They Picked the Wrong Gardener

Chapter 9

The police dug the bullet out of Noah's bedroom wall on Sunday night, wrote down "probable stray round," and left a cruiser at the corner until breakfast. Sarah wanted to keep him home. I was the one who said a bus with thirty children and four teachers on it was the safest crowd in the county. I will be wrong about that for the rest of my life.

They took him off the school bus at the botanical gardens, in the rain, in front of thirty children.

The class trip had been planned for a month. Noah had talked of nothing else all week, reciting facts about the corpse flower that bloomed only once a decade and smelled, he had announced over a bowl of cereal, like a dead mouse in a hot car. Two men in parks-department green had pulled up in a parks-department van with a printed list that had Noah's name misspelled. They told the young fifth-grade teacher that Mrs. Miller had sent them to pick up her son for an emergency. With twenty-nine other children screaming around the glass greenhouse, the teacher looked at the paper, signed the bottom line, and let him walk to the van.

Sarah's call reached me while I was clearing dead rose stems by the front gate. Her voice was thin, stripped down to bare syllables that gave me the van's description and the direction it had turned onto the county highway.

The lane moved without waiting for orders. The Chens drove straight to the elementary school to question the principal and gather the other parents. Old Mr. Delgado parked his truck near the county hospital entrances to watch the emergency ramps. Two police officers took down Sarah's report at her kitchen table, their questions polite, slow, and procedural, three steps behind what was happening on the road.

It was the boy who sweeps up at the hardware store who found the note. It was folded flat under the zinc base of my watering can on my porch, weighted against the wind with a single bullet.

Every deed on the lane. One hundred thousand in cash. The old water tower, sundown, alone. Come as a gardener, old man. Bring tools and we'll know. Bring anyone and the boy learns to fly.

I set the bullet on the porch railing and went into the kitchen to put the kettle on the stove. When trouble comes to a street, neighbors look for panic. A man with my past needs to be seen setting out cups, measuring dry leaves into a pot, and lighting the burner with a steady hand.

Sarah ran up the steps five minutes later, her nurse's bag slapping against her hip, her hair plastered to her cheeks by the rain.

"Police," she said, catching the doorframe with both hands. "Elias, we wait for the police."

"The police will take the tower at dusk with lights and a bullhorn, Sarah, and those men will hear them coming a mile off." I pushed a hot cup of tea across the oilcloth toward her fingers. "I know how Marco operates. There is a way to bring Noah home before dark, but it will not happen with sirens on the highway. Hold my street for me. When the squad cars come back, tell the neighbors to be porches and kettles and witnesses, nothing else. Witnesses are armor."

She looked into my eyes, her jaw set hard, and nodded.

I walked out back to the tool shed behind the row of blackcurrant bushes. In the dark corner behind the lawnmower, beneath two heavy metal oil cans, I lifted the loose pine floorboard I had laid down the summer I bought the property.

The zinc box rested in the dry earth. Inside, wrapped in oiled green canvas, lay three passports bearing names of men who never existed, cash banded in three different currencies, and a blued nine-millimeter automatic that had not seen daylight in ten years. I looked at the steel slide and thought of the boy, the corpse flower, and "Mr. Cole, were you a superhero?"

I did not pick up the gun. I reached up to the wooden rack on the wall and lifted down my good pruning shears, the pair with the ash handles. I slid the loose floorboard back over the passports, the cash, and the weapon, kicked the oil cans into place, and scooped dry kibble into Milo's dish by the door. Then I buttoned my faded work coat and walked up the gravel path toward the river in the falling rain with empty hands and an old man's coat.

The tower stands on the bluff above the river, a hundred years of riveted iron rising into the gray fog, with a ladder up the side. Three black sedans were parked in the weeds near the chain-link fence, their headlights cutting through the wet grass. Two men in rain slickers met me at the gate and searched me twice: sleeves, belt and boots.

Marco stood beneath the steel skirt of the tank where the iron was dry. Danny Cruz stood half a step behind him, holding a wide black umbrella over his boss's head the way a man holds a thing he is already ashamed of. The two guards laughed when they pulled the pruning shears out of my coat pocket, turning the curved blades under the headlights. The tallest of them, the one with the snake tattooed up his neck, stepped closer, looked at the balance of the handles and the ground edge of the carbon steel, and stopped laughing. He handed the shears back to me and said nothing to the others.

Noah was standing at the top of the ladder on the catwalk, against the damp sky. A guard in a nylon windbreaker held him by the collar of his jacket, but the boy had his red plastic dinosaur clutched tight in his fist. When Noah leaned over the iron rail and saw my coat in the headlights, he dropped his chin down toward his chest, threw both elbows up over his ears, and yelled into the rain:

"ELIAS COLE! ELIAS COLE'S STREET!"

Marco smiled, spreading his hands wide. "The deeds, old man. The cash. Then the boy."

"The deeds are back with the people who own them," I called up to him. "And the cash doesn't exist. You knew both of those things before I climbed your hill." I rested the open handles of the shears against my thigh. "Here is the trade, Marco. The only trade on the table tonight. Give me the boy, whole and walking, and you deliver the one thing Victor Kane has wanted for ten years. Me. Out of my garden. In the open. Tonight."

Marco tilted his head, watching me from under the umbrella, weighing the name against his instructions.

Up on the wet catwalk, the young guard shifted his weight to unclip the radio from his shoulder strap. For half a second his fingers slid free of Noah's nylon jacket.

I went up the steel ladder. Before any man on the gravel below decided I had moved, I cleared the last four rungs, swung my boots onto the rusted grating, and brought the shears around. The two cold blades clicked shut half an inch from the guard's windpipe, resting light against the skin without breaking it.

The guard froze, his radio dangling by its cord against his hip. Nobody fired.

"Hands off the merchandise," I said, pleasantly, into the rain. "He's not yours. He was never going to be yours. That was the whole misunderstanding."

The guard took two steps backward with his hands raised flat. I pulled Noah against my belt, slid him onto the ladder rungs beneath me, and started down, keeping my chest pressed against his spine to shield him from the men below. We climbed by touch through the slick grease on the iron, Noah's boots finding each crossbar while his free hand gripped my collar.

We were thirty feet from the ground when Marco stepped out from under the umbrella and raised a revolver with both hands.

The shot cracked off the steel tank and caught me high in the left arm. The jolt tore my fingers loose from the iron rung. Under our combined weight, the century-old mounting bracket snapped out of the wet masonry with a shriek of shearing bolts.

I threw my right arm around Noah's ribs, locked my bleeding left arm across his chest, and kicked hard against the falling ladder, twisting our bodies in midair so that my back pointed toward the black surface below.

The water took us like a door closing.