Джордж Хиггинс - The New Black Mask (No 4)

I reached down and pulled her eyelids. “She’s good for an hour,” I said. “Call nine one one. Give them the address on Pembroke.”

While she was doing that, breathing heavily, I picked up the automatic and ran back the action. Millie had forgotten to rack a cartridge into the chamber.

Approaching Pembroke, we heard shots.

I jammed my heel down on the accelerator and we rounded the corner doing fifty. Charlotte Corcoran, still in her robe, gripped the door handle to stay out of my lap. Her profile was sharp against the window, thrust forward like a mother hawk’s.

There was no sign of the police. As we entered Corcoran/Muldoon’s block, something flashed in an open upstairs window, followed closely by a hard flat bang. A much louder shot answered it from the front yard. There a huge black figure in an overcoat too short for him crouched behind a lilac bush beside the driveway. His .44 magnum was as long as my thigh but looked like a kid’s water pistol in his great fist.

“Hang on!” I spun the wheel hard and floored the pedal.

The Olds’s engine roared and we bumped over the curb, diagonaling across the lawn. Del Riddle straightened at the noise and turned, bringing the magnum around with him. I saw his mouth open wide and then his body filled the windshield and I felt the impact. We bucked up over the porch stoop and suddenly the world was a deafening place of tearing wood and exploding glass. The car stopped then, although my foot was still pasted to the floor with the accelerator pedal underneath and the engine continued to whine. The rear wheels spun shrilly. I cut the ignition. A piece of glass fell somewhere with a clank.

I looked at my passenger. She was slumped down in the seat with her knees against the dash. “All right?”

“I think so.” She lowered her knees.

“Stay here.”

The door didn’t want to open. I shoved hard and it squawked against the buckled fender. I climbed out behind the Smith & Wesson in my right hand. I was in a living room with broken glass on the carpet and pieces of shredded siding slung over the chairs and sofa. Riddle lay spreadeagled on his face across the car’s hood and windshield, groaning. His legs dangled like broken straws in front of the smashed grille.

“Ditch the piece, trooper.”

My eyes were still adjusting to the dim light indoors. I focused on Monroe Boyd baring his teeth in front of a hallway running to the back of the house. He had one arm around Tommy Corcoran’s chest under the arms, holding him kicking above the floor. His other hand had a switchblade in it with the point pressing the boy’s jugular.

“Tommy!” Charlotte Corcoran had gotten out on the passenger’s side. She took a step and stopped. Boyd bettered his grip.

“Mommy,” said the boy.

“What about it, trooper? Seven or seventy, they all bleed the same.”

I relaxed my hold on the gun.

A shot slammed the walls and a blue hole appeared under Boyd’s left eye. He let go of Tommy and lay down. Twitched once.

I looked up at Frank Corcoran crouched at the top of the staircase to the second story. His arm was stretched out full length with his gun in it, leaking smoke. He glanced at Tommy. “I told you to stay upstairs with me.”

“I left my ball here.” The boy pouted, then spotted Boyd’s body. “Funny man.”

Mrs. Corcoran flew forward and knelt to throw her arms around her son. Corcoran saw her for the first time, said “Charlotte?” and looked at me. The gun came around.

“Stop waving that thing,” his ex-wife said, hugging Tommy. “He’s with me.”

Corcoran hesitated, then lowered the weapon. He surveyed the damage. “What do I tell the rental agent?”

I heard the sirens then.

George V. Higgins is recognized as having the best ear for speech of any writer now practicing his craft in America. Praise for his dialogue implies that he is simply an accurate transcriber; but Mr. Higgins’s use of dialogue utilizes a sophisticated narrative technique in which authorial exposition is eliminated and the omniscient writer is replaced by the omniscient reader. George V. Higgins’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle has been selected as one of the twenty novels in the British Book Marketing Council’s Authors USA promotion. His thirteenth novel , Imposters, will be published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in the spring.

“I am telling you right now,” Norbert Johnson said, “that you would not believe, that no sane person would believe, what I go through with this guy.” He wore a gray T-shirt that said “Property New England Patriots” on the front, encircling a Patriots logo of a colonial soldier preparing to throw a football. He sat behind the old wooden desk in the range master’s office at the Watertown Sportsman’s Club in the basement of the old Franklin Pierce School. The first floor had been converted to a YMCA, and there was a basketball game in progress over Norbert’s head. The vibration made the big green pipes in the basement shake on their hanging rods, dislodging droplets of condensed moisture onto Norbert’s desk. To his right, behind the steel safety door with the pane of safety glass at eye level in the center, the Wellesley Annie Oakleys enjoyed their weekly hour shooting at cardboard targets, the dull, thin concussions of their S&W .38s, 9 mm.’s, and Beretta .25s coughing through the padded paneling.

“You’re gonna,” Shanahan said, nodding toward the top of the desk where Norbert had a chromed Colt .45 automatic apart, “you’re gonna get that thing all screwed up, you get it wet like this.”

Johnson looked down irritably at the gun. “Oh, I could give a shit,” he said. “You know whose gun this is? This is Lieutenant Foster’s personal sidearm, that’s whose gun it is. And you know the last time Lieutenant Foster personally cleaned his personal sidearm? Lemme give you a clue, all right? Eisenhower was president.”

“Oh, come on,” Shanahan said. “Foster’s only about forty. Can’t be that long ago.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Johnson said. “You’n’ me’re thirty-five. You’re forgetting: time goes by. Don’t matter who you are. Charlie Foster’s fifty-five. Fifty-four at least.”

“He can’t be,” Shanahan said. “He’s in beautiful shape if he is, and besides, even if he is, that’d only make him, what, about... ”

“About twenny years old when Ike was president,” Johnson said. “Which happens to be what he was. And sure, he’s in beautiful shape. Wouldn’t you be in beautiful shape, you never did a fuckin’ thing? Course you would, you jerk. Guy doesn’t even clean his own goddamned gun, for Christ sake. Naturally he’s got the skin of Elizabeth Taylor anna look of a man half his age. Heaviest thing the guy’s lifted since he turned eighteen’s a sandwich. A sandwich he paid for, of course — Lieutenant Foster takes no graft. He’s got integrity. Plus balls the size of an elephant’s, but that’s another thing.”

“Well,” Shanahan said, nodding toward the dismantled .45, “then I assume he’s paying you, I mean. For cleaning his gun for him.”

“Oh,” Norbert said, “sure he is. He’s paying me ten bucks. Which when I get it, I will treat you to a beer. Which I hope you’re not very thirsty for, right about now, because I have done this job before, for Lieutenant Foster. I have done it lots of times, for the same ten bucks. And you know how many ten bucks I have seen for doing it? ‘None’ would be a real good guess. You couldn’t miss with that.”

“He doesn’t pay you?” Shanahan said. “I wouldn’t take that from the old son of a bitch. I’d tell him he can take his gun and stick it up his ass.”