Robert Crais - Lullaby Town

She said, "I don't know what I'm going to do. I thought I did, but now I don't." She turned away from her son and looked at me. "I fought so hard to keep what I have here in Chelam and at the bank. Now that I've got it, you know what keeps coming to mind? Maybe I can get a better job closer to the city or up in Boston. Maybe I can find a better high school for Toby. Isn't that crazy?"

I made the same little shrug for Karen Lloyd that I had made for Peter Alan Nelsen. "Not crazy. It wasn't a choice you could make before. Now you're free to make any choice you want."

She sort of smiled at that and looked back at her son. "Yes, I guess I am." Then the smile became a little laugh that was light and open. It was the first time that I had heard her laugh.

After a while Joe and I went to the Taurus and Karen and Toby went to her LeBaron and the four of us drove back to her house beneath gray skies expectant with snow. We went inside and packed our things while Karen made phone calls and Toby dug around in the kitchen for something to eat. Twelve years old, and you're always hungry. When my bags were packed, I called United and booked two returns on a flight they had leaving from Kennedy at six-forty that night. When I told Pike the time, he said, "Didn't they have anything sooner?"

At twenty-four minutes after noon the black limo turned into the drive and Peter Alan Nelsen came to the door. Karen let him in. She said, "I thought you had gone back to Los Angeles."

Peter said, "I want to start over. I know that me coming here is going to create problems for you, and changes, and I want to do what I can to help you through them. I don't want you and the boy to think I'm an asshole. I want Toby to get to know me, and I want to get to know him, and I want to work out things like visitation and holidays and getting together. I want to pay child support, but only if that's okay with you. Can we talk about this stuff?"

Karen Lloyd said, "Oh, shit."

Peter said, "Please."

Karen Lloyd made a little whistle and tapped her right hand on her thigh and looked at the television. The television was not turned on.

I said, "Sounds pretty good to me."

Karen shook her head and frowned.

Peter said, "C'mon, Karen. Please ."

I said, "For Christ's sake, meet him halfway."

Karen crossed her arms and the frown grew deeper. "We'll see." Give'm an inch.

The phone rang and Karen Lloyd went into the kitchen and answered it. When she was gone, Peter said, "What do you think?"

I spread my hands. "We'll see."

Karen came back and said, "It's a man named Roland George."

I left them to stare at each other and went into the kitchen. Rollie came on with a tight, clipped voice. "You heard?"

"What?"

"On the news ten minutes ago. Sal DeLuca was shot to death in his health club, four in the head, close range, sometime around ten this morning. You know anything about it?"

"I think it was Charlie. If it was, I think he'll want us next."

I hung up and went back into the living room and told Karen and Peter and Joe Pike. When I told them, Peter said, "You mean the sonofabitch is coming back here?"

"Yes."

Karen said, "I knew it couldn't be this easy. I knew it wasn't over. What are we going to do?"

"Get into town where there's people. When you and Toby are safe, Joe and I will see what we can do with Charlie."

Karen called Toby and we went quickly out the front door and into her LeBaron. I told Peter to get in the back and I told Karen that I would drive. Neither of them objected.

Toby said, "Is it those men again, Mom?"

We pulled away from her house and went down the clean new tarmac street and turned onto the main road toward Chelam. It was twenty-eight minutes after noon.

We had gone about two miles when they found us.

T hey came up behind us in two cars, a green Dodge station wagon and the black Town Car, just as the snow began to fall.

Pike saw them first. "Behind us. Turned out from a side road, maybe a half mile back."

I pushed Toby's head down. "Get on the floor. Make yourself as small as you can and wrap your arms around your head."

I pushed Karen down on top of him.

The Town Car pulled into the left lane and the wagon stayed in the right and they came on hard. Pike reached under his jacket and took out his.357.

I pressed the LeBaron's pedal to the floor, but the Town Car inched closer and then there were gold specks flashing around it and something hit the rear of the LeBaron two times, bam bam , like rocks thrown by a kid hiding behind a tree. The right rear tire blew and Karen Lloyd made a sharp gasping sound and Toby said, "What was that?"

The LeBaron nosed up and I swung us to the right, and then we were off the road and bouncing across an untended pumpkin field, ripping through weeds and a barbed-wire fence and a couple of white birch saplings. I gunned the engine and forced the LeBaron across the field, sideways half the time and near out of control, until the flat right rear dug into the loam maybe three hundred yards from the road and the LeBaron wouldn't go any farther. I said, "Everybody out."

The station wagon and the Town Car skidded to a stop on the road and doors banged open and eight men pushed out, five of them with shotguns. Charlie DeLuca had been driving the Town Car and Joey Putata was one of the guys in the wagon, but I didn't recognize anyone else. Ric was conspicuous by his absence. No one now to keep Charlie calm, no one to rub his back and say the quiet things and keep Charlie DeLuca among the land of the sane. Sal the Rock had learned that. Charlie was certifiably, stark-raving, bad-to-the-bone out of control.

I shoved the driver's side door open and fell out, then pushed my seat forward and pulled Karen and Toby out after me. Pike went out the passenger's side and the.357 boomed twice. Peter followed Pike, and then the five of us were crouched down among the pumpkins behind the LeBaron.

Two of the guys up on the road started blasting away with their shotguns, but then someone did a lot of arm waving and they stopped. Three hundred yards with shotguns was silly.

The little pumpkin field was maybe five hundred yards on a side, bordered to the east and the west and the south by thick stands of birch and elm and maple trees. Behind us to the south there was a little ramshackle feed shed that looked to be maybe a hundred years old. I squatted down next to Karen and said, "Does anyone live around here?"

"Maybe a couple of miles that way." She pointed southwest.

"Is there a road behind us?"

She scrunched her face, trying to think but not having an easy time of it. "There must be. Some kind of farming road."

Toby said, "Yeah, there is. It's a utility road. Dirt."

"How far?"

"Maybe a mile and a half. It's on the other side of all these fields. It comes out by this little airport where the crop dusters fly, but there won't be anyone there. They close it down in the winter."

Pike said, "If we can get there, maybe we can make a farmhouse."

The snow fell harder, swirling and piling up in little white pockets on the LeBaron and on the pumpkins, thick enough in the air to make the men on the road indistinct and shadowy. Two of the shadows went off to the left and two of them went right and four of them started off the road directly for us. Classic pincer move. Probably taught that at the mafia academy.

I said, "They're going to try to envelop us, faster guys moving out on the flank, the other guys coming slow up the middle to drive us toward them."

Pike said, "Uh-huh," and opened the duffel. He took out the shotgun and a cartridge box and began filling his pockets with the shells. Twenty-five rounds in the box, but he found places for all of them.