Mystery

“By God,” his grandfather said. “Tom. You were hard enough to get rid of, boy, but I imagine—” His hand went into his pocket and came out with the gun Tom had seen him take from his desk drawer.

Tom’s gut went cold. He looked over his shoulder at David Natchez, who shouted, “Upshaw, put down—”

His grandfather pointed the gun at him and pulled the trigger. Fire and smoke came out of the end of the gun, and the explosion struck Tom like a blow. Mortality whizzed past his head, heating the air, and before the bullet splatted against the wall, another explosion banged into his ear drums. His grandfather had vanished into the gloom beside him, and Tom looked toward the passage and saw only empty space. He sensed a crowd of people staring down from the walkways. He turned sideways and saw what looked like the barrel of a cannon pointed at his head. His grandfather held it with arms extended, almost cross-eyed with concentration. Tom saw an index finger fat as a trout pulling on the trigger, and Natchez yelled, and the barrel jerked away from his face. It exploded again. Tom jumped backwards with the explosion in his head and saw a black hole appear in his grandfather’s head, just above the bridge of his nose. Flags of red and grey stuff flew out of the back of his head. The gun sank, and his grandfather twitched backwards and righted himself and went down on his knees, still trying to pull the trigger. A ringing clamor filled Tom’s ears like a physical substance. He was dimly aware of David Natchez walking toward him from beneath a walkway. Natchez said something that did not penetrate the molten lead filling his ears. His grandfather settled down into himself and fell foward. A muffle of sound came from Natchez, and all the heads hanging over the railings jerked back, except for that of a woman with a rag-doll face. Carmen Bishop lingered at the railing, looking as if she wanted to fly down at him, and then slowly backed away. Tom wobbled sideways and sat down.

Another muffled pillow of sound came from Natchez. Beneath the fullness in his ears, the words reached him at last. I don’t know how he missed you.

The gun didn’t pull to the left, Tom said, and felt his own words as individual, cottony wads striking his ears from the inside of his head.

Natchez looked puzzled, and Tom felt himself say, It’s an old story. He reached out and touched his grandfather’s back.

He looked back up at the walkways and Carmen Bishop screamed something down at him that disappeared entirely into the noise in his ears. “We’re going to do something with him,” he said, and this time dimly heard his own voice—tinny as an old record heard through a wall, but real words, not bubbles of pressure inside his head.

“I’ll call the station,” Natchez said in a nearly identical voice. “And I’ll send someone out to pick up von Heilitz’s body.”

Tom shook his head. “We’re going to take him with us.”

“Take him where?”

“Back to the bungalow,” Tom said. He leaned forward and picked up his grandfather’s pistol. It seemed surpassingly ugly, and heavy as an iron weight. He put it in his jacket pocket. Two men came through the long tunnel from the street, and Tom and Natchez turned to look at them as they walked into the court. One of them was the man in the white shirt, and the other, a few paces behind him, was Andres. The man in the white shirt looked down at Glendenning Upshaw’s body, glanced at Natchez, and shoved his hands in his pockets. Andres reached down, and Tom took his hand and stood up.

“You could make this a perfect day,” Natchez said, “by telling me you know where this pile of shit hid his papers and records.”

“I do know,” Tom said. “You do too.”

Natchez looked at his own pistol as if it had just been magicked into his hand, and pulled back his jacket to slip it into his holster. “Holman, go up to the third level on this side,” he said to the man in the white shirt. “Captain Bishop’s sister lives up there. I want a box of papers and journals, anything like that. Bishop’s finished.”

“I can see that,” the man said, and began moving toward the stairs. The woman with the rag-doll face was peering down at them again.

“No,” Tom said. “That’s not where they are. My grandfather stopped somewhere on the way here. He gave them to somebody for safekeeping.”

“Who was that?” Natchez asked.

Tom managed to smile at him, and saw understanding gradually cross Natchez’s face.

“You want me to go up?” the other policeman asked.

“No,” Natchez said. “If you want to stay out of jail, go home and keep your mouth shut. I have some business to take care of with this boy here, and then I’ll call you. I’ll pick up the papers, and then you and I are going to take two drunken shit-heads to the Elm Cove station and arrest them for the murder of Lamont von Heilitz.”

The other man swallowed.

“We were never here,” Natchez said. “Is that right?” he asked Tom.

“That’s right,” Tom said.