Mystery Writers of America Presents Vengeance Read online

  “What the hell’s that?” Goat’s captor piped up from behind him.

  “In Vietnam, the Cong used whistles since their radios were so poor. It got to be when you heard one of these, you knew Charlie was coming.”

  “What’s that mean?” Cassidy asked cautiously.

  “That means John Lee Pettimore is somewhere close.” Goat heard the man behind him take a breath. Most people knew of crazy Johnny Lee. “If I don’t blow this whistle, he’ll be coming to kill every son of a bitch in here.”

  Cassidy looked at Goat for a moment.

  The man behind Goat said, “He’s bluffing.”

  Cassidy looked past Goat and the man behind him and said, “I don’t think so.” Slowly, he set the revolver on the coffee table. “He’s not bluffing.”

  “No, he’s not, son,” Johnny Lee said. Goat glanced over his shoulder. Standing in the open doorway was John Lee Pettimore decked out in camos and black face paint, a large Bren machine gun weighing heavy in his hands.

  “The plan was the whistle,” Goat said.

  “I don’t like waiting,” Johnny Lee said, grinning.

  Goat picked up the Colt from the table, tucked it back into his waistband, and asked Cassidy Lane, “You kill my friends?”

  “I had no reason to kill them men. Bad for business to draw attention.”

  “What about the old man not paying you to run liquor?”

  “Him running shine didn’t hurt me none,” Cassidy replied. “I liked the old man, and he brought me a case of his shine once a month. We respected each other. We had no fight.”

  “People said he wasn’t paying your tithe and you were mad.”

  Cassidy snorted.

  “What?”

  “Aaron,” the man said with a sneer. “He tells folks that.”

  “Grubbs?” Goat asked. “Why would your man say that?”

  “He doesn’t work for me anymore,” Cassidy said. “He’s going legit, running security for a mine.”

  “Which mine?” Goat asked, things already clicking into place.

  “The Blue Diamond,” Cassidy said. Goat saw his own epiphany reflected in Cassidy Lane’s face. “He’s trying to lay these murders on me. I’m going to kill him.”

  “No, you’re not,” Goat said. “I am.”

  Chapter 7

  The whole apartment on the third floor of the rooming house was lit up. Goat sat at the small kitchen table keeping company with a jelly glass of moonshine from a jar he’d found under the sink. The apartment was silent, but Goat thought echoes of the woman’s crying lingered in the air. Goat and Johnny Lee had left Kayjay Mountain driving like hell for town. Once the pieces came together, Goat saw the whole thing plainly. Just like if you stir up sand and water and then wait long enough, the particles settle and you can see right through. The picture was clear.

  The tan of the NVA soldier’s uniform that night.

  Luther calling Ralphie’s teacher by her name—Carrie Love.

  Luther telling his father he was taking a stand.

  The old men at the barbershop talking about Luther delivering moonshine door to door.

  Luther being shot in the middle of his forehead.

  The six .357 Magnum rounds found on the hill. A cop’s gun.

  Bell County miners striking and the worry about northern agitators organizing unions. The mine owners wanting to nip things in the bud.

  The North Vietnamese soldier Goat glimpsed on the mountain was actually the tan sheriff’s uniform of Aaron Grubbs.

  And the fact that Chief Deputy Aaron Grubbs was working for the Blue Diamond mine—Luther’s mine.

  Goat and Johnny Lee found Carrie Love in her apartment, and between sobs, she confirmed his suspicions. In other parts of the country, every time people had come to help the miners, the mine owners had busted them up, shipped them out, or killed them. Carrie was a teacher but she was an activist first. She’d been asked to come down and help organize the miners, but she was told she had to be careful. Only a few knew of Carrie Love’s role. Luther was tasked with carrying messages between Carrie Love and the striking miners. Luther took and delivered messages with the jars of moonshine. Someone had leaked word that Luther was doing more than striking, and Carrie figured the mine owners thought Luther was pulling the strings, that he was the one calling the shots. No one suspected the hippie teacher was the mastermind.

  Nip the union organizing in the bud.

