Hawk said to me, “Didn’t need no fucking cops, babe.” I put my right hand out, palm up. It was shaking. Hawk slapped his down limply on it. We were too tired to shake. We simply clutched hands, swaying back and forth with Zachary motionless on the ground in front of us.
“Didn’t need no jive-fucking cops, babe,” Hawk said again, and a noise came hoarsely out of his throat. I realized he was laughing. I started to laugh too. The two Montreal cops stood looking at us with the guns half raised and the doors of the cruiser swung open. Down the hill another cop car was coming.
One of them said, “Qu’est-ce que c’est?”
“Je parle anglais,” I said with the blood running off me. Laughing and gasping for breath. “Je suis Americain, mon gendarme.”
Hawk was nearly hysterical with laughter. Now his body was rocking back and forth, hanging on to my good hand.
“What the hell are you doing?” the cop said.
Trying to control his laugher, Hawk said, “We just copped the gold medal in outdoor scuffling.” It was the funniest thing I’d ever heard, or so it seemed at the time, and the two of us were still giggling when they loaded us into the car and hauled us off to a hospital.
29
They set my arm and packed my nose and cleaned me up, and put me in the hospital overnight with Hawk in the next bed. They didn’t arrest us, but there was a cop at the door all night. My arm was hurting now and they gave me a shot. I went to sleep for the rest of the day and night. When I woke up, a man in plain clothes was there from the RCMP. Hawk was sitting up in bed reading the Montreal Star and sipping some juice from a big styrofoam cup through a straw from one corner of his mouth. The swelling was down a bit in his eye. He could see out of it, but the lip was still very puffy and I could see the black thread from the stitches.
“My name’s Morgan,” the man from RCMP said. He showed me his shield. “We’d like to hear about what happened.”
Hawk said, with difficulty, “Paul dead. Kathie shot him with the rifle while he trying to escape.”
“Escape?” I said.
Hawk said, “Yeah.” There was no expression on his face.
“Where is she now?”
Morgan said, “We’re holding her for the moment.”
I said, “How’s Zachary?”
Morgan said, “He’ll live. We have looked into him a bit. He’s in our files, in fact.”
“I’ll bet he is,” I said. I shifted a little in bed. It hurt. I was sore all over. My left arm was in a cast from knuckles to elbow. The cast felt warm. There was tape over my nose and the nostrils were packed.
“Naturally with the games established in Montreal we kept a file of known terrorists. Zachary was quite well known. Several countries want him. What business were you doing with him?”
“We were preventing him from shooting a gold medalist. Him and Paul.”
Morgan was a strong-looking middle-sized man with thick blondish hair and a thick mustache. His jaw stuck out and his mouth receded. The mustache helped. He wore rimless glasses. I hadn’t seen those for years. The principal of my elementary school had worn rimless glasses.
“We rather figured that out from the witnesses and what Kathie told us. That doesn’t appear, incidentally, to be her real name.”
“I know. I don’t know what it is.”
Morgan looked at Hawk, “You?”
Hawk said, “I don’t know.”
Morgan looked back at me, “Anyway the rifle with the scope, the mark on the wall, that sort of thing. We were able to figure out pretty well what the plan had been. What we’re interested in is a bit of information on how you happened to be there at the proper time and place. There were quite a number of weapons at the scene. None of you seemed able to hang on. There was a thirty-eight caliber Smith and Wesson revolver for which you have a permit, Mr. Spenser. And there was a modified shotgun, which is illegal in Canada, for which there is no permit, but for which your companion seems to have had a shoulder rig.”
Hawk looked at the ceiling and shrugged. I didn’t say anything.
“The other guns,” Morgan went on, “doubtless belonged to this Paul, and to Zachary.”
I said, “Yeah.”
Morgan said, “Let us not bullshit around anymore. You are not tourists, either of you. Spenser, I have already checked you out. Your investigator’s license was in your wallet. We called Boston and have talked about you. This gentleman,” he nodded at Hawk, “admits only to being called Hawk. He carries no identification. The Boston Police, however, suggested that a man of that description who used that name was sometimes know to associate with you. They described him, I believe, as a leg-breaker. It was not a pair of tourists who took Mr. Zachary, either. Tell me. I want to hear.”
I said, “I want to make a phone call.”
Morgan said, “Spenser, this is not a James Cagney movie.”
I said, “I want to call my employer. He has a right to some anonymity and the right to be consulted before I violate it. If I violate it.”
