30

“GIVEN UP ON MOTOR vehicles, John?”

“My car broke down over by the inn, so I borrowed a canoe from Ralph.”

Dag Gates nodded amiably through the screen. He was sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs on his porch, Runty lying against his master’s hiking boot, ears up, watching me with his ghost eyes. Gates himself had a can of Miller’s on the small camp table to his right, a series of rope sections over the arm of the chair next to his right hand. No weapons in sight or within reach. Unless you counted Runty.

“Come on inside.”

I opened the screen door and stepped across the threshold, just far enough into the porch so the door wouldn’t slap me in the rump.

Gates said, “Have a seat?”

“No, I think I’d rather stand.”

“Suit yourself, John, but the signs are good for one spectacular sunset tonight. We could share a beer, watch her together in about half an hour.”

“I don’t expect to be here that long.”

He nodded again, thoughtfully this time, and reached for his beer. “What’s on your mind?”

“I figured it out, Dag.”

“Did you, now?”

“Yes. From the beginning, I couldn’t really put a finger on it. Some of the people back in Massachusetts had a motive for killing one or more of those three people and wanting Shea out of the way, but the thing required a lot of local familiarity and planning, which made it hard to believe somebody from down there was the one.”

Another nod.

“But I couldn’t see any motive up here. Why go after the seasonal goose that lays some golden eggs in a poorish area, even if a goose like Shea does kind of get on people’s nerves a little? It didn’t make sense, till I found out that the goose decided to stop migrating.”

Gates took a healthy swig of beer.

I said, “Or, more to the point, you found out about it, delivering eggs to the inn one morning.”

He set down the can, deliberately. “Well, you got half of it.”

“Tom Judson being the other half?”

Gates lowered his hand to scruffle Runty between the shoulders. “Old Tom did this to me, John, and I made him pay for it with the piece of land you’re standing on. Only thing is, it ate him up to think of me across the cove from him, on his land. So he found Shea and sold out, moving up atop the mountain to look down on me looking over at Shea and wincing, John, wincing every time I saw what he was doing to the land.”

“It was legal at the time, I’m told.”

“Legal and right, those are two separate concepts, John. Completely separate. Anyway, after I watch Shea’s construction crew strip the land and build his house and lay his ‘lawn’ all the way down to the waterfront, into what should have been a buffer zone for runoff, I couldn’t take it. Halloween night, I got on my old leg prosthesis and hoofed it up to Judson’s new place.”

“Hell of a climb.”

“Used his driveway. Took me a time, but I was all fired up. Old Tom, he was sitting in the living room, drinking and watching his television. All the natural beauty around him, John, and the man ossifies himself in front of the tube. Well, he listens to me for about ten minutes, then starts to laughing and pushing me out, out through the door in the kitchen to the garage, the ‘servant’s entrance,’ he called it. Then he went back inside, locking the door on me. I stood there, seething with frustration about him, what he’d let happen, and I see the cases of his liquor in one corner and all his traps hanging from hooks on the wall. So I figure where Old Tom’d walk to get to his car or his booze, and I use my hand and foot to open a trap and set her down in his path. Like a trick or treat, see? I figured, he’d sold out to Shea and let the land be ravaged, I couldn’t maybe do much about that. But he’d also done this to me, I’d show him what it was like a little.”

Gates stopped petting the dog. “But then I’m walking back home here, I figure maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Wasn’t right for him to do it to me, maybe it isn’t right for me to do it to him. So I get in the door, and I dial Old Tom’s number, only I don’t get any answer. I try three more times that night. Nothing. I’m not up to climbing all that way again, the stump’s killing me from the prosthesis. I decide I’ll try him again in the morning. Well, I guess Old Tom, he was running out of whiskey, and he went out to his garage to get some more. He tripped and went down into that trap on his knee, and what should have been a broken ankle or lower leg ended up getting him killed, bleeding to death, wiping off all my fingerprints as he thrashed around.”

Gates looked hard at me. “I had some bad nights after that, John. Bad nights. Not worrying so much about getting caught, no. More about what I’d done. But after a while, guess what?”

“The guilt started to wear off.”

A nod and a little smile. “I thought you’d understand, especially after you telling me about those gang girls you had to shoot. I got away with Old Tom, and pretty soon it started feeling like it was the right thing to do.”

