Seventh Enemy (12 page)

She turned to me and tried to smile. “I could use one, too.” She stood up, and I did, too. She leaned against me. I put both of my arms around her. She snuffled, then began to shudder. She sobbed loudly. I stood there holding her for a long time, while the shadows darkened in the meadow.

A
KNOCK ON MY
bedroom door woke me up. “Come in,” I mumbled.

Diana pushed open the door. “Are you decent?”

“Many people don’t think so,” I said.

She laughed and put a mug of steaming coffee on the table beside my bed. “I’m going to the hospital,” she said.

“What time is it?”

“Seven. I’m leaving now. If you want to come…”

“I think I should hang around in case the sheriff shows up. Maybe later.”

She bent down and kissed my forehead. “Thank you, Brady Coyne. I’m awfully glad you’re here. I don’t know what I would’ve done…”

“I’ll come along later. If there’s any news, call me.”

She looked solemnly at me and nodded.

After I drank my coffee, showered, and dressed, I whistled for Corky and we went outside. Dark clouds hung over the mountains. I could smell rain in the air. I pushed through the dense woods until I came to the little clearing where we had found Wally. I knelt down and found some dark splotches on the leaves where he had bled. I looked around. Surrounding the clearing was thick undergrowth. A mixture of birch saplings and alders and hemlocks and knee-high weeds separated the clearing from the forest. An assassin could hide himself nicely in that undergrowth. I supposed it was also the kind of place a turkey hunter might hide.

I stood up and pushed my way through the close-growing vegetation and began to look around. I didn’t know what I expected to see—a footprint, a cigarette butt, anything—but I kept my eyes on the ground and tried to do it in an orderly way, studying every square foot. Corky snorted and snuffled here and there, hunting like a Springer spaniel is supposed to.

The woods were damp and dark and quiet, the way it gets when all the wild creatures know a storm is coming.

After what seemed like a long time I was aware that it had begun to rain. I heard the drops pattering softly on the leafy canopy over my head.

Soon the natural umbrella overhead would become saturated, and then the rain would begin to dribble down. But for now I was dry. I continued my search. I found ferns and mushrooms, clusters of tiny blue flowers, wild strawberries just breaking into blossom, a single pink lady slipper. But no footprints. No sign of an assassin.

Corky hadn’t caught any interesting scents, either.

I had turned to go back to the cabin when something caught my eye, a dull metallic glitter. I knelt down. It was a rifle cartridge, an empty bronze-colored cylinder, half hidden under the leaves. I picked it up and held it in my palm. It was about an inch long, with a narrowed-down neck. The legend .223 REM was engraved on its round end.

I looked back in the direction of the clearing where Wally had fallen. It was about a hundred feet away. There was a small opening in the thick growth, no more than a foot in diameter, and about waist-high on a tall man. Through it I could see the place where Wally would have been standing.

I imagined a man kneeling here, training his rifle on that opening, patient, figuring that sooner or later his quarry would appear.

This was where the assassin had waited.

I prowled the area on hands and knees. The canopy over my head had become saturated. Rain came dripping down onto me, and I soon became drenched. I found no boot prints or cigar butts or matchbooks or driver’s licenses. But I did find two more spent cartridges in the leaves, identical to the first one. These I picked up on the end of a twig and wrapped in my handkerchief. Maybe the shooter had left his fingerprints on them.

I knew I should turn the cartridges over to Sheriff Mason. I also knew I wouldn’t do that. He’d smudge them and drop them into his pocket, and that would be the end of them. As long as Wally lived, it was simply a local incident. The man in charge had decided it was a hunting accident. He had neither the resources nor the inclination to consider other scenarios.

When I got back to Boston I’d call Horowitz. He’d know what to do.

I had changed into dry clothes and poured myself a fresh mug of coffee when the obvious thought hit me.

Any assassin who wanted to kill Wally probably wouldn’t reject an opportunity to kill me.

And he probably wouldn’t pass up the chance to take a shot at Diana, either. A crackpot with a rifle would undoubtedly subscribe to the theory of guilt by association.

She and I had spent the previous evening lounging on the porch watching the darkness seep into the meadow. It had been stupid.

I didn’t want to spend any more time in Wally’s cabin. I didn’t want Diana to, either.

