Greenmantle (13 page)

“The kid’s gonna do what she’s told or she’s shit outta luck. Christ, they call this a road?”

“Sunday drive,” Howie said.

“Guess they got some real influential taxpayers living out this way.”

Howie laughed. They passed a turnoff to the right. “Better slow down,” he said. “We’ve got another mile or so and then we’re there.”

Earl slowed the car down a few moments later when a house came into view.

“That’s gotta be it,” Howie said.

Earl nodded, taking in the construction debris that littered the front yard. He cruised on by until a curve in the road took them out of sight of the house and then pulled over to the side.

“What time you got?” he asked.

“Seven-thirty.”

“Okay.”

Earl turned the car in the narrow road, happy now that they’d picked something as small as the Toyota. He’d wanted a two-door so that the kid’d be easier to keep an eye on. They drove back toward the house and took the first left after it, pulling over to the side of the road again. Stands of cedar and pine screened them from the house.

“Well, Howie, m’man,” he said as he killed the engine. “Looks like it’s time to go.”

Howie nodded. They got out of the car together and walked back down the road.

Earl slapped at his neck. “Fucking mosquitos.”

Howie waved them from his own face. He watched Earl play with the butt of his gun sticking out of the top of his belt. He hoped things were going to go a little cleaner than they had last night.

* * *

Ali saw the Toyota go slowly by the house as she was locking the front door and didn’t think twice about it. By the time it returned, she was in the kitchen, looking for a bag to carry her Tom Brown Jr. field guides in as she went up to Tony’s place. She found a plastic grocery bag from the Perth IGA, dumped the books into it and hurried out the back door.

She was already running late, but the moment she stepped outside, she paused, testing the air for sound, studying the edge of the woods. There could be anything out there, from Mally with her horns to who knew what? The sun was almost down behind the trees. Shadows were growing long.

Get a move on, she told herself. Bad enough she was late. She didn’t want to arrive at Tony’s all out of breath from obviously having run the whole way. He’d think she was more of a kid than he probably already did—scared of the dark, or of meeting boogiemen in the woods. Boogiewomen? Do you know how to boogie, Mally?

She shook her head, angry at herself, and started across the lawn, pausing again when she heard car doors slam on the road leading up to Tony’s place. She moved quickly across the backyard, then through the weeds in the field between their property and the road, raising a cloud of mosquitos that whined around her face. There, a little ways down the road, was the car. A Toyota. And she was just in time to see a couple of men down at the corner where Tony’s road met the dirt one that ran by her own house.

This is weird, she thought. Are they going to our place? But that couldn’t be—or at least it didn’t make any sense. Why would they park there?

A pinprick of worry started up her spine as she headed back toward the house, staying hidden in the trees that bordered Tony’s road. The two men were coming up their driveway, but what made her stop again, what made new shivers of fear go catpawing up her spine, was not the men, but the eerie sound of distant piping that floated from the forest northwest of where she was hiding.

That’s Tommy, she thought, remembering what the wild girl had told her. Tommy playing reed pipes. Whoever Tommy was…

* * *

“Here’s one for you,” Earl said as the house came into view.

“What’s that?”

“The one thing we didn’t think of: What if nobody’s home?”

Howie glanced at him, then at the house. No car, he noted first off. Living out in the sticks like this, everybody’d have a car.

“So what do we do?” he asked.

“Check it out. Wait around a bit.”

But not too long, Howie hoped, because that was just asking for trouble. Only try telling Earl that. Howie sighed. He wished they were back in T.O. right now, or even in New York, being wined and dined by Broadway Joe. The showgirl that Joe had provided Howie with had been everything that Tandy Hots with her act in the strip club had promised to be. Young. Built. There just to please him. The way she’d wrapped her legs around his—

A sudden uneasiness touched him, killing the memory. He cocked his head, listening.

“You hear that, Earl?” he asked softly.

Earl nodded and turned toward him, his features no longer clearly defined as the night crept in around them. “Yeah,” he said. “Some kinda…I don’t know…”

“Music.”

“Yeah. But it’s not just that. It’s like we’ve been made, you know?”

Howie looked nervously around. “We’re being watched?”

Earl nodded. He faced the cedars where Ali was crouched, hugging her knees to keep from trembling.

“I don’t know who the fuck you are,” Earl said, “but I know you’re in there. If you’ve got any smarts, you’re gonna step out here where we can get a nice long look at you, because you don’t want to know what’ll happen to you if I gotta go in there to get you.”

Ali stumbled out onto the lawn and stared at the strangers.

“Well, well, well,” Earl said. “Look what we got here. How’s your old lady, kid? Better yet,
where’s
your old lady?”

“Wh-who are you?”

Earl gave Howie a pained look that was mostly lost in the twilight and shook his head. “Fucking kid doesn’t even recognize her own old man,” he said. “Doesn’t that take the cake?”

Howie brushed bugs away from his neck. “Maybe she’s waiting to see what kind of present you brought her.”

Earl chuckled.

“N-no.” she mumbled.

“Oh, yeah,” Earl said. “No matter what that whore of a mother’s told you about me, you’re still stuck with me as your old man. Now you see, I figure it’s about time I took custody of—”

“No!” Ali cried, swinging her bag at him. Her shrill voice startled the men. The books struck Earl’s chest, knocking him off balance. Before he could recover or Howie could react, Ali had turned and bolted back the way she’d come.