“Like it was right to do The Foursome?”

He looked as if he wanted to spit. “They had no respect for the land, John. Or the sense of the pond, the things they did. The parties, the Jet-Skiing and the water-skiing, the music blaring out across the cove so’s you couldn’t hear the loons over it. The noise that was bearable a couple weeks a year, six, eight weekends, that would not be bearable all year, every year.”

“Why kill them in May, then? Why not wait till they were up here in the fall or winter?”

Gates dug little furrows in his forehead. “Wasn’t sure I’d be able to pull it off first time I tried. Maybe Steve wouldn’t need to go to the store for once. Maybe they’d stay bunched together all night, so I couldn’t get them one at a time and be able to reload. And besides, why should I waste another whole summer with them, John? Why wait another three or four months to start restoring things to the way they could be and should be? The trees, now, all the trees they destroyed? Takes five minutes to cut one down, but fifty years to grow one back. I likely won’t be around for that. But I’ve already been over there a couple times at night, planting some low shrubs and bushes.”

I thought about the new growth I’d seen from the deck the prior weekend.

He said, “Those’ll take hold and spread out, with the rain and the birds helping them along. They’ll re-establish that buffer zone, John. Slow the runoff and stop the silt before it gets into the pond.”

I shook my head. “Won’t change the house, Dag. Somebody else will just move in, maybe bring back the lawn and be noisier than The Foursome ever were.”

A grin that stopped just this side of madness. “I get wind of that, a little prudential lightning just might have to strike the place. She’ll burn down fast, before any fire equipment can get in to her. Shea won’t rebuild, he’ll need the insurance money for that fancy defense you’re helping him prepare. Pretty soon, the whole area’ll look like Old Tom’s place must now. Restored, returned to nature.”

“What if Shea gets off?”

“Not likely, John, not likely. Patsy Willis has a pretty strong case, and what’s more, she believes in it. Folks around here know her and trust her. Jury’ll hear Patsy telling it and believe her. All you’ve got is a pipe dream of how some poor crip gimped his way to your client’s house and somehow shot three people in cold blood with a crossbow. Doesn’t hold up, John.”

“Doesn’t have to, Dag.”

More little furrows. “The hell does that mean?”

“I don’t have to convict you. All I have to do is give Lacouture enough ammunition to create a reasonable doubt in the jurors’ minds about Shea doing it. He gets off, maybe you stay free, but he’s still going to be across the lake from you, and after the testimony at his trial from me, you’ll never dare try anything on him again. You’ll be back where you started, only with three more killings on your conscience.”

The next smile crossed the line into madness. “Conscience. I’ll tell you something about conscience, John, though I bet it’s something you already know about yourself. After that first one, after Old Tom, I was troubled something fierce, like I told you before. But after these last three? Not a sleepless night, not a wink did I lose over them. They despoiled their surroundings, Shea and his friends, turning this little piece of heaven into … into New Jersey, for God’s sake. They deserved to die for that, and he deserves to spend the rest of his days in a prison, staring at the human despoiling he’s going to see all around him. He could have had this, John. What I had. Instead he raped the earth, and he’ll reap that harvest.”

“Not if I testify, Dag.”

An exasperated sigh. “I thought you might be different, John. I knew you were from a city, too, but I thought you could see the beauty of this place, feel for yourself what I did when I first saw her, appreciate why I had to do what I did.”

“You didn’t have to do it, Dag.”

He shook his head slowly. “You’re a smart man, John. But not smart enough for your own good. Runty!”

The dog was up and snarling, screwing its haunches into the porch floor and about to spring. I reached into my pocket for the Airweight, hoping not to have to use it. My eyes on Runty, I took a step backward toward the doorframe, just catching Gates yanking one of the rope ends on the arm of his chair.

Something like a battering ram hit me in the back and sent me sprawling toward his foot, my hands reflexively out and down to break my fall, Dag’s boot already arcing in a nifty soccer kick that turned out the fading sunlight.

The cramping in my right thigh brought me most of the way out of it, the low quizzical clucking of the chickens helping a bit. Some wooziness welled inside my head under the gag in my mouth and over the pain in my cheek. I opened one lid, then the other. Lying on my back in shadow rather than darkness, I hadn’t been out long, but when I tried to move my left wrist from under me to check my watch, I got only a clinking noise from a plastic-covered chain that constricted the cramp in my thigh even more.

