They Picked the Wrong Gardener

Chapter 6

The plumber had the wrong hands.

He came on a Monday morning, in a clean uniform with a company name stitched over the heart. City water contractor, he said, here about the pressure complaints on the lane. Everything about him was right except the things that matter. His boots were new. His toolbox was a prop, the tools in it laid out like a shop window display, half of them still wearing their price stickers. And his hands, when he took my offered coffee, were the hands of a man who has never made his living with them. No callus at the thumb's root, no scars in the webbing, nails like a banker's.

Worst of all were his eyes. Plumbers look at pipes. This man looked at doors, windows, and the distances between them, the way you read a room you may need to leave quickly.

"Meter's fine out here," he said. "Mind if I check the heater closet? Pressure problems, nine times out of ten it's the heater."

"Help yourself," I said, and smiled my old man's smile. "Mind the cat's things. She's missing, but her bowl still lives there out of optimism."

He was in the closet for eleven minutes. A real plumber would have been four. I know, because in minute seven I heard the sound I had moved to this street to stop hearing: the soft snick of a device being armed, a sound with no business in a house full of roses.

He came out wiping his clean hands on a clean rag and told me the heater was old but honest, and that the pressure would settle by evening. He was good. His face gave away nothing.

"The greenhouse," I said, as he turned for the door. "While I've got a professional in the house. The valve out there drips something terrible, and my tomatoes are drinking the driveway. Would you look? I'll pay the call-out."

Greed is not what moved him. Curiosity did, and the professional's itch to walk the whole house before he left it. He followed me down the garden path, past the staked sunflowers, into the greenhouse, where the air smells of tomato leaf and wet earth, and where there is exactly one door.

The valve he had come to see screws onto the back bench, behind the seed trays, and he had to bend to get a look at it. When he bent, I hooked the closed shears behind his knee and took the leg out from under him, and the bench caught his weight. He was fast, but his wrists were behind his back with tomato twine around them before the seed trays stopped rattling, and my forearm across his neck, slow and even, did the rest. It took less than a minute. The loudest sound was one tray hitting the floor.

He woke sitting in the open back of his own work van, with his device in his lap.

It was a handsome piece of work. Military bones in civilian clothes, set to turn my heater closet into a gas explosion that would take the house, the porch, and any old man reading in his chair. He had built it to look like an accident.

"You'll want to know who sent me," he said. His voice was almost steady. "I don't know names. I get an envelope and an address."

"I know," I said. "That's not the conversation we're having."

I took a rose from the bed by the drive. Not a Peace. The Peace is still a black stick. An ordinary red one, and I laid it across his chest where his hands could not reach it, on top of a note I had written in my best school hand.

The device is disarmed. The street is not. Don't touch this street again. — the gardener.

"Tell them the old man sends his regards," I said. "The next one doesn't ride home in his own van. The next one rides home in a police car."

I closed the van doors on his face at the exact moment his professional calm finally broke, which was not an accident of timing.

I paid cash, no questions asked, to have the van towed to the freight yard Victor Kane's people use for their quieter deliveries. Then I went home, and I was in time to water the tomatoes, and to be seen doing absolutely nothing of interest whatsoever.

Which is why, two days later, I walked into Marco's pool hall at noon with my hat in my hands.

The hall was full of Marco's men, tables green as money. Marco sat by the bar with a cue across his knees, and every conversation in the place died in order of distance as I crossed the room. I had brought a tin of cat food with me, Milo's favorite, the fish kind, because I carry one now in case today is the day she comes home. I set it on the bar, to keep my hands free and honest.

"Mr. Cole," Marco said. He was enjoying himself. "Come to pay your taxes in person?"

"I've come to retire them," I said. I did not raise my voice. A pool hall at noon is a quiet place if the room decides to listen, and the room had decided. "The lane is off the market, Marco. The houses are not for sale at any price your developer prints. The collections stop. The visits stop. And the boy next door is off the table forever. Whatever Victor Kane is paying you for this street, it is not enough. It was never going to be enough."

Marco turned on his stool, slow, and looked me over like a man reading a price tag.

"You walk into my place," he said, "and hand me terms."

"Your place was the nearest room with all your men in it," I said. "I only wanted to say it once."

Marco stood. He is younger than me by forty years and taller by three inches, and he used both of them, coming around the bar slow. He took my tin of cat food off the bar and turned it over, and poured Milo's dinner out onto the floorboards in a gray, gleaming heap, while the whole room watched him do it.

"Washed-up old dog," he said pleasantly. "Victor's people are already here, grandpa. You're a story the street tells its kids. Stories don't scare anybody."

"No," I said. "They don't. That's why I don't tell them."

I picked up my empty tin, because a man does not leave his property in another man's mess, and I walked out through the whole room. Nobody laughed. Nobody followed.

I was already gone, so I heard this part later. At 12:07, every screen in the hall went black in the same instant. The security feeds, the racing screens, the little television over the bar, all of them together, three seconds of nothing. Three seconds is not long. It is long enough to count, and every man in that room counted them.

When the pictures came back, every feed was as it should be, the doors, the tables, the lot out back. Except for the wall above the bar, where nothing had been written before noon.

Someone had written there in pool chalk, in a hand as neat as a schoolteacher's, in numerals a foot high. A countdown, starting from a number every man in that room could read.

Seven.