The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [54]
“Where’s he going?” Ellis asked, regretting the question instantly.
Mel glared back at him. “The fuck do I know? Just keep your mouth shut and hang back.”
But it was Mel’s voice that made High Top glance for just a split second over his shoulder at them. Half fried, perhaps, but still clinging to self-preservation. Despite the two of them looking as if they’d merely left the bar at the same time, High Top nervously crossed the street to put some distance between them.
Mel cursed under his breath. He gestured to his younger colleague to come abreast of him. “Say something loud and give me a push,” he ordered quietly.
Ellis understood and began a playacting skit that made them look like a couple of drunks sorting through an argument as they staggered down the sidewalk. Across the way, they saw High Top give them a second look and noticed the tension fade from his gait.
Once more, as so often in the past, Ellis felt the adrenaline beginning to stir in him, along with the self-loathing that increasingly accompanied it.
The charade lasted as far as the intersection of County and the heavily traveled Route 7 corridor, one block up. There, whether because he was still pursuing his original destination or merely testing them again, High Top suddenly bolted across the still significant traffic to the far side.
“Little shit made us,” Mel swore, snapping out of his role and looking for a gap in the flow of cars before them. “Not as brain-dead as I thought. Come on.”
For a man of his build, Mel could move fast when he had to, and Ellis was hard put both to keep up and not get run over. In the latter effort, however, he caused an oncoming driver to lean on his horn, and like a bell at a horse race, that signal made High Top put his head down and take off.
They were in an unusual part of Bennington, given the burgeoning development on both sides of them. Here, just north of County Street, in a demilitarized zone separating where the malls were settling in and where the original town was located, there was an undulating spread of lawns and parkland bordering the banks of the Roaring Branch Brook—an offshoot of the Walloomsac that had once powered the area’s many mills. This was open land, a park dotted with a few trees and the scattered buildings of the veterans’ home and the State Office Complex, but it was dark and quiet and easy to get lost in.
Which was clearly High Top’s intention.
By the time they hit the other side of Route 7, Mel and Ellis were loping like lumbering hounds after their quarry’s flickering shadow, all subterfuge evaporated. Each was an unlikely choice for a footrace—where the prey appeared light and wiry, he’d been handicapped by self-abuse and poor health, and where the hunters should have been slowed by their bulk alone, their ambition more than compensated.
All three dove deeper into the park’s gloomy embrace, the latter two closing in.
A single slip finally ended it. High Top hesitated as he approached a small hedge by the water’s edge, cut right too late to get around it, and felt his feet go out from under him.
Mel pinned him to the ground like a mastiff on a hare.
“Jesus H. Christ, you little bastard,” Mel panted, spitting into the grass by the other man’s ear, “what the fuck you take off like that for?”
“What d’you think?” High Top coughed, squirming to get free. “You came after me. What d’you guys want?”
Ellis was standing bent over, breathless, his hands on his knees, watching the two of them, unable to speak.
Mel shifted around so that he sat astride High Top’s waist, his large hands keeping the other man’s shoulders pressed to the ground. The sound of the water nearby forced him to lean forward to be heard. Around them, barely visible between the screening trees and bushes, the town’s lights glimmered like cautious fireflies keeping their distance.
“We want to find out what you been up to.”
“I haven’t been up to nuthin’. I don’t even know you guys.”
“You