The Throat (83 page)

This
possibility had occurred to me the second before John spoke it. Then I
realized that Hannah had seen Fontaine in his old living room. "He's
upstairs now," I said. "If we get down there fast enough, we might be
able to catch him with them."

John opened
his mouth, making up his mind. His eyes were large and clear and
unreadable. "Let's go," he said. "It's even better."

I thought it
was better, too, but for different reasons. If we could catch Fontaine
with his records, we had a better chance of bringing him to justice
than if we simply met him on an empty street. All we had to do was get
down to South Seventh Street before Fontaine got away or burned the
records of his secret life. My next thought was that we actually had
plenty of time—if Fontaine had returned to his old house on this night,
it was probably to wait out the two hours before the meeting he had
arranged.

Alan appeared
in the kitchen door. "What's going on? What was that phone call?"

"Alan, I'm
sorry, but there's no time to explain," John said. "Tim and I have to
go somewhere. We might have some good news for you."

"Where are
you going?"

"Sorry, but
it's none of your business." John pushed his way past the old man, who
glanced at me and then took off after his son-in-law.

"I'll decide
if it's my business or not," Alan said, a little louder than before but
still a long way from shouting.

They were
standing in the middle of the living room, about two feet from each
other. Alan jabbed his finger at John. "Obviously, this mission of
yours does concern me, if you say that you'll come back with good news.
I'm coming along."

John turned
to me in total exasperation.

"There might
be some danger," I said.

"That settles
it." Alan grabbed his jacket from the couch and wrenched it on. "I am
not
going to be left in the
dark. That's that."

"Alan—"

Alan walked
to the front door and opened it.

Something
happened to John's face—it was not just that he gave up on the spot,
but all resistance left him. "Fine," he said. "Come along. But you're
going to sit in the backseat, and you're not going to do anything until
we tell you to do it."

Alan looked
at him as if he'd just smelled something nasty, but he turned away and
went outside without protest.

"This is
nuts," I said to John. "
You're
nuts."

"I didn't
notice you doing much to stop him," John said. "We'll make him stay in
the car. Maybe a witness will come in handy."

"A witness to
what?"

The car door
slammed.

Instead of
responding, John went outside. I went after him and closed the door.
Alan was already enthroned in the backseat, facing forward, ignoring
us. John walked around to the passenger door. I looked up and saw that
the night was perfectly clear. The row of street lamps marched down
toward Berlin Avenue, and a scattering of stars lay across the black
sky. I got into the car and started the engine.

"This has
something to do with April's death," Alan boomed from the backseat. It
was a statement, not a question.

"Maybe," John
said.

"I can see
right through you. You're made of glass."

"Would you
please shut up, maybe?"

"Fine," Alan
said. "I'll do that."

Gangs of boys
standing outside the taverns and the factory walls stared at us when we
drove through the valley. John put his hand on the butt of the
revolver, but the boys stepped back deeper into the shadows and
followed us with their eyes.

A police car
turned out of a side street and stayed with us all the way down
Goethals. I waited for the flashing lights and the siren. The car
followed us onto Livermore. "Lose him," John said, and I made a careful
right turn onto South Second and looked in the rearview mirror. The
police car kept moving in a straight line down Livermore.

On Muffin
Street, I turned left and drove past the rows of quiet houses. Through
most of the dark windows flickered the gray-green of the television
screen. They were sitting in the dark in front of their sets, watching
what was left of the excitement. Finally, I came to South Seventh and
turned down toward Bob Bandolier's old house. Two blocks away, I cut
off the headlights and drifted past the darkened houses until I reached
the same place where John and I had parked in the fog. I pulled in next
to the curb and looked at John.

"Okay." He
turned around to speak to Alan. "We're going to go into a house in the
next block. If you see a man come out through the front door, lean over
the seat and tap the horn. Tap it, Alan, don't honk the thing, just
give it enough of a touch to make a short, sharp sound." He looked at
me, still thinking, and then turned back to Alan. "And if you see
lights come on in the window, in any window, or if you hear shots, get
out of the car and hustle up there as fast as you can and start banging
on the front door. Make a hell of a lot of noise."

