They Picked the Wrong Gardener

Chapter 11

Victor kept his word the way rich men keep all their words: he sent other people to do it.

They came on the second night after the river, in the small hours when the street was dark. My left arm was pinned across my ribs in a sling, and the burns across my back had closed into ridges of scar tissue. I sat on an overturned crate in the greenhouse with a tin mug of black tea, watching through the glass. A man who has been told his garden will burn does not sleep in the house.

Professionals announce themselves by what they avoid. They do not brush against dry branches or scrape boots on gravel. These five came over the rear cedar fence, dark shapes moving low along the cabbage rows.

The first man stepped straight into the irrigation trench I had re-dug that afternoon. The cut was two feet deep in soft spade work, and he went down to his hip without a sound worth a name.

I had spent a decade building that garden, long enough to fortify a plot without ever admitting that was what I was doing. The trellis on the north side comes down if you cut one blue cord: forty pounds of bean poles and wet vine. The greenhouse glass is angled to throw alley streetlight into a man's eyes at head height. The underground sprinklers, set to winter pressure, take the feet out from under anyone sprinting across the beds, and the turned soil holds a boot the way deep water holds a swimmer.

I did not make it a battle. Battles make noise and evidence, and I had a boy asleep next door. It was a series of small, firm corrections.

The second man rounded the potting bench with a pry bar. I took his lead wrist, turned the joint, and guided his momentum forward until his knee met the corner fence post. He dropped into the grass. The third man drew a weapon under his jacket, but the glare off the angled glass caught his eyes; I severed the blue cord, and the heavy timber and wet vine collapsed over his shoulders, pinning him to the squash mound. The fourth man tried to swing wide through the herb patch, but his boots sank into the compost trench, and I directed him by the collar into the slatted enclosure, where he sat down hard among the damp coffee grounds.

My bad arm screamed through every turn, but my right hand did the work.

The leader was the last man on his feet, an unsealed accelerant can in his hand, because burning was the second half of their errand. I stepped out from the grape arbor, took his elbow, and put him down among the tomato frames. I pinned his shoulders with my knee and rested the point of the shears in the hollow of his collarbone, not breaking the skin.

"Five men," I said. "For one gardener. Tell Victor he packed heavy for an old man."

The man did not thrash. He looked up past the blades into my face, his breathing steady. Frightened men thrash; a professional offers information.

"You think the police are coming for us," he said, barely above a murmur. "Victor owns this town's police, old man. Bought them the way he bought your clinic and your council. When the cars come tonight, they won't be coming to help you."

He lay still under the shears. I understood the warning was part of the trap: despair was the sixth man on the team, sent in after the other five failed.

"Tell him a garden is not a house," I said. I pulled tomato twine from my pocket and bound his wrists snug behind his back. "You can burn a house. A garden is mostly underground."

I disarmed the five of them and lined them up along my front fence, hurt only in specific, survivable ways. I set a plastic tumbler of water beside each man, because it was a warm night and shock dries out the throat.

Then three police cruisers came rolling up the lane. Slow, dark, and not one had its siren on.

◆

They came back in daylight, which is how you know it is the law and not the other thing.

At ten in the morning, a county sedan stopped at my gate. A keen young detective stepped out with a clipboard and a charge already drafted in his head: unlicensed weapons. I sat on the porch steps with a tin cup of water, watching him come up the path. Milo was on the railing above my shoulder.

"Weapons," I said. "Son, I have a trowel with ambitions. You're welcome to arrest it."

The older man at the back let the detective talk. Ray Dolan, retired these six years, had been brought along because somebody at the station still remembered which cases not to hurry. He was the man who had stood in Marco's office with the photograph of the fountain and told Marco the truth for free. He stood on my gravel path, looked at my sling and the tomato beds, and reached the opposite answer from Marco's.

He stepped past the young detective and took the warrant from the clipboard.

"Your warrant has the wrong digit in the house number," Ray said mildly.

"It does not."

"It does now," Ray said. He folded the paper with great care, crease by crease. "The judge will need to re-sign. Tomorrow, maybe the day after."

He looked directly at me over the detective's shoulder. The look said: one night. You get one night. Clean it, or bury it, or become it, but do not be caught in between.

The young detective's collar flushed. "There were five men tied to this fence at dawn with dislocated—"

"There were five trespassers," Ray said, "who have every one declined to make a statement, on account of how they were found carrying accelerant on a street where a widow's house burned last week. Funny old world. We'll come back with the right paper, Mr. Cole. See that we're not kept waiting."

Ray turned the young man toward their car.

He left last. At the gate he stopped, pulled a manila folder from his overcoat, and laid it on the porch rail. The paper was soft at the corners from years in a private drawer. Milo sat on it at once, because she is a cat who is not my cat and has no respect for evidence.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Ten years of Victor Kane learning how to buy a street," Ray said. "Three names in there died learning it before you. A man in Fresno who wouldn't sell. A woman in a trailer park outside Reno — that one they called a fire, too. And a witness who was going to talk about both of them, who got as far as the courthouse steps."

He adjusted his hat brim against the sun.

"I copied it the year I retired, because I knew the original would have an accident. It's yours now. I can't arrest a ghost, Elias. But maybe a ghost can read."

He walked down the lane in the morning sun, whistling between his teeth.

I reached past Milo's paws and opened the folder.

The first page was a photograph taken at a crossroads outside Fresno: a dented stop sign standing in the weeds beside an empty irrigation ditch. Across the bottom of it, in sloppy red paint, someone had written a date and a price. It was the same red, in the same careless hand, as the paint on the stop sign at the end of our lane.