The Spring: A Legal Thriller - The Spring: A Legal Thriller Part 29
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The Spring: A Legal Thriller Part 29

The door opened a crack. Harry swayed a little, and the gaze of his red-rimmed eyes flicked past Dennis into the darkness.

"Where the hell'd you come from?"

"I was outside," Dennis said. "They didn't see me."

"Come on in."

This time Dennis said no to the offered vodka. "What did they tell you?"

"Told me I was a stubborn hind end of a mule." Harry chuckled cruelly. "Pointed the bone at me."

"Wait a minute. What about my appeal?"

"Hell, I didn't thank you, did I? You're a pal, but it didn't do a goddam bit of good. Never thought it would-I just didn't have the heart to stop you. They knew I'd get back to Paris and never leave. Let Ginette and Marie's granddaughters screw me to death." Harry took a step toward the staircase, then stopped, uncertain. "Gotta get some sleep. Think about all this."

"Harry, I have to talk to you."

"You're talkin', aren't you? Or is it me doin' all the talkin'? I'm a little drunk, Denny."

Dennis seized him by the shoulders. "Sober up and listen to me. I heard them talking in the lingo. I don't think they're going to do anything quickly. Not until Monday, Grace said. Mandee is Monday, right? Then they're going to beat you up. But they didn't say why."

"Beat me up? What the hell are you talking about?" Harry laughed. "Why would they do an uncouth thing like that?"

"I don't know. Oliver Cone said you were tuddish. What's 'tuddish'?"

"Crazy."

"And he said they had to cane you. That's what I didn't understand. What's punishment got to do with this?"

Harry sat down again in the chair, squeezed the vodka bottle between both hands, and gazed for a long moment into the crackling fire. Then he turned back to Dennis. "Say all that again, will you? You mind?"

Dennis repeated what he had heard.

A harsh laugh flew from Harry's mouth. "Cane me? You thought they said 'cane' me? Like with a rattan cane, like they used to do to those poor little English schoolboys?" Harry tilted the bottle to his mouth, swallowed, then smacked his lips, and sighed. "That ain't it, amigo. Wish it was. What you heard was c-a-i-n-cain. Like from the Bible. It's the lingo for kill. Bastard will put an arrow through my heart if he has his way, like he did with that dog of the Lovells."

Dennis worked it through his mind for five minutes. He believed Harry. It was planned for Monday, by which time, he now understood, Grace would pick up the necessary vials from the medical supply house in Grand Junction.

"You know I've lived for a hundred years," Harry mused. "More'n most people even dream of. You'd think I'd be ready to go." He tilted the bottle of vodka, drained the last few drops, looked at it in disgust, and then pitched it into the fireplace. "But I'm not, Dennis. Can't help it. I'm just not fucking ready. And you know why."

"Yes, I know why So let's get out of here."

"I can't go without my paintings," Harry said. "That's the whole point, ain't it? I guess they figured that out. They know I can't just cut and run."

Dennis thought about that for another long minute. "There's still a way. Pack what you need for a couple of nights. Come with me."

"Where to?"

"To my house. To talk to Sophie." Then he remembered Claudia had told him that Sophie had gone over to the Hendersons. "Harry, where's your phone?"

The painter pointed to an old black Bell handset on a table by a rocking chair in the corner of the room. Dennis picked it up, prepared to dial the Hendersons' number. But when he pressed the receiver to his ear he heard no dial tone, only silence.

"Harry, have you paid your phone bill?"

"Town does that for me."

"Then why isn't this damn thing working?"

"Sure as hell was working the last time I used it."

"When was that?"

"Day or so ago. Alarm clock stopped, so I called the operator to find out what the hell time it was."

"This line's been cut," Dennis said. He smiled thinly. "But I've got a cellular in the Jeep."

He squeezed behind the wheel, picked up the phone, and punched the on button. There was no dial tone. Attached to his ring of keys Dennis kept a penlight. He shone it on the telephone wiring and saw no evidence of tampering.