"What's this
about?" Alan asked.

"In a word,
April," John said. "Do you remember what I told you to do?"

"April."

"That's
right."

"I'm not
going to sit in this car," Alan said.

"For God's
sake," John said. "We can't waste any more time arguing with you."

"Good." Alan
decided the issue by opening his door and climbing out of the car.

I got out and
went around the rear to stand in front of him. John softly closed the
passenger door and moved a couple of feet away, deliberately distancing
himself. Haggard and defiant, Alan tilted his chin up and tried to
stare me down. "Alan," I whispered, "we need you to stand watch for us.
We're meeting a policeman inside that house"—I pointed at it—"and we
want to get some boxes of papers from him."

"Why—" he
began in his normal voice, and I put my finger in front of my mouth. He
nodded and, in his version of a whisper, asked, "Why didn't you ask me
along in the first place, if you needed me to stand watch?"

"I'll explain
when we're done," I said.

"A policeman."

I nodded.

He leaned
forward, curling his fingers, and I bent down. He put his mouth next to
my ear. "Does John have my gun?"

I nodded
again.

He stepped
back, his face rigid. He wasn't giving anything away. John moved up the
block, and I went toward him, looking back at Alan. He had the
monkey-king look again, but at least he was standing still. John began
walking across the street, and I moved along the side of the car and
caught up with him before he reached the next curb. I looked back at
Alan. He was walking past the front of the car, clearly intending to
keep pace with us on the other side of the street. I waved him back
toward the car. He didn't move. A single gunshot came from what I
thought was the northwest. When I looked back at Alan, he was standing
in the same place.

"Let the old
fool do what he wants," John said. "He will, anyhow."

We went
toward the Bandolier house with Alan trailing along on the other side
of the street. When we reached the boundary of the property, John and I
walked up onto the lawn at the same instant. I looked back at Alan, who
was dithering on the sidewalk across the street. He stepped forward and
sat on the curb. From one of the houses on our side of the street,
Jimbo's bland, slow-moving voice drifted through an open window.

I went up
toward the side of the house, hearing John pull the fat wad of keys out
of his pocket. I hoped he could remember which one had worked the last
time. We began working our way down the peeling boards.

When we
reached the corner of the house, I grasped John's shoulder and kept him
from walking into the backyard.

"Wait," I
whispered, and he turned around to face me. "We can't go in the back."

"Sure we
can," he said.

"We wouldn't
make it halfway across the kitchen before he knew we were in the house."

"So what do
you want to do?"

"I want to
get on the porch," I said. "You stand against the building, where he
can't see you when he opens the door."

"And then
what?"

"I knock on
the door and ask if I can see him now. He has to open it. He doesn't
have any choice. As soon as he opens the door, Alan'll stand up and
shout, and then I'll go in low and you come in high."

I jerked my
head sideways, and we crept back along the side of the house.

Alan looked
up at us as we crept back into view on the side of the porch. I put my
finger to my lips, and he squinted at me and then nodded. I pointed up
toward the porch and the door. He stood up from the curb.
Stay there
, I
motioned. I mimed knocking and pretended to open a door. He nodded
again. I poked my head forward, as if I were looking out, then put my
hands on the sides of my mouth and waggled my head. He made a circle
with his thumb and forefinger and stepped back off the sidewalk into
the deeper darkness of the lawn behind it.

We came
around the side of the porch and moved silently over the site of Bob
Bandolier's old rose garden. Alan came a little forward off the lawn.
Someone in the old Bandolier living room stood up on a creaking board
and began pacing. Fontaine was walking around in his childhood,
charging himself up.

Everything
fell apart before John and I reached the porch steps.

Alan
bellowed,
"Stop! Stop!"

