On the Other Hand, Death - Stevenson Richard - Страница 44

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Wiping my dripping face on my shirtfront, I said, "We'll go in my car. I'll explain on the way. Get in. Now."

They obeyed.

I drove past the kennels, a long, low white clapboard building with a pink and black closed sign stuck in the window of the main door. I parked a quarter mile down Karner Road, and the three of us hiked back toward the kennels. Twenty yards south of the building we entered the scrub pine woods and moved closer.

The front section of the building was in darkness, but from the woods we could see a light burning in a rear wing that had small slitlike windows running high up along its length.

With only one gun among us, we stayed together. We crept up to the side of an old dark green Pontiac parked in the rear yard, and then on to the wing, where we flattened ourselves against the wall.

Lyle and Timmy bent down and formed a two-sectioned platform with their backs, which I climbed up on and peered through the window. I saw no people, just a security guard's uniform hanging from a hook—that of the "cop" Mel Glempt had seen grabbing Peter—and a long row of metal cages lined against the wall opposite me.

The window I looked through was covered with rabbit wire but the glass was broken and half fallen away. The foulest stench I had smelled since south Asia hit me like an airborne sewage pit.

I climbed down.

Timmy whispered, "Catshit."

"Yeah. Catshit. And, even worse for Peter, cat fur."

Standing there, I had a picture burned into my mind of the filth-ridden cages I had just seen. I knew then how Peter Greco had died.

I doubled over and began to heave silently, but Timmy whispered, "Later! Later!" and I kept it down. It was a subject Timmy was such an expert on.

We moved to the rear corner of the wing and saw that thirty yards away a second one-story wing extended back from the main front building, and it too was lighted on the inside. We slowly crept toward it, and as we approached, the sound of voices came from one of the high windows. Lyle drew his revolver.

Again, I was raised up to peer inside, and I saw them. McWhirter, inside a stiff-wire dog cage, was bound with rope at his wrists and ankles, a gag in his mouth. Two men were just below me. I could see the bare right arm of one and heard the voice of the other, whose body was not within my visual range.

"Tell him they jewed us out of a hundred bucks," said the man with the arm. "Fuckin' dyke skimmed off a hundred. We oughtta go back there and bust her lip."

"Shut up, Glen. That don't matter!" said the voice of Duane Andrus. "Listen, baby, I want that fifty back within a week, or you are finished. You got that? I mean finished."

A long silence. Andrus apparently was speaking not to his brother but to someone on the telephone.

"Listen, I told you that was an accident, and I'm not gonna keep listening to you yap about that. The Greco guy was blindfolded and never would have recognized us, but this asshole's different—he's seen us—and what the fuck difference does it make? We're in it up to our tits now anyways, so you just shut your fuckin' pansy mouth!

Some big fuckin' help you've been anyways, so you just piss off! And you get me that fifty back, or your ass is fuckin' hamburger."

The receiver went down with a bang.

"He's such a worthless piece of shit, I don't know why ever—

"Shhhh!"

The low growl was no more than ten feet behind us.

"That's Brute," came a voice from inside the building.

None of us moved. None of them moved. The only sound was of the breathy, wet snarl, a pent-up animal rage gathering itself to explode. I turned my head slowly and saw it in the hazy moonlight. I knew they were usually trained to go for the neck, wrist, or groin, and I tried to decide which of those on me was expendable. I voted for wrist.

Focusing all my attention on the dog, I hadn't heard the movement inside the building, but suddenly a man I took to be Glen Andrus appeared around the back corner of the wing.

"Brute, kill!" he shouted, which was less original than "Have the vapors, Patsy," but more useful for the owner's purposes under the circumstances.

The beast hurtled toward our idiotic pyramid, and Lyle's gun thundered a bright charge into the night, its impact sending the dog cartwheeling through the air away from us. Our pyramid collapsed at the same moment, and Glen Andrus charged around the back of the other wing toward the Pontiac. Lyle took off after him. Timmy and I rushed around the corner of the wing where McWhirter was tied up inside.

I collided with Duane Andrus as he exploded out the door, and the two of us bounced off the door frame and found ourselves rolling together across the soft, warm, shit-littered earth. I wrestled him onto his back and was about to throttle him—not necessarily fatally, though it

could have happened—when his head came up and he clamped my left ear between his teeth. I worked my thumbs in hard against his esophagus. A continuous siren sounded inside my head and I heard a couple of sharp cracks that I thought might have been gunshots.

Andrus flailed at my lower back with his fists and bit harder with his teeth. Later, I could not remember feeling pain; there was just the sound, the shrieking of a siren a few inches outside my head, or a few inches inside it.

Timmy's hand hove into view. I knew that lovely a-little-too-well-manicured graceful thing with its soft blue veins as well as I knew my own. The hand was wrapped around a brick, which landed hard against Andrus's skull. He gagged, fell away from me, spit something bloody in my face, then lay moaning.

I stood up, felt sick, then squatted and lowered my head as Lyle came bounding around the corner of the building.

"You guys okay? I shot the other one in the ass. He's not going anywhere. Better call an ambulance."

McWhirter, whom Timmy had set free while I was tussling with Duane Andrus, staggered up to us, stooped and bent from having been tied up for eighteen hours.

He stammered, "They're not even cops! They're— they're worse."

"It can happen," Lyle said.

Timmy turned toward the kennels. "I'll call Bowman and the ambulance."

"You won't need to call anybody," I said, as the police helicopter roared into view above the woods off to the east. "But see if you can scare up a flashlight in there. I think I'm missing something."

Timmy was waiting when I was wheeled into my room at Albany Med. I was drugged up and didn't remember the conversation, but later he told me we had this exchange:

"I'll never leave you again," he said.

"I know, not for a minute. I was afraid of that."

"The doctor says you're going to be okay. He says it's back on. It'll look a little funny—not his words—but what the hell."

"Right. It'd be no fun for you trying to nibble at a hole in the side of my head."

"I told him that if the ear was too far gone, I knew where he could get hold of another spare appendage to sew onto your head in its place. When I said it, he didn't hoot with merriment."

"Plastic surgeons are not famous for their whimsicality. If they were, we'd all have faces like Valentino's. And cocks like Lyle's."

He laughed nervously and said, "In your left ear."

I said, "Yeah. Thank God."

"You'll be out of here in two days, the doctor told me. The bandage will come off in a week."

"Two days? No way. That might be too late."

"Too late for what?"

Most of all, I wanted my strength back then. So I didn't reply. I just shut my eyes, and slept.

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