Wilderness

"If I have to be. I have always been able to do what I had to do."

Janet nodded. She had finished her steak and was sipping wine. "That's true, Chris. He has always been able to do the things that had to be done."

"I hope he runs to form," Chris said. "There may be some tough things to do. And when we're doing them is not the time to rethink your position on violence." "I know," Newman said. "I'm committed. I won't back off." Janet poured more wine. "My God," she said, "isn't it something.

Sitting around eating steak, drinking wine, and talking about a killing."

Her face was animated and full of color. / love the way her lower lip is, Newman thought. And how she looks when she's enthusiastic.

It was nearly eleven when Chris Hood went home. They cleaned up the kitchen together. He locked the doors. And they went upstairs to bed.

"Would you care to have a small screw," she said.

"Don't mind if I do," he said.

"I'll be back soon," she said, and went down the hall to the bathroom.

He loaded the double-barreled shotgun and put it by the bed. He took the.32 off, belt and all, and hung it over the bed post. Looks like a paperback cover from the forties, he thought. My Gun Is Quick. He liked the way it looked.

He undressed and got into bed. She came back from the bathroom, her makeup off, her face scrubbed. She locked the door behind her and went to pull the drapes closed across the windows.

"Who do you figure will peek," he said. "Somebody up in the church steeple with a spyglass?" She smiled and pulled the rest of the drapes. Then she turned toward him and stood at the foot of the bed and undressed. The last thing she took off was her underpants, rolling them slowly down across the thrust of her pubic bone and then wiggling them down her thighs until she could step out of them.

The red scratches on her belly were clear. AK. He felt the cortex of desire in his stomach.

She stood still for a moment at the foot of the bed while he looked at her, then she turned off the light and crawled from the foot of the bed up beside him. He shifted over on his right side. She lay on her left facing him. She pulled the covers over them. He put his right hand against the delta where her thighs met. He put his left arm around her and pressed her against him. She kissed him with her mouth open. He put his tongue out, and hers met it at the edge of her teeth and kept his from penetrating. He groaned slightly and pushed his right hand against her. She pressed her thighs together slightly. With her right hand she pushed his hip away slightly and put her hand on his penis. He grunted. She began to move her hand. He groaned. She moved her hand faster. He relaxed the pressure on her vulva, though his hand remained. Her thighs relaxed a little. Her hand moved steadily. He rolled over onto his back, the covers kicked off, moaning steadily, arching his back toward her moving hand, his hand fell away from her body. Her eyes were closed, her face detached and calm. He twisted toward her. She moved her hand faster and he fell back. She rose to a half-sitting position and bent over him. Her back was to his face and arms as she bent over his penis. Lying flat and twisting with sensation he reached toward her but could touch only her back and right hip.

She sat up and lay back. She put her legs apart. He got onto his knees between her legs and she guided him into her. He lay on top of her, one hand holding her buttocks, the other beneath her back, his hand pressing between her shoulder blades. He tried to kiss her. She turned her head away. Her knees were half bent, her eyes closed, she lay quite still as he pumped above her. He put his left hand on her breast, and after a moment she pushed it away. She shifted slightly as his pelvis ground uncomfortably against her. The new position was more comfortable. She grunted once, softly, and put both hands on his rhythmic buttocks.

He ejaculated.

The decrescendo was brief and after a moment as he lay quietly on top of her, his face pressed in her hair, she made a small hip thrust that told him to get off. As he withdrew she shivered slightly as she always did.

He rolled over on his back beside her, holding her hand. She squeezed his hand, then pulled hers away. And sat up on the edge of the bed.

"I've got to get up," she said. "I'm full of glop."

CHAPTER 10.

In the morning Janet went to the Boston Public Library and spent the day in the microfilm room reading back issues of The Boston Globe for information about Adolph Karl. She went up to the university for her one o'clock class and came back at two-thirty and worked until five.

When she got home at six that evening she knew that Karl was married, had two sons, had been in jail for five years on an armed-assault charge, had been arrested four other times for loan sharking and narcotics and had been released. She knew that one of his sons had graduated from B.C. and was now in Suffolk law school. She knew that Karl had a summer home in Fryeburg, Maine. That he liked to hunt and fish around Fryeburg, that he was probably active in organized crime, had probably killed four people. She knew that Mrs. Karl's first name was Madelyn and that her maiden name had been Corsetti and that she was active in Roman Catholic women's groups in Ly

Her husband and Chris Hood learned of the store too. It was ten-thirty in the morning when Karl and two other men came out of the house and got into the blue Lincoln with the orange vinyl roof. Hood watched from the seawall and then turned and stared out to sea. Newman started the Bronco and cruised down slowly. He stopped, Hood got in, and they swung out three cars behind the Lincoln.

"He alone?" Newman asked.

"No. There's two men with him. He's in the back seat with one of them. The other one's driving."

The blue Lincoln drove west along the shore drive onto the Ly

"That Karl?" Hood said.

"No."

Hood got out and put air in the tires. The man came back out of the doughnut shop with a box of doughnuts and a paper bag. Hood got back in the Bronco. The Lincoln pulled back out into the Ly

The Lincoln pulled up into a loading zone with a yellow curb and parked in front of a furniture store on Portland Street just up from North Station. The sign said Adolph Karl's Union Furniture. Karl and the two other men got out and went in. Newman drove around the block. On the next pass by Union Furniture the Lincoln was still there.

"Why don't you go in and look around?" Newman said. "I'll keep circling."

Hood nodded. "Let me out on the corner. I'll stroll in and act like a customer. You go around the block and be on that corner. Double-park there. If I have to come out fast I want to know you'll be there." Newman said, "I'll be there." He stopped the car.

Hood got out of the car and strolled toward the furniture store. Newman put the car back in gear and went around the block again. He double-parked where Hood had told him to. He could see the front of the store. As he sat, a short fat woman in a tight pink dress that didn't reach her knees shuffled up to the car. She wore blue rubber clogs on her feet. She handed a card through the window of the Bronco.

Newman took it. The card said, "I am a deaf mute. You may buy this card for a quarter." Newman dug a quarter from his pocket and gave it to the woman. Her hair was gray and in a tight coil at the back of her head. She wore sunglasses. She took the quarter and moved away up Portland Street, toward Government Center. Newman turned the card over. On the back were diagrams of sign language. She can tell herself she isn't begging, Newman thought. He stuck the card in a crack in the defroster vent.