Greenmantle (20 page)

“What
was
he like, mom?”

“Different. Very different. Kinder. Or maybe he just seemed kinder. Not always concerned with making money any way he could. I’m not even sure when it all started to change.”

“Do you think he’s going to come back?”

Frankie nodded. “It’s the money, Ali. He wants the money we won in the lottery and I don’t think he’ll stop at much to get it.” She leaned back against the headrest, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel, then sat up abruptly. “We should get a move on,” she said, getting out of the car.

“Are you going somewhere?” Ali asked as she joined her mother on the driveway.

“Not me—we. I promised Joy I’d be her moral support at the funeral home this afternoon and this evening, though God knows it’s the last thing I want to be doing after all we went through yesterday.”

“Mom, I don’t want to go.”

“You have to, Ali. I’m
not
leaving you here on your own again—not with Earl out there somewhere, just waiting for the chance to hurt us.”

“I can go up to Tony’s….”

Frankie shook her head. “We’ve imposed on Tony too much as it is.”

“He won’t mind, mom. I
know
he won’t.”

“Ali, he has a friend staying with him. Do you really think they want to have you hanging around all week?”

“I got along really well with Tom,” Ali protested.

“Yes, and he was nice to me as well, but let’s not wear out our welcome, okay?”

“Tony said I could come up anytime I—”

“Ali, I said no.”

“I’m not going,” Ali said. “I’m not going to spend all day hanging around some yucky funeral home. I won’t even
know
any of these people, Mom.”

“Please don’t argue.”

“I’m not arguing. I just don’t want to go. Can’t we at least call Tony and ask him to be really honest about whether or not I could come up? I could bring some of my studying and a book. I’d just stay up in the guest room and not bother them at all.”

Frankie rubbed her right temple. She understood exactly how Ali felt. She wasn’t particularly looking forward to the rest of this day either. But she didn’t want to impose on Tony any more than she already had. They were going to have to learn to face this problem with Earl on their own, even if it meant that she wouldn’t be able to leave Ali home by herself for a while. It wasn’t fair to Ali, but it wasn’t fair for her, either. God damn you, Earl. Why did you have to come back?

“Mom…?

Frankie sighed as she turned to her daughter. The conversation she’d had with Tony went through her mind—all those reasons why it was so important that they faced up to their problems by themselves.

“I promise I won’t be any trouble or get in their way or anything,” Ali said.

“What if they have plans to go out?”

“Then I won’t go up—I’ll come with you. But can’t we at least
ask
?”

Frankie hesitated a moment longer, then nodded. “All right. We’ll ask, but I’m going to make the call and if he says no, there’ll be no more discussion—deal?”

“Deal.”

* * *

“Sure,” Valenti said. “It’s no problem at all.”

“I hate to ask, only—”

“No, really. I’d love to have Ali come up. Tom likes her and we weren’t going anywhere anyway.”

“Well, if you’re sure…”

“I’ll tell you, Frankie, if it was going to be a problem, I’d say so. You want me to come pick her up?”

“No. I can drop her off on my way to town.”

Ali was beaming when Frankie got off the phone. “I
knew
he’d say it was okay,” she said.

“Well, I’ve got to change,” Frankie said, smiling at her daughter’s infectious good humor. She gave Ali a once-over. “And you could do with a wash-up and change of clothes as well.”

“I’m on my way.”

Frankie shook her head. “Uh-uh, kiddo. I’ve got first dibs on the bathroom.”

* * *

“Tom’s here to help me with the problem we were talking about last night,” Valenti said to Ali.

The three of them were sitting around back of his house. The sky was heavily overcast, but so far the rain had held off. Valenti and Bannon were sitting in lawn chairs, while Ali perched on the stairs. Ali gave Bannon a quick glance as Bannon frowned at their host.

“It’s okay,” Valenti said. “Ali and I don’t have too many secrets, right?”

Ali nodded.

“Listen, Tom,” Valenti said. “The thing is, there’s more going on here than just who Magaddino’s going to send, or the problem we got with Ali’s old man.” He let that hang in the air for a moment as he looked from Ali to Bannon.

Ali shivered thinking of last night.

“Like what?” Bannon asked finally.

“Well, it’s not so easy to explain.”

“We could play him the tape,” Ali said.

Valenti nodded. “But I don’t think it’s going to do the same thing for him as it does for us. I think you got to hear the real thing first, and then the tape just sort of helps you remember.”

“I suppose,” Ali said. “All I know is that we should really be concentrating on who Mally and Tommy are, and how we can find them.”

Bannon looked at Ali as she said the name Tommy.

“Not you,” Valenti said. “This is some guy who’s been playing a flute or something in the evenings. He lives someplace back there.” He nodded toward the woods behind his house.

“You’re losing me,” Bannon said.

“So we’ll fill you in,” Valenti said. He explained about the music and the feeling of being watched. For the first time, Ali heard about what Valenti had seen the first night she’d seen the stag, and then it was her turn to describe her meeting with Mally. Valenti covered the events of last night. When they were done, they both studied Bannon for his reaction.

“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re putting me on, right?”

“I know the feeling,” Valenti said. “But there’s something going on back in there and I think it needs checking out.”

“Maybe. But it seems to me that you’d want this problem with Magaddino straightened out first. I mean, so someone’s playing music back in the woods. So what?”

“You haven’t heard it yet,” Valenti said. “And until you do, it’s going to be hard for us to explain why it’s so important for us to find out what it means. See, last night that buck saved us—Ali and me both.”

“That doesn’t make sense. It’s just a deer.”

