Rescue

NY 10020
    Copyright © 1995 by Jeremiah Healy

    All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
    For information address Pocket Books,1230 Avenue of the Americas , New York , NY 10020

    ISBN: 0-671-89875-2

    First Pocket Books paperback printing June 1996

    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

    POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

    Cover photos: road by Doug Plummer/Photonica; boy by Issaque Fujita/Photonica

    Printed in the U.S.A.

For the men and women of New England School of Law: past, present, and future



1

    I F i’d been wearing a suit, none of it would have happened. Actually, that’s not quite right. Some of it, maybe even most of it, stillwould have happened. I just wouldn’t have been involved in it.
    Usually I wear a suit, because a lot of what a private investigator does comes from lawyers, and lawyers in Boston expect you to look, and therefore dress, the way they do. That early September afternoon, though. I1 was driving south toward the city on Interstate 93 in blue jeans and an old chambray shirt. I was out of uniform because I’d been helping another investigator named George-Ann Izzo on a surveillance in one of those Essex County suburbs with views of meadow grass that make you think of the African veld. We were trying to serve process on a wandering civil-case defendant, and the last thing we wanted him to think as he looked out the window of his girlfriend’s house was that we were lawyers or agents of lawyers.
    George-Ann had relieved me at three p . m . , so the sun was slanting in the right-hand window of my silver Prelude, the last year of the first model. I had the moonroof back and every window and vent open. The air was still warm but not hot, the trees still full but not turned. I’d been paying less attention to the traffic, which was light, and more attention to the overpasses, which were many, because I’d already gone by a state trooper hiding on the southbound side of one of the abutments. The cruiser’s radar gun was angled for catching speeders who hadn’t noticed that New Hampshire’s limit of sixty-five dropped down to the Bay State’s fifty-five ten miles back. Then I rounded a curve, and the topography gave me a good half mile of lead time to make up my mind.
    An old car was stopped on the shoulder of the road, a flat on the left rear wheel making anybody working on it vulnerable to the “slow“ lane traffic. Only nobody was working on it, just what looked like a young woman and a younger boy standing behind the bumper, staring at their bad luck.
    Ordinary tow trucks don’t ply the interstates, and it might be a while in these budget-crunched times before a statie not on radar duty would drive by. I looked down at my old clothes and thought how I had a margin of at least an hour before I was supposed to meet Nancy Meagher that night.
    Taking a breath of the nice air, I put on my blinker and edged over to the right.
    As the Prelude slowed down behind them, the young woman turned to look at me. She was more a teenager, wearing a faded green T-shirt, tom blue shorts, and sneakers, maybe five-five with baby fat bulging on the upper arms, thighs, and calves. Her dishwater blond hair was pulled back into a ragged ponytail by one of those elastic ribbons I’ve heard Nancy call a “scrunchy.“
    The boy was about ten, give or take a year, in jeans and a red T-shirt. His hair was butch-cut and the color of growing wheat, his hands jammed into the front pockets of his pants. He kept his nose pointed at the flat tire instead of my car, only his left eye swiveling toward me, like a horse does when you approach it from the side. I felt a vague memory stir, something from the past that wouldn’t quite come.
    I parked behind the Dodge Swinger, my front fender jutting out a little to create a zone of safety around their left rear wheel. Up close, the Dodge looked older than its nearly twenty years, the yellow paint rusting over, the chrome heavily pitted, the tonneau cover on the roof scuffed and peeling every few inches like a blackened onion. The radio antenna dated from the days before you could retract them, and somebody long ago had stuck one of those plastic daisies on it, the things that were supposed to help you spot your car in a sea of them outside a mall or theater. Problem was, the plastic had faded to the point of translucence, and it was hard to picture anyone driving the Swinger,