Robert Parker - Wilderness

With an angry effort of will he stopped crying and lay silent and full of pity in the dark room staring at the ceiling, his hands folded on his stomach. His eyes wide open in the dark.

From the window of the room on the ninth floor of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Cambridge, a man named Steiger looked out at the Charles River and across it at the buildings of Boston University and beyond them at red-brick Back Bay.

Behind him a blond woman with dark eyes lay naked on the bed reading a guide to Boston. Steiger turned to look at her.

"Angie," he said, "if you're going to bleach your hair why don't you do it all over?" "You know the truth," she said. "Nobody else gets to look." "Just me," he said.

She smiled. "Just you." "You want something sent up?" he said.

She shook her head.

"Wine, beer, some hors d'oeuvres?"

"No. Just let me lie here and cool off."

There was a knock at the door. Steiger walked across and opened it. A man handed him a package wrapped in brown paper. Steiger took it silently and closed the door. He came back into the room with the package.

"What's that?" the blond woman said.

"It's a piece," Steiger said. "I don't carry one on airplanes, so they said they'd furnish me one when I got here."

He unwrapped the brown paper. Inside was a shoebox with Florsheim printed on it. He opened the box and took out a handgun wrapped in a blue terrycloth hand towel. He unwrapped the hand towel. The gun was a Ruger Blackhawk in a hip holster. In the shoebox was a box of Remington ammunition,.44 caliber.

Steiger took the gun from the holster, checked that it was empty, tried the action, examined the firing pin and the barrel, spun the cylinder, and nodded once to himself. He put the gun back in the holster, put the holster and gun back in the shoebox, and put the shoebox on the closet shelf.

"Who are you going to use that on?" the blond woman said.

"Guy named Newman," Steiger said. "Aaron Newman. He's a writer."

"What did he do?"

Steiger took off his shirt and hung it carefully on a hanger in the closet. There were two suits in the closet and three pairs of slacks and two sports jackets. Each was hung precisely. Each had space around it.

"He saw something he shouldn't have and they're afraid he might testify."

"You supposed to kill him or just tell him to keep his mouth shut?"

Steiger stepped out of his slacks and hung them over a hanger. He smoothed the crease with his thumb and forefinger. "They already told him to keep his mouth shut," Steiger said. "But now the man is getting worried. He thinks the cops are following him, and he figures maybe he better close any doors he left open before. I guess if he takes a fall on this it will be a big one."

"So you're going to kill whatsisface?"

"Newman," Steiger said. "Yes."

"How long will it take?"

"A week maybe. I like to look everything over before I move. You come into a town and try to whack the guy out first thing, you're not likely to get ahead. I been doing this a long time now and I don't even have an armed assault bust. You know why?"

"Because you're careful," she said.

"And I have never been in the joint since the year I met you. You know why?"

"Because you're careful," she said.

"Right with Eversharp," he said. "Besides, I do it too quick, we don't get to see Boston and have our tab picked up in this hotel. No point rushing things," he said.

He went into the shower. The blond woman read her travel guide. He came out in ten minutes, his body smooth and shiny from the shower, drying his hair with a towel. She looked at him.

"You're really something," she said. "Forty years old and you haven't got two ounces of fat on your body. What did you weigh when I met you?"

"One-eighty."

"What'd you weigh now?" Steiger smiled. "One-eighty and two ounces."

"Two ounces in twenty-two years. You're beautiful."

Steiger plugged a maroon hair dryer into the outlet over the bedside table and sat on the bed to dry his hair.

"Twenty-two years?" He took a Lucky Strike from a package on the table and put it in his mouth and lit it from a silver Zippo. "Jesus Christ, you were a baby. Ain't that something, twenty-two years." "I was fourteen," she said. She ran her hand along his thigh. "But not now."

He put one hand on top of hers. "Your book tell you what we're looking at out our window?" he said.

"I don't know," she said, "what's out there."

"Take a look," he said.

She got up and walked to the window. He looked at her naked back as she walked. She was tanned all over. She looked out of the window at the river and at Boston University beyond it.

"It's a school," she said. "Some college, I imagine." She opened the book and looked at it. "It's Boston University, I think."

He shut off the hair dryer and came and stood beside her. Her head did not reach his shoulders. She leaned her head against him. Below on the river a cabin cruiser headed slowly down the river toward the dam and the harbor. Behind it a wide and symmetrical V spread out over the surface of the river.

"I wonder what it would have been like to have gone to college," she said. "You'd have played football and I'd have been a cheerleader. And we'd have learned stuff and could talk about books and…" She shrugged.

Steiger held the burning cigarette in his mouth and let the smoke drift up past his dark narrow face.

"We don't need no fucking college, kid," he said. "We got all we need." "We got each other," she said.

He put his arm around her. "That's all we need, kid. We don't need any fucking other things else." "I know," she said. She put her arm around him and they stood looking down at the river as the powerboat moved out of sight and the wave V'd out and disappeared against the shoreline. "I know."

"What we need is a sniper gun with a scope," Hood said to Newman.

"We got firepower, but it's short-range stuff and we're having trouble getting close." "You got anything?" Newman said.

Hood shook his head. They had followed Karl to his furniture store again and were sitting in the Bronco parked up the street, eating hamburgers and drinking coffee.

"You'll have to pick one up," Hood said. "There's a good gun shop in Watertown."

"What should I get?"

"Tell them you want something like a Springfield 1903 A4 If you can get one, get it. If they don't have one, get something comparable. Tell them you want it for competition, and be sure it's got a scope. Any.go/og-type rifle with a scope will do. Remington, Savage, whatever."

"Okay, I'll go down tomorrow." "You have an ID card? "Hood asked.

"Yes, I got one when I bought that shotgun I keep."

"That's all you need," Hood said.

They finished the hamburgers. In the back of the Bronco a big fly with a green tail buzzed at the rear window, bumping it again and again.

"Let's look at the alley," Hood said.

"What's down there?"

"How will we know if we don't look?" Hood said. "You have to know everything, Aaron. The layout of everything, where everyone's deployed, all the options." Newman nodded. "Okay," he said.

They got out of the car and strolled down toward the alley that ran between the furniture store and a restaurant.

"There's got to be some reason for an alley," Hood said. "There must be a door or a ventilator, or windows or something. Otherwise they'd just butt the buildings up together." His eyes moved back and forth across the mouth of the alley. He was moving on the balls of his feet and his fingers drummed very gently but steadily against his thighs.

God, doesn't he love this, Newman thought.

There were three rats in the alley; one was on the ground and two were in the trash barrel that sat outside the back door to the restaurant.