Valenti nodded. “That’s the thing. It’s just a deer. A big one. So maybe someone trained it, but I don’t know. If I hadn’t seen what it did to Shaw’s car last night, I’d have had to say it might not even have been real. I mean, I saw these things chasing it the night it was out behind Ali’s place, but she didn’t see anything except the stag.”

“So what are you saying?” Bannon asked.

It was Ali who answered. “We should go up that track,” she said, pointing to where the road petered off into the forest, “and see where it takes us.”

Bannon glanced at the sky, then back to them. “It’s going to rain.”

“Probably,” Valenti said. “But I think it’ll hold off for a couple of hours still.”

“What about your leg?” Bannon asked.

“It’ll be okay so long as we take it easy. I’ve been looking at a map of the area and there can’t be more than about four square miles back in there before you run up against the Clyde River to the north and the county road that runs between Poland and Joe’s Lake on the east. We’ll follow the track—for an hour tops—and see where it takes us.”

“You’re the boss,” Bannon said.

Valenti looked at him for a moment, then nodded. “Only problem I see,” he said, “is Mario said he was sending somebody else to help us, but he wasn’t going to be here till later today. I don’t want to miss him.”

“That’s no problem,” Bannon said. “What he told me was, the guy was going to hang back and keep a lookout from a distance. We don’t make him, but then, neither do Magaddino’s people. When we need him, he moves in close.”

“I don’t like that. I don’t want to have to be thinking that one of the people out there’s on our side, you know what I’m saying? It’s going to make me hesitate—maybe at the wrong time.”

“Whoever Mario sends, he’s going to be a pro.”

Valenti nodded at length. “There’s that.” He glanced at Ali. “So what do you say, Ali? Want to go for a hike?”

Ali had been following the conversation between the two men a little nervously, realizing that she hadn’t really taken Tony’s background and current problem as seriously as she should have. Talk, like she and Tony had done about it before any of this began, was one thing. It was sort of romantic, like in a Bogart movie or something. But this was the real thing they were discussing now.

Maybe so, she told herself, but if she backed out at this point, she’d never find out a lot of things. About the stag, about the music… And besides, Tony was her friend and you didn’t back out on your friends when the going got tough.

She found a smile for him. “What are we waiting for?” she asked.

“Would you believe, a rabbit that can read?”

Ali held up a hand. “Please, Tony. Spare us the bad jokes.”

“Okay, okay. Let me go inside and pick up a couple of things and then we’ll go.”

“All right,” Ali said. “But if you’re not back in five minutes, we’re going without you.”

Valenti gave Bannon a “what do you do with someone like that?” look as he went inside, but Bannon just laughed.

“C’mon,” he said to Ali. “Let’s wait for him at the end of the road.”

Ali followed him. Anticipation of what they might find once they entered the forest was too strong to keep her natural good humor down. By the time Valenti joined them, she’d already begun to forget her fears.

4

Howie Peale woke with the sun shining in his eyes. He turned over onto his wounded shoulder. The stab of pain made him roll quickly onto his back again.

Above him was a low plaster ceiling. He moved his head so that he could see the rest of the room. Where the hell…? The fake wood panelling, the bookshelf stuffed with old Reader’s Digest books, the mounted carp on the wall, the dresser with its cracked mirror and top laden with makeup, deodorant and pantyhose—it all served to disorient him. Especially coming out of the dream he’d just had.

He’d been in an old beat-up Ford in the middle of the bush somewhere. The car had been abandoned, didn’t even have an engine, but he was sitting behind the wheel acting like he was driving it. There’d been a car like it in the wood lot behind his parents’ place and he’d often sat in it daydreaming that he was everything from Al Capone to a driver in the Grand Prix. But that was years ago, while in the dream he was an adult sitting in that old car, his nostrils filling with the smell of mouldering leather and the tang of old metal.

Still, that was okay. He could have handled that, no problem. Except that the big buck deer that had attacked them last night was standing in front of the Ford, staring at him through the cracked windshield. He saw violence in the creature’s eyes—the same kind of look that he saw in Earl’s when he’d wasted that guy the other night.

The stag circled round until it was facing the driver’s door and Howie remembered stepping on the gas pedal, as if that old Ford without an engine and up on blocks was going to take him away from the deer. He stomped and the buck came at him, head lowered, galloping, getting bigger and bigger until it hit the side of the Ford with a jarring crash.

Howie just sat there clutching the steering wheel, watching it back up for another run, then suddenly he wasn’t in the car anymore, but on a freeway. Coming at him out of a low ground fog was a pickup truck. It had a set of antlers attached to the hood, the headlights shining like some huge monster’s eyes.

Howie ran for the woods, the pickup chasing him. When he got in among the trees, he chanced a look back to see that the truck was gone. The stag was there instead, bearing down on him, antlers lowered. That’s when he woke up.

He remembered it all now, the dream and the reality of last night. The sense of dislocation left him and he sat up, gingerly feeling his shoulder through its bandage. It hurt like hell. That wop who’d shot him was going to get his, damn straight. Howie started to lower his feet to the floor when the door to the room opened and the brunette who’d taken care of him last night came in.

“Uh-uh,” she said, wagging a finger at him. “Doctor Mallon says plenty of rest, buster.”

“Doctor…?”

Sherry grinned. “Me, dummy. I’m Sherry Mallon—remember?”

Howie nodded. “Yeah. The nurse. Sure I remember—I just didn’t know your name.”

The blond woman named Lisa came to lean against the doorjamb. They were both wearing snug-fitting jeans today—Sherry wore a sweatshirt overtop while Lisa had on a lacy white blouse.

“So how are you feeling?” Sherry asked.

“A little woozy. Had some weird dreams.”