The Man Who Tried to Get Away

  I shook my head. I wanted her to go away, that was a fact. But I also wanted her to watch me struggle into my clothes. I wanted her to have no illusions about my physical condition. And if she stayed, she could talk to me. Help me through the peculiar ordeal of putting on my underpants.

  For no particularly good reason, I said, “That doctor’s going to have a spasm when he hears about this.”

  “No, he won’t.” She was sure. “I talked to him earlier. If you’re well enough to get dressed, you’re well enough to go home. All we have to do is keep an eye on you—take your temperature, watch for infection, that sort of thing. I already have your pills.” Gazing innocently at the ceiling, she finished, “I didn’t tell him about the job.”

  Well enough to get dressed. At the moment, that was debatable. Also trivial. She’d obviously spent some time getting ready for this case. That held my interest.

  “Tell me about the job,” I asked to keep her talking. “Who are we nursemaiding besides me?”

  “You’ll love it.” She made a studious effort not to wince every time my face twisted. “For once I’ve got us something easy. Might as well be a vacation.

  “Does the name Murder on Cue, Inc., mean anything to you?”

  I shook my head again. If Murder on Cue, Inc., was a company that arranged assassinations, I planned to send them after the bastard who invented underpants.

  “It’s a small outfit, only two people as far as I can tell. Unless they have a secretary hidden away somewhere. Roderick Altar and his wife. They run what they call ‘mystery camps.’ They get people who like to try to solve crimes, play at being Sherlock Holmes for a few days. Then they hire actors and plan a scenario and take the whole crowd to some secluded place where the real world won’t get in their way, and they stage a murder or two for these people to puzzle over. Nobody except Altar and his wife knows the difference between the actors and the guests. Whoever solves the murder wins.”

  “Be the first kid on your block to catch a killer,” I muttered. With my underpants on, I had to rest for a while. I couldn’t look at Ginny. I didn’t want to see whatever was in her eyes. “Don’t these people have anything better to do?”

  “Apparently not.” As a matter of policy, Fistoulari Investigations doesn’t sneer at people with money. They tend to pay better than people who don’t. But I could tell that Ginny shared my visceral reaction to Murder on Cue, Inc.

  “So what do they need us for?” I asked to deflect myself from my socks. “Don’t they want to catch their own killers?”

  “Security,” she answered.

  She didn’t elaborate.

  At last I had to look up at her. “What the hell do people who think killing is some kind of game need security for?”

  She shrugged. She was studying me intently, trying to see into my wounds—trying to understand them. “According to Altar, he’s just the organizer, the guy who pulls the practical details together, like where these people stay, how they get there, what they eat, who feeds them. His wife’s the murder enthusiast. She hires the actors, plans the scenario. She even screens the guests. I guess Murder on Cue is her hobby.

  “He says he wants security for the insurance. Supplying protection for his guests and their belongings, he gets better rates. But his wife has different ideas—he says. She wants security because—how did he put it?—‘the presence of private investigators makes the ambience more credible.’ And it gives the guests some extra competition. Solve the crime before the professionals do.”

  My brain must’ve been in worse shape than I realized. I actually got both socks on before I thought to ask, “You mean she isn’t going to tell us who the actors are? What the scenario is? We’re supposed to play the same game they’re playing?”

  Ginny gave me a tight little smile. “Playing along is part of the job. Mrs. Altar won’t tell the guests who we are, and we aren’t supposed to either. The only thing they’ll know is that two of them are investigators. But we don’t really have to try to solve the crime. In fact, we don’t really have to do much of anything.

  “Our main job is just to keep an eye on the general safety of the situation. Apply a little common sense. Keep the guests from getting carried away. According to Altar, they’ve never had any trouble. He doesn’t want to start now.”

  Maybe I’d finally grown accustomed to the pain. I closed my eyes, lifted one foot into my pants—and was amazed to discover that I’d survived the experience. I still felt like I was performing an appendectomy on myself with an apple corer, but aside from the usual lightheadedness and agony I was doing fine.