She called me a little after noon. “He was awake for a little while,” she said. “Groggy, pretty out of it. But he recognized me. He has no idea what happened.”

“Did you talk to the doctor?”

“Briefly. He seemed pleased. Walter had a fever in the night, but it’s come down. He says that infection is still the main concern.”

“Diana, listen.” I said. “I want Wally transferred to Mass General as soon as possible. I’m going to make a few calls. Okay?”

“But—”

“The best medical care in the world is at Mass General. Anyway, I want him near us. And we’re not staying here.”

“You can go home, Brady. I’ll be fine. I’m staying.”

“No, you’re not. It’s not safe.”

She was quiet for a minute. “You really don’t think it was an accident, do you?”

“Of course it wasn’t an accident.”

“So you think…?”

“You and I are going to find a motel tonight. Tomorrow we go home. Wait for me there. What do you need me to bring?”

“Brady—”

“We’re going to do it my way, Diana.

“Just bring Corky, then.”

I caught Doc Adams at his home in Concord. I explained to him what had happened. Doc knows every medical person in eastern Massachusetts and has an affiliation with Mass General. He said he’d handle the whole thing.

He called me back at four o’clock. “It’s all arranged,” he said. “There’s a room waiting for him. They’ll bring him by ambulance tomorrow morning.”

“I appreciate it.”

“I’ve seen Kinnick’s show,” said Doc. “He’s my kind of guy.”

I
FINALLY SUMMONED UP
the nerve to peek in on Wally Sunday morning, just an hour before they were going to load him into the ambulance for his trip to Mass General. They’d cranked his bed into a half-sitting position. He bristled with tubes, just as I’d imagined. Some of them were introducing fluids into him, and others were evacuating them.

I sat down in the chair beside his bed and squeezed his shoulder. “How you feeling?” I said.

“Just pisser.” One of the tubes snaked up through his nostril and down his throat. When he talked, it came out as a soft croak.

“Has the sheriff been in to see you?”

Wally rolled his eyes. I guessed it would hurt too much to shrug his shoulders. “Dunno. Been sleeping.”

“Did you see anything?”

“Huh?”

“When you were shot.”

“Nothing.” He closed his eyes for a moment.

“Pain?” I said.

“Comes and goes.”

“Who did it, Wally? What do you think?”

“Not SAFE. They’re not that stupid.”

“Who else, then?”

“Dunno.”

I leaned close to him. “You have a suspicion?”

He sighed. “None. Sleepy.”

Diana and I waited in Wally’s room until they wheeled him out to the ambulance that would take him to Boston. Then she and Corky and I drove back to the cabin. We cleaned up and packed and loaded our cars. Then she climbed into her Cherokee and I got into my BMW, and I followed her down the hill.

When we got to the gravel road, Diana bore left to head back to Cambridge. I impulsively took a right. Saturday’s rain had stopped sometime overnight. It was a sparkling Sunday afternoon in May, and I was reluctant to leave the woods and the clean air and the river.

I followed the dirt road that paralleled the Deerfield, crossed the narrow bridge, and pulled into the grassy area where Wally and Diana and I had parked a couple of days earlier. This time there were eight or ten cars there. None of them was a green Volvo wagon with Vermont plates and a Trout Unlimited sticker on the back window.

I didn’t bother rigging up. I clambered down the steep path and found a boulder on the water’s edge to sit on. From that vantage I could see three anglers casting flies. The one closest to me was a woman. She cast with fluid grace, and it relaxed me to sit and bathe my face in the sunshine and watch her. She was casting to a fish that was rising in a tricky location where the current eddied behind a rock. She changed flies a couple of times, shifted her position, and then I saw a little spurt of water engulf her fly. Her rod arced, and a minute later she knelt by the riverbank and unhooked what looked like a rainbow of fifteen or sixteen inches. She released it, gently stood, and noticed me. She grinned and waved and I waved back to her. Then she waded back into the river.

I sat there for a few minutes longer, then climbed the path to my car. I had found what I’d come here for—that “momentary stay against confusion” that Frost wrote about. Trout rivers—even when I don’t fish in them—do that for me.

I got into my car, followed the dirt roads to Route 2, and turned left. I was headed east, back to the city. I kept it below the speed limit. I was in no hurry to get home. Tomorrow I’d have to go to the office. It always amazed me how a few days in jeans and moccasins blunted whatever enthusiasm I had for the practice of law.