I was on the ground in the rear yard, my right lower leg doubled up under the back of my thigh, some of Dag’s stringer wrapped around the thigh where it joins the hip and the ankle above my shoe, like a Hollywood harness to fake an amputation at the knee. The rest of the stringer was around my left wrist somewhere behind me, tying lower right limb to upper left limb in a … diagonal.

“Good to see you’re awake, John.”

I turned my head. Gates and Runty sat on a log, watching me. Halfway between us, two hunting knives from his bookshelves were sticking in the ground, most of both blades still showing.

“Ralph helped me do that section of log over the door as a deadfall, to scare away the bears. I saw you coming down the pond, I figured you might just have figured out what happened. Seemed like a good idea for me to get her ready to greet you, in case reason didn’t work. Which, I’m sad to say, it didn’t.”

I rocked until I could roll onto my side. The dog whoofed softly, like a mock cheer at a ballgame.

Dag said, “Don’t think you’ll be able to do too much with that gag, only one hand. Slipknot, bitch of a thing to undo even with ten fingers working on it. And once you get to that knife, I won’t be giving you time to use it on anything but me. If you can.”

I tried to estimate the distance to the knives. Maybe eight feet for each of us, with Gates a strong favorite to get there first even if he didn’t know when I’d move.

Dag shook his head slowly, like he had on the porch. “Sorry to haul you out here, but the ground’ll soak up blood a lot faster and better than those floorboards.”

I felt the dirt of the yard. A full inch of dry powder from being pounded by his foot every day back and forth to the chickens. He was right about the blood.

“Of course, I thought about just towing you out behind the canoe and sinking you once we were in good deep water, but I’d still have to kill you first. To be sure you weren’t going to come to and thrash around like Old Tom must have when he felt the teeth of that trap chomping through the femoral.”

A warped smile. “No, I’d have to poke some holes through your lungs anyway, might as well be here and in a fair fight, let you go out like a man should.” The smile turned wise. “Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking they’ll be on to me no matter what, finding your body and checking for rope marks or knife wounds or whatever. Well, I have to tell you, John. This time of year, the little beasties on the bottom are all feeling that surge in the appetite brought on by the spawning spirit. I weight you down right, maybe using that popgun of yours to help, my guess is the crayfish alone’ll pick you clean before Patsy and the state boys think to start dragging the pond for one missing private investigator. Besides, I leave Ralph’s Gazelle back by the northern islands, everybody’ll start looking over there, especially after I tell folks you must have had a problem on your way back because you sure left here safe and sound and chipper as a munk.”

I shook my head as slowly as he had his.

“Come on now, John. I got away with Old Tom without even any planning aforehand. I grant you I worked on doing Shea and his friends for almost two weeks. Just before I heard from Ramona about Shea’s moving up year-round, I saw his wife and the guy in the other couple, saw them through my binoculars, loving each other up in the middle of the week when their spouses didn’t seem to be around and they didn’t think anybody was watching. Well, I was watching, and thinking, too. Thinking about what a good motive that’d give your Mr. Shea for killing them. So I started using the spare keys to get into the garage and house, practicing with that crossbow till I could split a twig at fifteen yards, picking the spot on their shoreline where I could beach the canoe nice and quiet behind the underbrush. Then that day, using the keys again to get the shoes and the crossbow, toodling along that night in the canoe, the binoculars letting me spot Steve starting up his four-wheeler and leaving for the country store. Easing on over there, crawling through the brush, and taking those de-spoilers, one by one as they came to me. Even left Patsy a little help, wearing my prosthesis and Shea’s shoes to make them bloody. I thought that was a nice touch, John, a one-legged man managing to make both shoes bloody, instead of just one. I left the bow itself where Steve’d find it and scoop it up, getting his prints all back over it.”

The warped smile again. “But, at worst your situation here falls somewhere between the two extremes, so to speak. I’ve had a little time to plan it, and besides, my on-the-job training in these matters should stand me in good stead. What do you think?”

