Son of Fletch

Don’t you think?”

“You’re not sending me out to hunker down in a gully with the other guys?”

Fletch said, “There’s a shower in there.” He nodded to the door to the study bathroom. “Fresh towels. Down the hall, back of the house, there’s a guest room. Closets, bureau drawers. Some old clothes of mine; some left by forgetful houseguests. While you’re showering and changing, I’ll go heat up the tuna puffs. You want milk?”

“We knocked out your phones. Way down the road.”

Fletch shrugged. “Some people around here still believe that when it rains real hard like this frogs drop out of the sky. When it rains this hard, there certainly are a great many more frogs on the roads. I’ve noticed that myself.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When I come back, try to look more like a prince, will you? A little less like a frog?”

The young man tried to smile, but failed. “Why?”

“A couple of counties are about to stop by. They want to borrow the Jeep to go looking for you and your traveling companions.”

“What are counties?”

From the hall outside the study, Fletch said: “Cops.”

3

Pulling off his sneakers as he walked, Fletch went through the kitchen into the small back hall. He stepped into his thigh-high black rubber boots. From a wall peg, he took his wide-brimmed dark brown hat and put it on his head. He buttoned his long, brown horse coat to his throat.

Knowing himself virtually invisible and inaudible in the night’s hard rain, he went out the back door, and along the side of the house to the front corner.

Outside the French doors, Jack was visible in the study lights, sockless, stamping on his work boots. He crouched to lace them.

As Fletch knew he would, Jack went down the front walk, across the road, and along the graveled driveway through the home pasture to the barns.

After waiting a moment, Fletch crossed the lawn, the road, and went in a straight line over a white board fence, across the home pasture to the back fence. He sat on the top board of that fence under a tree. From there, even in that rain, even in that dark, he could see movement in the area between the barns and against the back hills. Fletch had learned that if he remained perfectly still, especially sitting, especially if he lowered his head so that his hat was backed by his shoulders, he would not be seen under such circumstances, or at least not be seen as a human.

In a moment a skinny man walked, head down, between the barns. He was headed in the direction of the gully. He took rapid short steps.

There followed a huge man, with a big egg of a head, big chest, big gut. Angrily he was waving his arms. More visible once backed by the hill, he turned. Shouting something, he ran back a couple of meters.

Suddenly, smoothly, a tall, slim, lithe figure ran forward to him, and kicked him in the crotch. The lighter man, the boy, cracked the side of his right hand against the egg of the big man’s head. The young man’s voice came through the pounding rain. “Will you shut up!” Then the young man backed up a meter and postured himself defensively.

The fourth man, shorter than all of them, fatter, came into view. Arms akimbo, he stood over the crouching big man. Fletch guessed he was talking to him, exhorting him.

While he talked, the lithe young man Fletch knew to be Jack jogged ahead of the first man Fletch had seen, who was hesitating by the gate to the pastures.

Jack climbed over the gate. He disappeared across the stream toward the back hill.

Stepping on every rung of the gate, the second man followed.

Angrily shaking the gate as he climbed it, the big man climbed over the gate.

As if puzzled by the problem of gate climbing, the fat, bandy-legged man watched him. He looked for a way of opening the gate, but in the dark did not succeed. Then, clumsily, making more of a job of it than necessary, he climbed over the gate.

Faoni, Moreno, Leary, and Kriegel disappeared across the roaring stream, stumbling and slipping uphill in the dousing rain.

“HEY, ACE.”

“That you, Fletch?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Alston just came in.” It was two hours earlier by the clock in California. “Hang on.”

Alston Chambers and Fletch went back a long way together.

Alston had started his career as a prosecutor. When his children were born he decided he needed to earn a better living than the state provided him.

He tried being a defense attorney. He did make more money.

He hated defending people he knew to be criminals.

“The difference is,” he told Fletch at the time, “between telling the truth and distorting truth, making up a barely palatable lie to fit the facts, to seed reasonable doubt.”

“Not your bowl of minestrone, eh?”

“I hate my clients! I think most of them should be hung, drawn, and quartered. How can I spend my life hating the people I work with, spend all my time with, my clients?”

“Many do.”

“It’s like being a beautician in the land of the ugly!”

“There’s always divorce law,” Fletch said. “Personally, I can tell you how profitable that is.”

“I want to put all my clients in prison!”

“Then go back to putting them in prison,” Fletch said. “You were good at it.”

So, after time, with periodic objective advice, encouragement, and a few legitimate political dollars from Fletch, Alston Chambers had risen to the position of District Attorney.

Alston came on the phone. “Can’t you let me get home, let me take off my coat, smell the stew pot, and pat the cat before making me answer the phone?”

“You’re late. You must have slowed and smirked going by the county jail again. Did any of the citizens you’ve jugged wave at you as you went by? I know how you love that.”

“Are you in a factory?”

“No. Why?”

“What’s that noise?”

“Rain on an aluminum roof. Hard rain. I’m in the smokehouse.”

“Why? Are you going to talk dirty to me?”

“Probably.” Fletch had taken the cellular phone from the station wagon into the smokehouse. Frequently, the phone did not work in the deep valley of the farm. Despite the storm, the phone was working well. Through the open door of the unlit smokehouse he could keep his eye on much of the farm. Probably he would be able to see Jack returning to the house, his dark shape moving along the white board fence. Hoping the phone would not leak, especially that his conversation would not be heard on some police frequency, he had finger-punched out Alston’s home number in California.

“Hey, Alston,” Fletch said. “Listen.”

“Never mind. Take your time,” Alston said. “We’re just having duck Curacao for dinner. Those little onions.”

“I have a son.”

For a moment, Fletch thought the line went dead. It hadn’t.

“I suppose you do,” Alston said. “I never thought about it. A new son, or an old son?”

“An old son.”