  Everyone knew Luther was helping his dad make moonshine, so it wouldn’t take much for Aaron Grubbs to find the moonshine still. Then he and some hired thugs slipped up that mountain. Goat had spotted Grubbs’s tan sheriff’s uniform as they were making their way up to kill Luther and anyone else at the still.

  The steps outside creaked. Carrie Love’s apartment was on the third floor of the building, and it was the only apartment that was serviced by a rickety staircase running on the outside of the house.

  The killers were here.

  Goat took a swallow of the moonshine, the whiskey cool on the way down his throat but burning once it hit his stomach.

  Damn, Luther’s daddy did make good liquor, he thought.

  Before sending Carrie Love away with John Lee Pettimore in the GTO, Goat had had her make a call to Chief Deputy Grubbs. She told him she knew he had killed Luther. She told him she was scared, and she would give him all the paperwork she had on the miners and the organizers. She offered to trade the information for safe passage out of Bell County. Grubbs promised he’d let her leave once he had the papers.

  The doorknob turned slightly as a hand tested the lock.

  Then the hand knocked.

  “Carrie,” Aaron Grubbs said.

  Goat glanced at the green square propped against the door. Wires led back to the plastic square in his hand. He pushed back from the table and stood, making sure to be loud. The killers outside would think Carrie Love was coming to answer the door.

  Goat stepped behind the refrigerator and pulled the revolver from his waistband. With his other hand, he readied the mine’s trigger.

  Goat called out, “Grubbs, I’m going to kill you.” Outside there were confused voices. Goat pushed the mine’s trigger. Clack-clack.

  The claymore had a warning on it: FRONT TOWARD THE ENEMY. The warning was there for a reason.

  The claymore was a shaped charge of C-4 packed with hundreds of steel ball bearings, and they blew out in a scythe-like arc of destruction.

  The explosion shook the whole house.

  The apartment’s front door was blown out and clouds swirled inside. His ears ringing, Goat moved forward, kicking through the remnants of the front door. Outside, part of the landing was shredded. Below, in the alley, two bodies still clutching shotguns were splayed out on the roof of Aaron Grubbs’s cruiser. Partway down the stairs was a body, the man’s chest pulped by the claymore’s ball bearings. A broken Thompson submachine gun was on the step below the dead man.

  The blast had knocked Chief Deputy Aaron Grubbs down the stairs, where he knelt as if praying. His face bloody, his body listing to and fro like a bobbing ship.

  Goat cocked the Colt.

  Grubbs looked up and saw Goat. Tried to stagger to his feet, but stumbled and fell.

  With the comforting weight of the Colt in his hand, Goat McKnight started down the stairs.

  RIVER SECRET

  BY ANNE SWARDSON

  She took one tiny step toward me. Another—then hesitated. Her mother leaned down and murmured a few words in her ear. Reassured, the girl toddled forward more confidently and then, halfway to where I was playing, stopped again.

  She wore a white wool coat that reached almost to her knees. A few strands of curly brown hair escaped from the fur around her hood, which had been carefully tied at the neck. By her sleek-haired mother, probably. Those dimpled hands were too little to tie anything.

  Fortunately for me, they could hold a two-euro coin.

  The child looked at her mother again. It was time to reel her in. I ended
“Sous le Ciel de Paris” a verse early—kids never went for the melancholy material—and put the accordion down on its stand with a click. The girl turned her eyes back to me. I transitioned into 2/4 rhythm with the foot pedal on the bass drum. After picking up the trombone, I launched into the “Bayrische Polka,” keeping the oompah with the drum, adding a cymbal stroke to each downbeat with my other foot, and bobbing forward each time the slide came out with a wailing mwaa-mwaa.

  A big smile appeared on the little girl’s face. She walked confidently to the beret lying upside down on the bricks in front of me and dropped in the coin. I grinned too and gave her another duck, almost a half bow, with a forward slide of the trombone. The girl looked amused, then beckoned her mother to come as she held out her hand for another coin.

  “Maman!”

  A few more spectators peeled off from the stream of Paris tourists who were coming down the steps of the Solférino footbridge over the Seine on their way to the tunnel leading to the Tuileries Garden. They joined the gaggle of Americans in tracksuits around me and my drums, horns, and stands, attracted by the polka lilt and by the exquisite little girl standing before me.