He remembered what he had learned long ago in a wiretapping case that involved the Mafia and the NYPD. In certain branches of the military you were taught to disable a telephone by inserting a pin through the wire leading to the battery. When the fuse blew, you clipped off the ends of the pin. If anyone replaced the faulty fuse, it blew again. No damage was visible to the naked untrained eye.

They had seen his car, he realized. They had disabled the cellular when he was inside talking to Harry. He wondered what kind of men he was up against, and he felt the first touch of fear.

Chapter 28.

Flight

CLOSE TO HOME Dennis saw lights in the kitchen. The mountains loomed beyond like walls of ivory, the night so quiet that from the road he could hear the roar of the creek coursing over its bed between slabs of ice. He turned off the car engine, and then he also heard the thump of his heartbeat.

"Come on in with me, Harry."

In the warmth of the kitchen Sophie pressed her cheek quickly against his. She had been back from the Hendersons' for half an hour. The children were in bed, probably asleep by now. Claudia had gone home. Sophie hugged Harry, who seemed suddenly sober.

"Dennis," she said, turning her head, "there's something wrong with our phone."

With no apparent hurry he picked up the kitchen telephone and placed it to his ear. He heard no dial tone. He moved a little more quickly than he intended into the little book-lined room he and Sophie called the library. A fax machine on a separate phone line stood on the leather-covered chess table. He picked up the receiver-that line was equally silent. In his mouth he felt a dry, sour taste he had last known twenty-five years ago in the jungle near Da Phong. But when he sat down again at the kitchen table with Sophie and Harry, he was calm. He tilted his chair back and accepted the glass of wine Sophie handed to him. He told her all that had happened at Harry's house.

"They didn't see me. Oliver Cone had my car in the headlights of his truck for maybe ten seconds. He didn't do anything about it, so I thought he didn't know whose Jeep it was. I was wrong. They cut Harry's phone line, then they cut the cellular phone in my car, then they came here and cut ours from the box on the road." The muscles round his eyes tightened. He took Sophie's hands in his. "They didn't tell you they were going to bone Harry tonight, did they?"

Sophie shook her head slowly, burdened with an enormous weight of dismay.

"They kept you out of it," Dennis said. "They could have found you if they wanted to. They don't trust me because I'm Harry's friend, and I'm still a skibtail. And they don't trust you now because you're my wife. The other day I told Harry they weren't going to stop him with force. These were civilized people, I said, not barbarians. Sophie, tell me. What are they?"

"Frightened," she murmured. "Trying to protect what they've got. If Harry leaves ..." She didn't finish the sentence.

"If he leaves," Dennis said, "I understand there's a risk. But the alternative is worse. This community ... no, I'll put it more kindly-an element in this community intends to stop him no matter what they have to do. This won't be assisted suicide, it will be outright murder. I heard them say they had to cain him. I can't let them do that. You understand that, don't you? Not for any reason. I'm not questioning anything you told me. But no civilized community has the right to execute except by law, and then only as punishment for a terrible crime. Sophie, what crime has Harry committed?"

A change came over Sophie, a collapsing of her lips inward against her teeth, the blood rising to her cheeks as if she had been slapped.

"They think he'll go to New York," she said, "and decide to live forever. They see that as a crime against our existence. And he drinks." She turned to Harry, placing a hand lightly on his cheek. "I'm sorry, Harry. They believe that if you leave here you'll drink-and talk."

"I wouldn't do that," Harry protested.

"You wouldn't mean to. But it could happen."

"And if it did," Dennis said, "and people came here and asked for the fountain of youth, you'd laugh at them and talk them out of it the same way you did with those people from Oregon. But even that wouldn't happen. If Harry told people, they'd think he was crazy."

"Not if he became famous," Sophie said. "And if he didn't grow old, then they would have to believe. They'd have evidence."

Dennis prowled the room, the glow from the fireplace passing across his face and making it seem almost savage. He picked up his glass of wine, drank it, then set it on the coffee table.

"Is it the whole town, Sophie, or just McKee and Cone and Grace Pendergast?"

"It's them, but they're doing what the town wants."

Dennis faced Harry Parrot. "You're sober now, aren't you?"

