Title: Hush Money
Author(s): Robert B. Parker
Publisher(s): Berkley
Pages: 200
Year: 2000
Format: MOBY
Language: English
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We crossed the road and went into the woods. It had that bittersweet scent that the woods often have on a hot day. Except for the whine of locusts, and the occasional movement of the wind off the ocean, it was very still. Pine needles were six inches thick underfoot. We made very little sound as we walked. We walked in a wide circle aiming to come to Last Stand Systems, Inc. from a direction other than the road. It was easy going. There was very little underbrush. It was as if the land beneath the high pines had been carefully cleared. In about twenty minutes we saw the compound. Not much to see. It looked like it might once have been a manufacturing facility that had been recycled. There were three cinder block buildings with those high glass windows that nineteenth-century industrial buildings used to have, the kind that have a fine wire mesh running through them. The buildings were painted flat white. The compound was surrounded by a high chain link fence with razor wire on top.
I climbed a tree. From there I could see that the buildings faced onto an open area about the size of a football field. An American flag was on a flagpole in front of one building. A couple of men in dark suits and white shirts came out of the building by the flagpole and walked across the open area and went into the building across the way. I looked down. Hawk had taken a seat under the tree with his back against the trunk and his ankles crossed and appeared to be asleep, though he probably wasn’t.
I sat in my tree some more. There’s something about sitting in a tree when you’re a grown man that makes you feel like a doofus. But it was a feeling I understood, I’d had it before. I sat, doofus-like, and looked at the layout. To my left was a gated entrance with a guard shack manned by a guard. The gate was open, folded back out of the way against the chain link fence. The central building with the flagpole was directly opposite the gate. It was clearly the administrative place. The suits continued in and out of there. The other two buildings seemed to be a barracks and maybe a supply warehouse. A couple of green Jeeps and a black Lincoln stretch limo with tinted windows were parked in front of the administration building. They all had Maine plates. I noted the plate numbers.
As I watched, a man in starched fatigues and wearing a pistol belt strolled slowly along the fence. There was a radio on his belt on the hip opposite the pistol, and a microphone clipped to his epaulets. At the corner he stopped and spoke to another guy with the same equipment who had obviously walked down his length of fence. One of them leaned his hand against the chain link as they talked. Which meant the fence was not electrified. The other two lengths of fence were hidden by the buildings. I watched as my guy turned smartly and strolled back along his fence and, sure enough, met another guard at the other corner. Being a trained observer I concluded that the perimeter was guarded by four men. I watched some more. The guards went back and forth. After about a half hour a squad of four other men in starched fatigues came out of the far building under the direction of another guy and they marched out to change the guard. I sat some more. In the next hour and a half I counted at least twenty men in starched fatigues and sidearms either guarding the perimeter or marching about in the compound in something resembling close order drill. My left knee was beginning to hurt where I’d gotten shot once. I wasn’t sure I could stand the excitement of another guard change, so I climbed back down the tree and stood and stretched out my knee a little. Hawk tilted his head back and looked at me.