The Poisoned Rose (3 page)

With the motor off, the heater wasn’t running, so the air inside grew chill and damp quickly. My hair had only just begun to dry. I started to button up my denim jacket against the damp. The metal buttons felt cold to my fingertips. The third button from the top was missing. I had no idea how it came off or where it was.

“You’ll need a different kind of coat,” Augie said.

These were the first word either of us had spoken. I had to look past him to see out the driver’s door window, which was my only view of the bar. I had done all I could up till then to pretend he wasn’t there.

“You need a particular kind of coat for this work,” he added. He didn’t look at me, simply kept his head turned and his eye on the bar at the end of the street.

“I have an overcoat at home. The seams are torn but it works for the most part.”

He shook his head. “No, an overcoat’s no good. Try to find something that doesn’t go past your mid-thigh. Field jackets work best. Pea coats, too. Long coats and dusters just get in the way, and besides, if you walk into a place wearing a coat like that, you’ll get noticed. That’s a fact. When I see anyone with a long coat I immediately think he’s hiding a shotgun or baseball bat or something. I don’t take my eyes off him.”

I nodded and put my hands in my pockets for warmth.

Augie said, “You can probably get a liner to wear under that jacket, or a down vest to wear over it, something like that. Pocket warmers hunters use are good for long stakeouts like these.”

I looked at him. He was still looking to his left, toward the bar. I saw a thin scar on the back of his head, interrupting the hairline near the base of his skull.

“Frank mentioned that you worked for him once before,” Augie said.

“Yeah. Sort of.”

“What does ‘sort of’ mean?”

“I did a job but didn’t get paid.”

“Frank stiffed you?”

“No. He referred me to someone who had a job that he couldn’t take. That person ended up stiffing me.”

“And that’s how you got the scratches on your face?”

“Yeah.”

“They’re from a woman, that much I can tell.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The width of the cuts, and the depth. They’re like cat scratches. Men don’t generally do that. Men gouge, woman claw. So, a woman, right?”

These scratches had been left by a woman. Her name was Callie Weber, a college student who had turned heroin addict and hooker. Frank had come to me and offered me quick money if I found her for an interested third party he wanted to impress. That was all I needed to do—that and let him know where she was hiding. But of course in the end that wasn’t the whole story. I’d learned too late that she had enemies—wealthy men who were former clients of hers, whose lives she could too easily ruin—and when I found her and she figured out what I wanted, she panicked and ran. Like a fool I’d tried to stop her, and that was when she clawed at my face.

The act of someone fighting for her very life.

The next day her body was found floating in Peconic Bay.

Augie said, “You don’t want to talk about it, do you?”

“No.”

“Frank withheld information from you, didn’t he?”

I nodded.

Augie waited a moment, then said, “You can’t let this work get to you. You’re not supposed to like it. The minute you start to, that’s when it’s time to get out.”

“So why do it?”

“Let’s just say it’s part of the order of things. A necessary evil.”

“What does that mean?”

Augie shrugged off the question. “Just don’t believe for a moment that because I take Frank’s money that I’m anything like him.”

“Then why work for him?”

Augie looked back out the driver’s door window, toward the bar on the corner. “It’s personal,” he said. “Look, no offense, kid, but I’ve got to be honest, I’m not all that comfortable with the idea of you being the guy to watch my back if the shit comes down. I don’t know the first thing about you, I want you to understand something very important right now. You are to just sit here and watch. You don’t get out of this truck for anything, you stay put and don’t do a thing, no matter what happens. When this is over, I’ll tell Frank you did fine and that you’re ready to work on your own, that you’re a natural and he’s lucky to have you. If he wants to keep hiring you, that’s between you and him. But I don’t want to work with you. Again, it’s nothing personal. You just get cautious at my age. Do you understand?”

I told him that I did.

“Good,” he said.

Our silence resumed, but not for long. The door to the bar opened a few seconds later. Augie and I both sat up a little straighter and watched as a man stepped out onto the sidewalk and stood under the small awning over the door.

He was immediately followed by another man. Even across this distance and through the rain I could tell that the one who had exited the bar first was Vogler. The second man had black hair that hung halfway down his back. Neither of them was a terribly big man. They stood face to face and talked.

