A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(76)

“She gave me some too,” Jane said. “I put a little on my tires before I left her house.”

“You really did that?” said Jimmy.

Jane said, “It didn’t hurt to remind myself that we have friends and relatives, and they’re in this too.”

“And maybe friends who aren’t people?”

Jane shrugged. “I’ll take the help.”

The next morning when Mattie got up, she walked quietly and carefully from the spare room into the living room to keep from waking Jane. She looked at the couch and saw that the blanket was neatly folded and the pillow was on top of it. She looked at the spot where Jane had left the keys to the Passat. They were gone, replaced by the keys to the Chevrolet Malibu.





19



Jane 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.