  My location, at the entrance to the underground passage between the bridge and the stairs to the gardens, was the best in the business. When I blew a long note on the trumpet, the tones reverberated off the rounded tunnel ceiling. The cymbals were sharper, the drums crisper because of those acoustics. The river’s flowing water gave a sense of space and openness. And with my back to the passage wall, I could spot the oncoming Italians in high-heeled sandals, the rotund British, and the tall Dutch wearing backpacks, and then adjust the musical selection accordingly.

  Still, each day I needed something special to get an audience going, something to lure a real crowd around me. I needed that more than most, since I never sang, only played. The more people, the more likely I could pass the hat at the end of a set. It was always more lucrative than just waiting for the coins to drop in one by one.

  If I was lucky, that moment had arrived.

  But Maman wasn’t about to chip in another coin. She was distracted by a squat woman wearing a kerchief over her hair. In her grimy fingers, the woman held out a dull, gold-looking ring as she sidled closer to her target.

  “Mais, madame, see voo play, madame, madame…” The woman didn’t pronounce the words properly. Half her teeth were missing. Even though it was March, she was wearing sandals, without socks, along with a moth-eaten sweater and a long skirt with faded yellow flowers.

  “Leave us alone, you disgusting thing! We’re just trying to enjoy the music!” Maman held up a forbidding hand as the beggar took a step closer, waving the ring and giving a sidelong glance in the direction of the lady’s Hermès handbag.

  The mother tossed her head, cinched the tie of her cashmere coat, put one hand firmly around the clasp of her purse, and held out the other to her daughter. “Come, Marie-Christine. Let’s go watch the boys sail the boats in the basin.” The little girl ran to her, and without another look at me they were gone, up the steps and into the gardens. I tried to save the day by playing “Hello, Dolly,” replete with plenty of slides and bass thumps, but it didn’t help. The crowd melted away. There was silence.

  Only the kerchiefed woman was left standing there. She looked at me like a whipped dog, her head down, barely meeting my eyes. I stared angrily. I didn’t speak, because I never did. I didn’t cross my arms or shake my finger at her, as I had sometimes done before. But she knew she had driven away my clientele, and she knew I was angry. It was one of our agreements. She was supposed to do her job, and I would do mine.

  She twisted her hands in her skirt and sighed.

  “I’m sorry, Baptiste. I thought I could help. Top us up a little.”

  Why I had decided to extend a hand to Tatiana I will never know. I had everything I wanted: a city license to play my one-man setup in a rainproof location that sucked in half the tourists in Paris; enough money to pay for my tiny studio in the Eighteenth Arrondissement and for the frozen dinners I bought each night at the Picard store. There was enough to send to my family in the south too, back when I used to do that. Back when I talked to them. Back when I talked. Before my memory told me I should speak no longer.

  I nodded firmly toward the gardens and she knew what I meant: “Leave my customers alone. If people pay you for those stupid rings, they won’t pay me for my music. And they certainly won’t put money in my beret if they find their wallets missing.”

  She shuffled off slowly, cowering as she went. I turned back to my instruments, my anger passing. She needed the money more than I did, and every coin she pickpocketed in the park reduced the number I felt compelled to slip her at the end of the day.

  Maybe I shared with Tatiana because no one else would. Gypsies are human rats, I’d heard the policemen say after they’d chased the beggars, pickpockets, and scamsters from the gardens. Send them back where they came from. Don’t touch them; they’re dirty. Even American tourists, the most gullible of all the nationalities that walked by me, eyed the rings the Gypsies proffered with suspicion, then turned their backs and patted their wallets.

  So Tatiana got a few coins from me each day, coupled with a warning that if she ever stole from me, she’d never see another euro. She understood everything from my face, my gestures. I’d give her a shake of the head when I wanted her elsewhere, a tilt when a good potential mark walked by. I’d bring her the odd bit of poulet rôti from my previous night’s dinner, a thin blanket when I had bought a new one.

  What Tatiana mostly got from me was something no one else gave her: an ear. As I packed up each night, she’d come by and tell me in broken French about her life: growing up in a camp outside Plovdiv, making her way with others of her kind in a series of ragtag caravans from Bulgaria, across Hungary, over the Austrian Alps, then here. Camping, stealing, camping. Along the way there had been a man, and a child or two. She didn’t know where they were now.

