A String of Beads (25 page)

19

J
ane reached Western New York in the dark. It had been a seven-hour drive, but she
had stopped for meals and breaks, and then had taken time to sleep for two hours at
a rest stop. The urgency she had been feeling since the night the ancient woman had
come to her in her dream seemed to burn in her until she had worn herself out. Now
she was feeling stronger.

There was a hotel on Niagara Falls Boulevard that she had driven past many times and
felt curious about, so she checked in and got a room on the third floor. She ordered
a late dinner from room service, showered, and changed into dark-colored clothes and
running shoes.

Her mind kept returning to Walter Slawicky. When she had stared into his windows and
watched him, he struck her as a person who had decayed along with the old house where
he lived. He looked slovenly, even physically dirty. He had clearly been spending
money lately, and that might mean he had done a service for someone. All she really
knew was that he was a liar. He had not sold Jimmy Sanders a rifle and ammunition.

Jane decided to see what else she could learn about him. She drove east to his house
in Caledonia, parked on the next street parallel to Iroquois Street, and walked up
the sidewalk intending to turn at the corner toward his street. When she reached the
cross street she saw a car she had seen before. It was parked on the right side, facing
Slawicky’s street, no more than a hundred and fifty feet from Slawicky’s house, but
far enough from the corner so it could not be seen from Slawicky’s. As she came up
on the parked car she peered in the side windows.

It was a plain-wrap police car, the one she had seen Sergeant Isaac Lloyd park the
first time she’d been to Slawicky’s. She could see the police radio under the dashboard,
the Remington 870 shotgun upright in the rack, the police flashers on the shelf at
the back window. If Isaac Lloyd was here, she was going to miss tonight’s chance to
find out more about the witness. She stopped and prepared to go back the way she’d
come.

Then it occurred to her that leaving might be a mistake. This could be an opportunity
to learn what the state police were doing. She crouched and put her ear to the car
window to see if she could hear anything, but the police radio was turned off.

She walked to Iroquois Street, then trotted across it to Slawicky’s next-door neighbor’s
house on the right. She kept going until she reached the side of the house, and then
moved more slowly beside the clapboards to the back, went low, and leaned out enough
to look across the backyard into Slawicky’s.

Slawicky had made another new purchase. Parked on the lawn behind his garage was a
motor home. It had the round-cornered silhouette of the newer RVs, but it was one
of the small models that looked like a little bus. Jane ran her eyes along its contours,
and then focused and stared. What her eyes had at first accepted as a deeper shadow
began to move and assume a recognizable shape. It was a man on his hands and knees,
crawling along the ground beside the vehicle, looking under it. As she watched, the
man made it to the space just behind the front wheels, fiddled with something in his
jacket pocket, and then reached under. He turned on a flashlight.

Jane stared at the cone-shaped area lit by the beam. What had aroused his curiosity
was a spot underneath the parked motor home. It didn’t look green like the rest of
the lawn. It seemed to be a patch of bare earth about four feet on a side. It had
some light brown substance sprinkled over it—mulch, maybe, with white specks of chemical
fertilizer that were picked up by the beam of the flashlight.

As the flashlight played over the patch, its glow illuminated the bottom of the vehicle,
the grass, and the face of Sergeant Isaac Lloyd. Then the light went off, and Jane
pulled her head back. Ike would get up now and move to something else. She didn’t
dare put her head out again for fear of being seen, but she listened hard, ready to
run if she heard him coming in her direction.

She heard nothing at first. It worried her because she knew he was good at moving
quietly.

When she heard footsteps they were louder than they should have been, and they seemed
to be coming from the wrong spot. Her ears placed them at the far side of Slawicky’s
yard, by the hedge. They sped up, breaking into a run—two or three men at once. She
heard a harsh, popping sound, then two more. Somebody was firing a gun with a silencer.

