The Third Hill North of Town (7 page)

Gabriel had stared at her. “You’re not serious.”

“I surely am.” Her smile had deepened. “If the war lasts a long time I’ll probably end up helping a lot of soldiers to get better, so God’s getting an excellent deal, if I do say so myself. All the doctors and nurses tell me I should have been a nurse instead of a teacher because I’m so good at it.”

“You’re talking crazy, Mom,” Gabriel had protested. “God doesn’t make
bargains.
”

She’d raised an eyebrow. “I had a dream where we shook hands on it, and that’s good enough for me.” She paused. “It was a very odd dream. God had two thumbs on His right hand and a hideous wart on the end of His nose that I couldn’t help staring at. But He promised He’d look after you, and I believed Him.”

Gabriel had narrowed his eyes. “You’re making this up.”

She’d laughed. “Only the part about the wart. The rest is true, I swear.” She’d reached out and pulled him to her, then, gripping him tightly against her body. “Don’t you dare make a liar out of God, Gabriel,” she whispered in his ear. “I couldn’t bear to lose you.”

Edgar Reilly’s voice on the phone abruptly pulled Gabriel’s mind back to his hardware store office. “Gabriel? Are you still there?”

Gabriel blinked. “Yeah,” he rasped. “I’m here.”

“Oh, I thought for a minute there we’d been disconnected,” Edgar said, sounding relieved. “Well, as I was saying, I know this is a terrible blow for you, but the police are doing everything in their power, and I’m sure we’ll hear something very soon. You mustn’t . . . well, you really mustn’t give up hope.”

Gabriel’s big fingers turned white as they clutched the receiver. He suddenly couldn’t bear to listen to any more of Edgar’s platitudes, so he thanked him brusquely and asked him to call if he heard anything else, then hung up. He stared at the walls of his hardware store office for a minute or two, and he began to tremble.

Images of a rabid black man flooded his mind. He could see his mother screaming for help; he could see her body lying on the side of the road somewhere, flung from the car like a bag of trash; he could see the light leave her lovely green eyes and her face turn still as stone as she gazed up at the sky.

“Mom,” he murmured aloud, his voice cracking.

He dropped his forehead on his desk and began to cry.

 

Lloyd Eagleton of the New Hampshire State Patrol was more excited than he’d been in his whole life. He’d become a state trooper in ’59, but in the three years since he’d never made what he considered an “important” arrest. Oh, sure, he’d busted at least half a dozen drunks for causing bad accidents or raising hell on the roads, but the bulk of his days were spent handing out endless speeding tickets to pissed-off tourists and truck drivers. He couldn’t believe his luck in finally being given a chance to bag a major scumbag.

It was really happening this time, though. The 1959 Edsel he was following was definitely the car everybody was looking for. It was a cream and brown Ranger, sure enough, and as he got close enough to verify its Maine plates, he flipped on the cherry light “gumball machine” on top of his squad car and snatched up his radio microphone to notify the dispatcher he was making the stop.

Like a lot of young troopers, Lloyd enjoyed the feeling of power that came with a badge and a .357 Magnum. He loved everything about his uniform, too, from his flat-rimmed Smokey Bear hat to his glossy, black leather gunbelt and shoulder strap.

“Car twenty-seven to station!” he bawled into the mic. “I’ve got the bastard!”

This wasn’t supposed to be the sort of thing he said on the radio, but he was far too worked up to deal with the usual formalities.

A skinny Negro in the backseat of the Edsel was visible through the rear window. He had a strip of white cloth wrapped around his head, and he was leaning over the front seat, by the driver, who appeared to be a white woman.

Lloyd gaped. “I’ll be damned,” he muttered. “She’s still alive!”

When he’d heard the bulletin that afternoon to watch for the Ranger, he’d assumed (along with every other cop who received the broadcast) that the lady victim from Maine they’d been told about was already dead, killed by the black son of a whore who’d assaulted her while she was driving.