  I SAW THE little girl again not long after that. It was warmer, but she still wore the white coat. She was with her mother, and so was a handsome black-haired young man—younger than the woman. His arm was wrapped around the waist of his companion. His eyes were on the woman’s face; his hand was atop the little girl’s head, stroking her hair.

  I wasted no time in pulling out the trombone and starting up the polka.

  “Maman!”

  The girl pointed to me and made an excited little jump. The Mother—what else could I call her?—reached for her purse, but the man pushed her hand away. Fishing in his pocket, he pulled out a pink ten-euro note and inserted it in the little girl’s fist. He took her other hand in a firm grip, plastered a big smile on his face, and started walking with her across the paving stones toward my waiting beret. I kept up the beat. Tatiana, happily, was nowhere to be seen.

  The child lost enthusiasm with each step. The farther she got from her mother, the more her feet dragged, the more she tried to turn back. Her face twisted into a pout. The beret was forgotten. The man kept the smile fixed in place and continued forward, pulling on her hand, trying to ignore her reluctance. The tourists were nudging one another and pointing.

  The conflict ended when the girl stopped moving her feet entirely and collapsed on the ground, wailing. The man bent over her, ostentatiously trying to pick her up and get her pointed toward me, wrapping his arms around her and lifting. But she pulled away, dropped the ten-euro bill, and darted toward the Mother. When she got there, she buried her face in the cashmere coat. The woman made a gesture of resignation and picked up the sobbing girl, draping her over her shoulder as the man picked up the money and then rejoined them. They walked up the steps, side by side, the ten-euro note still in the man’s hand. I had warned Tatiana away from the mother, but I wished she were nearby now so that I could nod my head toward that prey.

  She came to my stand late that day as I was breaking down the equipment. Business had been good, she said. For me too. My pockets dragged with change
, from yellow fifty-centime pieces to two-euro coins. I even had a few bills. As we sometimes did, we dragged my drum case and horn bags around the corner and sat on one of the concrete benches overlooking the Seine.

  We often ended the day like that when the weather was good and the cops didn’t chase us away. The setting sun shone pinkly on the cream-colored stone buildings across the river: the Beaux Arts rail-station structure of the Musée d’Orsay; next to it the squat headquarters of the Légion d’honneur. To the left, upriver, were the towers of Notre-Dame; to the right, the glass-paned cavernous roof of the Grand Palais, French flag flying atop.

  The river itself was a sight to see. At this time of year, the Seine was fed by runoff from the mountains. A deep and viscous brown, the water was almost level with the cobbled walkway along the banks. The current slurped against the bridge’s pilings and pushed against the prows of the Bateaux-Mouches as they slid up and down the waterway with their cargoes of tourists.

  “Look at this,” Tatiana said, lifting her skirt and taking her earnings out of a pocket sewn inside. “There was a guy waving a ten-euro bill around and when he put it in his pocket he left a corner hanging out. He never even saw me.”

  I clapped her on the back.

  THE MOTHER, THE man—I’d named him Romeo—and the little girl came by on their way to the gardens often in the month that followed. They—at least the child and her mother—probably lived in the Seventh Arrondissement, on the other side of the footbridge, in one of those apartments with ten-foot ceilings. People in those apartments wore cashmere coats and dressed their little girls in clothing from Tartine et Chocolat, the fancy children’s store on the boulevard Saint-Germain.

  Romeo must have learned his lesson, because he never again tried to bring the girl to the beret. She let him hold her hand across the bridge, the Mother alongside. Then she always walked up to me alone. I’d play the polka and do my bobbing routine. It got to be a game: She’d smile at me and I’d respond with a couple of little dance steps and a trombone wail. More steps toward me and I’d twirl around. The girl would laugh and put a coin in. I felt like laughing myself, for the first time in years. Unlike my older fans, who seemed almost ashamed to be giving money to a beggar, albeit a musical one, the child looked straight into my face. Her expression, a kind of puckery smile with a flash of her blue eyes, made me imagine that she knew how much those coins meant to me.