  Trying not to pant—trying to prove that I really did have a wit or two inside my skull—I produced another question. “What do you know about this Altar? And his wife.”

  “Do you want help?” She meant with my pants.

  I ignored her offer. After a moment she pretended that she hadn’t said anything.

  “Roderick and Sue-Rose Altar. I haven’t met her. He’s in his early fifties. Not exactly fat, but he likes food more than exercise. Used to be a venture capitalist, until he made too much money to justify working. Now he manages his investments. And takes care of Sue-Rose and her enthusiasms.

  “I don’t have your talent for snap judgments”—a reference to my ingrained preference for intuition over reason—“but if you pushed me I’d say he’s just a bit bored with Sue-Rose and her enthusiasms and his whole life.”

  That settled it. A nursemaid job if ever there was one. If Murder on Cue had ever put on a mystery camp where anything actually happened, Roderick Altar probably wouldn’t have been bored. I should’ve gone back to rejecting the whole idea. Unfortunately I’d thought of another reason why I couldn’t do that. Ginny wouldn’t abandon me—and the harder I made it for her to protect me, the more likely she was to get hurt herself. So I kept my opinion of useless work to myself.

  Almost like I’d done this sort of thing before, I put my other foot into my pants and pulled them up.

  Someone should’ve applauded, but my audience didn’t bother.

  Get off the bed. Tuck in my shirt. Thread a belt through the loops. Buckle it. Keep your breathing shallow and act like you aren’t about to fall on your face. A dazzling performance, Axbrewder. So maybe it was just a nursemaid job. If it required me to stand and walk and possibly even shake hands, it was going to be as much as I could manage.

  “What about your coat?” Ginny asked. “You want help with that?”

  I wavered and wobbled in front of her. For some reason, she looked taller than I was—which should’ve been impossible, considering that I’m six-five and she isn’t. Maybe it was déjà vu, a reminder of all the times she’d come looking for me, looking for a way to rescue me from myself, and I’d stood there unsteady with drink and let her pretend that she needed me. Whatever the explanation, I didn’t like it. So I asked the kind of question that usually got me in trouble.

  “Why us?”

  I’d caught her with her mind somewhere else. Probably still trying to guess how far I’d be able to walk. “Why us what?”

  “Why does Roderick Altar want Fistoulari Investigations?” Speaking distinctly was as close as I could get to sarcasm. “You don’t usually do this kind of work.”

  “I asked him that.” She still wasn’t thinking about my question. A frown knotted the bridge of her nose, and her eyes kept flicking away from me as if she didn’t enjoy what she saw. “He said he must’ve heard my name somewhere. Or read it in the paper. I told you I’ve been doing interviews.”

  Which finally struck me as odd. She ordinarily didn’t have much patience for the media. So I put in, “Why?”

  “Trying to keep a high profile,” she explained absently. “As long as we’re news, we’ll be harder to hit.

  “But I don’t think he actually cares who we are, or whether we’re any good. He isn’t that interested.”

  What she said made perfect sense, of course. But I still hated it. I suppose the truth was that I’d b
een angry at her for a long time. She should’ve let me drink myself into my grave, instead of rescuing me over and over again. And she should’ve been stronger when she lost her hand, instead of putting the burden on me—refusing to wear her claw, requiring me to take care of her for six months because she felt so crippled, so much less than a human being, not to mention less than a woman, that she didn’t have the courage to do anything except hurt.

  Now that she’d returned to being herself—put on her claw and taken control of the situation—I was even madder. Her vulnerability had been my only defense against my own weaknesses. It had compelled me when nothing else worked. The less she needed me, the more helpless I felt.

  Our feelings for each other had gotten pretty twisted over the years.

  If there was one true, clear thing hidden away inside me anywhere, it was that I wanted to get those feelings untwisted. And as far as I could see, work was my only way to untwist them. A nursemaid operation was a lousy opportunity, but I didn’t have any others at the moment.

  I stuck to the point of my questions.