She ran to the rhythm of the distant music that was calling to her, speeding across the lawn, sleek and fast like a stag, through the field, then up the road to Tony’s place.

Behind, Earl reached for his gun. Howie took a step toward him.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Earl demanded. “Get after her!”

Howie blinked, then nodded and took off across the lawn, following the sound of the girl’s footsteps. An ugly smile cut Earl’s face as he set after them.

Little bitch was going to pay for that. Where’d she think she was coming off anyway, hitting her old man?

* * *

Valenti sat up and checked his watch as the tape of piping finished in his cassette machine. It was getting late. About time he could hear the real thing come drifting from the woods behind his place. About time for Ali to be here as well. Where was she?

He got up and turned off the stereo, then went to the front door and stood out on the steps. There’d been something funny about her voice when he’d called earlier, something he couldn’t quite place. He looked across the darkening fields. Like someone suffering mild shock, he thought, recalling the quality of it now. What could have happened?

He turned back into the house, thought of calling her again, then decided he’d go down the road to meet her instead. And just to satisfy the uneasiness he felt, just for insurance’s sake—“You can never be too careful, Tony,” Mario had been fond of telling him—he crossed over to his stereo cabinet and opened the cupboard on the bottom left.

First it needed the key that was always in the pocket of whatever he was wearing. And then you had to know the right board to push on the side of the cupboard that unlocked the hidden compartment under its floor.

He pulled the false floor away to reveal a cavity that went down into the space between the ground floor and the roof of the basement below. There were rifles in there, a shotgun, a UZI machine gun, some handguns, boxes of cartridges, spare magazines for the automatics and the UZI, and a large fireproof box that held various IDs and travelling money in case he ever needed it. Ten thousand dollars in used American bills. Another couple of grand in Canadian currency.

He looked at the weapons, thought for a moment, then extracted a small .32 automatic. He checked its load, then snapped the magazine back into its grip and slipped the weapon into the pocket of a windbreaker. Putting the false floor back in place, he locked the cupboard once more, then put on the jacket. He picked up his cane by the door and went out into the night, moving as quickly as his bad leg could take him.

When he first heard the piping start up he was already out of his own yard and on the road. The music didn’t register straight off. He’d been listening to Ali’s tape so often during the day that the piping had almost become a part of his thoughts. But now as he paused to listen, waving bugs from around his head, he heard someone come running up the road. He switched the cane to his left hand, thrust his right into the pocket with his .32. It wasn’t just one someone, he realized as he took the automatic off safety.

* * *

When Earl hit the road, he turned right instead of following Howie and his daughter. He sprinted for the Toyota, snapped the door open and got in. He touched the wires together that they’d pulled out earlier when they’d stolen the vehicle and the car coughed into life.

Right, he thought. He put the car into gear, hit the lights, then tromped on the gas. The peppy little car roared forward, headlights cutting the night like a dragon’s gaze. Earl switched the beams to high and speed-shifted into second gear as the car picked up speed.

* * *

Ali just about died when the headlights came on behind her and picked out the man coming toward her from the direction of Tony’s house. The sound of the car’s engine drowned out the piping, but she could still hear it inside. She was still the stag, fleeing the hounds. She almost bolted into the bush, then realized who it had to be on the road in front of her.

“Tony!” she cried.

The man pulled his hand from his pocket and the headlights sparked on the metal in his hand. He leveled the weapon in her direction.

* * *

Howie heard the car start up and nodded to himself. Good thinking, Earl. The kid was going to outdistance them, but not if she stuck to the road. Then the headlights lit up the scene in front of him. Beyond the girl, he saw a man who seemed to appear out of nowhere. Howie scrambled for his own weapon as the stranger levelled his gun, then realized that Earl was burning up the road behind him.

He lunged for the side of the road just as the car reached where he’d been running. There came a sudden crash, as though another car had plowed into the side of the Toyota. Howie shot a glance in its direction and his eyes went wide with fear.

* * *

Move, Howie, Earl thought, or you’re dead meat. Maybe he’d just clip the kid. She wouldn’t be running anywhere so fast then. And if he miscalculated, well, what the fuck. He didn’t need to deliver her in one piece. He just needed her for as long as it took Frankie to cough up the money. And if Frankie didn’t know the kid was dead, she was still going to pay up. After that, well, maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to waste the both of them anyway, just so’s not to leave any loose ends.

Howie jumped to one side and then Earl realized that there was someone else on the road with his daughter. He had long enough to see the weapon in the man’s hand, long enough to register the man’s features—a dead man’s face—then something hit the side of the car and he was fighting the wheel to keep the vehicle on the road while slamming on the brakes.

The engine stalled as he brought the Toyota to an abrupt halt. He turned to see what had hit him, not really registering the shock of the impact, still stunned from seeing a man that he knew was dead on the road ahead of him. Turning, he found himself face to face with an enormous buck deer.

“Jesusfuck,” he mumbled and reached for his gun.

The stag lowered its head, backed up, and hit the car again. Earl’s gun clattered to the floor. The side window cracked into a spider web design. Earl shook his head and put up his hands to protect himself as the deer backed up once more.

* * *

Valenti had his gun ready, finger squeezing the trigger when the stag burst out of the forest to hit the Toyota side-on. He eased off the pressure on the trigger as the car slowed to a stop, stalled. The engine went dead. The headlights dimmed but stayed on.

“Ali,” he ordered, taking a few steps closer to her. “Get up to my place.”

“B-but…”

“C’mon, sweetheart. Don’t argue.”