Alan was already thirty yards past it and headed along the downslope, briefs for the Mohica case foremost on his mind, when he registered Janet’s blue Taurus, warning lights blinking like fireflies, dark and silent by the road. It wasn’t safe to pull a U-turn here on the hill so he continued to the bottom and turned and drove back up again. He crossed lanes and parked into her dead headlights and got out of the car and peered in through the window. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or not to find that there was nobody home.
He got back into his car and tried her on his cell phone but all he got was the machine and that definitely didn’t relieve him. The gas station, maybe? Arranging for jumper cables or a tow truck? Could be. He got Kaltzas’s number from Information but when he tried it the line was busy.
The anxiety really didn’t hit him until he reached the roadhouse and saw the side of the road swarming with cops, saw the jackknifed car and the Jeep and the crime- scene tape and the forensics team working over the body of a man and then it really hit him when he saw the paramedics wheeling a woman into an ambulance. Janet? My god, he thought. He didn’t know why he thought it-the woman could have been anybody-but it came unbidden and pounded through his blood. He slowed and then stopped even as the officer waved him on. He flashed his ID. The officer frowned at him anyway.
“What happened? Accident?”
“Shooting. One dead. One of ours, dammit.”
“The woman?”
“Girl. Can’t be more’n seventeen. Concussion, fractures, god knows what else. It’s a helluva mess.”
He nodded. “Thanks, Officer. Good luck. Hope you get the bastard.”
“Bastards,” he said. “Three of them.”
Alan guessed it was just his night to be corrected. He pulled out and tried her again on the cell phone.
“ Leave a message,” she said.
“Vehicle described as a late-model four-door Buick station wagon, light blue. Suspects are assumed to be armed and..
“Dangerous,” said Emil.
Billy reached over and flipped off the police band and pounded once at the steering wheel. “Shit,” he said. “How’d they make the wagon?” said Ray.
“The car that passed us by back there. While Billy was toyin’ with the Man.”
“Shit!” He pounded the wheel again.
“Called us in as an accident, probably. Good citizen. Well hell, we are an accident. An accident waitin’ to happen!”
It seemed to break the tension and they laughed. Broke it for them, anyway, if not exactly for Janet. They were all too damn matter-of-fact about this. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t normal. And Emil. Couldn’t anything shake Emil?
“We’ll just find us another car, that’s all,” he said. “Meantime we better get off the road awhile.” He turned to Marion. “You know a place?”
She looked at Janet.
“Do I know a place? Hell, yes.”
She draped her arm over Janet’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze.
“ ’Course I do,” she said.
She’d chosen the house because, unlike the Justice Building, where every footfall echoed like pistol fire across the marble floors, where even the walls were polished on a weekly basis, where the air was processed and always traced with disinfectant, the house was as much of nature as in the midst of it. Over 120 years old, it stood surrounded by tall untended grass atop a hill at the end of a two-lane dirt track that wound past a small country graveyard and an abandoned church of even earlier origin. Its beams were hand-hewn. Both fireplaces worked. The occasional bat still fluttered upstairs in the attic.
Her nearest neighbors were over a mile away. The house was quiet. It was private.
Now it was remote.
“How many phones?” Emil said. He’d walked in with his gun drawn. He shoved it in his belt.
“Just the one in the kitchen.”
“Truth, now.”
“Just the kitchen.”
“Ray? You want to take care of that?”
“Sure.”
Ray walked into the kitchen, put the paper bag containing the whiskey down on the counter and the beer in the refrigerator and unplugged the wall jack. The blinking light on her answering machine blinked out.
“Any guns?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. You want to hide the carving knives? I promise not to look.”
Emil smiled. “I just might do that.”
Billy plopped down in her armchair like a man after a hard day at work. Emil went to the refrigerator to get himself a beer. He popped one for Ray and handed it to him, then another for himself and closed the door.
“Hey,” said Marion.
“Oh, right.”
He got her a beer, opened it and stepped out of the kitchen and handed it to her.
“Sorry, Marie.”
“Marion.”
“Sorry. You care for one?”
“No,” Janet said.
She needed something a whole lot stronger. Not too much, god knows she had to keep her wits about her. But Jesus, something. She went to the kitchen cabinet and took down the fifth of Glenlivet and a glass and uncorked the bottle.
“Scotch?” Ray said.
“Uh-huh.”