Augie reached down and turned the ignition. The starter motor cranked twice, then the engine caught. A burst of exhaust tumbled down the dual exhaust below the rusted-out floorboards.

Gripping the steering wheel with his left hand, Augie rested his right over the knob of the gear shift. I could see it shake from the vibrations of the motor. He sat completely still and waited, watching the scene at the end of the block through the driver’s door window.

“Someone’s not happy,” he said.

The kid, Vogler, and the guy with the long black hair were going at it, arguing and yelling at each other, their faces just inches apart. Vogler pointed his finger in the second guy’s face, but the second guy swatted it away and pointed back, only at Vogler’s chest. He jabbed Vogler hard, and Vogler just took it. He stopped yelling and listened to whatever it was the second guy was telling him. Then Vogler turned and stepped out into the street. The second guy yelled at him as he went, but Vogler just kept going without looking back. He crossed the rain-swept street and got into an old Dodge Rambler. The lights came on and I heard the sound of its motor start, and then the Rambler backed out onto Main Street.

Augie flipped on his headlights and shifted into reverse. He waited till the Rambler was moving forward, then let out the clutch and backed us away from the curb. He shifted into first and we moved slowly forward. I listened to the transmission whine.

But before Augie could shift into second gear an old black Caddy whipped around the corner, turning from Bay Street on to Main, skidding to a sudden stop in front of the Rambler, cutting it off. The Rambler barely stopped in time. It and the Caddy formed a perfect t shape, the driver’s door of the Caddy facing the windshield of the Rambler. The instant the Rambler stopped Augie pushed in the clutch and down on the brake pedal. His truck slowed, twenty-five feet from the other two vehicles at the end of Main.

The brake lights of the Rambler reflecting off the rainy street looked to me like an illustration of fire. I sensed something and my stomach tightened. Just seconds after the near collision, the driver’s side window of the Caddy rolled down far enough for a hand to extend out. Augie and I immediately saw the gun it held, but there was nothing we could do.

Six shots, one right after another, punched holes in the Rambler’s windshield. The first shot sent a jolt through me. My muscles flexed hard. The same jolt tore through me with each successive shot. When it was done, when the revolver was empty, the Caddy began backing away, its tires slipping on the wet pavement.

I said, “Jesus,” and reached down for the door handle. I jerked it up, and the door swung open and I stepped down to the street, into a good inch of water. I heard Augie call my name, but I ignored him and started toward the Rambler.

The Caddy backed onto Bay Street, the driver cutting the wheel sharply. The vehicle spun around, then paused long enough for the driver to shift into drive, after which the vehicle sped forward, heading toward the bridge to North Haven.

I looked for a license plate but the Caddy was moving too fast. The scratches on my face stung in the rain and I felt my legs turn a little hollow from fear. I kept running, though, toward the Rambler. It was the only thing I knew to do.

By the time I reached the vehicle, its driver’s door had swung open and Vogler had slumped out from behind the wheel and was lying on the street. The water around his head was dark with blood. The darkness was spreading out fast.

I came to a stop and crouched to see his face. I had to lean around him to do so, and my chest touched his shoulder. His body was lifeless, his limbs falling to a rest at odd angles. I saw his face, or what was left of it. One bullet had creased his temple, the other shattered his cheekbone. Part of his right ear was missing. There was another bullet wound in his chest, and I could hear air being sucked through it. I saw then that his eyes were open, searching. He looked puzzled, shocked. His eyes met mine and there was a cognition. There were bits of shattered windshield glass in his wounds. He tried to move his mouth but the nerve damage to his face was so severe his jaw wouldn’t work.

I took off my denim jacket and laid it over his torso. He was on his side. I could see that the bullet that had entered his chest had exited through his back, just below his left shoulder blade. I knew enough to know that he would probably be dead before an ambulance could get to him. The nearest hospital was in Southampton, twenty miles away. The nearest ambulance station was only a little over a mile from here, but in his condition it might as well have been a hundred.

Still, I lifted my head and looked toward the entrance to the Dead Horse, where a handful of people had collected, among them the kid with the long black hair, the one Vogler had been arguing with.

