“You just don’t touch me,” Grace said. She had her hand firmly clamped on to her son’s upper arm. “You just behave,” she said.
The secretary was still sprawled on the desk in the outer office. I slid the .357 back in under my arm as we went into the corridor.
“So much as look funny at this guard,” I said, “and everybody’s dead.”
Grace squeezed her hand on her son’s arm and pushed her shoulder against him.
“We’ll go straight to my room,” she “There’s a way out that way.”
As we approached the guard I said to Russell, “You catch the Cubs on cable? How ‘bout that Sandberg?”
Grace said to the guard, “How is your family, Ralph?”
He smiled and nodded, “Fine, Mrs. Costigan.”
“That’s nice,” Grace said.
I nodded as if Russell had spoken. “Still, I think it’s probably Bobby Dernier that makes them go, you know?”
Out of earshot, down the tunnel, Grace said, “You saw what your father did, your father died for me, died to keep this man from hurting me. Now it’s up to you. You do exactly what this man says. You do it just like your father would. You do what I say.”
“Just like my father would,” Russell said.
We both knew that wasn’t why his father died. When we came to the second guard we went through the same rigamarole. This time Russell said yes he had seen the Cubs on cable.
Then we were in her apartment. I took my gun out.
“Back here,” Grace said. “In the back of my closet. Don’t look, I haven’t had a chance to pick up today.”
There was a way to light the tunnel from the inside, and Russell knew it. What had seemed like a Dante-esque descent in the darkness became a few hundred yards of banal corridor in the fluorescent brightness. Outside on the grassy hillside under the high stars the journey underground seemed an eternity that happened long ago.
Grace said, “There, we did just what you said.” She held Russell’s arm. “Rusty and I helped you escape.”
I nodded. I was looking at Russell. He looked back, the stiffness in his face clear in the bright harvest moon. He stared back at me. Our eyes held. He seemed to be waiting. I did too. Neither of us knew quite what we were waiting for.
“You have to let us go,” Grace said. “You said that if we helped you you wouldn’t hurt me. That’s what you said.”
Russell and I looked at each other some more. I could smell the grass as the minimal night wind moved over it.
“That’s what you said,” Grace said. “Rusty. He said that.”
“Go ahead, Ma,” Russell said without moving his eyes. “He won’t stop you.”
“Alone?” she said. “Out here? In the dark? I can’t go alone. You have to take me.”
The smell of the grass was released by the dew that had gathered on it while I was underground. It was the smell of spring mornings when I was small. I nodded slowly.
“Good-bye,” I said and turned and walked away.
“Spenser,” Russell said.
I turned. He had a gun, a short automatic.
Grace said, “Rusty, you put that down.”
I still held my own gun. We stood ten feet apart. “What would she say if you killed me?” Russell said.
Grace said, “Rusty.”
“I won’t kill you,” I said.
“She make you promise?” Russell said.
“I promised,” I said.
“Stop it,” Grace said. “You stop it right now. Rusty?”
“I didn’t,” he said.
I put the .357 back under my arm. “She needs both of us alive, so she can make the choice,” I said. “Unless she can choose she’s lost.”
Grace clapped her hands sharply, the way you do at a puppy. “Russell Costigan,” she said. Russell held the gun in front of him at arm’s length and aimed over the barrel at me. Grace stood about five feet away, rocking slightly with her hands clutched over the back of her head. Russell moved the gun back and forth in a small arc.
“She chose already,” he said, moving his head very slightly to continue to sight over the moving gun barrel. “She told me in Mill River that she was going back to you.”
The gun was a Beretta, nine millimeter.
“She said she loved me, but she loved you more,” Russell said. The tinniness was gone from his voice. “She said the shrink had helped her, and that you had changed some.”
Peripherally I could see Grace stop rocking and stand motionless with her hands still on her head. “I couldn’t let