She looked out from behind the neighbor’s house and saw three men firing at Ike Lloyd.
She saw Lloyd sheltering at the back of the motor home, and saw him reach into his
jacket for a gun. He aimed, then fired at one of his assailants, but missed. The shooter
made it to the house while the others spread out. The pop of the next silenced pistol
came from a different angle, and Lloyd spun and went down. He was hit. He rose to
a sitting position and clutched his thigh with his left hand, but he leaned close
to the big vehicle and raised his gun arm again.

Jane had no weapon, nothing she could use to help him. She pivoted and sprinted along
the side of the neighbor’s house and across Iroquois Street. In a few more seconds
she was beside the plain black police car. She took out her pocketknife without opening
it, gripped the handle with the rounded brass end protruding below her fist, and hammered
the side window. It shattered, throwing little glittering cubes of broken glass onto
the driver’s seat. She grasped the inner door handle, swung it open, tugged the shotgun
up and out of its rack, pumped it once, and ran with it.

As she dashed across the street she saw a flash of sparks spew from the muzzle of
a silencer, and stopped. She raised the shotgun to her shoulder and fired. The report
of the shotgun was like a thunderclap, and the kick rocked her back. She ducked low
and ran the rest of the way across the street, pumped the shotgun again and moved
across the front of the neighbor’s yard to the porch of Slawicky’s house. She went
to her belly and searched for her next target.

She could see that the man she had just shot was lying on his back, face to the sky,
with his arms apart. In the dark she couldn’t see him very well, but she could detect
no movement from him. The police load was usually number four buckshot, but she had
been no more than forty feet away. He was probably severely wounded, or even dead.
She couldn’t see the other two men, so she rose to a crouch and ran around to the
back of Slawicky’s house.

Jane leaned out from the corner of the house in time to see the other two men begin
to move. One of them ran toward the front of the motor home, and the other toward
the back. Jane aimed and fired at the one heading for the front, and he dived face
forward, lay on his belly, and slithered backward to withdraw. The other man changed
his course to get behind the motor home.

Jane braced the shotgun’s barrel against the clapboards at the corner of the house
in case the others appeared again, took out her cell phone, and dialed 911.

“Town of Caledonia. What’s your emergency?”

“A state police officer has been shot. He’s in the backyard of the house at ninety-six
ninety-two Iroquois Street, and there are two men shooting at him. Another is lying
in the yard.”

“Give me your name, please.”

“Get cops and an ambulance here now.”

“Officers are on the way. Your name—”

Jane turned off the phone and waited there, where she could keep the two healthy shooters
from getting near Ike Lloyd. After a minute or two, she heard lots of rustling sounds
as the men moved across the yard and back toward the street. She advanced to the rear
wall of the garage, closer to the wounded man.

She called, “Sergeant Lloyd.” After a pause, she said, “Ike.”

“Who are you?”

“The lady who borrowed your shotgun. They’re clearing off. I called nine one one and
they said cops are on the way. Can you hold out until they get here?”

“I think so.”

“Use your belt as a tourniquet. I’ll leave your shotgun in your car.”

“Wait,” he called. “Don’t move. Do not leave the scene. We’re going to need—”

Jane turned and ran along the side of the house. She was across the road and at the
black police car in ten seconds. She wiped the shotgun off with her sleeve and set
it on the floor of the backseat, and then ran again. She was in the Passat and driving
toward the west with her window open when she heard the sirens approach. She pulled
over, turned off her lights, and ducked down while their lights appeared and flashed
past. Then she sat up, turned on her lights, and drove.

When she reached her hotel in Rochester she went to her room and showered, then picked
up her clothes. She was sure a short-barreled twelve gauge shotgun must leave plenty
of burned powder on the shooter, so she put all of her clothes in the bathtub, scrubbed
them with soap, and rinsed them off with the shower, then soaked them in the tub and
hung them up to dry before she went to sleep.

Her sleep was dark and dreamless, and she awoke in the late afternoon feeling alert.
She went to a Laundromat, washed, dried, and folded her clothes, stopped in a restaurant
for an early dinner, and then turned on the television set in her room at six to see
the local news.