"I sure am," the painter said. "Might be better if I wasn't."

"When you came here sixty-five years ago and they took you in, you agreed to the pact, isn't that so?"

"You know I did," Harry said.

"You had a choice. You could have said no."

"Sure I could have."

Dennis realized he was cross-examining. Old habits died hard. "You understood what you were swearing to, didn't you?"

"Yep. I did."

"In the light of that, will you keep your word? Will you agree to go through with the departure ceremony?"

"No, I sure as hell won't," Harry said.

"You won't change your mind?"

"No way, amigo."

"What do you want to do?"

"Leave. Get the hell out."

Dennis spread his hands on the kitchen table, pressing hard enough for the knuckles to whiten. "I can't allow them to kill him," he repeated to Sophie.

"But they won't let him leave!" she cried.

"I'm going to drive him to Aspen right now. Mickey Karp will take him in." He turned to Harry. "Tomorrow we'll hire a truck. We'll come up here with a couple of deputy sheriffs. No one will be able to stop you from loading your paintings and anything else you want into that truck. Nobody will stop you from leaving this town and this valley for wherever you want to go. You'll be safe, Harry. You'll be free. ' Softly, Sophie said, "If you do that, Dennis, they'll never let you back into Springhill. Not you, not your children. Not me."

"That may be so," he said. "I'll deal with that when Harry's in Aspen and doesn't have to worry about these fanatics pinning him down so Grace Pendergast can shove a needle into his vein."

He was quiet for a few seconds; he tried to read Sophie's mind, but her eyes told him nothing.

"Stay here with the children," he said.

Harry had brought extra socks and underwear in an old Adidas bag. He wore corduroys and fur-lined boots and a beat-up red parka that smelled of stale tobacco. He sat next to Dennis in the front seat of the Jeep, drumming his fingernails against the metal of the glove compartment. He reached inside his jacket and took out a cellophane-wrapped cigar.

"Do me a favor," Dennis said, "and don't light it."

"You sure are fussy at some funny times. How about back East? They let you smoke a good cigar when you feel like it?"

"I can't remember. Write me a postcard and tell me."

"You won't be here to get it. Didn't you hear what your woman said? They find out you did this for me, you'll be out of here."

Dennis tried to understand exactly what that meant. Sophie owned the house: they could not be dispossessed. The worst the town could do was shun him. Would they take it out in some way on the kids? He couldn't tolerate that.

It had already occurred to him that if he were forced to leave Springhill with his two children, Sophie might not come. If she renounced him, she would be able to stay. Her life was here. He was her husband and partner, but it might be more painful for her to give up her roots and home than give up a man she had known for so few years. I'm not sure what she'll do, he realized.

"You got a weapon with you?" Harry asked.

"Goddamit, of course not. Is this Dodge City? Am I supposed to be Wyatt Earp? They're not going to bushwhack us, Harry."

Chewing on the unlit cigar, Harry shrugged, which Dennis took as a form of agreement.

They passed through the town, turning north past the general store on the narrow forest-lined road that wound down with a dozen hairpin turns toward the flats of the Crystal River, the village of Redstone, and then the town of Carbondale. It was dark enough on Main Street for Dennis to be sure no one was following them.

They passed Harry's gray Victorian. The old Chevy truck was parked by the woodpile. The night had clouded over. The road took a sharp turn to the left.

Dennis slammed on the brakes. A massive dark load of snow blocked the road, plowed to bulk five feet above the level of the road for a distance of ten yards. The Jeep could not get through it.

"That's what I was worried about," Harry said. "You can't get out of Dodge if they don't want you to."

The two-lane road lacked shoulders. Beyond the tons of snow in the shadows of fir trees Dennis made out the black angular mass of the truck and attached snowplow. It sat there on the road like a silent prehistoric animal guarding a burial site.

"And my guess," Harry said, dropping his hoarse voice to nearly a whisper, "is that if you or me were dumb enough to try and walk through the woods and get around that bit of snow, either Mr. Cone or Mr. Frazee-or both, or some others-is sitting in the cab of that truck. And with a weapon. You think this ain't Dodge City?"