I was thinking what Teen Angel had taught Sheriff Willis and me years apart a long time ago. Blade parallel to the ground, come up and in under the ribs. Twist hard to the strong side of the major hand, do as much damage as possible.

Gates hopped up, Runty slipping to the ground. “Oh, I know. You’re thinking this isn’t really going to be all that fair a fight, what with me having a good deal more experience in being shy the relevant limbs. Well, I apologize for that, John, I truly do. But I can’t see any other way.”

He gestured to the knives and then to me. “Probably your best chance is to kind of scrabble on your hand and knees over to take one of them, then hope you can get me as I come down at you with the other. But I guess you have to go with your own sound judgment on this sort of thing, eh?”

I got onto one hand and two knees and began moving toward the knives, learning pretty quickly that I could pick up only one support at a time if I didn’t want to collapse in the dust. Gates gave me a head start of three or four lurching steps before bounding nimbly as a kangaroo over to the knives and snatching one of them before bounding back. I grabbed a fistful of dirt as he hefted his weapon in the palm of the right hand.

“Just had a flash of me letting you get to the knives first only to see you throw one into the woods and come after me and Runty with the other.”

I nodded. He smiled.

Then I rose to a full kneeling position and threw my fistful as hard as I could at his face.

Gates’s forearm came up, but not quickly enough to keep all the dirt from his eyes. He troweled the forearm back and forth across them as I used my right hand to get upright onto my left leg and come forward for the other knife.

That’s when Runty charged me.

I dropped down again and used my open hand to shovel a sandstorm at him.

The dog yelped and veered, yowling as his paws worked furiously at his closed eyes. Gates got one of his own eyes cleared, rubbing at the other as he tried to shush his dog. Instead Runty kept yowling, bucking around the yard in circles, his snout dowsing toward the ground.

Two more stutter steps and a lunge by me, and I had the other knife. Dag noticed and feinted toward me once clumsily, the closed eye hampering his depth perception. I rolled and braced with my hand and got up on the left leg as the dog crashed through the underbrush and out of sight but not hearing, its cries piteous.

Gates said, “You’re going to go a little more slowly on account of Runty, John.”

As I tested my hopping, Dag worked on clearing his other eye, getting to where it just blinked rapidly, the tears running down his face with some pink to them from burst blood vessels somewhere in the white. My weight canted a little to the left of vertical, I found I could do pretty well, as long as I didn’t hit a soft spot in the dirt.

Gates now began to adjust to his worse eye, hopping forward in a bracketing way, shepherding me toward the log he’d been sitting on. I wanted no more part of that than a fighter wants to be backed into a corner of the ring, so I tried to sidle left and away. He cut me off, his left leg a pogo stick, mine a faulty crutch. The Jukado from the service gave me some balance, the jogging and Nautilus some muscle strength, but against Dag I had no hope of winning an endurance test.

He seemed to sense what I was thinking. “Not as easy as it looks, eh, John? Those tendons and ligaments around the knee, you got to do lots of leg lifts, some with the foot out to the side, to build up and support the joint for this sort of thing. Why don’t you try and end it quick, either way? Come for me, John. Come and kill me.”

No, it was still my best bet to make him come to me first. He kept the left-right/in-out bracketing going, edging closer after each series of movements. Runty’s yowling had calmed down, as the dog seemed to be going hoarse.

Then Gates feinted wide right before leaping left. In a smooth movement he spun around, slashing at me with his knife. I instinctively shifted my weight and, without a right leg under me, went down heavily.

“Sorry, John,” he said above me, “Looks like this’ll have to be it.”

“That’ll do, Dag.”

Gates and I both looked over to the rutted, weedy road mouth. Ma Judson stood there, left foot in front of right, green felt hat at a determined angle, the old Weatherby at her hip and holding a little north of Dag’s belt buckle from thirty feet away.

“Ma, what’re you doing?”

“Might ask you the same. Heard Runty raising a ruckus, and I come over to find you trying to skewer a man.”

While Gates hopped a few steps toward her, I slid the knife carefully between my neck and the gag and began sawing away on the cloth.

Dag tried a smile. “Cuddy here, he went just plain crazy, Ma. Tried to kill Runty with one of my knives.”

“That why you trussed him up like that?”

“Well, yeah. I had to—”

“That why you got him gagged, too?”