  “You still haven’t answered me. Didn’t you tell me Murder on Cue has been doing mystery camps for a while now?”

  Ginny made an effort to come back from wherever her head was. “So?”

  “So Roderick Altar has hired security before, too, and it wasn’t us. So what went wrong? Why wasn’t he satisfied with whoever it was? Or has he really had some trouble he isn’t telling us about?

  “Why have we got a nice safe job like this right now, just when we happen to need it, and it’s the only thing the commission will let us handle?”

  I had her attention now. “Are you serious?” she asked, staring at me. “Is this really the way your mind works? Axbrewder, you’re sick. Or they’re giving you too much medication. Coincidences do happen, you know. Every event in life isn’t aimed at you.”

  But that wasn’t my point. “In other words,” I countered, “you didn’t ask him. You let him offer you this job, and you didn’t even ask him why.”

  The tip of her nose had gone white, which usually happens when she’s furious. Ominously quiet, she said, “All right, Brew. Spit it out. What’s your problem now?”

  Luckily I knew her well enough not to take this anger personally. She wasn’t mad at me. She was mad because I’d touched a nerve.

  I looked at her straight. “You don’t usually miss that kind of question. You aren’t thinking hard enough about this job. You’re thinking too much about me.”

  “It’s a nursemaid operation,” she snapped back. “How much thought do you think it requires?”

  I didn’t try to answer. I didn’t have to. As soon as she heard what came out of her mouth, she caught herself, and her eyes dropped. “All right,” she said again. “I get the message. I do worry about you too much. There’s no job so simple it can’t get messy if you don’t pay attention to it.

  “Put on your coat. Call a nurse when you’re ready to go.” Without waiting for my opinion, she headed toward the door. “I’ll meet you at the discharge exit.”

  In some way I’d shaken her self-confidence. Maybe I’d just reminded her that she had as many reasons to be angry as I did. Or maybe she was still more vulnerable than she liked. Disgusted at herself, afraid for me, and more desirable than any other woman I knew, she left me to figure out the pain in my gut for myself.

  3

  The coat was too much for me. Ginny had unearthed a thick and somewhat ratty three-quarter-length sheepskin from my closet—a relic of more prosperous times—and I couldn’t face hauling it up my arms and over my shoulders. Instead I pushed the buzzer to call a nurse. Then, while I waited, I retrieved the .45 and hid it in one of the pockets of the coat. The coat was pretty heavy anyway. Maybe no one would notice the extra weight.

  The hospital staff must’ve had orders to get rid of me as soon as possible. A nurse arrived with a wheelchair almost right away. Without any discernible sense of loss over my departure, she put my coat on for me, helped me sit down, and gave me a ride to the discharge exit. By then Ginny had finished swearing on her soul to pay every conceivable penny of my bill. She and the nurse maneuvered me into the passenger seat of her creaky Olds. The nurse slammed the door.

  Ginny started the Olds. To distract myself from the many pleasures of sitting in this position with miles of tape strapped around my ribs and every suture straining, I asked, “Now what?”

  Spinning the wheel one-handed, Ginny took us out of the parking lot. Instead of looking at me, she watched the traffic for ambushes or tails. Her purse lay open beside her so that she could reach her .357. Just in case.

  “The camp doesn’t start until tomorrow,” she said, “but today we have an appointment with Mrs. Altar. Look the place over, find out what she wants us to do. I told you it’s up in the mountains. I gather Murder on Cue is renting an entire hunting lodge for the week, complete with staff. A place called Deerskin Lodge.” She tried not to sneer when she said the name, but she couldn’t help herself. Then she added in a different tone, “It’s a good three-hour drive. Can you stand it?”

  I didn’t answer that. I was too busy showing off my heman private investigator stoicism. “The Altars like isolation.”

  Ginny nodded. “Adds to the appeal of the situation. Makes the guests feel like they really do have to solve the crime, or else they might get killed themselves. Also prevents intrusion from the real world.”

