Pale Kings and Princes

I stopped at a small roadside store called the Quabbin Sub Base and bought two submarine sandwiches, one turkey, one veggie, and each sliced in half before they wrapped it. I stopped at the Wheaton Liquor Store and bought a bottle of Chianti Classico. Everywhere I’d been since Monday a Wheaton police car had shown up and parked and a Wheaton cop had looked at me. Nobody had rousted me since Henry and J.D., but they kept an eye on me and let me know it. When I came out of the Wheaton Liquor Store I didn’t see a cruiser. TGIF. Except cops don’t quit for the week at five o’clock Fridays. I got into my car and pulled out onto Route 9 heading west toward my motel. No cruiser in sight. I felt like one of those cavalry troopers in western movies who says, “It’s quiet,” and his buddy says, “Yeah, too quiet.” A small blue Chevy pickup appeared in my rearview mirror. At a stretch of road where passing was possible, I slowed. The Chevy slowed behind me. Okay. I picked up speed. So did the truck. Ahead of me a late-model Ford sedan, maroon with a beige vinyl top, pulled out of a side road and preceded me in the same direction. I took the Colt Python out from under my left arm and put it beside me on the seat. The three cars went in procession up a hill around which the road slowly rose, and then down into the valley. On each side the woods came down to the road shoulder, new woods, second-growth forest maybe fifty years old, bare-limbed in winter with dirty snow in harsh patches among the trees. We went left around another curve and began to climb up the next hill, the road curving in the opposite direction so that from the air it must have looked S-shaped as it went over the two hills. There was no other traffic on the road. Near the crest of the next hill the road made a sharp bend back right again and as we rounded it there was a green Ford van broken down in the oncoming lane. The hood was up and a guy in a red plaid mackinaw was leaning in under it. The sedan in front of me slowed to a stop beside it and I stopped behind the sedan. The pickup behind me slowed and then turned at right angles to the road so that one lane and most of the next was blocked behind me. It was late afternoon in December and already dark enough for headlights. With the cars parked in various directions the lights crisscrossed eerily in the woods and on the otherwise empty road. The guy under the hood straightened and in my headlights I could see he was wearing a ski mask. A guy got out of the truck behind me wearing a ski mask, and two men got out of the sedan in ski masks. All of them had baseball bats, except the guy with the broken-down van who had what looked like an ax handle.

I stepped out of my car holding the Python down next to my leg. Nobody said anything. I waited. The woods were dead quiet. No birds, no gentle breezes sighing through leaves. The only sounds were of the motors idling and my heart thudding loudly in my chest. I walked around my car and stood near the passenger’s side, next to the edge of the road. The three men fanned out in front of me and began to walk toward me. The guy behind me stayed where he was, holding the baseball bat on his right shoulder, his hands low on the grip handle. I noticed he choked up about an inch.

“You going to learn that you don’t belong here, pal,” the guy in the red plaid mackinaw said. “You been told but you’re going to have to learn it the hard way.”

The three of them were quite close now. The ski masks were colorfully woven, crisscrossed with jagged stripes of red and yellow yarn. Positively festive. The guy in the red plaid reached the front of my car.

“How much of this is negotiable,” I said.

“Negotiable.” He laughed. “Fucking negotiable. You can negotiate with the hospital, pal.”

He swung the baseball bat against the front end of my car and smashed the headlight on the driver’s side.

“You want my car to leave town too?” I said.

He smashed the other headlight. The road was darker, but still bright with the headlights of the other cars. They made each of the batsmen cast long surrealist shadows. I took a slow deep breath and cocked the revolver and brought the big Colt up carefully and aimed and gently pressed the trigger with the ball of my index finger and shot the guy in the mackinaw in the left thigh above the knee where it might just be a flesh wound and if it broke the bone it could heal with less complication. The heavy-duty Magnum slug spun him when it hit and sprawled him on his right side in the roadway. The gunshot was thunderous in the silence. Then the baseball bat made a loud clatter when it hit the asphalt and then made a smaller clatter as it rolled on down the hill until it rolled off the road into the brush.

The guy in the mackinaw said, “Jesus Christ, he shot me.” The other three froze for a moment and in two running steps I was into the woods and out of the light.

The guy in the mackinaw kept saying, “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ.”