Gates seemed confounded by that one.

Judson said, “What’s the matter, you afraid he’d bite Runty?”

Dag tried a laugh that didn’t work.

The sound of my knife ripping through the last fibers of the cloth brought his attention back over to me.

Watching Gates, I said, “He killed your brother, Ma. And the three people across the cove.”

“Don’t listen to him, Ma.”

Judson said, “Why not? Listened to you first, didn’t I?”

I said, “Dag found out that Shea and his wife were going to move up here year-round. He couldn’t stand that idea, so he set up Shea by killing the others.”

“Shut up, Cuddy!”

Judson lowered the muzzle a little. “Dag?”

He changed tacks. “They were going to ruin it for us, Ma. Ruin things all the year through instead of just for a little of the summer. I couldn’t abide that, and neither could you.”

The old woman gnawed her lower lip.

Gates said, “But he’s the only one who knows, Ma.”

I said, “No, I’m not.”

“He came here alone. We get rid of him, we’ll be all right. The pond’ll be all right. We’ll get everything back to normal again.”

Judson said, “Dag, what that Mr. Shea did to his property was wrong, but what you did was wronger. This here, this killing of another innocent, that’d be wrongest of all.”

I saw Runty coming back cautiously through the woods behind her.

Gates saw him, too. “But Ma, Cuddy’ll just spoil it for all of us!”

“No, Dag. He’ll just spoil it for you, account of what you’ve done already.”

“But—”

Judson said, “Put down the knife, Dag.”

I said, “Ma, Runty is coming up behind you.”

She didn’t look back. “Don’t matter. He won’t bite a hand that feeds him, no matter what Dag here might tell him.” A breath. “Dogs are a lot better that way than people, oftimes.”

Gates looked at his dog, then at Ma, then at me. I was no more than two bounds away from him.

He said, “I don’t believe you’d shoot me, Ma.”

Judson brought the muzzle back up to serious. “Be a bad thing to count on, Dag.”

Gates executed a turn to me on the ball of his foot, like a member of a precision drill team. Raising my knife, I got to my knees.

Judson said, “Dag, don’t.”

He gave me the madness smile with the half of his face she couldn’t see. Dr. Sardonicus. “Don’t believe you’d shoot a neighbor, Ma. Not over Old Tom and those despoilers.”

“Wouldn’t be over them, because I can’t bring them back. I can save Cuddy here, though, and I will.”

“Ma—”

She brought the stock to her shoulder. “It’s wrong, Dag, wrong, wrong all over wrong. And if you can’t see that, my not pulling this trigger can’t never save you.”

The madness smile spread wide, and his torso dipped a little, putting the coil into his spring. Gates left the ground and was still on the rise when a barrel from the old gun spewed flame and thunder. A sickening sound filled the air, the whumping noise a broom makes hitting a rug over a clothesline. Dag lofted left and capsized, losing the knife and landing on his back.

Runty was to him first, yipping and pushing his nose at what used to be the left side of his master’s chest. Ma Judson moved quickly, almost beating me. Gates’s eyes were open, the right one fluttery, maybe from the residual dirt, but I doubted it. Every time he breathed, there was a gurgling sound in his throat, and little bubbles of blood came up through several of the red-rimmed holes in his shirt.

Judson took one look and said, “I’ll get the Bronco.”

Something like Dag’s voice said, “Ma, hospital’s … twenty miles.”

“We’ll still try.”

“Ma, I wouldn’t make it … to the end of the camp road.”

Judson’s voice quavered. “Well, we can’t leave you in the dirt to die, Dag.”

He looked toward the west. “Sun’s setting. Be mighty fine … to sit in that lawn chair a while.”

Judson got me untied from the chain stringer. I went to the waterfront as she took off her buckskin jacket and pressed down on as many of his wounds as she could. Between us we managed to get Gates up and into the chair at the side of the house, the far ridge across the pond visible between a couple of tree trunks and over a low, needled pine branch.

The sun touched the ridge tangentially with its rounded bottom, firing the underbellies of the clouds above it like bricquets. The shoulders of the clouds blushed toward lavender and then deep purple before the pale blue background of the sky. The part at the horizon finally hazed toward pink as all the clouds darkened and scudded slowly southward.

Dag Gates got to see most of it.