one foot after the other on the stairs.
On the fourth floor Mary pushed open another door, led us out of the staircase into a musty-smelling corridor that was dimly, eerily illuminated by moonlight streaming in through a large stained-glass window at the opposite end. She led us into the third room on the right, closed the door, and turned on the light. I looked around, saw piles of broken furniture, steamer trunks, dozens of standing lamps without bulbs, assorted bric-a-brac. Everything was covered with a thick layer of dust. I turned to Mary, found her staring at me; her face was ashen, her eyes filled with alarm. I felt the warm blood on the lid of my left eye a moment before it oozed into the eye itself. Suddenly I was in total darkness.
"Mongo, you're bleeding!"
"Mmm," I replied as Garth grabbed me under the arms, marched me back a few steps, and planted me in the depths of an overstuffed armchair. A cloud of dust rose up around me, and I sneezed.
Garth wiped the blood away from my eye with his handkerchief, then began carefully unwrapping the bandage from my head. "I'll need fresh bandages, alcohol, and lots of cotton swabbing," he said over his shoulder to Mary, who continued to look very pale. "Do you think you can find those things around here?"
Mary swallowed hard, nodded. "Yes. We have medical supplies. I'll get them."
But she didn't move.
"Don't panic, Mary," Garth said in the same quiet, soothing tone as he continued to unwrap my bandages. "And don't worry. The hardest part of Mongo is his head, and we know there's no fracture. Just get the bandages and alcohol, and try not to be seen. Okay?"
"Okay," Mary replied in a small voice, and then hurried from the room.
Garth, who was kneeling on the floor in front of me, finished his unwrapping job. He dropped the blood-soaked bandages on the floor, then wrinkled his nose as he studied the gash above my right eye.
"How does it look?" I asked.
"Gory. Want to see?",
"Why not? I've never seen my own brains, and I need something to cheer me up."
Garth got to his feet and rummaged around in the surrounding piles of junk until he found a cracked hand mirror, which he brought back to me. I looked at myself in the mirror, decided that, all in all, my head didn't look as bad as I had expected. The right eye was swollen shut, which was no surprise. Scalp wounds are notoriously bloody, and all the blood was coming from an area above my right eye where two or three of the dozen or so stitches closing the gash had torn loose. There was also a shaved area the size of a pancake on the right side of my head, just above the ear, and another cut; I counted eight stitches there, and they had held firm.