Lloyd was not necessarily the dumbest cop on the road, but neither was he—as his supervisor once remarked—the “shiniest penny in the fountain.” He had made more than his share of errors in his three years of service with the state police, the worst of them involving an altercation with a teenaged drunken driver whom Lloyd bullied into a fistfight. This sort of behavior wasn’t uncommon for Lloyd, who enjoyed a good tussle, but the situation became nearly lethal to his career when the boy was afterward revealed to be: (a) sober, and (b) the youngest son of the lieutenant governor of New Hampshire.

Once Lloyd was in possession of these facts, he let the kid off scot-free, of course (save for a black eye and a fat lip), but the lieutenant governor had not been forgiving. Lloyd was suspended for three months without pay, and then stuck on probation for an entire year following his return to duty.

His year of purgatory for that lapse in judgment was now over, thank God, but Lloyd knew he was still deeply in the doghouse with his superiors. The only way to redeem himself in their eyes at all, he believed, was to make a high-profile arrest, so he had been praying for months for something just like this to come his way.

And now his prayers had been answered.

“Holy shit!” he yelled with glee at the dispatcher through the radio. “We’ve got a hostage situation here!”

He hit the siren and stepped on the gas.

 

Jon Tate was in a full-blown panic. The instant he saw the flashing red light behind them he assumed it had to do with the money he’d stolen back in Maine, or even worse, Becky Westman’s pregnancy. The improbability of a New Hampshire state trooper already having information about either of these offenses never crossed his mind; his conscience was running roughshod over his common sense. He slumped down in the front seat as much as he could, to get out of the line of sight.

“Oh God, oh Jesus, oh Jesus God,” he whispered hysterically as the squad car’s siren began to wail. He could picture himself being led away from the Edsel in handcuffs. “I am so fucked!”

Julianna, of course, was viewing things a bit differently than Jon, though with an almost equal sense of dread. “Oh, for pity’s sake!” Her voice betrayed her dismay. “Daddy will never let me drive again if he finds out I did something illegal!”

Jon gawked at her, uncomprehending, and attempted to stuff his bag of stolen cash under the seat.

In the backseat, Elijah was flushed with triumph and waving happily through the rear window at the trooper he believed to be his savior. He didn’t know how this miracle had happened, but he was betting his mother, Mary, had something to do with it.

Oh, thank God!
he thought.
This freak show is finally over!

 

“I ain’t believing this,” Lloyd Eagleton grunted into the radio, shaking his head as he glared at Elijah through the windshield. “The fucking asshole is
waving
at me, like this is all some kinda big joke.”

The radio squawked back at him.

“Car twenty-seven? What’s your location?” Brenda Freeman was the dispatcher. “Maybe you should wait for some backup?”

Lloyd was aware Brenda thought he was an idiot. She’d been on duty the night he’d beaten up the lieutenant governor’s son, and she wasn’t about to let him forget it.

He’d show her, though. He’d show them all.

“There’s no time,” he barked back. “He might kill this lady if I wait any longer.”

He flipped the siren off as the Edsel lurched over to the side of the road and came to a gradual stop in front of him. He pulled in behind it and reached down to unsnap the holster on his Smith & Wesson.

“The suspect has pulled over,” he advised Brenda. His hands were sweating, but he chalked that up to excitement more than fear. “I’m going to go get him now.”

He drew his gun and opened his door.

“Dammit, Lloyd, don’t be a dipshit!” Brenda screeched through the radio loud enough to make him wince. “Where are you?”

He almost didn’t answer, but at the last second he decided it couldn’t hurt anything to reveal his location.

“Highway ten, right by the Ashuelot River Bridge,” he said. A grin spread across his face. “But if the other guys want in on this they better hurry!”

There was no way anyone else could get there in time to hone in on his glory. He dropped the microphone into the seat before Brenda could answer and stepped from his car, crouching behind the door for cover.

 

The gravel on the side of the road was wet and the ground was riddled with potholes as Julianna put on the brakes and steered them onto the shoulder of the highway, followed immediately by the police car. The Edsel bumped along and came to a rest a few feet away from a small bridge over a river. To the south was a cranberry bog; to the north was a thickly forested area. A wild tangle of birch, maple, and pine trees was little more than a yard from Jon’s door, and even with all the windows closed the sweet, pungent smell of the pine trees filled the car.