After the station’s logo she saw the word
BREAKING
. A girl who looked barely out of high school was sitting in as a newsreader with
the veteran anchor, Don Hennick, who must have been nearly eighty. She introduced
herself as Kimberly Wachtman and said, “We have live, breaking news at this hour.”
Don Hennick said, “A state police officer has been shot in Caledonia. An accident
in Cheektowaga holds up a train, and the Bisons win three in a row. We’ll be back
in sixty seconds.”

There was a commercial for a supermarket chain in which a husband, who appeared to
have been stunned by high voltage, walked in an endless aisle unable to find what
he wanted, only to be saved by his wife, and then a commercial during which a pair
of loathsome fast-talking car salesmen tried to talk an innocent young couple into
buying an inferior car until they escaped to a neighboring lot, where the really good
cars were sold by a handsome man. Next there was a series of rapid-fire pitches for
five of the network’s new shows.

The news returned with “live breaking news!” Kimberly said, “A state police officer
has been shot. We go live to Brenda Sturridge at the scene in Caledonia.”

Brenda Sturridge was a familiar face to Jane, a forty-five-year-old blonde holding
a microphone on the sidewalk in front of Walter Slawicky’s house. Behind her, police
officers and technicians were moving around, ducking under the yellow
crime scene
tape to go back and forth to their vehicles. “Yes, Kimberly and Don, I’m at the house
now. Caledonia police have not yet finished their investigation, but they’ve told
me that a state police officer was in the yard of the house behind me on the ninety-two
hundred block of Iroquois Street. They say he was watching the house of a witness
in an ongoing investigation when he was ambushed by gunmen, shot, and wounded. The
police will not elaborate further on the case, but said the officer was able to administer
first aid to himself, which may have saved his life. They refuse to speculate on the
motives for the shooting, but the investigation continues. Brenda Sturridge, Western
New York News. Back to you, Don and Kimberly.”

The image of the old man and the young woman in the studio returned. “Now we go live
to Amy Norris at Buffalo General Hospital for more,” said Don as Kimberly looked serious
beside him.

This time the scene was outside a rear entrance of the big brick hospital building.
Amy Norris was a tall, thin black woman who looked like a fashion model. “I’m outside
the hospital where the state police officer has been taken. Hospital spokesmen have
stated he’s in stable condition. He sustained a bullet wound in his right thigh, but
they predict he will make a full recovery. He has been identified as Sergeant Isaac
Lloyd, age forty-one. The state police headquarters revealed today that he is an eighteen-year
veteran with the force, with citations for outstanding merit and valor. The state
police spokesman declined to comment on the incident, or on the case Sergeant Lloyd
had been assigned to. Amy Norris, Western New York News.”

Jane watched the image change to Don and Kimberly in the studio again. Don said, “An
illegal U-turn over a set of railroad tracks has ended in tragedy today.” Jane turned
off the television set.

She left the hotel and drove to the store where Carey’s nurses often bought their
work gear. She went inside, selected a package that contained two sets of light blue
scrubs, a package of surgical masks, a box of thin latex gloves, and a cap like the
ones surgeons wore. She found a bag with a shoulder strap, took all her selections
to the counter, and paid for them in cash.

IKE LLOYD LAY IN HIS
hospital bed, his right leg throbbing. All day there had been a little nurse who had
been very gentle, very solicitous of his well-being and comfort. All she had really
been able to do for him was come in every three hours or so and give him another shot
of painkiller, but she had smiled and spoken softly. Each time she left he fell asleep
again, a strange dreamy sleep, very colorful and vivid.

Whenever Lloyd awoke, he fought to bring his dreams back. Most of them started well—running
the marathon in New York City last year, or walking through the woods around Salamanca,
or sitting in an Adirondack guide boat fishing on Tupper Lake. In one dream he had
actually been having sex with Molly. He had hated to let that one go, and had struggled
to stay asleep until the pain in his leg had grown too sharp. That one had probably
been triggered by her visit to his hospital room, and then missing her after she’d
gone home. He had called her to tell her about it, and she had laughed and told him
he was still too weak to have that kind of dream.