“Call an ambulance,” I yelled. The rain was a steady peal in my ears, as heavy as a waterfall. My voice barely cut through it.

Nobody moved at first, they all just stood there and stared at me. I glanced through the storefront window and saw that the bartender was on the phone, her eyes fixed on Vogler and me. Gurgling sounds added to the sucking sound coming from his chest wound. I looked down at him. His eyes were locked on me, but they were becoming glassy and dimming. Any minute they would roll back in their sockets and his lids would half close and the look of dulled surprise that has been worn by every corpse I have ever seen would show itself on his face.

I said, “Hang on,” but I knew he couldn’t hear me. He was bleeding out of this world, and quickly. I felt his neck for a pulse, but what I found was more of a flicker interrupted by long stretches of nothing.

I looked back up at the people gathered outside the Dead Horse. They continued to stand there dumbfounded, watching me. After a moment, the guy with the long black hair turned away and returned inside the bar. He casually removed a cell phone from his belt, opened it, pressed two buttons, then brought the phone to his face.

I yelled to the people outside the bar, “Somebody get a blanket!” But before anyone could move, Augie’s pickup truck skidded to a stop behind me. I turned and saw that the passenger door was open and that Augie was leaning across the seat, holding the door so it wouldn’t kick back and close. He waved me in.

“C’mon, let’s go.”

No one by the bar was moving. I looked back down at the kid. His eyes were vacant. There was nothing—no one—behind them now.

I heard from behind, “C’mon, Mac, let’s go.”

I stood and faced the crowd, then looked down at Vogler’s body once more. Finally, I turned and climbed into the passenger seat of Augie Hartsell’s pickup.

We were in motion before I could close the door. I fastened my seat belt as we steered through the stop sign and around the corner. Augie gunned it through to fourth gear as we crossed the bridge and went after the black Caddy.

I sensed him glance at me once we hit the straight away of Long Beach Road. I felt his stare for a moment but didn’t look at him. I kept my eyes fixed straight ahead, looking for the Caddy’s tail lights on the dark and rainy road ahead.

To our right was Great Peconic Bay, though it was hard to make out in all this rain and dark. It seemed to me like a void in the night, more an absence than a presence. If I wasn’t a local I might not have even known it was there. It was hard right then to see things for what they were.

A few hundred feet ahead on the narrow beach road the distinctive rear lights of the Caddy suddenly appeared. Augie flattened the accelerator, and together we raced toward violence.

We pulled in tight behind the speeding Caddy on Noyac Road and followed it closely along the rim of the bay. There was, as far as I could tell, only the driver inside. I looked at the rear license plate, but it was blacked out with tape. Several times during that first minute Augie nearly lost control in one of the many sharp corners in the road. But that didn’t deter him. He looked intense, wedged in behind the wheel, and it wasn’t long into this confusion before he reached back and removed his .45 from his belt and laid it on the seat between us.

It must have been digging into his back. I looked at the weapon but didn’t want to touch it. It was an old model 1911 with walnut grips. The safety was on, and the hammer down, so there was no chance of it accidently firing, even if it went flying off the seat. Still, I couldn’t just leave it there, so I picked it up, opened the glove compartment, and stowed it there.

Augie had returned his hand to the steering wheel. His eyes were fixed on the road ahead, his left foot hovering over the clutch, his right holding the gas pedal to the floor. All I could do was hang on to the frayed door strap with my right hand and grip the dashboard with my left.

Augie kept the nose of his truck right there on the tail of the Caddy for several miles, till Noyac Road veered away from the bay and followed a wavering line through the woods. We passed through middle-class neighborhoods, during which I kept an eye out for cars pulling out of driveways and late-night joggers. Then the neighborhoods gave way and we entered a long stretch of barren wood. Here the streets were unlit, and sharp corners came up unannounced. The driver of the Caddy was having as difficult a time as Augie keeping his vehicle on the road. At one point it fish-tailed and looked about to spin out of control. Augie hit the brakes and backed off so his truck wouldn’t get clipped by the swerving Caddy. But once the Caddy regained control and continued on, Augie pushed the accelerator down to the floorboard again and we surged forward till we were right back on the Caddy’s tail.