  Leaning on the accelerator, she took the Olds up the access ramp onto the freeway and began the long climb out of the valley where Puerta del Sol sprawls along the Flat River. The sky was gray with winter, and a temperature inversion trapped a pall of woodsmoke and exhaust fumes over us. Nevertheless the San Reno Mountains reared up ahead like they didn’t give a damn about such things, filling the whole eastern horizon.

  “According to Roderick Altar,” Ginny concluded, “they’ve used this lodge several times now, very successfully. The setting is perfect, and the staff knows what to do.”

  “Duck,” I snorted cryptically.

  “Huh?”

  “The staff knows what to do. Which is duck. They don’t want to get hit by flying bullets when all those amateur sleuths start apprehending each other.”

  “My, my.” Ginny Fistoulari making polite social conversation. “You’re in a good mood this morning.”

  With an effort, I swallowed more sarcasm. Her comment had the effect of making me realize that I had one more reason to dread this job, one I hadn’t admitted yet. I hated nursemaiding and being nursemaided. I hated the things she and I did to each other. And I also—this came as a surprise—didn’t want to make a fool of myself in front of eight or ten crime buffs. After all, “detection” and “investigation” aren’t the same thing. The guests probably knew a hell of a lot more about “detection” than I did. “Mystery” camp was their game, and I wasn’t likely to be good at it.

  What fun.

  Hunkered down into my pain, I concentrated on surviving the drive up to Deerskin Lodge.

  The freeway ran through Pico Canyon and across the high plains to the east of the San Renos, but we turned off while we were still in the mountains. For half an hour or forty-five minutes, we had good clear road. It went in the direction of Puerta del Sol’s ski resorts, and no one is more willing to invest in good clear roads than ski resorts. After the resort turnoff, however, the driving conditions deteriorated. We’d had an unusual amount of snow Tuesday night, and today was the next Monday. At this elevation, at this time of year, the temperature extremes chew hell out of the pavement.

  We slogged up into thick pine forests and unexpected meadows, but I was in no condition to appreciate your basic winter wonderland scenery, sunshine glistening everywhere, white draped over the trees, nothing on the ground except snow and game tracks. I was too busy hurting every time the Olds lurched into a pothole or skidded over a patch of glaze.

  But eventually I got tired of stoicism. “Why do they start on Tuesday?” I asked Ginny
, just to break the silence.

  By now she must’ve been sure we weren’t being followed. Instead of watching the rearview mirror, she concentrated with a kind of aimless ferocity on her driving. “A group of hunters left the lodge yesterday. The staff won’t be ready for more guests until tomorrow.”

  “And how long does our job run?”

  “Seven days, counting today. Everybody’s supposed to go home Sunday night.”

  How nice. A week of keeping amateur Sherlocks from shooting each other. There was just one problem. “What do we do after that?”

  Obviously, she wasn’t on my wavelength. “After what?”

  “After this week. El Señor won’t give up on me that fast. We’ll still have the problem this job is supposed to solve.”

  Ginny flicked a glance at me, then turned her eyes back to the road. Carefully she ruddered the Olds around a shiny curve. “By then you should be stronger. According to your doctor. The more you move around, the faster you’ll recover—as long as you don’t do anything crazy. And the commission probably won’t keep me suspended much longer. We can find a job that’ll get us out of town. We won’t be restricted to hand-holding operations.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life hiding. But there was no point in complaining about it. The rational vestiges of my mind understood that Ginny was just trying to keep me safe. One job at a time, one decision at a time. That was all anyone could do.

  At the moment, however, I didn’t feel equal to it. I wanted to get away and never come back. Some problems you can’t do anything with except run.

  I made Ginny stop the car and help me into the backseat. Getting in was tough, but once I’d stretched out on my back my insides hurt less. As long as I didn’t get carsick, I’d probably survive the rest of the trip.

  “Take a nap,” Ginny said over her shoulder. “I’ll wake you up before we get there.”

  “Fine,” I murmured as if I had that much common sense. But I didn’t sleep. I spent the time trying to figure out what was wrong between us.