"Goddamn,"
John said, and took off across the lawn. Alan had misunderstood what he
was supposed to do. I came up out of my own crouch and ran toward the
steps before Fontaine could open the door.

But the front
door was already open—that was what Alan had been yelling about. Paul
Fontaine stepped outside, and a squad car, the same car we had seen
patroling, turned into South Seventh from Livermore. Its light bar had
not been turned on. "Goddamn you, Underhill," Fontaine said.

Alan blared,
"Is that him?"

A light came
on in the living room of the house behind him and in bedrooms of the
houses on either side.

"Is that the
man?"

Fontaine
swore, either at me or at the world in general. He came running down
the steps, and I tried to get away from him by cutting across the lawn
toward John.

"Come back
here, Underhill," Fontaine said.

I stopped
running, not because of his words, but because I thought I saw someone
moving through the darkness between the houses behind John and Alan
Brookner. Alan was staring wildly from Fontaine to me and back, and
John was still trying to calm him down.

"I'm not
letting you get away," Fontaine said. The man between the houses across
the street had vanished, if he had ever been there at all. The patrol
car swung up to the curb about thirty feet away, and Sonny Berenger and
another patrolman stepped out. As he uncurled, Sonny was looking
straight at John and Alan—he had not even seen us yet.

"Underhill,"
Fontaine said.

Then Alan
ripped the big revolver out from under John's jacket and jumped down
into the street. Instead of going after him, John flattened out on the
sidewalk. Alan raised the gun. He fired, and then fired again in a
chaos of flares and explosions that filled the street. I heard people
yelling and saw Alan drop the gun a second before I realized that I was
lying down. I tried to get up. Pain yanked me back down into the grass.
I had been hit in the front, but the pain blared out from the hot
circle in my back. It felt as if I'd been hit with a sledgehammer.

I turned my
head to see Fontaine. The big wheel of the world spun around me. Part
of the wheel was a black shoe at the end of what looked like a
mile-long gray leg. When the world came right-side up again, I turned
my head very slowly in the other direction. I saw the stitching around
a buttonhole of a gray suit. The reek of smoke and ashes came from his
clothes. On the other side of the buttonhole a white shirt printed with
a huge red blossom jerkily rose and fell. Alan had managed to hit us
both. I got the elbow of my good arm under me, hitched up my knees, and
pushed myself toward him. Then I rolled up on my elbow and saw the
other patrolman running toward us.

A few inches
away from mine, Fontaine's face was dull with shock. His eyes focused
on mine, and his mouth moved.

"Tell me," I
said. I don't know what I meant—tell me everything, tell me how Fee
Bandolier turned into Franklin Bachelor. He licked his lips. "Shit," he
said. His chest jerked up again, and blood gouted out of him and
drenched my arm. "Bell." Another gout of blood soaked my arm, and the
policeman's upper body appeared above us. Two rough hands dragged me
away from Fontaine. I said, "Ouch," using what felt like commendable
restraint, and the cop said, "Hang in there, just hang in there," but
not to me.

I stared up
at the black, starry sky and said, "Get Sonny." I hoped I would not
die. I was floating in blood.

Then Sonny
bent over me. I could hear the other cop doing something to Fontaine
and visualized him slapping a big pressure bandage over the wound in
his chest. But that was not where we were, that was somewhere else.
"Are you going to make it?" Sonny asked, looking as if he hoped the
answer were no.

"I owe you
one, and here it is," I said. "Along with a lot of other people,
Fontaine killed that graduate student and Ransom's wife. He was a Green
Beret officer named Franklin Bachelor, and he grew up in this house as
Fielding Bandolier. Check up on a company named Elvee Holdings, and
you'll find out he was tied into Billy Ritz. Somewhere in this house,
you'll find two boxes of notes Fontaine made on all his killings. And
inside a couple of boxes in the basement, you'll find his father's
photographs of the places where he killed the original Blue Rose
victims."