the ground under the tree.
I said 'shhh' automatically, the way people do with dogs, even though dogs generally don't know what 'shhh' means. In Pearl's case I was up so high, and shhh'd so weakly, that Pearl probably didn't hear it anyway.
And then I saw them. Mostly I had been hoping I wouldn't and I could concentrate on making it to the Mass Pike before my leg gave way. But they were there, in three groups. In front a big dark guy, with long black hair, wearing a red and black mackinaw. He was tracking-his head down, swiveling slowly back and forth.
'Son of a bitch,' I said. My voice sounded hoarse and funny.
Behind him were three other men. I recognized Maishe from the restaurant inBeverly, and Anthony. The third guy wasn't anyone I knew. He carried a white sack in his left hand. And behind them, straggling, maybe ten yards back, was Gerry Broz. He was laboring.
The white sack was probably a pillowcase. He'd probably had the brains to grab it and fill it with whatever foodstuffs he could find in Patty Giaco min's kitchen. He was smallish, and wiry looking, from where I was watching. And he looked country, like the tracker. Maishe had an Uzi, and
Anthony carried the shotgun. They looked tired and wet, but still functional. Behind them Gerry was so tired he almost staggered. Even at a half mile I could tell he was exhausted. He was a plump, flabby, small framed kid. All the muscle he had, he hired.
It had taken me about forty minutes to get to where I was from where they were. They were moving faster than I could, but Gerry slowed them down. I had at least a half hour, and I knew I had better make my stand here. I was nearly spent. I edged down the tree, holding my bad leg carefully away from me. When I reached the ground I had to ward Pearl off, to keep her from hurting my leg again.
'Unerring,' I said. 'You are unerring.'
I moved slowly back down off the rise toward the stream. I made a wide circle as I went, being careful to avoid the path I'd taken up. The tracker would follow my path across the stream and up to the ridgeline before he discovered I'd doubled back. It should be enough time. If things worked out. I reached the stream and entered it about twenty yards below the place
I'd crossed before. I waded upstream with Pearl on the bank, moving through the brush, glancing at me in puzzlement now and then, but enjoying the cascade of smells that she was encountering among the weeds along the bank.
I took the ripening groundhog carcass from inside my jacket and tossed it across the stream to her. It landed five feet in front of her. She stopped.
Dropped her head, raised her rear end, and put her front legs straight out in front of her. Then she pounced on it. Picked it up in her jaws, shook it a couple of times, and dashed off into the woods with it. Which is what I was hoping for.
At the point where I'd crossed before, standing in the water, I bent one branch and broke another, so that the tracker shouldn't miss it. Then I moved across to the far bank and pulled loose a small sapling, as if I had grabbed it to climb the bank and it had pulled loose. The water moved rapidly here, the streambed full up with the long rain. I went back to the far side of the stream, the one they'dcome from, and edged myself in against the bank, under the low sweep of a black spruce whose roots were half exposed in the stream bank.
I was hip deep in the water, half crouched against the bank. The cold water numbed my leg. The rain granulated the black surface of the stream. There were no rocks here, no snags, so that the fast water moved sleekly without any show of white. Pearl was out of sight, communing with her lunch. I took the Browning out and cocked it and waited.
In twenty minutes they arrived. The tracker first, moving easily through the cover. On his right hip I saw the nose of a holster poke down beneath the skirt of his mackinaw. He paused at the stream, looked both ways and across, saw the broken branch on the other side. His hair was long and black and wet, plastered by the rain against his skull. In profile he had a nose like Dick Tracy, and around the eye a hint of American Indian. I saw him nod to himself once, then step into the stream and walk across. Behind him came the other three: Maishe and Anthony, and the stranger with the sack. I had been right. It was a pillowcase, soaking wet now, and lumpy with canned goods in the bottom. Maishe looked back once, hesitated, then shrugged and went into the stream. The other two went with him. They were all up the other side and thirty yards beyond before Gerry reached the stream. He was a mess. He was still wearing the camel's hair topcoat he'd worn in Beverly. It was belted up now, and the collar was up. But the coat was sodden with rain and probably added twenty pounds to his load. He was limping, and his breath was audible for ten yards, rasping in and out. Even in the cold rain his face was flushed, and he staggered occasionally as he struggled through the thick woods. He paused on the stream bank, gasping. Across the stream, Maishe turned and looked back. Gerry waved him on. Maishe shrugged again and started up toward the ridgeline after the other three. Gerry gasped in a big gulp of air and then edged into the stream. When he was halfway across I came out from under the tree and caught hold of him by the long modish hair at the back of his neck.
I yanked him back toward me and jammed the Browning into his ear.
Gerry made a kind of yowling noise, and the people ahead stopped and turned. I held him motionless there in the stream with my gun screwed into his ear. The tracker hit the ground, rolled once. As he rolled I saw a flash of metallic movement. Then he was behind a rock outcropping with his handgun out. It was a big one, with a long barrel.
The other three stood motionless. The wiry guy with the pillowcase frozen in a sort of half crouch. The other two standing upright, looking at Gerry and me in the water. The noise of the stream and the sound of the rain was all there was.
'It ain't Richie,' Maishe said finally.
'And proud of it,' I said.
Gerry's voice was barely audible as it croaked out of his throat.
'Spenser?'
'Un huh.'
Again silence. Pearl appeared on the rising ground opposite and sniffed at the pillowcase that the wiry guy was holding.
Nobody moved.