Elijah tried the door handle but it was still locked.

“You better let me out, lady.” He was feeling more assertive now that his release was at hand, but he supposed there was no point in being rude. “I promise to tell him it was all a big mistake if you’ll just let me go, okay?”

Before Julianna could answer they heard a man’s voice shouting behind them.

“What did he say?” Jon whispered from the floor of the front seat. His cheeks and forehead were coated with sweat.

Julianna looked in her rearview mirror. “I don’t know.” Her mouth fell open. “Why would Sheriff Burns hide behind his door like that?”

Elijah turned around and got on his knees in the backseat so he could get a better look out the rear window. All he could see was the trooper’s black shoes under the open driver’s door of the patrol car.

The trooper yelled something else they couldn’t make out.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Julianna said in confusion. “Why doesn’t he just come talk to me?” She hit the lock release and opened her door a crack.

“Hello, Sheriff Burns!” she shouted politely through the opening. “Can I help you?” She turned her head to Jon and dropped her voice. “Maybe he has me confused with somebody else, do you think?”

Elijah lunged for the rear door handle while it was still unlocked, but before he could grab it the trooper’s strained voice rang out once again.

“Put your hands up where I can see them right now, goddammit, or I will open fire!”

Elijah froze, facing the front again, realizing the situation could get out of control very quickly. He didn’t want to be shot accidentally, nor did he want Julianna to be hurt if there was any way to prevent it. The woman may have kidnapped him, but it wasn’t really her fault. She wasn’t in her right mind, and he hoped she wasn’t going to do anything stupid.

The trooper resumed yelling. “I mean it,
nigger!
You’ve got until the count of three! One . . .”

Elijah’s face went blank with shock.

“No, oh no, oh no no no,” he spluttered.

Julianna’s head flew up in rage. “That is the lowest, rudest thing I’ve ever heard in my entire
life!
” She was beside herself with indignation. “People in polite society say ‘Negro!’ Everybody knows that!”

“Two . . .” bellowed the trooper.

Jon Tate slowly raised his head in the front seat. “What’s happening?” he demanded.

His relief to discover that the cop wasn’t there for him was tempered by his inability to make sense of what was going on. From where he was crouching he could only see Elijah from the nose up, but the kid was crying, and he looked petrified. Their eyes locked over the seat, and Jon’s confusion deepened.

“But why are the cops after
you?
” he asked, bewildered. “You haven’t done anything wrong, have you?”

 

Whatever else could be said about Lloyd Eagleton, he was an excellent shot with his revolver. In target practice he could routinely hit the bull’s-eye ten out of ten times at a distance of twenty-five yards, and he even had a gold marksmanship pin on the breast of his uniform to prove it.

At the moment he was less than fifteen feet away from the Edsel, and he could see the young black man’s head through its rear window. It was an easy shot, and Lloyd was more than prepared to kill the SOB if he didn’t surrender. He’d yelled out a couple of warnings already but so far there had been no response.

The driver’s door on the Edsel popped open a crack and a woman’s voice sang out.

“Hello, Sheriff Burns! Can I help you?”

“What the hell?” Lloyd muttered. “Who the fuck is Sheriff Burns?”

His face began to flush as he puzzled over this and came up with an answer: The black bastard must be
forcing
the woman to call him the wrong name, just to piss him off. He hated it when punk-ass little delinquents pulled shit like that, and he wasn’t about to put up with any crap from such a lowlife douche bag.

“Put your hands up where I can see them right now, goddammit,” he yelled back, “or I will open fire!”

Silence was the only answer.

Lloyd filled his lungs with pine-scented air. “I mean it,
nigger!
You’ve got until the count of three! One . . .”

Lloyd supposed he shouldn’t have said “nigger,” but it sounded tough to his own ears and he thought it might help scare the prick into giving up. He didn’t like to think of himself as a racist, but in his opinion there were times when “nigger” was the only word that fit the bill, and this was definitely one of those times.

“Two!” He aimed his .357 through the gap between his open door and the body of the car. He was surprised to notice the barrel of the gun was shaking quite badly. He’d never shot anybody before, and to tell the truth he was terrified.