Whitley stuck his hand in his pocket. Without even thinking about it, I leveled the gun at him.
“I’m just getting the man a piece of paper,” Whitley said, pulling out a pad. “Private eyes always gotta have some paper, am I right? Tell me you at least carry a pad of paper with you.”
“Here,” Harwood said, taking the pad from him. “Show this to Mr. McKnight. I think this may help solve our problem.”
When Harwood was done writing, Whitley took the pad and hobbled over to me. One man in a wheelchair, another man holding himself up with a cane. Me with a gun in my hand, deep in the forest on a cold April night. Life couldn’t get any stranger.
But then it did. Just as I was wondering what this piece of paper would say-some kind of dollar figure maybe, some kind of deal he wanted to make for the land-I saw Harwood’s right hand move. There was a little console attached to the armrest on his wheelchair. There were buttons on it. He pushed one of them.
Whitley’s cane was already whistling through the air when the lights turned off. The pain was instantaneous as he caught me on my right wrist, just above the thumb. My hand went numb. The gun dropped to the ground. As I went down for it, a gunshot ripped through the night. The bullet must have gone right over me. The flash from Harwood’s gun was a single frame of light, enough for me to make out Whitley’s foot coming my way fast. I got a forearm up just in time to block it. I rolled before the next shot could find me.
You let your guard down, Alex. Harwood wrote it out for him, right there on his little private eye’s notepad. When I turn out the lights, hit him! Or something else just as brilliant And you fell for it.
The cane caught me again, this time on my right shoulder blade. I went to the ground facefirst and tasted pine needles.
This is it, Alex. They’re gonna kill you right here. They’ll dig a grave in the woods and bury you.
“Don’t shoot!” Whitley said. “He’s right here!”
“Well, get out of the way!” Harwood said.
“Turn the lights on!”
“Damn this thing!” Harwood said. “I can’t see what I’m doing!”
I got up on my hands and knees and crawled. Something stopped me. It was Whitley’s leg. Before he could kick me with it, I grabbed and pulled. I was already on my feet and running when I heard him screaming something about his back. I didn’t stop to help him.
The lights came on just as I was about to run into a tree. A thoughtful gesture on the part of my host. Then a bullet hit the tree and sprayed bark in my face. So much for thoughtful gestures.
I ran for the car. The hell with zigzagging, or whatever you’re supposed to do when somebody’s shooting at you. I just ran as fast as I could make myself go, a forty-nine-year-old ex-catcher who never had any speed anyway. Not even in his twenties.
I went down behind the car. Harwood fired a couple more shots at me. That’s right, use up those bullets. How many does he have left? Did he shoot five times? Six? Clint Eastwood asking the punk if he feels lucky. Hell of a thing to think of at a time like this, but it rang true. It was time to see how lucky I was.
I opened the door and got in. Piss or no piss, I was taking Whitley’s Cadillac for a ride. I turned the key and listened to the engine grind.
And grind, and grind. Then it caught. I flipped the lights on, gunned it forward. I had no choice. There was no way I could back it up all the way down that trail. As I swung the car around, I saw Whitley in the glare of the headlights. He was still on the ground, flat on his back.
Then Harwood in his chair. The gun pointed right at me.
I swung hard to the left. The window on the passenger’s side exploded. The wheels spun, kicked up dirt, and then I was finally moving in the right direction. I took that big white boat right down the alley through the trees, making myself breathe. In, out. You’re in the clear now. Relax and drive.
When I got back to the main road, I took it west and then south, back toward Orcus Beach. And Maria. The cold air rushed in and made my eyes water.
The same damned thing had happened to my truck. Somebody had shot at me and blown out the window on the passenger’s side. What are the odds against that happening twice in a lifetime? What a strange and terrifying world this is, I thought, and how glad am I to live to see another night of it?
If I had only known. The night wasn’t through with me yet. Not by a long shot.
CHAPTER 20
My right hand was useless. Just a little pressure with the right thumb on the steering wheel, goddamn it all to hell, that hurt. I knew it was swelling and would be every color in the rainbow come morning. I knew this because it had happened before, at least half a dozen times. As a catcher, you try to keep your right hand protected, either behind your back like I used to do or tucked under your right leg. But sooner or later, you’re going to get hit in the hand with a foul tip. Or with the bat itself. If you’re lucky, you can still pick up a baseball the next day.
I kept driving. I needed ice, a tight bandage, and a drink. And I needed to get out of this filthy, stinking homeless shelter of a car, take a shower, and maybe burn my clothes. Then, with my hand wrapped up, a shot and a beer, four Advil, I’d be a new man.
Come to think of it, my back didn’t feel so hot, either. Whitley’s second swing had put a nice little knot in my muscles. A back rub would be the only other thing I would need out of life. I imagined Maria doing just that. This time, I didn’t tell myself to stop thinking about her that way. I let the movie run in my head, imagining what would happen next. And then after that.
When I got back to Orcus Beach, I dropped the Cadillac off at the boat ramp. I grabbed his UHF receiver and his cell phone. Then I threw the keys out into the sand as far as I could, and instantly regretted it. There was nothing wrong with the idea, but I should have thrown the keys with my other hand.
I fired up my truck and drove up the road to Maria’s house. The clock read 11:15. It was hard to believe so much had happened that night, and it wasn’t even midnight yet.
I went to the door and knocked. This is where Randy was standing when she accidentally shot him, I thought. “Maria, it’s Alex!” I said. I didn’t want her to make the same mistake. “Let me in! Everything’s okay!”
I heard the scrape of the dead bolt and then the door opened slowly. She looked out at me. She didn’t say anything.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“Yes.”
“They tried to kill me.”
“I’m sorry, Alex.”
“Don’t be sorry,” I said. I went past her into the house, into the kitchen. I emptied out a tray of ice cubes into a dish towel and then wrapped it around my hand. Then I started looking around the place, first by the phone, then on the kitchen counter, looking for a pen, or an outlet converter, or whatever the hell else there was in the house that was actually a bug. I didn’t need to find it. Not at that moment. But I wanted to be doing something. I wanted to be moving. For some reason, I was suddenly a little nervous about what might happen if I stopped.
“Say something,” I said, putting the earphones on. I kept one ear free. “I can run this on battery power, find out where the bug is.”
“What happened?” she said.
“He’s up by Traverse City,” I said. “On the land.”
“There’s nothing there.”
“He has an RV,” I said. “He sort of camping out up there.” There was a jarful of pens on a little table in the hallway. I started going through them. “Do any of these pens look strange to you? Or is this all the chief’s stuff? If it is, you’re not going to know if something’s out of place, are you?”
“What did he look like?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I have nothing to compare him to. Except, well, you know he’s in a wheelchair.”
“Yes.”