Up ahead on the right I saw a sign that read
GUNS
. Why not? I thought. I pulled into the peastone parking area. Only two other vehicles were there, a blue Ford pickup and an old Buick sedan.

It was a low-slung square dark-shingled building. Handprinted signs in the window advertised
AMMO, BAIT, TACKLE, AND GUNS NEW AND USED
.

I climbed the steps and went in. A bell jangled when the door opened. A beagle was sleeping on an old sweatshirt beside a cold woodstove in the corner. He opened his eyes, looked me over, decided I wasn’t a rabbit, and closed them again. Two men were leaning toward each other over a glass-topped display case. The one behind it, I figured, ran the place. The other was a customer, or perhaps just a friend in for a chat.

On the wall behind the glass case stood a rack of guns. There must have been forty or fifty of them standing there on their butts. Guns of every description—double-barreled shotguns, pumps, autoloaders, bolt-action rifles, rifles with scopes.

The glass case under the two guys elbows contained boxes of ammunition and an assortment of handguns.

I glanced around the rest of the place. Against the back wall stood the bait tanks. There was a free-standing rack of spinning and bait-casting rods. Rotating display racks held lures affixed to cardboard, vials of scent, spools of monofilament, hooks, bobbers, swivels, lead weights. There were knives and hunting bows, bowsights and broadheads, canteens and tents and sleeping bags, camouflage suits and boots.

It reminded me of an old-time Five and Ten, with a theme.

I prowled around while the two men talked at the counter. I took a small Buck knife from a shelf, slid it from its sheath, and tested it against the ball of my thumb. I’m a sucker for good knives. I collect them the way some people collect paintings. In fact, a well-made knife to me is beautiful, a work of art. I only actually use two or three of my knives. But I do like to own them.

I continued browsing until the customer left the store. Then I went up to the counter.

“How ya doin’?” he said. He had a bristly black mustache and watery blue eyes. Late thirties, early forties.

“I’d rather be fishing,” I said.

He nodded. “Ain’t that the truth.”

I put the knife on the counter. He picked it up. “Want this one?”

I nodded. “It fills out my collection.”

“Buck makes a good knife.” He hit some keys on his old-fashioned cash register. “Forty-two bucks. Plus two-ten for the governor.”

“Fine,” I said. I jerked my head in the direction of the rack of guns. “What kind of rifle would you use for turkeys?” I said.

“Rifle?” He smiled. “No kind, that’s what. Get yourself arrested, hunting turkey with a rifle. You want a tight-bored twelve-gauge autoloader for turkey. One of those Remingtons with the thirty-inch barrels, they’ll send out a nice tight pattern of number fours. You want to shoot your turkey in the head, which ain’t much bigger’n silver dollar. You wanna kill a turkey, you need all the help you can get. Shotgun’s the thing for gobblers.”

“You wouldn’t use a rifle?”

“Not in Massachusetts, unless you want to break the law. Some guys go after turkeys with a bow. Helluva sport, bow and arrow hunting for turkey. You plannin’ on goin’ after a turkey?”

“I never did it. Sounds like fun.” I fumbled in my pockets and brought out one of the empty cartridges I’d found in the woods, the one I’d already handled. I had sealed the other two in a plastic bag, hoping there were fingerprints on them.

I handed the cartridge to the guy. “You wouldn’t use one of these for turkey, then, huh?”

He squinted at it for a moment then handed it back to me. “Very common varmint load, the .223 Remington. Put a good scope on a .223 and it’d probably work real fine on a gobbler. Except, like I say, it’s illegal.”

“So I’d want a shotgun,” I said.

He nodded. “You need camouflage, turkey call, maybe a spread of decoys. I got all that stuff. Also a video that’ll teach you how to call. You’ve gotta know how to call ’em in. Kinda late to get started, actually. Spring season’s about over now.”

I nodded. “Maybe next year I’ll try it.” I took out my wallet and handed him my MasterCard. “I’ll take this nice Buck knife, anyway.”

He ran the card through his machine and gave me the slip to sign.

I peered up at the rack of guns behind him. “How’s the market for assault guns these days?” I said.